You Are Not Invincible
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Self, Psychology, Neuroscience, Spirituality, Relationships

At what age did you feel the most invincible?

How did you realize that you were not, in fact, invincible?

I asked several people about the age that they thought they thought they were most invincible, and the responses varied widely. While I put my peak feelings of invincibility around 19, others cited when they were children at 7 or 9. Some said their 40s, and a lot of people put the years of their early to mid-20s or their teens.

There is no universal age of invincibility, but I thought about whether feeling that you are invincible is a good or bad thing. After all, we are all fallible and human and make mistakes, and the more invincibility we feel, the more risks we take, the more we feel immune from consequences.

Of course, invincibility is an illusion, but is it a bad illusion? Isn’t it better to feel invincible than like you’re not capable of anything? The draw of believing you’re invincible in the first place is the thrill of putting yourself in risky and novel situations. For most people, they feel the most invincible in their teenage or young adult years.

Dr. Gary Wenk of ​Psychology Today​ notes that after teaching college students the effects of drug use on their brains for 30 years, the story never changes. Teenagers and college students always still used drugs and believed nothing bad could happen to them.

“They are young, their lives stretch out before them to the horizon and they feel immortal,” Wenk said.

Wenk states that the immortality feeling is due to the frontal lobes not being fully developed. Neuronal myelination insulates neurons, and also makes electrical signals move faster in the brain. Without as much myelination as adults, teenagers’ electrical signals are slower and the frontal lobes are some of the last parts of the brain to myelinate since they evolved the most recently. The frontal lobes allow us to anticipate the consequences of our actions, and consequently, we stop feeling immortal.

According to Wenk, most women finish myelination by 25, while men finish by 30, so women’s brains mature faster than men. We see more of our mortality the more we mature, and although I studied things like neuronal myelination in the frontal lobes when I was in college, that didn’t stop me from acting recklessly all the time.

I don’t really have a good answer for why we feel invincible, but I will share my own relationship with my own sense of invincibility. After my second semester, sophomore year of college, I took more than 21 credits each semester, all while trying to put in a lot of hours in my work-study and being a college athlete. I didn’t prioritize sleep and just tried to force and bulldoze my way as a jack-of-all-trades, modern-day Renaissance man.

It might have been a bad idea, but I genuinely thought I could do it. In fact, I wanted to prove that I could because I wanted to ​feel​ invincible enough to be the kind of guy that did it all. And I tried. At times, I was even successful and did improve at everything I did.

But even when I had those moments of success, when I reached the mountaintop, I still realized that it didn’t make me whole and didn’t make me very fulfilled, especially the semester I had an almost perfect GPA. I was confused and just generally frustrated not only that I wasn’t invincible, but even in the times I did feel invincible, it wasn’t all that.

I was human not only in the sense that I wasn’t invincible and flawed, but I sought meaning and fulfillment much greater than just being invincible. I felt relationally and spiritually deprived because I was prioritizing my own success and well-being above that of others. Life revolved around my own success and achievements, and it took a long time until I didn’t want to live that way anymore.

It was the only way I knew how to move forward, but I knew I couldn’t keep moving forward like that anymore where I was a strong, invincible person who didn’t need the help of anyone to survive.

Being invincible was not possible, and even if it was, it wasn’t as cracked up as people made it out to be. I wasn’t invincible in the sense that I had needs far greater than I was willing to admit in relationships and spiritual fulfillment. It was natural for someone my age to feel and seek that sense of invincibility, but I realized that it is so much better to be comfortable in my humanity than reach for something I wasn’t.

I started to prioritize the relationships in my life more and spent more time with the people I surrounded myself with. And I realized that living with an invincibility complex just felt so ​lonely​ all the time — and it was people I lived with, ate with, worked with, went to church with, and ran with who made me realize that even though I wasn’t invincible, this life is much better when you’re not alone, when you have people to toil and struggle with.

I wasn’t invincible, and I was much more fulfilled when I accepted my humanity and stopped trying to be.