Item — HN Reader

Key quote from the article:

> Participants mostly gave themselves advice around relationships (“Don’t marry her. Do. Not. Marry. Her.”), education (“Go to college”), selfhood (“Be yourself”), direction and goals (“Keep moving, keep taking chances, and keep bettering yourself”), and money (“Save more, spend less”). These topics closely match the most common topics mentioned in research on people’s regrets.

> Most participants said that the advice they offered was tied to a pivotal event in their past, such as a time they were bullied, a relationship breakup, or an incident involving drink or drugs, and about half the time they had regret for what had happened. The timing of these pivotal events was most commonly between age 10 and 30 (consistent with research into the reminiscence bump – the way that we tend to recall more autobiographical memories from our teens and early adulthood).

> The majority of participants also said that following the advice would have brought their younger self closer to the kind of person they aspired to be, rather than making them more like their “ought self” (that is, the kind of person that other people or society said they should be).

This was the most important sentence for me.

Me too. But it also made me wonder how you draw a line between the 2. We’re social creatures, and to a degree our aspirations are created by social expectations; the boundaries of who we are are fuzzy.

Teens and early adulthood are the formative years and where most people are susceptible to peer pressure and gain an ability to make their own decision.

Therefore it's very likely that the combination of these factors are particularly powerful at enabling bad decisions in that age range.