At nineteen, adulthood feels like a costume you’re still breaking in. You’ve been handed a student ID, a complicated timetable, and a freedom that tastes oddly like invincibility. It’s the year freedom outweighs wisdom, where impulse often wins over judgement. It is the time in life when “why not?” feels like a perfectly valid reason.
Ask almost any functioning adult about their university years, and watch the same expression flicker across their face, half pride, half disbelief. They will tell you about the societies they joined on impulse, the degrees they nearly switched, and the internships they turned down because they “weren’t feeling it”. Some may reminisce about cutting their own fringe at 2 a.m., dating the wrong person for three months too long, spending rent money on concert tickets, and pulling consecutive all-nighters fuelled by caffeine and delusion.
Were these good decisions? Not particularly.
But would they erase them? Rarely.
Identity Crisis and Indecisiveness
At nineteen, most bad decisions are not catastrophic but rather experimental. You’re trying on identities like switching outfits. Sometimes a political debater, gym enthusiast, hopeless romantic, future CEO, and tortured poet. Some feel oddly natural. Others might make you cringe in retrospect. But every single one leaves you with something to carry forward.
There’s something almost poetic about how nineteen-year-olds misjudge risk. We glamourise spontaneity and treat consequences as abstract ideas meant for ‘proper adults’. Like picking the module that excites us the most over the one that makes sense, and booking trips when we should be revising. We also tend to choose friends over sleep, which may end up being a story for the future.
And yet, beneath the chaos, there is growth quietly unfolding.
Subtle Growth
The failed group becomes a lesson in negotiation. Heartbreak sharpens your understanding of boundaries. A missed deadline teaches time management more effectively than any time planner ever could. Even the cringe (especially the cringe) turns into its own kind of syllabus. You learn how to sit with embarrassment and move past it, sometimes with grace. Importantly, you realise the world does not collapse with one mistake. And you discover that you are far more resilient than you ever gave yourself credit for.
Most importantly, you learn who you are not.
Bad Choices and Discovery
Adults tend to recall those years with an unexpected tenderness, not because they were especially wise, but because they were unapologetically unfiltered. University was the rare stretch of life when experimentation felt allowed. There was room to be reckless without being irreparably damaged, idealistic without immediate cynicism, ambitious yet without fully grasping the price attached.
The “bad choices” of nineteen are rarely about destruction. They are about discovery.
Of course, not every mistake comes without consequence, and privilege often softens the landing that deserves recognition. Still, within limits, there’s something developmentally essential about misreading the world slightly. About overrating your emotional intelligence. About being convinced you’ve figured everything out, only to discover you haven’t.
Stepping into Adulthood
By the time adulthood fully arrives, in a full package, with taxes, performance reviews, and long-term commitments, the appetite for chaos diminishes. Responsibilities sharpen caution. Experience replaces impulse. And sometimes, in quiet moments, there is nostalgia for the version of yourself who would book the flight, confess the feelings, or switch the major.
Nineteen is not about making perfect decisions. It is about making vivid ones.
So perhaps the art was never about choosing wisely. It was in choosing boldly and surviving long enough to laugh about it later.
Image by Nereid Ndreu via Unsplash