Moreover, there are so many things that need doing that are plenty impactful and just require discipline to do it frequently; that you never bothered to think of other ways to make an impact shouldn't mean you should dissuade others from finding out new ways to make an impact.
Lastly, there is precisely zero evidence that you get another shot at life so it's grossly irresponsible to push people into thinking that their dreams and their real life should be readjusted into some bullshit dichotomy of fantasy vs real life.
(I have heard people in their early 20s giving this same advice; Good god could you imagine the world if people stopped following their dreams so early in life)
(I was a C/D student in STEM subjects by the end of high school. I can't imagine what my life would be like if I didn't kick it into overdrive, thereby managing to get involved with some of the most prolific scientists on this planet and getting my name on a few papers; actually I can imagine, I would have blown my brains out because my life was incredibly miserable up until then)
"Good god could you imagine the world if people stopped following their dreams so early in life"
I imagine it would be indistinguishable from the way it is now. I don't see that the world is built on "great contributions to humanity", just the slow layering of knowledge upon knowledge.
I'm glad you made yourself happier by applying yourself more diligently to your studies when you were in school, but "try harder" is not a helpful response to the parent comment. Almost none of us make any impact beyond our immediate social circle, and even if you do that impact will very quickly become indistinguishable from noise. You don't need to accept that, but it's true, and if you do accept it your life will be better
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
If you are in your mid 40s you are not going to become great at something new to you (painting, quantum physics, chess, programming, etc etc). It is nice to dream of that, but it does not happen.
You might become decent and contribute to society in your new skill but that's different.
Who are those people who have made a single great contribution at an advanced age (let's say past 50)?
The few that I can think of (like that obscure mathematician who didn't get tenure and did his research alone) labored in their calling starting in their 20s at the latest.
The one exception could be business success which indeed is possible even at a very late age(Colonel Sanders etc)
Business success and greatly contributing to the society in the way that most people dream of aren't mutually exclusive. You might not be the kind of person with a PhD who made a scientific breakthrough and finally developed a great self-driving car, but if you created a business that managed to achieve that same thing, I see no reason why it wouldn't count.
That's a very interesting statement. Almost all people I know here in Poland, including myself, dream of having a life devoid of external pain, obligations, limitations etc., so that you can do whatever they choose to do. Rarely if ever anyone mentions anything about wanting to have a greater impact.
Maybe that's the next step of rich consumer society that US is at and that Poland hasn't reached yet - one in which people are aware that living (surviving in relative comfort) is easy, so they need to raise the bar for themselves somehow or they'll get depressed over the lack of challenges.
Or maybe it's just a cultural difference? American society is very much a culture of doers, while Polish is not. There are societies even richer than American, for example the Quatari, where people seem just content to mostly do not do anything particularly ambitious and just hang out.