Declared Ready

I have been mulling the question of whether a person feels ready or only summons up the courage to tell themselves that they are. The time that passes in between the two stages is what they may perceive as when they were not ready. A couple of young people I know have told me recently that they need more time to get ready for one thing or the other. Objectively and looking from the outside in, a person would say they are ready and have been for a while but they don't see it that way. They have yet to tell (or perhaps convince) themselves of their readiness. Something is preventing that. 

For one of the two (A) it is about postponing decisions for another day to enjoy that last and final burst of freedom. She sees freedom as finite and responsibilities forever. There is a fallacy in that concept and waiting makes things harder. The other (B) also a woman is hoping for inspiration to strike in place of doing methodical work. She believes if enough time passes, readiness will become inevitable. Reading this story in Quartz brought these two much younger friends to mind. Maybe this lack of readiness on time has to do with not being in empathetic surroundings which leads to thinking that decisions are made and lived through all alone:

A University of Michigan study of nearly 14,000 college students found that students today have about 40% less empathy than college kids had in the 1980s and 1990s. Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our-All-About-Me World, argues that that the rise of narcissism and loss of empathy are key reasons for why nearly a third of college kids are depressed and mental health problems among kids are on the rise.