My advice would be to ask a variety of adults (who you know) what they wish they knew when they were in the time period of being your age through their early 20s.

Not everything they say will be applicable to you, or will be impactful, but you’re bound to pick up a few valuable insights that might give you head starts in several areas, if you implement them while very young.

The toughest part of youth is that you can’t know what you don’t yet know, and any strong life lesson shared with you by someone else who endured the pain to get it, so that you don’t have to, is worth its weight in gold.

If they addressed the privacy nightmares that they are likely to present… by not being directly connected to the internet, by using a local and contained personal AI instance, by never being able to film anything with them without it being clearly obvious to others… then I’d be excited for that kind of tech.

But we all know that it’ll turn out to be the dystopian, corporately-connected, data-leaking version of the tech that’ll spread everywhere. So, I’m actually not really looking forward to it.

I mean, Google did this back in the day, does that count?

That’s extremely risky, a TON of people speak Spanish, including a bunch who you would assume did not by surface-level appearance. Your coworker got really lucky that they didn’t get caught and called out.

I’m trying to figure out why a manager would assume that people speaking in Spanish are doing it to have a nefarious, malicious secret code, when Spanish is the fourth-most widely spoken language on the planet, and is not a difficult second language for English speakers to start picking up comprehension with.

If I wanted an evil secret code, wouldn’t I pick something far more obscure?

Fast food has priced itself mostly out of my household. Probably better for our health, but we spend far more time cooking now.

Used to get it probably twice a week for convenience. Now it’s down to about once or twice a month, during the handful of occasional evenings where we have absolutely zero extra time to cook.

I use it at work for stuff where it would be inefficient for me to pick up entirely new side skills to only be used rarely and sporadically.

For example, I made a spreadsheet tool to compose ordering spreadsheets in Excel for a system at work that needs them. Most of it uses basic macros that you can record with the basic macro recorder in Excel, with no special skill required, but every now and then I need to introduce functionality into it that’s far more complex.

Instead of learning obscure VBA coding for something I do once every two months, I can just tell ChatGPT that I have spreadsheet A called this and spreadsheet B called that, assume that they are both open, and write me a macro that does A and then B and then C and then D between them.

It does it in five seconds, I plug the code in, test it, and then go about my day. That’s its positive use case for me.

Guns were never the problem

Places in the world that have far less gun proliferation statistically, objectively have far less gun violence per capita, and less injury and death resulting from it.

It’s almost as if guns aren’t used to hurt people as much if they aren’t available to most of the population to use. Not sure what else to tell you.

SB is my good friend. I love gaining my time back, and it does my heart good when I’m given the opportunity to give time back to others.

That’s awesome! ¡Diviértete!

I can definitely recommend the Shokz OpenRun.

I picked up a pair in February, and they’ve been solid. They’re extremely compact, the sound quality’s pretty good for BC headphones, and the battery goes for quite a while. They also have a decent mic if you need to use them for phone or Discord or anything like that.

Don’t sleep on Spanish if it’s being offered, it’s the 4th most spoken language on the planet and is heavily woven throughout the US.

I took it in high school but didn’t solidify it until adulthood, when we had Venezuelans marry into the family. And it’s a fantastic and fun language. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

The simplest wind instruments are things like your basic wood flutes, recorders, ocarinas… simplest stringed instruments are going to be 3 and 4 stringed stuff like cigar box guitars, tenor guitars, and ukuleles. But none of them are just pick up and play.

Realistically even the simplest instruments are going to require at least 50 to 100 hours of practice and instruction to reach an advanced beginner / early intermediate level, where you start to be able to intuitively do things that sound good. The great news is that good YouTube teachers can help you reach that point, if you’re willing to put in the time and practice.

I learned to play guitar and tenor guitar in my 30s, and it’s been extremely rewarding to just be able to unwind and create some music whenever the mood strikes. It was work… but enjoyable work, if that makes sense? I liked the practice and getting the results of my progression. I’d definitely recommend learning to play an instrument to anyone with the time, patience, and inclination.

How will things be? Really rough and really dark, for several decades.

Hopefully we’ll all make it out to the other side, and see a (likely transformed) world trying to rebuild itself for the better.

They made sure the military looked like crap on parade. A lot of units weren’t in dress uniform and the marching was noted as sloppy where it looked on purpose.

I was actually really impressed with how they pulled that off. When you get really, really skilled at something, it becomes more and more difficult to intentionally perform terribly at it.

Looking like trash when they are, in reality, the complete 180° opposite of trash, was in itself an incredible display of skill lol

I don’t think the population is as hopelessly divided as the social media spaces make it out to be, but at the same time, the federal government looks more and more unrecoverable from corporate interests and back to the people every single day. It’s probably past the point of return, excepting major societal shakeup.

It feels like there may come a point where the states that are large enough to be countries on their own start looking into any mechanisms that would allow them separation, just to be able to run themselves without federal interference and incompetence.

I’ll use something real that I like about them, but to be clear, it’s still 99.9% money and 0.1% that other thing lol

Get a back and shoulder loofah and call it a day (not endorsing this one, just using it as an example of what I’m talking about).

We just might be able to stop repeating negative history in 60-100 year phases all the time, due to the overwhelming majority of people having living memory of those events, instead of a handful of people due to the restrictions of the human life span.

Hey, I’m heading into my late 40s and I haven’t been able to say that yet lol