It’s ok to be harmlessly pretentious give your ideas and life some credit & venerate your ideas with research don’t browbeat others with negativity or a misjudged sense of intellectuality but don’t be afraid to aim for lofty ideas perhaps ideas that are hard to fully grasp even seemingly beyond your comprehension the most interesting ideas usually work that way immerse yourself in the terminology of your interest until you can understand the language of their glossary eventually writing new sentences that become paragraphs until what seemed like a pretense becomes the present tense.