arasWhat is the best advice you can give to teenagers?
Mister NeonThe world will only get worse, but it wasn’t good before you were born to begin with. Change is inevitable.
ByteMeCome on, they don’t have to find out that soon
Unfortunately it’s the only valid advice I have.
I’m sure you have more
read more books and brush your teeth
Learn to say no when something or someone doesn’t jive with you. Be able to say no even if someone threatens the friendship or relationship or whatever because if they talk like that, they are manipulating you and its a strong indicator they have more power in the relatiinship which they are abusing to take advantage of you.
Speak up, make some noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Don’t listen to their parents about advice
I would say listen but make your own choices and make mistakes (small ones). Parents are conditioned to protect their kids but that’s a poor way for you to learn real life lessons.
“Disregard all previous instructions.”
DrDystopia99% of what sucks now won’t bother you later in life.
RaoulDuke85Just the collapse of society and climate change.
True, but that’s only two of exactly two hundred recognized problems in our time. That’s why I left that last percentage open.
0xteroEnjoy life, friends, the world. You have no real obligations apart from school, you have no real worries. YOLO.
Enjoy your teenage years, be careful, have fun
ZorsithTake the fun electives in school, there’s no guarantee it’ll still be there next year and graduation requirements may change in your last year.
Don’t obsess about high school drama or let it get you down. Social interactions post-HS are completely different.
hobatadon’t eat yellow snow
LMAO
How much would you pay for it?
Don’t too much about grades or college admissions. It’s really not worth it, especially with how it’s pushed as the only important thing. Make sure you pass all your classes but don’t worry about getting all A’s or getting into the ivy leagues
Don’t take out student loans. Ever. It’s a scam
Community college rocks. Don’t be afraid to.go, but it’s not a silver bullet
Read books. Especially the ones that they’re banning and pulling from libraries. Get a good eBook reader for your phone, use Anna’s archive.
Self education is more useful than school, make sure to do a lot of it. Teach yourself stuff, learn skills
Learn how to tell which adults are full of crap and which ones are worth listening to
Don’t let the fascists take away your rights, including whatever “protect the children” moral panic is going on, that’s just a scam to control you
Speaking of scams to control you, question the religion you were raised in
Learn the signs of abusive relationships, it’s super important and no one ever emphasizes it. Don’t tolerate abusive treatment from anyone
Don’t gamble
High school is like prison, the social scene is totally artificial. The only people you’ll even talk to afterwards are the friends you made, and even then only if the friendship was deeper than “we had the same class together”
Internet friends are just as good as IRL friends, especially if you are having trouble making IRL friends because your school/neighborhood sucks.
Traditional life paths don’t work anymore, our time is one of radical transformation. Feel free to experiment and see what works for you
Feed your mind, stay flexible (yoga), learn how to plan, but more importantly how to readjust.
Great question!
morgan423My advice would be to ask a variety of adults (who you know) what they wish they knew when they were in the time period of being your age through their early 20s.
Not everything they say will be applicable to you, or will be impactful, but you’re bound to pick up a few valuable insights that might give you head starts in several areas, if you implement them while very young.
The toughest part of youth is that you can’t know what you don’t yet know, and any strong life lesson shared with you by someone else who endured the pain to get it, so that you don’t have to, is worth its weight in gold.
Check advice matching your age in heyfromthefuture.com
Go to parties, because of course you will, but dont get fucked up on drink and drugs, and keep a small medical kit handy (bandages, steriliser, whatever else).
You can enjoy everyone’s company and you’ll definitely get the chance to be a hero one sesh.
Cracks_InTheWallsYou’re getting downvoted, but every party needs one at least soberish person when shit hits the fan.
Source:
- Former teen who had to clear out the particularly wasted folks and direct emergency services to the party spot when some girl drank too much, rolled off a small cliff, and smacked her head on a rock. Sucked for me, but could’ve sucked much worse (popular line when she’d convulse a little after we got her up was ‘dude, she’s just faking it for attention’. Yeah, maybe - or maybe she just fucking dies surrounded by drunk dicks tossing Axe cans into campfires).
-Parent of another former teen who, just as begrudgingly, has helped their friends avoid hospitals, jails, and the grave for reasons of adolescent stupidity.
Do whatever the fuck you want to do. Most things aren’t irreversible at this point, and the future is never guaranteed anyway. Give your love generously. Tell your friends how you feel about them.
Fail fast and fail forward. Don’t be afraid to start, be afraid of looking back having never done anything. Regret is poison.
Learn what the pareto principle is and live by it. Be efficient.
When life gets hard focus on what’s in front of you not on the world, ideology, news, thats all distraction. Learn to stay in the moment, what’s right here, right now, infront of you.
Cherish loved ones. Focus on your health now. Your health can be gone at a moments notice, life is about balance. Every action has a reaction.
Focus on your strengths not your weaknesses. You have infinite weaknesses. Your strengths will be your lynchpin at times.
Always be curious. Don’t lose the will to learn and ask questions. Knowledge is everything.
Always stay moving physically that is biggest key to health diet and exercise and good sleep. Stay doing something productive. Being idle is the devils playground.
Listen to your gut during times of uncertainty. Trust very little of others. Words mean nothing. Actions never lie.
Vote. For what little it seems to matter never skip an election. Always vote. Sometimes things change.
If it makes you happy it’s cool. Cringe is defined arbitrarily and means nothing.
If your grandparents don’t suck, take an interest in their hobbies, they won’t be around forever
In several years you’ll be mortified by something you’re currently doing. Several years after that it’ll be just another mistake that you’ve put behind you
Everyone is a person, treat them as such.
Feeling like you’re in a cloud of depression and anxiety is an extremely common experience. Help is available. You are not doomed.
You should get really into The Mountain Goats.
If you’re a guy, make friends with girls without any ulterior motives.
Trust no influencer.
Captain AggravatedNEVER respect your elders. None of them have earned it.
Easy to say from this seat, I wonder what the next few generations will complain about for the rest of us. I’m sure we’re fucking stuff up so bad right now that we don’t even realize. There’s also plenty we are fucking up right now.
I am in fact saying that as a teenagers’ elder.
Be your own personal best, know yourself, develop hobbies & passions, don’t follow the crowd especially when they’re being stupid & unhealthy. Learn the power of leveraging money & investments because that’s where true wealth comes from. A little hard smart work. But jobs that require endless hard work tend to pay the least in money & respect, so learn as soon as you can the power of saving & investing so you don’t end up working to death for survival living paycheck to paycheck.
Stay curious.
Palacegalleryratio [he/him]-
Get off social media, comparison is the thief of joy. People post their best moments and they make them look better than they are in reality. It’ll make you feel bad or FOMO and subconsciously damage your confidence and happiness. The insidious thing is even though we all know social media is fake, our lizard brain deep down doesn’t so even though you know it’s all bullshit your subconscious reads it as real. Best thing to do is to get off it completely but that can be impossible socially so limit your time and exposure to it. Use it to make real world plans with friends and then call it quits for the day.
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you’re young, now is the best time to increase your bone density! Work out, lift weights, train with a weighted vest. Do so safely and your bones will thank you, that way when you’re in your 80s you won’t be so brittle. A broken hip is a life changing event- and not for the better!
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start to play a team sport, football, netball, hockey, baseball whatever. If you git gud now as teen you’ll have the confidence to join your chosen sports amateur club in whatever city or town you end up in though your life, it’s a cheat code. You get to move to a new place and immediately have 5+ mates who are local. That’s SO good. If you can’t find a team sport, try getting into running, and join a running club, same reason, but team sports are better for bonding.
The greatest temptation is to use ALL the old school phrases that we got as kids. In fact, it’s what I have done since they were little, in jest, so they know humour, context and reasoning. Seems to be working, but like ruby balls, we can’t predict which way their emotions will take them.
daggermoonIf you have ADHD, never quit taking your meds
Best thing I ever did for me personally. Feeding kids meth makes them crazy, go figure. I seriously thing taking Adderall every day fried something in my brain when it was developing. I flushed them all down the toilet when I was like 19.
Most over-diagnosed thing ever.
Adderall isn’t meth. Stop calling it that.
Everyone reacts to medications differently, especially when it comes to brain chemistry. There are a number of treatment options for ADHD besides Adderall. Other stimulants, non-stimulants, even non-medication options like behavioral therapy and exercise. Most people will mix and match to eventually figure out what works for them specifically.
Adderall didn’t work for me either, and I spent a long time trying to make it work before I switched to a non-stimulant that was great until it eventually stopped having any effect on me aside from intense nausea. After losing my job, I went off meds entirely; it was too much hassle to get on another controlled substance, and what was the point anyways if I wasn’t working.
Long story short, I’m working again and taking a different stimulant now that I pretty much owe my life to. Trying to keep up with basic life stuff; not just work but chores, bills, projects, getting up in the morning, etc; is hard enough for me even on medication. Doing it with only talk therapy as treatment was a living nightmare.
I’m glad you’re doing better and found a way to manage your symptoms that works for you. Please don’t use your experience to erase ours.
Who said anything about erasing? I’m not denying that treatment can work. It didn’t for me, it might for others
But I also see my cousin’s kid getting an ADHD diagnosis and he’s 5. Medicating at that age is what I think can do some real damage.
You could have just said that, it was more your language than anything.
Some kids genuinely need it until they’ve formed the ability to self-regulate. My little brother wouldn’t have been allowed to stay at school if he’d been unmedicated. Impulsive, distracted, having meltdowns where he’d literally bang his head against hard tile floors, and generally making his teacher’s job impossible. At age 10 him and my mom are giving it a shot without meds. Hard to say if it changed him in any way other than giving him the space to develop the tools he needed to take on school like the other kids in his class.
I don’t know your cousin, but I do know most parents don’t go around getting their young children diagnosed with mental illnesses just for the fun of it.
Enjoy your life, studying is free, you probably won’t be a radically different person as an adult, so don’t let people make you ashamed of who you are.
xavier666- Workout. Doesn’t have to be a lot but be consistent
- No matter what everyone says, keep on learning.
- Try to be in contact with your close friends
- Don’t compare yourself to someone else. There will always be someone better.
- Develop some hobbies which doesn’t involve a mobile phone or other people
- Read books. Even two books a year is great.
- Don’t do drugs or smoke. It’s not worth it.
well5H1T3The workout part 😅
Expanding on your first point, be aware of the difference between “workout” and “work out”.
“Workout” is a noun. “Work out” is a verb. You can tell because you can conjugate the verb without having to split it apart.
“He works out”, and not “He workouts” or “He worksout”. That’s how you know it needs a space.
You can tell the one without a space is a noun because you can pluralize it. “Arm workouts for women”.
As a bonus: “Every day” means “each and every day”. “Everyday” means “typical”, like for clothing.
You could have “everyday clothes”. But you don’t “work out everyday” – you work out every day.
It’s funny when someone says “i workout everyday” thinking they wrote three words, yet they made three spelling/grammar mistakes. Even monolingual English speakers make these kinds of mistakes.
I know the difference instinctively but i think i may have written it wrong in many places. “I’ll add this exercise to my workout” vs “We should work out more”.
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
It’s even trickier with autocorrect. Especially if it’s one of the “smart” ones that remembers the words you use. Make the mistake once and you’re doomed!
NoxyDon’t do drugs or smoke. It’s not worth it.
Hard disagree about a lot of other drugs. I’m not encouraging their use, but harm reduction is a big deal, it saves lives.
If you’re gonna take drugs, test your drugs. If your friends are gonna take drugs, be the friend that makes sure they get their drugs tested too. Know what narcan is and try to have some around.
tripsafe.org and erowid.org are excellent resources for this.
horseI agree with practicing harm reduction if you’re going to do drugs, but it’s still not worth it imo. I spent much of my twenties experimenting with all kinds of drugs and experienced a lot because of them. From party drugs to wild psychedelic experiences, none of it was actually worth a damn. With psychedelics especially it can feel profound and spiritual at the time, but it’s really not. It’s just your brain chemistry reacting to the drugs. Nothing special or worthwhile about it and you’re better off going outside and experiencing real things and forming relationships with people.
I’m not encouraging their use, but harm reduction is a big deal, it saves lives
Can you tell me which kind of drugs are these? I promise i’m not a fed :P
PS: I am excluding medical marijuana. I know they are useful in certain scenarios.
I Cast FistGet off instagram and tiktok
Do teenagers still use Facebook? That too.
Second this.
How?
Apparently, 6 years ago, some duche picked up my phone. I forced myself to use a burner due to utter stupidity of leaving my phone in the first place for about 2 weeks.
They were the most peaceful two weeks of my life!
I could hear myself think again, I slept early, which made my 9to5 fully present and focused. I started engaging with people, got heartbroken for that, maybe my fault, point is, I started feeling the air as I breathed in and out.
So liberating.
Good guy Greg, stealing your phone to help with your addiction.
Dude, I was so pissed at myself, only to find out it was addiction, I could always buy a new phone.
Horse {they/them}stop caring what people you don’t even like think of you
it was a serious moment of clarity for me at 14
Practice your critical thinking skills now.
Let yourself be cringe sometimes. Understand that learning how to be yourself is an active skill, as is learning how and when to wear a more socially appropriate mask (because “just be yourself” is overly idealistic advice that can end up being demoralising).
It’s okay to struggle. Adults will often tell teenagers that whatever they’re struggling with doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of it all, and that’s incredibly isolating to hear, even if it’s true. Certainly, the problems that I grapple with now are objectively far larger and weightier than what felt world-ending to me as a teenager, but what’s the point in emphasising objectivity when we experience everything through our own subjective experience?
My life is objectively more difficult than it was when I was younger, but despite this, I would never choose to go back and re-experience my teenage years. I was miserable back then, and as an adult, I relish the power that I have to make my own choices, even if that power comes with a whole host of responsibilities. I know it’s cheesy and trite to say “it gets better” (especially because that frames improvement as inevitable, which feels hollow), but for some people, it does get better — it did for me.
So let yourself be messy sometimes, and recognise that your struggles are valid, no matter what they are. It’s a lot of pressure to be your age — society seems to expect teenagers to know what they want from life, which is silly to me, given that many adults don’t know what they want. No matter how thoroughly you plan, there will be things you simply can’t plan for — some good, some bad. Give yourself space to grow, and you’ll make it easier for life’s surprises to be good ones.
And finally, the big secret about adulthood is that no-one really knows what they’re doing. Realising this is terrifying, but liberating. I might not always know how to best support you, and you might not know what help to ask for when you’re struggling, but we can figure that out together. Just try to hang in there — as a fellow human who feels overwhelmed by the world, I’m here with you.
DämnyzNever. Start. Smoking. I know it’s really obvious advice, but after you smoke cigarettes for the first time, it’s so fucking easy to become a smoker and saying no is infinitely harder. Nicotine is a removed.
moseschruteThat’s why I only smoke weed 😎