Know-nothing arrogance

(This idea has been running through my brain for some time. I finally said it in a comment in someone else's journal. Reposting, after nitpicky edits, here.)

There should be a specific word meaning "the type and amount of arrogance that leads a person with no formal training and no experience in a particular subject to believe he knows that subject better than someone who has lots of formal training and/or lots of experience in it". 'Cause it's common enough to deserve a name.

Whatever people decide to call it, I hope it's surgically correctable.

When Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for three years.

(A tip of the hat to Tom Lehrer for the title.) This is yet another comment I posted elsewhere first.

The other day I had a minor bout of what-have-I-done-with-my-life. I get those from time to time. I figured we all do, especially around birthday time! I asked my beloved whether he ever got those. He said no.

No? Hmm.

Turns out when he was little he had goals. Go to MIT, start a high tech company. He did them. Check. Done!

(Now he has a similar feeling of "where do I go from here?" So from this moment on, we're in the same boat, in a way.)

Once he said that I realized something. When I was a child I didn't have goals. I had dreams. Most of those dreams I discarded for very sane reasons, many of them having to do with being a girl. (No Blue Angels for me.) But goals and dreams are different. Dreams are safe because you don't have to do anything; you don't have to risk failure. I never got around to making goals, because enough of my dreams simply weren't workable. I learned early that it was a bad idea to risk. (There's the difference between Rob's situation and mine. He knows he can achieve big goals. I "know" I can't.)

Now I have a bunch of discarded broken dreams, no goals achieved, and no one to blame for it but Mom myself. (Sure, Mom broke a few of my dreams, but I can't blame her for being right. And it wasn't her job to come up with goals.) Veddy intedesting!

I still have dreams. I haven't fully let go of "be an astronaut", but of course that one's got to go. I'm 38 in three days and I have multiple chronic pain conditions. It's a non-starter. But there are other dreams I could turn into goals...

...if I had the courage. It'll take courage. It was painful enough when all the dreams broke; how much more will it hurt when I try for a goal?

But if I don't find that courage, all I'll have in another 37 years is discarded dreams and no one to blame for it but me. Right? RIGHT!