sometimes, the most valuable lessons are the harshest ones. What’s a piece of brutal, no BS advice you think every younger generation needs to hear? It could be from your own experience, something you learned the hard way, or just a tough truth no one talks about enough. Let’s hear the cold, honest reality.
To help jumpstart this community, I am crossposting posts that I like from /r/askmenover30. The original post can be found here.
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If something seems wrong for more than 24 hours, get to a doctor, urgent care, or ER.
Thanksgiving, 2018. I was 49 years old. A good time was had by all. Met the girl who would become my daughter-in-law.
3 days later I developed really bad heartburn. Yes, I did have that extra plate of sweet potatoes. “Take some pepto, you’ll be fine.”
Monday - heartburn all day. “Eh, it’s the holidays, you’re already working from home, don’t be a wuss.”
Tuesday - “Man, I wish I could have got to sleep last night, oh well, work isn’t going to do itself.”
Wednesday - Massive nausea and vomiting. “OK, now I’m taking a day off.”
Thursday - Heartburn moved into my upper arms. “That’s a thing??!?!?” Center of my chest feels like there’s a chunk of granite, pulling down on all my innards.
Advice nurse: “Yeah, go to the ER, get checked out. Don’t drive yourself.”
ER: “Blood test confirms the heart attack, come with us.”
Thursday: Cardiac ward.
Friday: Cardiac ward doctor: “That heavy feeling is your heart, every time it beats, it’s only pumping out 30% of what it’s supposed to. That’s the line between ‘walking around, talking to people’, and ‘no longer walking around, talking to people.’ You have to have open heart surgery.”
Saturday-Sunday: Cardiac ward.
Monday: Open heart surgery, ICU.
Tuesday: ICU “OK, let’s get you up and walking around!” Really? Are you sure? “Yup! Come with us! Let’s see you walk!”
Wed-Thur: Cardiac ward.
Fri: Back home on a 6 week recovery clock.
Wow glad you are better!
Been a tough couple of years… congestive heart failure, 2nd heart attack, now my doc is making noises about potential cancer. 🤷♂️
More tests that had been scheduled for September have been moved up to the 25th.
The vagus nerve is a bitch, it gives very confused messages.
If you are very lucky you will see many people you love very much, die. If you’re not lucky, you will die first. It will usually be a surprise. Tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Say “I love you” often, express your gratitude often, be in the moment often, with anyone you care about, and with yourself.
Amen. Your answer is one of the few that is actually brutal advice that everyone should be given.
Something I’ve wanted to know, but have been too afraid to ask older friends, is does it get easier? Especially as the number of people dying keeps increasing and happening more and more frequently.
Im 50 and no it does not. Losing my mom’s 68 year old BFF in December hurt just as much as my grandmother dying 37 years ago.
To add: knowing in advance that a death is imminent vs a sudden death is not easier. If you can, add people to your life. Loneliness makes loss even worse.
I think that depends on the death. My other grandmother who died a decade or so had significant dementia and hadn’t recognized me in two years despite weekly visits. By the time she died I had already mourned her loss.
It’s ok to be wrong about things. Whether it’s a relationship, a job, an opinion, whatever. Take ownership of those mistakes and fix whatever it was. You’re not a failure because a relationship doesn’t work out or that you had the wrong answer at work or a discussion or anything.
I’ll go even further - you should welcome being wrong about things.
We are all making shit up as we go, and that means that you WILL make mistakes. Seeing those mistakes as opportunities to learn and make yourself better will turn you into a better person than someone who resists admitting their mistakes.
It also was one of the things that most helped my confidence.
I see confidence as the absence of fear of messing up.
You can gain confidence by practicing until you’re are good enough to not make mistakes… or you can just accept that you’re not a perfect person, that you’ll make mistakes, and try your best anyway.
Aside from the very closest of your immediate friends and family, nobody else in the world cares about your intentions or what you think or feel. Your bosses, coworkers, professors, and many of your friends and acquaintances will judge you entirely on what you do. And in many of those relationships they only care about what you do for them specifically.
The same boring-ass advice you’ve been hearing and reading since forever is right.
Save for a “rainy day.” Get a new job with better pay and benefits? Save a bunch of that money. Don’t go buying toys. You don’t know if your car’s going to quit, get in a wreck, need a home repair, or hurt yourself and need days off to recover. You also don’t know if your job will go TU for whatever reason leaving you scrambling to find a new job. Save up, then buy a toy after you’ve got a cushion.
Take care of yourself. It’s a royal pain in the ass and is orders of magnitude harder to undo damage you’ve done to yourself as you get older - if it’s even possible. Alcohol abuse, overweight, etc. will shorten your life and hold you back. IDK what is going on with these guys that are 40 and complain about aches and pains. I’m way past 40 and have none of those problems, but I’m also not overweight and do my best to visit the gym regularly.
Use a condom. STIs and unwanted pregnancies. The first you can hopefully fix with meds. If you can’t, like AIDS, you’ll have to tell every potential partner forever, and you’ll lose a bunch if them that won’t want to risk it. The second is a lifetime that will forever attach you to the kid and the mom (or the dad), like it or not, and complicate your life inescapably if a marriage isn’t viable or lasting.
Don’t get complacent. If you’re not where you want to be and you have the desire and opportunity to move up, do it. Every year you spend earning less that what you can is hundreds of thousands of dollars missed out on in interest, wages, and retirement savings at the end of your career. Potentially millions.
IDK what the future holds for the markets and if they’ll still be a viable method of retirement investment, but for now it seems to be. The best advice I ever got is invest in index funds, use dollar cost averaging, and do not fuck with your money. The first is self explanatory. Index funds are self-cleaning (poor performers are removed and better performers added), so you don’t have to deal with managing it. Second, keep adding money, regularly, even when the market is down. When it’s down, the stocks are “on sale”. Buy more. However, you cannot time the market, so don’t try to wait for lows to buy in. Third, don’t fuck with your money. Don’t take it out when it’s going down, don’t try to time a rally, and most of all, don’t pay any manager to do this stuff for you because you’ll end up paying capital gains and transaction fees wiping out a chunk of your gains. Once your money is in, don’t fuck with it, especially when the market is down. You’ll pay taxes on losses and fees on the changes. Shooting yourself in the foot. Stay away from individual stocks like Tesla or Apple.
Infatuation is not love. If you want a long term relationship or a life partner or parent for your children, learn the difference. If within a short period of time you think you’ve met your perfect mate, SLOW down until you can see them as a real person complete with imperfections, and only then decide how much space they should occupy in your life. If everyone you know doesn’t think they are a good match, they might be right and you might be blinkered. Do your due diligence - especially before you create any children who have to deal with your fallout.
Promises and contracts can’t be trusted. Language makes a wall of interpretation between every person that can be used to claim the original premise of the agreement was misunderstood.
You are not a good person by default. Being a good person requires work, and that work starts by understanding who you are today and ends when you die.
You are shaped in a million ways by your parents, teachers, friends, bosses, media, algorithms, influencers, etc. It is not the mark of a good person to be passively shaped by their environment into a functioning member of society.
A good person considers how they’ve been shaped and actively works to change themselves to align with their personal values. Hell, examining the hodgepodge of conflicting values that society has pushed onto them is one of the biggest parts.
It is humbling, tedious, frustrating work, and many people go their whole lives without doing it. But it’s worth it for the peace that comes in being proud of the person that you’ve made yourself into.
TL;DR: go to therapy
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How you see yourself is far more important than how other people see you.
How you see yourself is a little bit more important than how you actually are.
A little bit of self-delusion goes a long way.
The trick is to do it and know you are doing it, and yet hold the line.
You have to be true to yourself, even when that truth is that you are lying to yourself.
If an old person gives you advice you’ve heard over and over, it’s often because that old person didn’t listen when they were young, either, and they only learned from hard experience recently why the advice is given over and over.
If you’re going to ask for advice, especially from old people who probably have learned the hard way, and then ignore the advice… why even ask?
Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t use drugs, exercise, clean up your diet. Heard it all before? Of course, you have, and there’s a damn good reason.
Don’t get married until you’ve lived together for at least two years. Two years isn’t arbitrary, it comes from experience.
No one cares more about you than you care about yourself.
You alone are responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. The more personal responsibility you accept, the more power you have over your life. When you blame other people, you’re saying you have no control over your life–so don’t be surprised when people manipulate you and take advantage of you.
if you assume that everything anyone ever tells you is a lie, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised much more often than you are now, and blindsided/disappointed much less often
Christ, that’s cynical
