Make Mistakes Now!

Sunshine Mary had a typically great post, Girls conspiring to turn other girls into sluts: a good reason not to send your daughters away to college.

I don't have anything to add to her piece, but this caught my eye. A quote from her source article:

All of these things are part of being young, make mistakes now so when you’re too old for these mistakes to be acceptable, they’ll be out of your system. It may seem far off, but everything will fall into place someday. Being twenty-something is awesome, and you’re never getting these years back so stop planning your life and start living it.

Long before I started walking the Catholic and Dark Enlightenment paths, I knew this attitude was garbage.

One makes mistakes in one's twenties--that's a fact of life. Those mistakes are made because one enters adulthood with a head full of untested theories about the way the world works. We forgive these mistakes because they are understandable--young people think that they are making good decisions but they are incorrect. In those situations, we pick them up, dust them off and make sure they've learned their lesson.

But by no means are you supposed to make mistakes. You shouldn't make decisions that you know are wrong just because you know that they'll be forgiven.

I have a feeling that when all these young feminists, social justice warriors and evangelical atheists realize that they aren't living in a world made of Nerf, we're going to see a real backlash and, I hope, a return to wisdom.