Things for Teens

I saw another of those “What advice would you give to yourself when you were half as old as you are now” things and it got me thinking. I wouldn’t have much advice to give myself really. I knew then most the really important things I know now. Telling myself at 15 “High school won’t last forever” wouldn’t help because I knew that already. The only thing I would gain from giving me information like that would be to inform my 15 year old self that I got dumb and obvious when I grew up.

If there were bits of advice I really should have paid attention to, it would be difficult to see how explaining them to myself would really help me zero in on them. The sorts of things I would say would either be so obvious that I knew them then, or so precise and exact that those tidbits aren’t really fit for public consumption.

Also, those things tend to be rather maudlin regret-o-thons and frankly I can do without those. I don’t regret a hell of a lot of things and even things that make me wince to remember them were important steps in my personal development. I’m not sure I’d want to take those things away, no matter how painful they were at the time or how cringe making remembering them might be.

So I decided on another tactic. What would I tell someone half as old a me, someone about 15 years old who needed a fistful of advice? I’ve come up with the following list of items.

Items for a 15 year old to know:

1. When you’re out of high school, things are going to start to change and you’re going to have to be a grown up. Everyone is going to expect you to be a fully formed adult at 18, despite the fact that they will continue to treat you like a child well into your 50s.

2. In the next few years, you’re going to be forced to make some choices that you are ill prepared for. All the adults around you will try to sway you one way or another, without giving you ample information to make an informed decision. They will also chide you for not making a better decision no matter what you choose because it’s not exactly what they told you to take. This isn’t going to stop, everyone thinks they know what’s best for you and while in some cases they might be right, you have to do it yourself so you might as well pick what you actually want.

3. You should probably learn how to bank. Go look up opening an account, balancing a check book, and make sure to read some horror stories about credit cards. I’m going to assume that you haven’t been told any more about these things at your age than I was, but you will be blamed if you do anything wrong.

4. You know that tendency adults have of yelling at you for doing things wrong when they never told you how to do it right? Yeah, that’s going to get worse. People assume that everyone around them is fully educated on everything in life and that they’ve been told how to do everything then needs to be done. This of course, in spite of the fact that those people are often as ignorant as anyone else.

5. Most adults really are as stupid as you think they are. Don’t get too high and mighty about it though, you’re about to be one of them and the kids under you are going to think you’re stupid too. Most people aren’t as bright as we’d like them to be, we can more easily spot the flaw in others than we can ourselves.

6. Its incredibly rare that anyone in another generation is going to help you get ahead. The people who are older than you resent your youthful energy, your drive, and the fact that you can still eat spicy food*. In many cases, they resent the fact that your exuberance makes them have to work harder just when they’re becoming less able to do it. If you want to get ahead, you’re going to have to fight for it. Take every advantage you can find because we’re certainly not going to help you.
*Yeah, you’re going to find out about that one and that will not be a happy day, I can tell you.

7. Don’t be afraid of sex, just be careful about it. Learn how the protections work and use them. You don’t want to catch something nasty or find you’ve got a kid that you’re not ready for. That aside though, it is a hell of a lot of fun if you do it right. Figure out what works for you, keep trying new things, just be careful about it.

8. Almost any statement someone older than you says that starts with any variation of “When I was your age” is probably a lie or contains some percentage of lies in it. We didn’t respect our elders, our politicians were criminals, we were rotten stinking little bastards, the music wasn’t much better than what you have now, neither were the movies or the TV shows. What you are hearing is the sound of nostalgia, and it’s dangerous in the hands of idiots. (see item #5)

9. Life isn’t fair. Unless things have drastically changed in the last few years, this is quite possibly the first time it’s ever been brought to your attention. Part of the problem is that if you’re a white middle class kid in America, life has been amazingly fair for you up until now. Actually, now that I think about it, it hasn’t. You just didn’t notice because it was unfair in your favor. You’re not going to be prepared for how very unfair life can be, because if your life is like the one we had, you’ve been overly shielded from the nastiness the world has ready for you. One of the first bouts of unfairness will come when you are lambasted for not being as fully aware of how things works despite no one ever telling you anything.

10. World War Two is over. You need to stop thinking of the French as people who give up all the time and you need to stop thinking of the Germans as Nazis. That was all a very long time ago. If you are 15 now, then it’s very likely that your grandparents were born after the Second World War ended. With that in mind, do try to update your world view a little to encompass some of the things that have happened in the 60 years that have gone by since then. It’s bad enough hearing antiquated world views from people my own age, I don’t need to hear it from your whipper snappers as well.

11. There are people you can go to for advice, don’t be afraid to go to them and don’t be afraid to ask for it. Remember, when they were your age, most the adults you know had no better idea what they were doing then than you do now. That’s called inexperience, and it’s really no one’s fault you’re still knee deep in it.

12. You are going to screw things up, and if you’re very unlucky, you will screw them up quite spectacularly with fireballs that can be seen from space. Don’t worry about that. There is no real shame in making mistakes. You’ve got to make them to gain experience. The only shame is in not learning from those mistakes and doing the same thing again and again.