A systematic study of the advice people would give to their younger selves | Hacker News Reader

A systematic study of the advice people would give to their younger selves

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This is a funny one. Just imagine if you do go back in time, tell your younger self to "not marry her" and you actually don't marry her, then you may end up in a different position like being alone or wasting your life chasing other feel good things. Then that new you may grow up with even more regrets and dream of being able to go back in time to tell themselves to DO marry her.

This is essentially why I’d never take that theoretical opportunity. I’ve had plenty of hard times in life that could have been avoided if I knew what the future held. But I think I always come out the other end (eventually) better off in one way or another. Which I credit to the principles that I try to live my life by. If I was instead making decisions based on some infallible vision of the future, who knows how things would have turned out. There’s plenty of things in my life right now that I value a lot, and when I ask myself ‘would I trade those things to avoid hardship I experienced in the past’, the answer is always no.

This is a great thought experiment. We don't observe the counterfactual.

I've noticed this with people and their early career decisions as well. "If I could do it over again, I would have majored in something else," or "I should have taken that job." They often don't really know if it would have improved their circumstances.

Hearing enough folks talk like this made me realize that most people will have some regrets, no matter how smart their choices were. It's part of life.

The other study mentioned shows regrets follow opportunity. So yes it's very likely... as we don't know the results of taking the other road and never will. So maybe the lesson is whatever you choose be content with that choice... in that at least you had a choice where none might have existed. But that's not the human condition.

Another aspect of this is to consider all the moments when it could have gone very wrong. Somehow, we only consider the missed opportunities and not the lucky saves. Speaking of taking roads, you can become a traffic statistic any time you cross the street but it doesn't appear in our tree of past possibilities.

I’ve thought about that. I married the objectively wrong person in my late twenties. Got divorced four years later. But, I definitely wouldn’t be as good of a husband or (step)father now if I hadn’t made that mistake the first time. I wouldn’t have appreciated my current marriage as much.

As someone currently in their late twenties, what compelled you to get married and what ultimately was the breakdown if you don't mind me asking?

I don't know what made me get married honestly. Maybe I was more in love with the idea of marriage than marriage itself and that I was tired of the dating scene. I got married relatively quickly after I met her.

The divorce was caused by her having a drinking problem. Most of the time we were dating she was living out of town and I was to naive to know what a drinking problem looked like. If you have ever dealt with someone with a drinking problem, it's the constant terror of not knowing what you were going to get when you got home.

But more generically, she was so consumed with friends, her family, and her own addictions to put us first. I was definitely not perfect, but it didn't matter what I did if there is only one person who is mentally all there.

I resonate a lot with what you went through because I find myself thinking a lot of the same thoughts. I think it's fair to assume most people grow up wanting a family of their own but there's this constant pull between waiting to find the right person while simultaneously feeling like life is passing you by and wanting to move on to the next phase.

You're spot on when you say that a drinking problem with someone you love is very difficult to spot. It's so easily masked with cheerfulness and parties. Thank's for sharing some info, it'll help me in the future!

Definitely, my parents had been married 35 years at the time (now 50 years) and they were high school sweethearts. So yeah, I guess I felt behind.

Same here, my wife drinks drinks a lot probably.

I miss spending time with her but she it seems wants her bottle more.

Not the OP, but was in an essentially identical situation. I married my high school sweetheart. I met her when I was a HS junior. We had a long-distance relationship for four years, lived together for another three, then married, so we didn't rush into it. I was head over heels in love with her. We had a lot in common, and a lot of good times.

It broke down because we just grew apart. I decided I was tired of being a geek so I stopped doing geeky things and started acting more like a normal person. She didn't. The breakup was amicable. We had both met other people whom we both married after the breakup and are both still married to (at least AFAIK -- I'm not in contact with her any more). Despite the fact that we probably had the easiest divorce in history, it was still one of the most stressful experiences of my life. I don't recommend it.

My second wife and I just celebrated our 23rd anniversary. She is completely different from me, not at all the sort of person I would ever have imagined myself being with. And yet, somehow it has worked out this time.

FWIW.

your experience gets at what i think may be essentially confounding in giving advice to our younger selves.

you are not the same person, through time. you will live many lives and become many different people.

I think there is a big difference between being allowed to send a one sentence "oracle" statement like that vs having a half hour conversation with your younger self around why you shouldn't marry her, how it turned out to be the wrong decision, and what you should focus on instead.

The grass is always greener on the other side, but a bird in hand is better than 2 in the bush.

A stitch in time saves the space-time fabric of the Universe from falling apart.

It doesn't have to actually be MORE regrets, it is just as powerful with the observations of merely different possible ones.

While reading the article I was wondering what circumstances people were in when they made those choices.

For example, was it the late-20s to mid-30s man that was otherwise worried about companionship who then seemingly felt lucky or blessed to find a good match without compromise? Before the likelyhood of age-congruent marriages became a thing of the past?

Would just knowing to avoid that person actually prevent them from making the exact same mistake? Swiping on dating apps and enduring meetups with the forced pretext of dating?

Would the distraction of discontent in their relationship really be less fulfilling for them than the distraction of a wish for companionship, or the drive to merely check the box on rites of passage?

Is there a way to know?

I find this comic sums up that feeling quite well: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/33

Moral - do ALL the things!

I have a feeling that an easily overlooked moral of the story is that the brothers kept going because of the loving memory of what the other brother is doing

Well said!

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

– Søren Kierkegaard

Whenever this is posted to HN commenters usually ask how you can regret something after having hanged yourself. Or maybe it's in the split second before the rope snaps and you lose consciousness?

He was a Christian and I think he could believe in death and regret.

Some of us believe that there is life beyond the grave.

Yes, but one path is a known bad (marry her) and the other is a possible good/bad. Weighing the amount of bad that the marriage is vs the likelihood of it being worse is key.

I've wanted to build this as a service (for fun). Basically a sight to give advice to yourself from two years in the past. Why two years? It's long enough to have some perspective while retaining enough detail to be useful. The fun bit would be that you would have to contribute your advice before you got advice from people similar to yourself.

It would be a lot of fun to try to get basic demographics out of people giving the advice and try to find out the best way to pair advice given with advice seekers. Age? Some life choice your contemplating? Gender/Orientation/Race who knows what would make advice actually useful!

Probably a terrible idea but it's fun to think about.

Maybe start a subreddit?

I'd like the advice to be more targeted. For example if I started programming two years ago maybe now I know I should have cared more about SQL and done a project that includes that. After giving your advice and describing yourself you would get a top-x list of advice you could vote on, but I'd like it to encourage specificity over generality.

Interesting, Advice specifically about career advancement hun? I was imagining general advice because they are easily shared.

Good idea!

Seems like a neat use for massive cross sectional data. The more people share the closer their advice can be tailored to someone like them 2 years ago. Similar applies for receiving advice. I’m thinking like an okcupid style question system.

But please build in a way to undo all those previous questions and answers with an account. Sometimes everything changes for somebody. Or they meet the love of their life and should be able to add that into their current perspective.

Might be a good way to help people bracket the bigger life changes and realize they need to make them.

https://heyfromthefuture.com/age/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902561

That's great! I'm so glad it exists!

Note sure if it's taken out of context, but I always use this quote to tell myself that I cannot make a decision that's 100% right or wrong:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7511-i-saw-my-life-branchin...

Key quote from the article:

> Participants mostly gave themselves advice around relationships (“Don’t marry her. Do. Not. Marry. Her.”), education (“Go to college”), selfhood (“Be yourself”), direction and goals (“Keep moving, keep taking chances, and keep bettering yourself”), and money (“Save more, spend less”). These topics closely match the most common topics mentioned in research on people’s regrets.

> Most participants said that the advice they offered was tied to a pivotal event in their past, such as a time they were bullied, a relationship breakup, or an incident involving drink or drugs, and about half the time they had regret for what had happened. The timing of these pivotal events was most commonly between age 10 and 30 (consistent with research into the reminiscence bump – the way that we tend to recall more autobiographical memories from our teens and early adulthood).

> The majority of participants also said that following the advice would have brought their younger self closer to the kind of person they aspired to be, rather than making them more like their “ought self” (that is, the kind of person that other people or society said they should be).

This was the most important sentence for me.

Me too. But it also made me wonder how you draw a line between the 2. We’re social creatures, and to a degree our aspirations are created by social expectations; the boundaries of who we are are fuzzy.

Teens and early adulthood are the formative years and where most people are susceptible to peer pressure and gain an ability to make their own decision.

Therefore it's very likely that the combination of these factors are particularly powerful at enabling bad decisions in that age range.

Now I need the study that tells me whether following that advice leads to the expected outcomes.

Context is the crux of it all IMO. We try this with our kids. It doesn't work all that well. They have to have some context or experience to understand what the advice means as for myself, I would have a difficult time blindly acting on advice without understanding and unfortunately, hitting a wall with your head is a very good lesson.

This is the struggle is it not? While it seems like some lessons are best learned the hard way, it also feels like a waste of time to not learn from someone else's mistakes.

I think so too. My father was a teacher and then a school principle. He is a very likable fellow and had an ease with most all of his students in relating with them and getting them to listen to what he had to say, particularly the difficult ones others didn't like, probably his high likability factor helped tremendously and very happy disposition. It is having that bridge or way over to relate to others or hook them in that really allows advice or words to have a deeper meaning in terms of sinking in knowledge or advice. Years later I've seen fairly often students of his past recognizing him and thanking him for things he told them. Pretty cool.

I think this leads towards how I try to give advice; I tend to stay away from saying "do x" but rather telling a story about what happened when I tried it.

In relating to religion as it seems to have some parallels of missing "context" for me. Religions have amazingly very great advice in many things but I cannot accept the rationale behind them and have discarded them missing the good parts of the advice so I end up "discovering" things later in life that are actually good practices because I understood them from a framework that made sense to me. Some examples would be fasting and being thankful for what you have. Advice I would never take if I didn't have my own frame of reference.

"Spend more time on discussion forums, young Frog"!

Future Frog here...

You first learned about the VR startup that has replaced Facebook and LinkedIn from an article on HN in 2020, so keep on surfing baby (p.s. go-all-in)!

Advice I'd give:

- Discipline yourself to train your musical skill between 14 and 20. It is fine to also try to win over girls with it (I thought it was disingenuous at the time, I was wrong).

- If you can stick to programming, do it. Just be sure to find fun in it while sticking to it, if not it's okay to drop it.

- Rush through university in 3 years (bachelor and master) in business informatics and call it a day. Do keep an active social life though and do the honours program as well. If you can't help yourself, do an academic gap year with very varied courses after your master.

- For your master, you may want to consider going to another country. If you want to work in the USA, then try to see if you can get a cheapish US master that will allow you to quality for the H1B visa.

- During this time, learn coding on your own, enough resources available by now.

- If you have issues with being social, I wrote a guide. It's attached. You'll be fine.

- If you feel addicted to video games, understand it's social contact that you're after. So simply get more of a social life.

- By doing this: your life will be nothing like mine. You'll encounter your own set of issues which shows how gritty life really is. You'll simply have to deal with it. Also, life could be far grittier so count your blessings!

Thanks for sharing. I'd like to read your guide about being social. Did you mean to add a link?

Is there really a guide? It's all "social skills". Or whatever who am I talk?

Let's show some things, I did not mean to add a link. It'd become a book. This is by no means comprehensive:

1. Giving someone a compliment almost always warrants a neutral or better reaction back.

2. Giving someone a compliment about their personality almost always guarantees the person will believe that said quality is part of them.

3. Being negative, even what you say is true, is quite likely to invite neutral to negative feedback. I've experienced this one on HN sometimes (this particular sentence is an example of the principle FYI).

4. Making a joke most of the times has to do with: show A, but then you show how you meant B and B is logically consistent. Unfortunately, it didn't help me directly in generating jokes but it did help me in analyzing them. That allows me to see whether my own jokes are any good.

5. What someone finds funny says something about their personality, and most likely also about the level of development they are at (I got this from a child psychology book but I believe it to be true for adults as well). If someone makes a lot of jokes about rockets, then that person probably likes to think about rockets. If a person jokes about how prime numbers aren't actually prime, because the only prime number is zero (just made that one up, ha!) then such person likes to think about math and language. If someone makes racist jokes, I immediately try to distance myself from them.

6. BODY LANGUAGE EXISTS!!! When I learned about this (age of 16) my mind was blown. It took a while to understand what was meant by "language" and it was very hard to find a good perspective on interpreting it, but I did eventually. I think my own intuition was the best perspective, because body language is all about context and books -- in most cases -- are way too literal about the "language" part. Some books, however, gave some good examples of how context can change (e.g. you also need to take into account what someone says and my meditation experience taught me you also need to take into account to what extent people are conscious about their body language, attention to it changes its meaning).

7. People like more good looking people. However, there is an interaction effect, because people also like their favorite archetypes. So my suggestion is: become the best good looking archetype that you want to be. I'm currently not following this advice, but my candidate list is: the intellectual, the hipster, the musician and the consultant. These archetypes are all part of my personality.

8. People who exercise well, sleep well and eat well have better social skills than people who don't. Except that there is an interesting thing that happens when people are slightly sleep deprived (this has been studied, don't have a source), which is also my experience. In certain conditions/situations people have better social skills when slightly sleep deprived, their inhibition is also lower but they're sharper than someone with alcohol.

9. Alcohol sucks, don't use it for social skills. I've experimented a lot with this actually. Yes, you lose inhibition but in my particular case my common sense drops more rapidly than my lack of inhibition and anxiety is making up for it.

10. With some people rationality doesn't help. If it doesn't, then it is my believe they are open to an emotional perspective. For these people, you need to sway them by emotions and feelings. Being ultra positive always works here, even what you say isn't true. Since these people don't care about rationality when they have this perspective, they are turning a blind eye towards truth in that moment. Don't fight it, level with them and just tell them that they are amazing people and if they aren't doing anything crazy, it's all fine. If they are, just give them a small hint of where to go, nothing too big since the emotional perspective cares about feelings and if you overload with information, that always feels bad.

11. I have another guide on how to get intimate relationships :P

I could go on. All these things weren't apparent for my 16 year old self. Most of these weren't apparent to my 20 year old self either. Some skills I only learned after the age of 28.

>11. I have another guide on how to get intimate relationships :P

Hey man I need the part 2 for this. Just got out of a rejection (I always thought she was into me but it was all in my head).

> It is fine to also try to win over girls with it (I thought it was disingenuous at the time, I was wrong).

I have some regrets over some similar things, like letting a girl's ex scare me about her, and feeling it would be wrong for me to reciprocate the feelings of a 15 year old I liked when I was 17... sad you felt that way about music, why did you think that?

- And wear sunscreen.

People can try giving similar advise to their younger nephews, nieces, etc and see the effect. The effect would be about the same of any advise given to their younger selves. Younger selves are excellent at ignoring advise from older ones.

Yup, and advices are rarely intemporal. Some things work better in certain contexts than others.

I find it odd that they didn't have more folks in the same category as myself. I would want to warn myself about the circumstances of the deaths of some people I knew. A phrase such as "Make sure he doesn't get on that bus" seems a little more important in my eyes. I suppose the warning about horrible events would have more effect, but if limited to personal experiences it would seem saving folks in your orbit would be more popular. Maybe its a sign of how much safer the world has become.

It might have to do primarily with how the question is asked. If you say "what information about the future would you impart to your past self if given the chance", then that opens it up to broadly changing future events. But "what advice would you give yourself" presents it more as what would you say to benefit yourself the most.

It's also possible that those that have had people close to them die in easily preventable ways may think of it differently. Having someone important to you die in a car crash is different than having them die of old age or of cancer or some genetic disorder, which are broadly either unchangeable, unknowable of what causes it for sure, or both.

Buy more MSFT, a lot more.

And hold onto after it crashed around 1999 until Balmer left.

The one piece of advice a professor might have been able to give their class in the 60's or 70's, but I could never say now: Have more sex.

Why couldn't you say it now?

I had the idea young people are having less sex than the generations before.

I’d mostly want to tell my younger self to invest everything I had in bitcoin.

and dont keep it in mount gox...

If I had followed the advice I'd have to give my past self to avoid unnecessary pain and hardship, I wouldn't be where I am today, and I wouldn't have met my wife.

I'll take all the pain and suffering it took to get to where I am. It made me who I am, and affected who I met, and who I kept, and how strong my relationships are.

I wouldn't trade that for anything.

That's why I would tell myself to umm... lean in. I believed my love should be constantly high and less of a fight. I never believed relationships can survive lows. I thought study and programming should be effortless, so I was hard on myself when I was not smooth like an olympic gymnast. I could have excercised harder through some aches, hangovers, insomnia etc.

"Buy Microsoft at the IPO." :-)

Seriously: be nicer to people. Everyone around you just as insecure and unsure of themselves as your are. You don't need to show you're better or cleverer than everyone else. Just smile, be friendly, and chill. And offer to help out with the grunt work more often.

"However scary it may seem, switch to emacs, evil mode is good enough."

"There's this thing called lisp, you should check it out."

Amusingly my younger self did actually get this advice (thanks Randall [0]), but I did not know what to do with it at the time, other than to file it away for exploration in the future. Only over a decade later when I finally had enough context could I actually take action on that advice.

This is one of the reasons why I find general advice to be useless in many cases. "You should do X" or "You should not do X" are practically useless, and often the person already knows that they should or should not do something, but they have no idea how to get from where they are to that imagined future. If all you can give is advice, the best you can do is try to give advice about the very next step so that someone can actually act on it. "Check out lisp" should be, "go install this package, and read this book," or "here's a professor you should take a course from." When I have gotten advice in the form of "take a course from this person," it has always proved to be invaluable because the first step was stupidly simple, and the rest of the journey had a guide who had walk that way before.

0. https://xkcd.com/224/

Raise your hand if you thought the first paragraph was going to end in this somewhat more humorous way:

The question is an old favourite – if you could travel back in time, what advice would you give to your younger self? Yet despite the popularity of this thought experiment, no one has actually done it.

My advice would be to try new things, engage and embrace them. I've found im not the type of person that can do the same thing over and over for years, even if it's something im supposedly good at. Finding the courage to make that change has been the pivotal point.

Tricky, I would say it's not worth it to gamble with winner takes it all type of things. You'll never notice that you made it and actually will probably fail.

On the other hand I would not have much respect for young person who would actually follow this advice.

Here’s my contribution after listening to “how to change your mind” by Pollen.

Keep your mind open, but live in the moment. Embrace those around you who embrace you-and go after Pamela.

It would be interesting to see how these advices change or remain the same across cultures.

The advice I'd give to my 18 year old self is funnily enough something I knew at the time: Kill yourself now, it's all downhill from here. 52 yrs old now and the slope is getting steeper lol

I know a number of folks who remarried and found happiness, and even had kids (!) after 50-55. Life isn’t over until you decide. Engage with the world, try new things for a time and see what sticks.

Just to put some statistics on it.

58% of men over 55 remarry and 41% of women marry/remarry after 50.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13genb.html

I have kids who are successful and seem happy. I sincerely regret ever single sacrifice I made to get them there. I wish I could have my life again so I could fuck it up even better :|

I hope you don't tell them that. Hearing my parents say that would change me forever.

"I'll tell you an anecdote that played a role in my life. I was about twenty-two and one day I was in a terrible state. We were living in Sibiu, a city in the provinces where I spent my whole youth, and where my father was the priest of the city. That day only my mother and I were home.... All of a sudden I had a fantastic fit of despair, I threw myself on the sofa and said "I can't take it anymore." And my mother said this: "If I had known, I would have had an abortion." That made an extraordinary impression on me. It didn't hurt me, not at all. But later I said, "That was very important. I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?" Because, in effect, it's all without substance."

- Emil Cioran, Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris With Uncommon Writers

Did anyone force you to have kids?

You have your life now: go and fuck it up as much as you want.

Have you talked with a therapist?

The older you get the less you have to lose. It sounds like you need a midlife re-evaluation of what makes you happy. Go run up some credit card debt and live a little. They won't make you pay when you die.

You devil, you :) I like the way you think, but I can do better than credit card debt ;)

One of my pieces of advice I'd like to send back in time would be to prevent someone else killing themselves.

Along these lines, I don't have any words for my younger self, but I would probably thrash the hell out of him with my fists until he stopped being such a brat.

gotta love paywalled academic papers.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/00224545.2019.1609401

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