The thing that comes only with age is: to not give a fuck.

When we learn that it doesn't matter we can all be little old people who are purple mohawk headed, wearing clashing neon adidas jumpsuit with zebra primted boas.

To just invest in broad index funds instead of trying to play the stock market.

Bogleheads

The sunk cost fallacy is a very easy way to get stuck being miserable.

Sometimes a drastic change might be painful at the time but will be much better for you overall.

Brushing teeth regularly, and flossing , is more important than I ever realized.

People just don't care about you that much, if you go into the street wearing nail polish as a a male presenting person no one will care if you don't act weird about it. Same thing for shaving your legs.

Family might care though, what helped me was understanding that I spend a few days per year with my family maximum, but I spend that whole time with myself. So who cares what they think be yourself.

This helped me start transitioning at 19

I'm a perfectionist and I realized I've been making life too hard for myself. Choosing a low bar for success but keeping the ceiling high has felt like a much healthier approach.

"Fake it till you make it" doesn't mean pretend to be happy until you are happy. I committed to a relationship I wasn't happy in, a career I wasn't happy in, and hobbies I wasn't happy doing, all because I wanted the approval of others. A divorce, career change, and hobby swap made me much happier.

I was never going to "find myself" and so I should have just gone to college with my friends for computer science and made the good money when jobs were easier to get even though I had no interest at all in it. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz. Now I'm a worthless schmuck in a factory living in someone's garage paying their mortgage in rent prices.

All my interests are hobbies, some of them even too expensive for me to do lol they're nothing you can monetize.

The things that don't kill you, do not always make you stronger, but leave you wounded forever.

• Any work or study done during an all-nighter is a waste.

• If you meet someone and all they do is talk about themselves, they won't be a good friend.

• Nobody really cares how you look or what you wear. And anyone who does has bigger issues they would rather not deal with.

That it doesn't matter what other people think of me as long as I'm happy.

Your own happiness is more important that somebody else’s happiness.

Not to say you shouldn’t be nice or help people, or invest in other people’s growth.

But don’t do it to the detriment of your own.

At 50 I learned I’d been tying my shoes wrong my entire life.

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm

You can just ask people out. You can just ask to kiss someone. I was in my mid 20s when someone told me the first one, and late 20s when someone told me the second one. Dating got a lot easier after each revelation.

Not too late but later than I should have:

• To seek professional mental health help
• To understand that Bisexuality really exists. Growing up and in my teens in media and pop culture it’s seemed that you either were gay or straight, no other option.

That there's a opensource version of reddit!!

Relationships can be anything you want them to be. I wish I spent less time trying to figure out if someone liked me and just tried to have fun with everyone I met.

Being a good person is a weakness in capitalist civilizations.

Stoicism. The philosophical ideas of how to live a purposeful and good life.

Compound interest.

Manage your finances. Know where every penny goes. Budget as best as you can - plan for all of the things you know you spend money on through a year. It doesn't mean you can't spend money on things you like, but it does mean that you know when you can afford it. It gives you confidence and control no matter how much you are making.

When someone is abusive or hurtful to you, 90% of the time it's not your fault. It's that there is something wrong or something broken in them. They are malfunctioning and it's necessary to understand that.

The other 10%.... Well, own that and fix your mistake.

But a very large majority of the time, it's them being broken and wrong.

Basic necessities arent a given and one should b grateful for em

That it's never too late!

My family is never going to return the favor. Should've gone to school instead of taking care of them.

Lying can get you ahead in the immediate, but then you’re a liar, and liars lose friends and alienate people.

Go to therapy.

Empathy, Hurt people hurt people.

It's OK to only do what you KNOW you are capable of doing. Too many people hurt themselves trying to push themselves too hard, when they just aren't ready yet.

Probably would’ve been nice to know I was trans a few years younger but I started hormones at 20 as did a friend my age who came out at 16, so like it probably would’ve been less consequential than much.

The importance of studying. And related, calculus and how electricity works. Both would’ve saved me a lot of money to have learned 6 months earlier.

Also how to say no to someone trying to negotiate your boundaries and use your kindness to push you into a relationship. I should’ve walked away the second she said she wanted to negotiate my no and that she wasn’t going to give up on pursuing me. That situation fucked me up and wasn’t even the first time someone with insufficiently controlled bpd wound up pressuring me into romantic/sexual situations I wasn’t comfortable with by making it harder to say no than to give what they wanted.

you don't have to make a living from the thing you enjoy most in life, in fact it's sometimes better not to.

Take it sleazy. Not for everyone, but for some people the most productive way of getting stuff done is doing it with less effort. Don't go too fast and burn out

I'm not sure it's ever too late to learn anything. Unless you are dead.

But I do wish I'd been able to feel ok about my body as a teenager, the anorexia was harmful to my bones & heart, so I guess technically I learned too late to value my body, or learned it too late to avoid damage anyway, though I'm pretty healthy overall now. I think almost all teenagers are uncomfortable with their looks in some way, at least they were back then.

Dynamic programming. I should have just chased a check rather than trying to save the world

Dad was not lying on top of mum to squash her.

No matter how much 6yr old me was complaining after entering their room early one morning.

That you don't put soap in the bootyhole