Advice to my 17-year-old self

Not that I would have listened

Shibetoshi Nakamoto @BillyM2k

being an adult isn’t as hard as i thought it was going to be when i was growing up it’s way more annoying, though

At some point during my senior year of high school, I started to feel sick. I was lethargic, I would feel nauseous when eating anything, I had a headache constantly, I would wake up in the middle of the night in a pool of sweat, my heart racing. Googling my symptoms became one of my self-destructive hobbies, and of course doing this would lead to a rabbit hole of horrific potential self-diagnoses such as meningitis, lupus, and/or a brain tumor. I started having episodes where I was convinced I was having a heart attack. I just knew that something was very wrong with me.

And I was right - but not with my body, with my mind. I had developed a pernicious combination of hypochondria and panic disorder. And although it is obvious in hindsight why, at the time I couldn’t admit it to myself - the underlying reason was fear of the unknown. The clock was ticking on graduation, and the uncomfortable truth was I was absolutely terrified of the “real world,” going to college, getting a job, becoming an adult. I was not at all ready to face it. And my way of coping with it was to invent an internal excuse for why I wasn’t able to cope like my peers were - I was “sick.”

Getting over all of that self-sabotaging behavior took an unpleasantly long time, and even so it’s not difficult to fall back into the same thought processes when I get anxious, particularly the panic and hypochondria (thanks a lot for bringing it all back, COVID-19). But it did help my desire to want to be more honest with myself - if I’m feeling stressed or anxious or sad, I want to understand the root cause so I can address it, rather than just let myself fall into the same traps as before.

So I thought it’d be interesting to write a thought exercise - what advice would I want to give myself then, if I could?

1. The real world isn’t as hard as you think it will be. It’s just really annoying.

Photo by Cris Saur on Unsplash

High school is hard. Yes, your life is on rails in a lot of ways, and “adulting” vastly opens up the amount of things you have to think about. But the novelty of all your emotions and the raging hormones makes everything so extra in high school, and no coping skills have been developed. Heartbreak, embarrassment, failure - all this stuff feels so bad the first time. You’ll feel overwhelmed, a lot.

And that’s okay. That’s normal.

As you continue to adulthood, you’ll still encounter many new and difficult things, but you’ll live, you’ll learn, and you’ll develop the mental frameworks to deal with it all. And instead of obsessing and dwelling on your feelings and coming up empty, you’ll be too bombarded with all the day-to-day annoyances. Chores, taxes, the DMV, grocery shopping, traffic, deadlines, relationships, jury duty, lawyers, travel, job search, aging, finance, scheduling, budgeting, family issues… The list goes on and on and on.

It’s important to go through have these experiences, though. It’s important to learn how to manage your emotions, to explore the unknown, to take calculated risks. As you develop your experiences, you’ll develop a toolkit to draw from to start handling more difficult situations. The best thing you can do for yourself is to push yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone so you can learn the real truth - you’ll be fine. You can handle it. It’s not that bad. It’s just really annoying at times.

2. Adults are just making it up as they go

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

The biggest secret about being an adult is that none of us know what we’re doing. We’re all idiots. You know that cringey phrase “fake it ‘till you make it?” Yeah, that’s everyone. Now of course we start learning how to do things better and eventually we’re not all incompetent at everything, but we’re incompetent at quite a bit of things.

And that’s fine. The world we made for ourselves has an incredible amount of absurdity and nonsense. We have the basic necessities of food and shelter that make sense, but then on top of that we put together some wild, nebulous systems like politics, finance, justice, and a whole bunch of other stuff that is really just all made up. It’s our best effort to prevent ourselves from fighting all the time, based on some lessons from past failures, and not really knowing any better. And we’re all just trying to navigate it.

The only reason adults aren’t chronically overwhelmed is because we’ve adapted to all this absurdity. The systems we put in place to keep order are a combination of nonsense and held together by duct tape. In a way, it’s a miracle that we’ve accomplished anything at all, because behind the scenes is almost always a shit show.

So right now you might feel a huge fear of the unknown, but as you learn more, you’ll just end up feeling like ignorance is bliss. And you’ll find that everyone is too focused on their own journey to navigate this ridiculous world we made that they’re not going to think about your journey. You’ll be free to mess up and learn and get better. If you screw up, you can try something else. You’ll adapt. We all have.

3. You get out of things what you put in

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

The next step of your life after high school is probably college. You’ll hear a lot of people describe it as a grift. They’re not wrong, but it depends on how you look at it. Let me explain.

If your expectations are just that you’ll just approach it the same way as high school, take some classes for 4 years and graduate with a degree and then it’ll lead to a good job, then yes, it’ll be a grift. Because unlike high school, college is not on rails. It’s an opportunity to be on your own for the first time and to get your shit together.

Don’t optimize for grades. As long as you are passing, your grades will not matter much in the real world. Optimize for learning, inside and outside of classes.

Take all the opportunities you can! Seek out and join groups that have common interests. Get a part time job on campus. Do a study abroad program. Go to office hours and get to know your professors. It won’t necessarily feel like it, but you’ll have more free time than you’ll ever have again in your life. Don’t get bogged down by thoughts that you might be making a mistake with your initial major of choice - you can change all that in the future if you need to. Failure is fine, and even encouraged, because failure is a great teacher. This is the time to figure out who you are and what you like.

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So then, without advice from future me, what actually ended up happening? Well, my first year of college, I ended up not able to handle it - I would consistently have panic attacks in the middle of class and became a regular at the campus clinic. Eventually, I gave up, dropped out, and moved back home. I felt like a huge failure at the time.

But slowly, I was able to get my shit together. I transferred to a different school and started over. I got a campus programming job, then went through an internship program and gained the confidence that showed me that I could be competent in the “real world.” I was able to graduate and start my professional software engineering career.

All throughout, though, I spent a whole lot of my free time shitposting on message boards, running online communities, playing mmorpgs, and making dumb silly tech stuff that amused me. At the time, I felt really guilty about spending so much time on these things, since I thought I really should be studying more.

But when I look at all the things that led to the biggest successes in my life, it wasn’t really from studying… It was mostly cultivated from spending all that time doing what I really wanted to do. Which was apparently shitposting and making dumb things 🤣