Adolescents have a hard time understanding the shared human experience, because they haven’t yet had enough close relationships to realize that their own thoughts and feelings aren’t in fact unique. They also tend to overestimate how much they know and how little others know because, well, what they know is all they know. As Mark Twain said, “When I was fourteen, my father was so stupid that I could hardly stand to be around the old man. When I turned twenty-one, I was simply amazed at what this elderly gentleman had learned in only seven short years.”
