Why Giving Advice To Your Younger Self Is Nonsense

Every time I scroll through social media, teeth clenched and blood pressure rising, I inevitably come across an article or thread where a forty-something author gives advice to their younger self. Usually pretty obvious, anodyne stuff like: start a pension, go to the gym, avoid hookup culture, invest in Bitcoin, don’t smoke crack, and so on.

I think we can all agree that “invest in Bitcoin” and “don’t smoke crack” are on point. I’m no expert on decentralised non-sovereign cryptographic value protocols enabling permissionless peer-to-peer transaction finality - but Bitcoin seems to have worked out for most. And while smoking crack may improve your life massively in the short-term, it’s a far worse long-term bet than crypto.

However, much of the other wisdom doled out seems to forget one key thing: at forty, you’re radically different to who you were at twenty. And if you’re not, you should be worried. There are few things more tragic than a middle-aged adult who still behaves like they’re fresh out of high school. If you want to cram your forty-year-old arse into a packed nightclub and sink ten tequila shots, that’s your business. But be prepared to wake up the next morning feeling like Vinnie Jones has repeatedly slammed your head with a car door¹.

It’s tempting to believe that if you were transported back to the age of twenty, along with all the skills and knowledge you’ve acquired since, you would absolutely smash life. You’d make astute investments, regulate alcohol intake, look like a God in the mirror, and find the perfect partner. Sadly, this is bollocks. It’s a way of thinking that ignores what it actually means to grow up, to become an adult. Your twenties are when you start trying to figure out the world around you - and, more importantly, who the hell you are. It’s a process fraught with failure and self-deception; I look back on that period of my life with barely-concealed horror. But if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: failure is the ultimate learning tool. You need to make those mistakes to grow as a person - and sometimes, the worst mistakes precipitate the biggest breakthroughs.

This is something you can’t really explain to young people; they need to experience it for themselves. There’s no universal formula to success in life, just as there’s no perfect diet. But that’s no reason to despair - quite the contrary. Within that uncertainty lies the key to adventure - to the richness and variety of human experience.

So, after deriding the very concept of giving young people advice, let me give young people some advice: try your best to make the right decisions, but expect to make mistakes. Accept and embrace your imperfections; they make you who you are. Resist becoming an automaton - so obsessed with optimising every aspect of your life that you forget to have any fun. And most of all, don’t spend every waking moment drinking the toxic brew of social media and culture war politics. I know that’s exactly what I do, but I’m forty-two; I’ve earned the right to be a grumpy middle-aged git. But you don’t have to do that - let life enchant you instead.

1. A movie reference for my fellow forty-somethings.