Twenty and Certain About Everything
When I was twenty, I had an opinion about almost everything. I knew what success looked like, what kind of career I wanted, where I wanted to live, what love was supposed to feel like, and the sort of person I thought I would become. Life seemed surprisingly straightforward. Work hard, make the right choices, stay disciplined, and eventually everything would fall into place.
I do not think I realised how comforting certainty can be.
The Comfort of a Puzzle With Answers
When you are young, the world feels like a puzzle waiting to be solved. Every question seems to have an answer, even if you have not found it yet. You believe there is a right decision, a right career, a right partner, and a right timeline. If life feels confusing, it is only because you have not figured it out yet.
I carried that belief for years. Then life did what life always does. It became more complicated than my opinions could hold.
What Actually Changed My Mind
I met people who completely changed the way I thought about success. I watched relationships that looked perfect quietly fall apart. I saw incredibly talented people struggle to find work, while others stumbled into opportunities they never expected. I realised that kindness and intelligence do not always protect you from heartbreak, and that hard work, while important, does not always arrive at the destination you imagined.
None of those experiences made me cynical. They simply made me less certain.
Speaking Less in Absolutes
These days, I notice how much less I speak in absolutes. I rarely say, "this is how life works." Instead, I find myself saying things like, "maybe," or "it depends," or "I do not know enough about their story."
Years ago, I would have mistaken that for weakness. Now I think it is one of the quiet gifts of growing older.
Certainty Disappears the Moment You Pay Attention
Because certainty has an interesting habit. It usually disappears the moment you begin paying closer attention. The more people you meet, the harder they become to simplify. The more places you visit, the less convinced you are that your way is the only way. The more life you experience, the more you realise that every confident opinion is usually standing on a very small piece of a much larger story.
I used to admire people who always had answers. Now I admire people who ask thoughtful questions, the ones who listen before they speak, the ones who are willing to change their minds, the ones who can say, "I was wrong," without feeling like they have lost something.
When the Questions Get Better
Perhaps wisdom has less to do with collecting answers than becoming comfortable living with uncertainty. I think that is one of adulthood's strangest surprises.
When you are younger, you expect confidence to grow alongside experience. You imagine that by thirty or forty you will have life mostly figured out, that bills will make sense, relationships will make sense, work will make sense. Instead, something else happens. The questions become better.
You stop asking, "how do I become successful." You begin asking, "what kind of success is actually worth building." You stop asking, "how do I make everyone like me." You begin asking, "why do I need everyone to."
The questions become quieter, but somehow they matter more.
Why Jupiter Prefers Curiosity to Certainty
Perhaps this is why I keep returning to astrology, even after all these years. Not because it gives me certainty, but because it reminds me that life was never supposed to fit into simple answers.
Jupiter, often called the planet of wisdom and expansion, is not really interested in proving that you are right. Quite the opposite. The deeper you travel into Jupiter's world, the more it encourages curiosity over certainty. It asks you to keep learning, to keep exploring, and to remain humble enough to believe there is always another perspective you have not considered yet. If you want to see how that expansive energy actually plays out across a year, Jupiter's 2026 transit is worth reading alongside this.
I find that strangely comforting.
The Freedom of Not Knowing Everything
The older I get, the less pressure I feel to have everything figured out. I do not need every decision to be perfect. I do not need every chapter to make sense while I am living it. I do not even need every question to have an answer immediately. Some things reveal themselves only after you have lived through them.
Perhaps growing older is not about replacing uncertainty with confidence. Perhaps it is about replacing fear with curiosity.
There is a freedom that arrives when you stop pretending to know everything. Conversations become more interesting, people become more interesting, and even your own life becomes more interesting, because you are no longer trying to force it into a story you wrote years ago.
You leave room for surprise, you leave room for change, and most importantly, you leave room to become someone you could not have imagined when you were twenty.
What I Would Tell My Younger Self
If I could sit down with that younger version of myself, I do not think I would give him many answers. I would probably ask him a few better questions instead.
Because the older I get, the more I realise that certainty is not the opposite of confusion. It is often the opposite of growth.
Falling in Love With the Questions
Your birth chart has never expected you to know exactly where you are going. It has only ever invited you to keep becoming.
And perhaps wisdom is not arriving at the perfect answer. Perhaps it is learning to fall in love with the questions that keep changing you.
Read more reflections like this on the Teja astrology blog.