We must leave our nest to make sense of the world

When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary. Without them, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically speaking, this means we must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual Being. We must take note of our disarray, without completely abandoning that father in the process. We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning

I love this quote because it explains so many things for me. Learning, growing up, even operating at work.

You first don’t know what you don’t know. As a baby, a graduate or a beginner. You have role models you make the world from, Parents, teachers, older colleagues. As you learn more, you develop your own tastes. You start to detract from your role models and want to discover more things on your own but you also keep in mind where you first learned something. Then as you learn newer things, you realised that the values your role models taught you were good, so you try to go back integrate what you now know with what you knew then.