When they say that teenagers believe they are invincible, they don't literally mean that. What they mean is something like "Teenagers are hopeless dreamers who believe that they have a better chance than average of achieving great things."
If you had told me that at age 18, I would've disagreed with it, but only because it didn't seem particularly optimistic to me at the time. Not being optimistic about my chances would've crushed me.
@thor Interesting. I feel I was always more on the defensive pessimism side than the optimism side even when I was a teen.
@mrjunge As with all people, it's probably hard to generalise. I wasn't the sullen kind of teenager. I was the dreamer type. I'm still a dreamer, really. I was never good at the execution part, though. With age, I have concluded that I don't want the things I dream about desperately enough to do anything about them. Actually, there is very little in life that I want that bad. When I do execute, the dream was often better than the real thing.
@thor And yeah. In my life I've kind of gotten used to being disappointed in the real thing once I get it. Ironically just reinforces my "presentism" of sorts.
@mrjunge If I'm going to get more nuanced, it's probably accurate to say that I'm an optimist until I try to plan how I'm going to execute, at which point I become a pessimist. For example, when people say "just ask for what you want", I can't, out of fear of rejection. When people say "go out and network", I usually don't, because I'm not very good at that.
@thor Yeah. Life is a huge exercise in patience with oneself eh. Sometimes things don't develop at the time you'd like. There are some things I struggle with that, if I had an easier time with right now, would probably make a good difference for outcomes. And that if I had an easier time with only later may not make too big a difference in outcome.
@mrjunge However, in my teens, I was still expecting to somehow develop those skills, and break those inhibitions and tendencies. I wasn't necessarily optimistic about the present, but I expected things to sort themselves with age. Some of them did, but much later than expected, and some of them didn't.