Note 1: I'm by default reluctant to write anything explicitly related to gender issues, because our society has a very special way of being stupid about that, and it doesn't feel like adding my voice to the mess would really be, you know, adding anything. I think in this case an exception is justified, because I might genuinely have things to say here which are so controversial that they probably haven't been said before.
Note 2: Yes, I know, it's very easy to nitpick about the title. There's always some clever trick that can turn phrases like "be beautiful" into "have a beautiful body", and "have respect" into "be a respected person". Regardless, I think there's a natural way to cognitively relate "feeling-of-being" to certain aspects of human existence, and "feeling-of-possession" to others. Thank you for understanding.
There is a certain high-level pattern of progress seen in almost every human activity, which I like to call “growth triplets”. A growth triplet follows an archetypal sequence of three stages: naive, clever, and wise, with the exact meanings of these terms varying depending on the situation. The defining feature of the pattern is that the third stage has some unexpected similarities to the first one. Because of this, most people have to actually go through the second stage before they can appreciate the thir