kill all your social media accounts. you will do 5-10x better in life.

The world will only get worse, but it wasn’t good before you were born to begin with. Change is inevitable.

Don’t listen to their parents about advice

“Disregard all previous instructions.”

99% of what sucks now won’t bother you later in life.

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 is always the one that gets the grease or at least whatever grease there is to be gotten.

read more books and brush your teeth

If you’re in the USA and you don’t need to go to college for something like being a doctor, lawyer, architect, or credentialed engineer, don’t bother with college if you have to go into debt for it. It’s not worth it, and student loans generally can’t be dealt with by bankruptcy.

Nevermind that higher education in the USA is a racket. Between textbook revisions done purely for profit, courses requiring paying licensing fees to textbook companies just to submit required coursework, universities wasting money on sports or military investments, it’s just not worth it.

At least, consider community colleges.

Doesn’t matter, they won’t listen.

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.

Don’t worry it will be over soon.

Never stop learning. Life is an adventure.

1. The worst thing you can do in life is to cause irreparably damage to your or someone else’ body. It can diminish your or someone else’s life for at least decades, cost a fortune to repair if it’s repairable at all or worse, it causes you to damage yourself even further later in life because it made you more clumsy, leaving you or the other person with even more irreparable damage or even death.
2. If you suspect you might have a mental illness like autism, get it checked!
   Without it you might not figure out what’s holding you back, and reread point #1.
3. The second worst thing you can do is lose a lot of money. That’s never going to come back.
4. The only thing you should be gambling your money on are investments that you think would improve the world or what everyone would consider an established safe bet. That way, you either can’t blame yourself for being stupid or that you’ve at least put money into a good thing. For the former put in small and only add more when it grows. If the value of your investment went down last time you checked, then there’s usually something very wrong with whatever you put money into. And you can be scammed even if they have a great product to show for.
5. For teen boys, when it comes to girls, they are at an advantage because there’s less of them.
   They get much more attention on average because of this.
   This will last as long as there are no alternatives.
6. Technology kills social norms.
   What you thought was completely normal can go the way of the dodo tomorrow
   and it’s always due to some technology.
   You’ll be surprised how hardcore someone can rail against or for some issue
   and then one year later… it’s gone!
7. We are moving into an age of full automation.
   All jobs will be lost and it’s why it seems to get harder to find one every year.
   Why your parents and grandparents might not understand this yet is beyond me.
8. Socialism is still winning and going to be right, front and center for decades to come.
9. For the rise and fall of great powers,
   the abundance of energy and especially electrical power,
   is more important than any ideology, including socialism.
   The Soviet Union only lost because of a lack of coal, which was important in the 20th century.
   It did have lots of oil and so for most of its existence it grew faster than capitalist nations,
   but oil is too easily transportable and therefore too easy to sell instead of invest and too easy to steal.
   The irony was that the US did not exploit the situation until their conventional oil production peaked in 1970,
   causing their economy to spin out of control in debt.
   In 1973 the US started to rope Middle East countries into its petrodollar scheme
   and as a result of that by 1975 the Soviet Union’s economy froze until it collapsed.

Take 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.

Enjoy your teenage years, be careful, have fun