I have this friend. His name is John.

However, I prefer to call him the Human Embodiment of a Massive Hemorrhoid as John has a way of making me slam my head on a keyboard:

Mildy Funny

Mildly. Just mildly.
That’s what you call the weakest sauce of Salsa: mild.
He just called me mild…

To compensate for my lack of witty retorts, I have decided to outdo John’s own blog just to be vindictive and hopefully offer something helpful.

1. Trust in love’s timing.

Oof. This one is tough.
I don’t mean to sound like the Joker, but we live in a society-

That teaches us to be proactive. In charge of our destiny. That mindset bleeds into relationships and love. “Love is something you work on”. “Love is a choice.” “If you don’t put yourself out there, you will die lonely and unloved…” something along those lines.

To a certain extent, I do buy into that mentality.
But not to the same extent I did in my rose-colored youth.

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Sometimes not trusting in timing could result in being in love with someone who did not love you back. It meant being vulnerable, giving your best, and bending backward for someone who did not work out for you.

There are a lot of reasons why relationships don’t work out, not the faults of either party. Maybe your ethics didn’t align, your lifestyle and long-term plans were not compatible, his or your needs in a relationship were not met. And maybe you were both in a very vulnerable and uncertain place in life. Being together felt better than being alone at the time.

Those experiences were hard to accept but they play a role in maturity and growth. To my younger self, you will be in relationships that you had hoped would endure to the end, and the punchline is that it didn’t.

Learn to say “it was nice while it lasted”. Enjoy every conversation, every joke, every shenanigan you’ve had with this person. Value every philosophical conversation, as it may help shape your outlook in life. Accept that every moment you’ve spent with this person genuinely made your life enjoyable.

There was no stone unturned, no words unsaid, and nothing held back. There was nothing you could have done to make it work. If it all ends, and if you gave it your “all” in a relationship, the closure will follow.

And that’s all fine. You will have learned a lot about yourself along the way and that is someone genuinely did value their partners and connections with other people.

2. Get a ROTH (IRA) account.

My advice to my younger self is to throw in half of my earnings in a ROTH account at age 18. And continue throwing in whatever disposable income came my way. $50 here, $20 there, and watch that savings grow.

The ROTH account is a “band-aid” two areas I am concerned about.

1. Job insecurity
2. Inflation

Traditionally, (in my parent's generation) people have reached financial security by getting into well-paying jobs after college and staying there until retirement. However, the financial model that worked for an older generation, may not be a model to absolutely trust today.

From my observation, someone will graduate college with a highly practical degree (engineering, accounting, computer science). But instead of landing a secure job position with pensions, health insurance, and benefits. It seems to me that a college graduate will do contract work for a few years and when that work contract is finished, they will have to apply for a new position at a different organization.

And on-and-on it goes.

With contract work, there does not appear to be any pensions or retirement systems in place. Accounts like the 401k and ROTH account helps mitigate some of those problems of unsteady employment. You will still have enough stored away to retire if a setback happens career-wise.

There is still a chance that a financial emergency may happen and all of that disposable income stored away will disappear. (Which is why I don’t like that the retirement accounts seem to be the only system that offset elderly poverty). But in the likely chance that no major financial or medical emergency will happen to you, the ROTH and 401k account may provide a lot of security for old age.

I wish I knew about the retirement accounts sooner,
I would have opened one immediately the very day I turned 18 years old.

The (IRA accounts) were never taught to me.
It doesn’t help that money is an awkward subject to talk about in American culture. Conversations like saving for retirement, debt, earning potential, and credit cards (compound interest) were just seldom talked about as deemed too “impolite”.

There is a “must-read” piece by the author Neal Gable that gives me a sense of some of the financial challenges that come with old age and the instability of a career.

“I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5 — literally — while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.”

It would be wise for my 18-year-old self, to act and plan around that.

3. Get your work done,
But don’t take yourself too seriously.

It’s kind of funny.

Popular opinion states that young people are carefree, spontaneous, and happy. The older someone gets, the more serious and pessimistic they are.

I feel that happens because when you are young, you get this idea about the world… But then life happens and you get disappointed that expectations and reality did not align. When enough of those “expectations vs. reality” moments happen, that is when the seriousness of old age sets in. The joy or pleasure other people feel just seems “foolish” and “naive” to you. That is when the cantankerous personality sets in and you get old. A pessimist is just a really disappointed optimist, it has nothing to do with wisdom.

My advice to a younger version of me is to do the complete reverse of that popular opinion stated above. The world wasn’t actually as bad as I thought.

There are absolutely going to be stressful and unfair moments. There are going to be moments when you are at a loss of what to do. Life is going to be overwhelming, you will experience getting too close to someone and then lose them. You will not always have the answers to a problem that arises. Some of the things you plan out and put your “all” into aren’t going to work out.

But at the end of the day, you can’t take yourself too seriously.
It is incredibly important to laugh off your mistakes, your problems.
You did all that you could with the given information you had at the time. No one could tailor or customize advice to you, except you.

To my younger self, get your work done.
But please don’t take yourself too seriously…

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