Some Advice for Teenagers

A Patreonite asked me to write up some advice for teenage girls, and another one asked me entirely separately to write some advice for teenage boys. 

Putting aside my doubts about my own wisdom and the chances of appealing to the modern youth, I'm always happy to respond to requests. It's a sad truth about my productivity that I'm usually much better at working to a deadline or from requests than at generating from air. 

I was at one point a teenage girl, though I was not very good at it. I was a weird kid. I spent too much time in my own head, didn't have a very good brain/mouth filter, never did my homework, skipped class to read books (thereby failing even to be a cool rebel), and was too proud to try to fit in. I can probably give decent advice about it, though, following the survivorship bias principle that failure can be more instructive than success.

Some of this advice splits on gender lines, mainly because one of the most impactful elements of teen development for most teenagers is the sudden surge of sex relevant hormones. I'll do any non-binary teens reading this the credit of assuming that they can mix and match from what suits them among the gendered generalisations I'm going to make in this grab bag of advice. 

I asked my twin brother for specific guy-advice for teenage boys, and he came out with these:

• Bathe Regularly
  
• Choose the right moment to begin shaving: too early or too late both come with problems
  
• Be Gentlemanlike
  
• Play contact sport

If you like, I can have him expand those on a future podcast (Let me know below!)

My dad's offering for young men was as follows:

• Be Good
  
• Don't be bad
  
• Make your mind clear

Which probably tells you more about my upbringing than I might be comfortable with. I can vouch for it being a pretty uncompromising standard of personal responsibility to hold yourself to internally, for better or worse. 

Here are some more general pieces of advice percolated by yrs truly:

Make friends of different ages. 

One of the problems of the way school is run is that people are divided into age-groups. This means you're surrounded by people who are standing at the same height as you, relative to the horizon. 

Having younger friends can give you perspective on your own wisdom and stupidity, and having older friends can give you somewhere safe to offload problems that are not parent-appropriate, and teach you how to operate in the real world. 

Your parents don't count as friends for this, because they're your parents and they remember you when you were a teaspoonful of assorted fluids. Your siblings might count a bit.

A mix of friends of different ages helps you to feel your place in the world, with responsibilities to others, and support networks. Out of school clubs for sport or art or surf-lifesaving are good places to start making these friends. 

(As a side note, friends are people you can invite over for dinner with your parents. Secret older friends, particularly if they're heaps cool and dangerous or sexy are not the kind of friends I'm talking about.)

Pain is overrated

I've talked about this before. There's a tendency, particularly in teenage girls, to be in the midst of complicated adult style emotional issues. It's a good way to feel important and it's a waste of time. 

Life will fuck you. Life is full of pain. It'll come for you. Don't run towards it. Enjoy simple pleasures while they are guilt-free. Damaged, dark, cynical and complex people seem very interesting to start with, but they usually aren't, and it's not so much fun to be one. 

Joy is more interesting than you think, and it is something you can practice and get better at, even if you're not naturally inclined towards it.

If you're lucky enough to have some self awareness, you'll be able to weed out what is actually a problem, and what is just titillation and drama, and steer hard left away from the latter.

What you definitely are as a teenager is intense.  All your feelings are as dialled up as they can possibly be. Use that intensity to make things. Like Henry's recommendation towards contact sports, this is a good time to build yourself a sense of confidence in your capability, your strength and your ability to be a useful person in the world.

Be as active as you can be.

No exceptions, really. Do a sport if you have an able body and access to facilities. If you don't, do what you can, as often as you can. It really really helps. It helps with everything from mental health to physical resilience to assertiveness to self esteem to meeting different people to muscle hormesis to knowing your limits and understanding what kinds of pain are okay and which ones will kill you. 

Sex and Love 

At some point, you will be in love (desperately) with someone who doesn't love you back. You need to find a way to be graceful in dealing with that. It's almost impossible to do, and it hurts a lot, but I believe in you. 

Likewise, at some point, it's likely that someone will be in love with you, who you don't like. Being kind and generous and clear and firm in this will be incredibly good for you, them and the future of the human race. 

Remember, gross creeps are real people. Even people you're in love with are real people. This is hard to believe, but worth thinking about. 

You have time. 

You're young enough to become the best in the world at something, or to fail at any number of exciting and interesting things that will make you a super useful and interesting and exciting adult. Experiment with things (not drugs). Try taking a vow of silence for a day and see how you manage, eat with your opposite hand, walk round your house blindfolded for an hour, or leave your phone at home. 

As a teenager, you're still not sure who you are. This kind of experiment will help, I promise.  

Less time than you might think

That said, time gets shorter the older you get. It's a cliche because it's true. Time lasts longer while you're in your teens, so try not to let it drip away in rage and social media bullshit. Daydreaming is actually a good use of your time, though. 

Be useful.

The idea of teenagehood is a relatively recent one. In part because we don't have coming of age rituals in our society. On one hand, you can have access to adult sexuality via the internet from a ridiculously early age, and on the other hand you have an extended sense of lack of consequences that's bleeding out into people in their twenties and thirties. 

There's no reason that you, at whatever age you are now, shouldn't think of yourself as a member of a society, a community, a world. Think about how you can be useful. Not just charity work, though that's an excellent start, but think about how you can have an impact on the world, and what skills you'll need to be useful. It's a remarkably good feeling, and backed by science. 

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Disclaimer: this is just me thinking about things, and isn't meant to be exhaustive. I've tried to avoid the kinds of advice you can get off any buzzfeed listicle. Feel free to add advice below. 

This is a request-based post, so if you're a patreonite who'd like me to turn my mind to something, hit me up in the message service or email me. I'm always happy to try to think about something. 

If something I do suits your taste, please do share it around your circles. The more people the better. It helps a lot.