This is a wonderful post and articulates something I've also struggled with over the years - and I'm much older than 16!
To me, it can be distilled down to human decision making... how flawed we are in terms of cause/effect, how logical fallacies are so powerful. Ultimately we discovered that the Scientific Method was a tool for us to overcome these flaws. Hopefully there is a similar tool out there in the ether which can help us to navigate complexity with similar confidence.
I think that tool might be just any general framework that gives a better idea of what any small microscopic actions might lead to at a high-level. We definitely cannot qua(nt/l)ify how actions seep through given free-will and a general fringe-ness to us. We can still at least identify most probably scenarios without much difficulty. I believe behavioral economics or even epistemic studies do a good job of identifying general trajectories, by virtue of a fairly high sense of reducibility given human behavior and the benefit of hindsight respectively.
Indeed the human mind by itself isn't really trained to think beyond maybe one or two orders of implications that actions hold. Hindsight and somehow modelling agentic behavior by understanding incentives might do the trick.
To me, it can be distilled down to human decision making... how flawed we are in terms of cause/effect, how logical fallacies are so powerful. Ultimately we discovered that the Scientific Method was a tool for us to overcome these flaws. Hopefully there is a similar tool out there in the ether which can help us to navigate complexity with similar confidence.