The Invincibility Of Youth

Sept. 29, 2025 When I was younger. I felt like nothing could harm me in life. Like there was no obstacle that I couldn’t overcome. Literally, there was nothing in the world I felt as though I couldn’t do, and this, of course, led to me doing a plethora of activities that could only be described as foolish.

But what did it matter?

I was a child, and one who, like so many other children, didn’t truly know pain and suffering.

I remember when I was a youth, no older than 8–10 years old, there was a game that me and my cousins would play where we would essentially jump off of houses… into a pit of wood chips on the playground.

There was a tall structure at the park that, if we worked together, we could get to the top of. We would stand on a bench to obtain an initial height adjustment, then use our young and limber bodies to support each other until, with great effort, we could grab the scaffolding and pry ourselves onto the top of a very large pavilion.

This pavilion was of equal standing in height to the houses that were no more than 20–30 feet away from it.

And we would take turns playing a game of chicken, jumping off of the pavilion at escalating heights until all but one of us inevitably backed out, because the height had become too frightful.

I had a tendency to be one of the last to stop jumping. And on many occasions, unless my legs gave out from the pressure, I would jump from the highest point.

This may seem like a pointless story, but to me it is a prime example of how, in my youth, I felt as though nothing could hurt me. I felt as though I could literally jump from any height and be fine.

There are many other examples, some to much more escalating degrees, though I won’t be sharing those stories.

This came to a head for me when I was talking to my younger brother. He was 11 years old and telling me about his new dream to become a lawyer, which I was, of course, happy and supportive of.

I initially thought that he would want to be a lawyer for some idealistic reason. Justice, maybe. Or to be what he perhaps saw as a hero. Or anything similar.

But it wasn’t through any idealistic lens that he was looking at it.

It was a strictly practical assumption based on monetary gain.

“Lawyers make more money,” was his reasoning.

So I asked him if he thought he’d like being a lawyer, because I was hopeful for some idealism.

And he said no.

This is fairly normal, I do believe, but for some reason it hurt me.

It hurt me because, for some reason, his dream didn’t have an ounce of hopeful idealism. No whimsy. No wonder. No lack of rationality. No sense of the invincibility of youth.

He’s always been an intelligent and long-thinking individual, but in that moment I felt like he was losing the youth, innocence, and wonder of young boys. He should not have had to be so realistic. He should have been untainted by the practicality of the world.

He was growing up and losing his invincibility of youth....if only he had a space to protect it