Epiphanies in Summary

These are the epiphanies that have changed my thinking and hopefully subsequent behaviour in life. Summmarised and presented in neat autobiographical order for you:

1. Parents have no idea how to be parents.

As a post grad student mixing with pre-grad students I see the same sort of behaviour. It's a trust or assumption that the academic teaching you knows what practitioners are like. For me though red flags go up when a lecturer tells me 'in a professional business report, referencing is REALLY important.' my experience tells me this is a bold faced lie. In a professional report, the executive summary and/or the accompanying presentation is important. The rest of the report is just an insurance policy, and the frequency with which real decisions are made, means that they hardly if ever get read.
Similarly it was only when I became aware that there was a great disparity in parenting styles and outcomes that I had the blinding flash of obviousness that neither of my parents had gone to school to learn how to be a parent before having my older brother. They like most parents were just winging it, their foreknowledge of parenting was from the perspective of being a child and impressionistic observations.
This epiphany both increased my admiration for my parents and simultaneously destroyed the reverence/faith I had in their ability to parent. I'm lucky my parents did a good job of parenting. This doesn't mean they are or were infallible though. There is shit they messed up. You need to hold your parents to account, and as you mature increasingly hold them to the same standard as anybody else you choose to associate with. Some parents are bad, some parents are good, the import of the epiphany is that YOU don't have to become them.

2. Other People Don't Think Like You Do.

If I had any clout in management schools I would call this the the one hurdle criteria for being a manager. Some people, and honestly the least admirable, pleasant and desirable people in my experience cling to a belief that everyone thinks the same way they do, value the same things they do and everyone else is just getting it wrong.
It liberated me from a lot of frustration, anger and viscousness to realize that some people are introverts, some people are extroverts. Some years later I learned of Jungian personality types, Myers-Briggs is probably most famous and pretty cumbersom there is also the DiSC model which is pretty user friendly.
The ability to empathise, to put yourself in somebody else's shoes removes a lot of hostility from the world. Quite literally, you realise people aren't trying to frustrate annoy or destroy you, it just doesn't occur to them that you value different things, operate a different way.
Before you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes you have to first acknowledge the fact that other people wear different shoes in the first place.
Every environment seems hostile until you understand it, like playing a video game where an obstacle at first seems insurmountable, then you figure out the sequence and it becomes easy as pie. I can't guaruntee other people will become easy as pie once you understand them, but you will become kinder and it takes the edge off.

3. You have to live with yourself.

This was really productive for me, and it actually came probably before number 2 but who cares. I had 5 years where I was single for 2 months. I had had one girlfriend for the last 3 years of that period and then she dumped me. For the first time in my adult life I was confronted with myself and I didn't like it.
Thus I had to learn to be kind to myself, proud of myself and like myself. I actually made a conscious decision not to reenter a relationship until I had learned to do all these things. It took a lot of effort and I had to do a lot of stuff. But I did it, had another relationship and it was much better because of it. Instead of being a draining parasitical partner, I actually brought stuff to that table. I think the relationship was mutually beneficial and enjoyable. It still ended, but it was fun.

4. The Answer is not another person.

This had the same catalyst as above, but really broadly speaking, everyone is broken in some way. Everyone is messed up. Nobody is 'normal' it just doesn't happen. The people in life that have their shit together are the ones that realise something is broken and make an effort to fix it, and fix it themselves.
What I had been doing wrong was using other people to try and validate me and give me esteem. I eventually learned that self-esteem needs to be generated by me and is actually sustainable.

5. Truth is external and robust.

I have recieved much feedback in my life that I come across as a know-all. The incidence hopefully has been dropping over the past few years.
I used to think there was some greater truth, some universal meaning I could internalise that would give me some edge over the rest of humanity. I persued knowledge, I needed to be right.
I have given up on this notion. I still have genuine intellectual curiosity, and I revere the scientific method of learning about our world. But truth is external, it is the universe itself. It does not require our belief or understanding of it to feel validated and go on existing. It is in our interests to apply our full faculties to touch on that truth where we can, and we are all part of it.
But it is simply to large to ever internalise, thus we shouldn't wrap our egos up in it. We can be wrong, it's okay. We have a perfect right not to know things. We should even be willing to doubt our own knowledge and change our minds when confronted with new evidence. If the map doesn't match the ground, the map is wrong, not the ground.
I will now back down from arguments that I adopted without much thought, the old me was trained through the questionable academic darling of debating to defend arbitrary positions to the death. That so long as people thought we were right then we would be respected. Debating is almost the opposite of a life skill.

It's not much but I'm still young.