Advices I would give to my 18-year-old self

And that still applies to me being 31 and try to keep in mind.

• You can’t, and you shouldn’t, change or try to save people. You can’t and you shouldn’t force them to take a certain action that you consider beneficial, no matter how objective and obvious that benefit is. You can only accompany them, listen to them, and help them from the position that they allow you. In the best of cases, your influence can be positive for them and generate change. The same from others towards you.
• Read more classics and fewer self-help books of the moment. There’s a reason they are classics and they contain much more wisdom than many forgettable 150-page pamphlets.
• Read Jung, value intuition and what comes from the unconscious more. - Added to the above: You don’t have to rationalize everything you feel. Sometimes, if you feel something, and your decision is to turn around without bothering anyone, that’s perfectly fine.
• No one judges you, analyzes you, or looks at you as much as you do at yourself.
• Don’t pay too much attention to what people say about relationships and money. Just what they do. And the same applies to you, you’re not better or worse than anyone else at that.
• More and more people went to college over the last few decades, but the jobs available to those college students didn’t grow at the same rate. Think carefully about what career to study and if you should even study one.
• Everything is learnable. The only variables are time and energy. Those are the variables to consider.
• Don’t underestimate how much of your reasoning is guided/post-hoc. Many decisions are made and then we rationalize why to feel more confident about them. In some cases it is impossible to do anything about it, but in others it can be useful to think about the concrete consequences of the decision to contrast it with reality.