Open your window. Hear that? It's the sound of a cold, uncaring universe. No, it really is cold and uncaring. It is unable to think, you bastards. Also away from stars it can get incredibly cold. Babies and toddlers are extremely dependent on their parents, so they don't really matter in this short documentary on how cold and uncaring the universe is. When you are a child, you begin to be able to think more clearly for yourself and start to make your own decisions. Because of this, you are sent to school where you learn relevant facts if your age is sufficiently low enough to not have covered everything that is relevant already.
Once you are mostly done learning relevant things, you begin to learn irrelevant things until the end of high school. At this point, some people are at their full mental capacity thinking-wise, of course not knowledge wise, as no one is. Usually people have discovered the key to getting passing (or higher) grades while still doing almost nothing. By the end of this phase, people have mostly graduated from childhood where you are a peasant constantly ordered around by relevant and irrelevant authority figures.
After this, due to the "go to college you lazy bastards" during high school, a vast majority of people go to university/college having no idea, or a hazy idea of what they want to do with the rest of their life. Depending on what major you go into, and how much you care, roughly determines what you are capable of reasonably doing with the rest of your working life. Many people in college also have jobs, mostly part time, and stretch themselves thin while simultaneously taking difficult yet rewarding classes. Many people in this phase discover that the morals their parents taught them are not set in stone at all, and begin to discover their own set of morals after being completely amoral for some time.
Upon graduating college, if you go through it and actually try, your success depends more on your degree than on your grades, just that you passed in your degree. Adulthood opens up a vast variety of options for you to choose from, from being a homeless person donating all of your earning to charity, to a wealthy entrepreneur that worked their way up the income ladder and, just maybe, now sits as one of the richest people in the world. Most people however, in their negativity, dream up a bad, boring life and wind up living that. Most job creation sits in the high and low sectors that are hard to automate at the current state of technology.
Many higher up jobs, especially near the very top of a corporation's job hierarchy-
eh fuck it this is too much effort I'll finish this when I have more time in the weekend *unless nuedarkon 2013 happens*