Advice is wasted on the young
It's good to go a bit nuts
I like being given advice, and offer it when I think I have it to give. I find few things more pleasurable and readily motivating than scrolling through a load of optimistic tips about how to live your best, ideally organized in list form; more than ever, I think there are some counsels about life and how to live it which are just true and true for everybody. You should save, you should exercise, you should try to be kind, five profiteroles are enough.
Nonetheless, when I see such sensible advice being given to young people, and particularly young men, there is a part of me which can’t help but suppress a chuckle at the thought of my younger self receiving it.
The advice is usually eminently sensible – work hard, start getting skills, open a savings account, head to the gym, get married as soon as the option is there to do so. It conceives of youth as a sober season, a time where physical fitness can be harnessed to relentless improvement in life, laying the deep good groundwork for success in your 30s and beyond. The watchword for this Jordan Petersonian conception of youth is discipline, and if you fail to properly apply discipline at these tender ages the whole trajectory of a life can be fatally skewed.
Fair enough – it is good to think long-term, and youth really does seem the rare part of life where there’s plenty of time ahead and room to build in. And perhaps there really are some people who really do possess that level of maturity and focus in youth, those from a deprived economic background, for example, who have had to focus their energies above all on transcending their economic circumstances.
Yet the reason I can’t help but stifle a chuckle is that I’m well aware offering me such sensible counsel would have been completely wasted on me in my early adulthood. I’d have given no greater a reaction than silence and promptly gone to seek the opposite of whatever it was I was being advised to do.
It doesn’t matter if you’d have told youthful me that I needed to start saving and striving and building a sensible career; I was, quite frankly, off on one, and it took me an awful long time to come back to earth. Yes, I was privileged to have the time to live like that, tho the stomach-churning depression I battled in early youth didn’t feel like a privilege at the time. It still makes me feel sad how sad I was, all the more so given I've had a fair dollop of happiness since.
For a writer, I think I have an unusually low level of engagement with my childhood. Many of those who write, it seems, see being very small as a blissful, forever-lost Arcadian state, an idyll which can never be returned to. A joy they’re always trying to get back to in their work. For me it is all blankness; grey 1980s weather, parents constantly arguing, Sainsbury’s Homebase. It feels in a way that my whole experience of life begins in my late-teens, when I took the fateful step of selling my Nintendo 64 and my life took off in a gale of books and tunes.
Perhaps in part because of this childhood lacuna, it strikes me just how long – and I speak as someone whose life even in my early 40s still feels very much a work in progress – it took me to mature. And this is as someone who was, on the face of it, intellectually impressive; 4 As at A-Level, the highest mark in their subject at first year University exams, at an elite university to boot, and always adding further education certificates to the pile. Overeducated, impractical, but with excellent prospects overall.
Yet animating me in my youth was not a career plan or good sense or the need for a family life, but two interlinked drives; the desire to be a famous writer and the ongoing attempt to get laid. I was consumed by these, and by music, and by a need to live somewhere other than the UK. It felt like I needed to live hard, and decadently, in order to get it all out.