Hey the common age of legal adulthood in the West is not an arbitrary “cultural” thing, it’s ideally 18 at a minimum because that is when the human brain has gotten past its most intense emotional and hormonal development hurdles.

The difference in judgment is staggering even between someone who just turned 16 vs. someone 16.5; we do a MASSIVE amount of mental growing and changing crammed into those first two decades at a pace unrivaled by any other species.

And then even after your psychological state has calmed the fuck down around 18, we now know the effects of adolescent development continue until about age 25. You got over the worst of it, but 25 is when the parts of your brain responsible for the bulk of your reasoning skills actually wrap up their growth process.

Some further maturation seems to continue between 25 and 40, but some countries now recognize 25 as the official end of “adolescence” as far as psychologists are concerned.

This is why someone 20 should not be dating someone 16 even where it’s legal, why a 14 year old boy shot by police should not be described as a  “man,” why we should be raising the age of military and police enlistment by a couple of years, and people probably shouldn’t start driving cars until at least 18-20 either.

If you’re under 18 you actually are mentally and physically a child in the most objective possible sense. That’s not an insult to any of you 17 and under, just try to have a nice childhood while you still can and don’t sneak into bars and join the air force and shit, you’ve got like up to 80 years ahead of you for that.