Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age
heyfromthefuture.com
heyfromthefuture.com
Every year seems a little much? Maybe at young age, but 21/22/23 doesn't really make that much of a difference, or even 40/45
The advice should be written for the perspective of the reader not the writer:
"Hey 13 year old, don't stop learning how to play piano"
How would that help a 13 year old? Something like "Hey 13 year old, I stopped playing the piano at your age and now I'm regretting it very much. I often dream how well I could play if I didn't stop and I also could teach my kids"
Obviously you do not control the text. A short description with tips would maybe help.
I struggled with the idea of creating a page for every age. I eventually settled on the idea that people could take the platform anywhere they wanted to, whether it was passing generic advice along, or sending themselves a very specific message at a specific time in their life. That being said, it's kind of cool to see the ages that mean the most to people.
I like your idea with the short description - do you mind if I quote your example?
Thinking back on my life so far, the years 19, 20, and 22 were quite unique with respect to my then-current circumstances/knowledge/abilities (even though I was in the same undergrad program and had roughly the same job during these years).
If I had the opportunity, I would give 19-year-old me very different advice than 20-year-old me! 19-year-old me really needed it! And don't even get me started on the advice 22-year-old me needed.
Adding some pages that aggregate the advice submitted to similar ages (20s, teens, 18-35, choose your favorite grouping) wouldn't be bad for those who are interested, but I think taking the focus away from individual ages would minimize something quite neat that you've done here.
Other commenters mentioned that people grow at different rates, but there's nothing stopping you from looking at the advice for ages around you
“Don’t go bald, bald people aren’t happy.”
Maybe the advice should have been posted for 20 year olds and not 34 year olds. It’s still not helpful as is.
If you feel like your happiness is dependent on your having hair, then you should probably really ask yourself why.
If you feel like having less hair makes you less attractive, then I can tell you I've had loads of hair and now none of it, and I've met women that love or hate both.
Own it.
On the other hand, age might be used as a way to self identify a spot in the site. As children we are raised by age and grade to measure where we are, should be and headed. It's a form of subtle conditioning we do not have a choice in until it begins to wear off in one's 20's or 30's.
- Piece of advice
- Written by a {person's age}-year-old
- Background on how that advice affected them to this point in their life.
Otherwise, it kind of reads like a generic motivational quote.
There is a constant set of themes, for each of the years I scanned but especially my age which is 23, to travel, invest for the future, and start businesses and I am increasingly skeptical of each.
I am just starting out, and I am here because I used to think that my future involved travel and startups, but recent news has made it clear to me that travel is one of the human obsessions that is destroying this world and that the future will not happen: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-...
My advice, for all age groups, is to enjoy what you have now and don't have kids- the world even 10-20 years from now isn't one worth living in.
It just made me try harder, but I think every kid needs to get over that bridge to become a legitimate adult - to be faced with both success and failure, and realize you are only ever at local maxima, there is always another mountain to climb, and you do it to aspire to see more and further.
The environment has suffered damage, and it is likely to suffer further damage in the short term, but the time to start fixing that is now.
So what's left? People. We are the essence of anything meaningful on earth. Despite our negatives, we've managed to thrive and create meaning. We have a consciousness that transcends our own understanding, and in this we should embrace each other in hope that our future is better.
Perhaps your feeling is that you just don't like people, and need to find positive ways to interact with them so that you can see a brighter future.
If you're NOT giving up on the future just yet, you'd be much better off maximizing your impact on public policy (from municipal to federal levels) instead of trying to become an inert object.
You can be part of the solution without needless self-imposed extremism.
The climate has always been in a state of flux. For as far back as e.g. ice core records can show, the temperature and weather and atmospheric gas concentrations have gone up and down and all over the place, for millions of years.
Despite that, here we are, supposedly at the highest point yet demonstrated of intelligent civilization, our species having overcome all of it--and there are members of said species like yourself, who are acting completely irrationally, against all historical evidence.
If our ancestors thought like you, they'd have all frozen to death in caves, and we wouldn't even exist. "Hey, Ug, baby, wanna start a fire and get it on?" "Nah, I'm grieving cause the wooly mammoth outside sneezed and blew some dirt into the lake. We're all gonna die anyway, so why bother having kids? Might as well go ahead and freeze to death now here in this cave."
Get a hold of yourself, before it's too late for you to make use of the limited years you have on this planet. Tomorrow isn't promised to anyone.
Seriously, now, you might actually be clinically depressed. It's very hard to think rationally or overcome irrational feelings when depressed. You're on the Internet, so google up the signs of clinical depression. If any of them apply to you, go get some help from someone trained to provide it. There's no need to suffer helplessly when we have tools available to help. Do something now, because no one else can truly help you until you decide to start helping yourself.
> but recent news has made it clear to me that travel is one of the human obsessions that is destroying this world and that the future will not happen:
If you think that impending climate change (/climate catastrophe) is significantly impacted by the "human obsession" of travel, you are drinking someone else's kool-aid and pulling wool over your eyes as to the real causes (industry greenhouse gas emissions, industry and non-industry energy generation, and agriculture).
>My advice, for all age groups, is to enjoy what you have now and don't have kids-
My advice for all age groups is to take with a massive grain of salt what a 23-year old suggests to you, perhaps going as far as to completely discount any "life advice" given by this demographic. And I'd also suggest to make a decision about having or not having children based on your life circumstances rather than some absurd claim (coming below) that the world sucks.
> the world even 10-20 years from now isn't one worth living in.
We get it; you're a pessimist. People have espoused this same sentiment for decades (actually, centuries or longer).
People have been espousing that we are doomed for decades, but many of them were actually right: we have not meaningfully deviated from the predictions made by the 1972 report The Limits of Growth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth) for example. Reality has continued tracking along with our climate models, which were used to predict doom decades ago. Some doomsday scenarios have a preponderance of evidence that they are happening, and I feel that understanding that is not pessimism but realism.
It's also the mindset for people who stagnate and adopt a defeatist attitude.
It's also an extremist mindset, that closes itself away from other options and is fueled constantly by more pessimistic thoughts.
It's also a mindset that can quickly lead to depression, due to the constantly negative and skewed perspective of life.
It's also an easy mindset to disguise as "realism". There is no realism in what you've advised, in fact the advice for people to stop reproducing due to a doomsday scenario is perhaps the least realistic thought when it comes to reactions to global warming. The absurdity of such an advice is only explained by the naivety of someone who only now started life (which is accurate).
Young people today are born into a world with a considerable amount of inertia leading it to a not so happy place. The evidence points to this not being just pessimism, but a reality they will have to face and deal with in their lifetimes. Rising sea levels, political instability as once habitable and arable land become inhabitable and barren, increasingly sever weather, etc. Pessimism and optimism in this case refers to how severe these problems will be and whether we can either put them off or mitigate the consequences, not whether or not they are happening.
My advice to you, as someone who's older than you and used to think exactly like you: climate impact can be an excuse to stay in one's comfort zone. Try to go out of your way to do things you're not comfortable with, or you may come to regret wasting your youth in front of the computer.
Per what subjective measure? There has been torture, famine, genocide, and worse catastrophes for millions of years. I'm not even exclusively talking about human, social constructs. Animals have been weeding each other out for forever. There have been asteroids that nearly strip earth of all life. Would you say those times were not worth living in either?
If so, i think you may want to ask yourself what makes life worth living. Life may be filled with struggle and adversity (and the specifics of how it is so will likely continue to differ), but the beauty of it is that we get to try our damndest to make better and more out of it.
Do not go gentle into that good night~
I heard the same advice 40 years ago. The world today is wonderful. I will be very sorry to leave it.
We're hackers, no? Rather than declaring the goal impossible, why not try to find clever alternative solutions?
1. We only ever confront challenge either on the individual or among our peer group. No matter how much you try to collectively call everyone a citizen of the Earth and part of one family your biology prevents you from being empathic to those a few orders of magnitude outside your local self. This means you both cannot wax poetic for the woes of everyone else and you need to recognize 99.99999% of humanity will, optimistically, not give a shit about you.
2. Climate change is the kind of problem with stupidly simple solutions that are just hard to implement and take sacrifice and work to accomplish. In the same way curing many plagues in the era of vaccination was a simple solution - reach herd immunity in a population - with a logistical nightmare to accomplish. People died by the millions in the struggle to make it happens, and millions will die victims of climate change until the broader interests of humanity wake up and force the change necessary to fix the problem, but its not any one persons burden to bear.
We could all be killed tomorrow. by a gamma ray burst from a star in our local cluster going supernova. Or an accidential nuke launch at a dilapidated silo could cause total annihilation of the surface world. Or some alien species an infinite amount of distance from us could execute an experiment that fundamentally alters the constant rules of the universe that redefines what matter is.
We don't know whats coming, we do what we can for ourselves and those around us in our time, and we can't be distracted from what we can do with what we can't do, like alter the minds of billions to suddenly decide to take climate change seriously, or stop violent crime, or end tyranny, or feed everyone. That later is a great example - plenty have wished and prayed for global food security, but it took the efforts of millions of individuals over decades to propagate wells and agricultural practices throughout the third world that have led to recent years being consistent record lows for global thirst, hunger, and extreme poverty. They might have cried about it in their early 20s in the 70s-90s, but they got up and did what they could, and collectively had a major impact on it.
So if you really do care about climate change - and being from HN - there is a huge tech scene around solutions and tools to fight it. Get involved and do something. Don't just complain about it, because that doesn't help anyone.
It was terrific, highly recommended! You might find visiting a few to be a satisfying way to connect with likeminded folks.
The one I lived on was a secular, rural-US community with at the time pretty intense covenants [0] but there are lots, with widely varying beliefs.
Has english subtitles.
One thing I think is missing is a "From: a x year old" for each bit of advice. I think the advice to someone in their 20's would be quite different coming from someone in their 30's vs 70's, and that in itself could be very interesting.
One area where I think future advice can be most helpful is in preventing hard-to-reverse mistakes. 18F's data release for college completion rates, employment rates, etc in 2012 may have helped people avoid bad decisions[0]. Another example could be increased wariness of using a drug after hearing personal stories of people trying to quit. Using the recently shared visualization of related subreddits[1] and looking at the "/r/askdrugs" graph, one can see Kratom and quittingkratom, phenibut and quitting phenibut, benzodiazapines and quittingbenzos, opiates and quittingopiates.
Each piece of advice has a little person icon with a number next to it. That's the age of the person that gave that advice.
Would love to see the distribution of up votes. Do 60 yos agree with the advice the 40 yo is giving the 20 yo?
Uhmmm, rrrright.
Glad to see it's real - with curation, I think it could be hugely valuable. I'm 42 and wonder what people who were 50 or 60 would tell me they wished they knew at 42 as I don't have a lot of folks those ages in my life.
Trying to get contributions from older generations is tough, but would likely provide the best advice. I need to find a few media sources to submit to that target this age group.
I think getting advice is the hook to get people to the site. Once you get some valuable advice, the theory is that some of those people will be inclined to participate.
I'd think about this approach:
1. Seeding this with advice from people you trust. Don't even get them to register - just get the advice and input it yourself
2. Aggregate advice into posts e.g. "Top 10 lessons for peopel in their 40s from the future"
3. Share / pay to promote those posts on Facebook
4. Profit (?)
Secondly and related, I'd do a quick study of every single bit of general tech around you as for how long it's been in use. This will open your eyes to what has been and ready for what is coming. Mentally track how long this and that has been in play—you'll be surprised and more importantly, you'll see opportunities. Go!
-Edit- Misread that title and added mine here. ^_^
I do love the idea of collecting wisdom. The hard part is getting the 14 year olds to believe it!
I can think of some advice that is specific to an age. If you're going to apply for an overseas working holiday visa, you want that last chance reminder at age 28 or 29... because once you hit 30 you're no longer eligible.
But I agree in general about age ranges. I like the idea of the user choosing their exact age, but it'd be better if the person giving the advice could choose the range of ages their advice applies to.
I think it might also need some filtering / curation. The current advice at age 64 to "start saving for retirement" is, uhm, probably a bit too late at that point. I think they made a typo in the age fields somewhere.
http://global-goose.com/travel-tips/working-holiday-visas-fo...
"Canada and Australia have signed a mutual agreement that allows young Canadians between the ages of 18 and 35 to travel and work in Australia for up to 12 months. (The age limit used to be 30, but it was increased to 35 in 2018)."
Canadians appear to be a special exception though. If you're Australian, most countries still limit you to age 30 (and Cyprus & South Korea limit you to 25 or younger, apparently):
https://global-goose.com/working-holiday-visas-for-australia...
Bang on about the 14 year olds believing it. I rejected any notion that I didn't know everything at that age.
Unfortunately, the hard thing is that when you're < 19 years old you don't want to listen to anyone because either you know everything already or they wouldn't understand.
It's a paradox.
I think that's why you hear so much of "work hard and stay in school." People are trying to be as broad as humanly possible to appeal to as wide of a net as they can.
Welp, thanks for the inspiration :D
Well that certainly flies in the face of everything everyone is told as a kid.
1. Registration form is too long. Lower the barrier to entry. Maybe only ask for email and username? Or just email with a default username?
2. Try lazy registration so the flow is:
- click advice
- enter advice
- hit submit
- get asked to login/register
Email and username is a good call, thanks. I had never thought about that kind of flow before, but that's interesting, encourage people to submit advice, then ask for registration. Think I might do that. Thanks!
Better to warn users that they must log in to contribute (why?), and to provide the sign-up and contribution in the same page.
> Hey 81 year old, You've got one good year left... maybe
Ouch! That one sucks
"Try" sounds funny in the context of me being an 80 year old (just testing for the octogenarians who are desperate for advice :) I'm not quite 80)
What I’m finding interesting is the metacommentary on what your userbase (which I’m presuming is mostly HN at the moment) looks like. The advice for teens and twenty somethings is wide-ranging and pretty good. Almost everything for folks in their thirties is pithy and reads like it was written by someone younger. (My own bias: haven’t checked past age 40). So, presumably, there’s not as many people commenting retrospectively on their 30’s.
Would be neat to track the delta between a subitter’s actual age and how old they’re willing to advise.
I am not on my computer but a couple of ideas I had:
1. Match people with similar personalities (measured by the big 5). This idea hypothesizes that similar personalities can help each other.
2. Match people per topic. This idea hypothesizes that experts can help non-experts.
Matching older people with younger people and allowing them to chat regarding their lives can give a time traveller type of effect. Here is someone who's done what you want to do and walked a similar path beforehand already.
Hey X year-old: 90% of advice, like everything else, is bad.
It might be worth trying to find advice from people who have actually faced real hardship rather than trying to wing it all on one's own.
Of course, none of this is actionable until you apply it to your own life, but I don't think this is meant to be taken as gospel. It's a neat idea, no more no less.
Not going to go into things that I think could be improved right now but just leave this as encouragement to develop this further as it can really be useful to the world! Well done on getting the idea shipped!
Like you can't just say "be more confident" to someone. Or "do more exercise". Or "don't go into debt". No shit.
I'm sure that the idea is that these things will fall off the bottom if the site gets more popular, but pretty much by definition, there will be less advice at the older end, so there will be less to push off the rubbish.
How can anyone judge whether the information is good for an age group higher than their own, or even for their own age? I would have expected that you can only vote on advice for ages younger than yourself, much the same as giving the advice
Don't need my coffee, found my morning anxiety!
I'd say life doesn't really begin until you're on your own, so around 18 for me, but I'd really say that life picked up around the late 20s, early 30s. So, at 37, if I look at everything that I've done in the last 10 years, and now knowing what I want to do, I've still got three lives to live.
Absolutely. Since I've turned 30 I've gotten married, found my career, and bought a house. I've really only figured out life in the last 5 years or so. I've got many lifetimes to live as well.
Maturity, focus, concentration, self confidence all ebb and flow with time and aren't guaranteed to be monotonic. Civilization allows us to do great things, but it also enables the individual to be a weaker total person while being particularly skilled in one area.
Is that actually the case? I feel like a hunter/gatherer society isn't particularly well rounded - it's just a couple of skills that one lives or dies on. I wouldn't say that a caveman was well rounded, instead they were just ignorant of everything outside of "find something to eat and kill, then mate with something else".
Good site, thanks for the help.
Well that was sure worth my time spent on the website. I’m not sure how I will best incorporate this advice into my life.
Don't go bald.
In this case, the advice about baldness is a joke based on a negative stereotype for baldness, and not genuine advice at all. The default response in this post appears to be along the lines of preventing or reversing hair loss, showing support for the stereotype, and that people are taking the content at least a little bit seriously. I'm just here to say this particular piece of 'advice' is misleading at best and harmful at worst. Baldness will only affect your happiness if you let it.
Looking through it, I'm not sure I like the ability to post to your current age though. It doesn't read like worthy advice to me.
Some people have prodigious technical skills. They'll use absolutely all of their abilities to try to lift the truck off the baby, and the wall of equations they produce while failing will make you feel like you don't belong.
Don't confuse this with intelligence. It's not. The best answers are simple.
Aren't there at least two, the key distinction being the necessity of including other people?
Hmm actually my younger self was already familiar with half of this set. I'm guessing you are talking about the other half.
Hey 26 year old, these are your prime earning years, make sure you're saving as much as you can
Still good advice, just a funny juxtaposition.
It might be "peak savings opportunity because you don't have a family", but that's not at all the same thing.
It's a nice idea and the site works pretty well on mobile, but it sort of grinds my gears.
It's all about your priorities/tradeoffs and how much work you're willing to put into it. They lead a very no-frills budget-restricted life, keep very minimal possessions, put effort into finding overseas teaching jobs in low cost-of-living areas, finding dirt-cheap travel deals, and honestly I think the kids getting all this early travel and cultural exposure is probably a big net win (vs e.g. prioritizing things like buying them the latest video game consoles and fashionable clothing, etc).
You could say the same for starting most small businesses. There are loans available to get up and running if you have a solid business plan and don't have awful/ruined credit, and many viable businesses can be "pay my bills" profitable fairly quickly. You won't make as much excess cash as getting on the corporate treadmill and doing well, at least not earlier on, but you do reap the rewards of being your own boss and learning a suite of skills that's much rarer, and over time even the small business world can eventually become quite lucrative if you want it to be.
Perhaps one of them is achievable, but only at the cost of a very high level of focus - and giving up on the others.
Travel is certainly a lot easier to achieve when you're young, and in many places cheaper (e.g. Interrail tickets, which I would recommend to anyone looking to see a lot of countries in a short time)
So how is their retirement plans coming along?
>...and honestly I think the kids getting all this early travel and cultural exposure is probably a big net win (vs e.g. prioritizing things like buying them the latest video game consoles and fashionable clothing, etc).
That seems to be a loaded assumption. I've known people who spent their entire childhood traveling, and rather than culturally rich they just couldn't fit into any culture - they were inappropriate and had difficulty functioning in a North American lifestyle due to having a mish mash of wordly exposure which has proven to be pretty career limiting. They can tell neat stories about their time in South America, but can't figure out why people don't want to hear outright that their ideas are dumb. There's this assumption that the more you travel the more well rounded you'll be, but you've just been you in more places, doesn't mean you'll be a better person.
Someone has been watching too many financial planning commercials. And is assuming life expectancy will continue to outpace retirement age a few decades out.
And struggling with the close-minded back home after travel isn't a good reason not to do it.
Here's the thing - if you can save enough, you can retire when you want, regardless of retirement age. I don't believe life expectancy will decrease, and I definitely want to be able to enjoy my golden years without working.
Why is traveling now considered such an absolute good that it is impossible to criticize it, or to assume that it will automatically make people more open-minded? The parent posters point was that traveling won't make everyone well-adjusted and open-minded. I find it silly to claim that everyone will benefit, there surely must be some people who won't benefit.
Taking the parent's post in good faith, I find it reasonable to conclude that yes, in my experience there are people who, after extensive travel in their youth, experience difficulties adhering to local cultural standards. For a neutral example, I find the American puritanical reaction to sex & nudity frankly stupid, but it would be unwise to ignore these aspects of the culture.
By way of analogy: it's fine to take the first job you're offered and work there until you retire. If you took a new job, you'd have to learn new skills and deal with new coworkers, a new work culture. And should you return to your old company after the new one, you might try to incorporate skills, processes, or attitudes from the other place you found beneficial, changes which the old guard may not appreciate (but management should).
Yes, those rights being the sole right to purchase health care. Which can be very good if you have money and doesn't exist if you do not.
But do all nations actually have that?
Family. Literally everyone wants to retire near their family, kids, and grandkids.
I'm not suggesting optimizing for retirement, but I am advocating being aware of it. Choosing to make financial choices where only today is considered seems irrational as well, considering that tomorrow can and will come.
Yes, this adventure started in the mid-90s and lots has changed since then, and yes both parents have degrees; but if you’re going to take your family around the world, it’s not your currrent pay that matters, it’s what you’re offered in the place you’re going to.
Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?
The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page."