Advice for Gen Z: avoid cocaine and learn to sew Words of wisdom from the experts

Nick Cave, Musician and Writer

Be kind, be bold, be civil, read books, get off social media, stay alert, love stuff, create, build, reform, forgive, converse, and stop breaking things. I wish that back then I had known about the preciousness of things.

Helen Thompson, Author and academic

I wish I had known both that you have to choose the best of yourself and run with it and that the chances to thrive are not what one assumes or expects. I wish I had both had more conviction of purpose and practiced more humility.

Geoff Dyer, Author

Drink less, and read more, especially books you think you’ll have more patience with as you get older (late Henry James, Dostoevsky) because in fact you will have less. Learn languages before your brain turns to mush. Play as much sport as you can. If you’re a man: don’t be a jerk. If you smoke (and you shouldn’t have started, obviously), stop immediately. Start using moisturiser (face and body). Stay hydrated.

Bret Easton Ellis, Novelist and Screenwriter

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ‍‍*shrug emoji*‍

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Writer and Musician

Jed Mercurio, Writer and Director

In my 20s, I learned more from my mistakes than I ever did from my successes. It’s tempting to wish you’d never written a particular script or book, but that’s not possible. What is possible is to commit to learning from failure and becoming a better writer as a result.

James Pogue, Essayist and Journalist

It’s uncomfortable advice, but I would say that the great lesson I took from my 20s was that it’s a time when you should try to experience some real danger, physical hardship, and toil. I notice in my 30s that it’s become much harder to work that sort of thing into life, but the well of resilience and capability it offered me has been (so far) lifelong, and it translates into all sorts of unexpected situations. If there’s one thing I notice about my generation, it’s that we often seem to lack really basic familiarity with the physical world — how to sew on a button, how to keep a plant alive, how to spend a cold night when the heater is broken or we’re out camping. There are a lot of ways to get this kind of experience, and I don’t want to suggest any one particular path, but most all of them involve some hard work, some real danger — even just working as a carpenter for a bit is much more dangerous than most of the jobs college grads will do today — and a testing of your own limits. I tend to think people who have this kind of background and experience wind up maturing into adults who are a lot more multifaceted, even-keeled, and sure of themselves moving through the world than a lot of us who grew up in the digital age. 

Lias Saoudi, Musician (Fat White Family)

I think back on that decade now as the great regression, a desperate stab at a kind of pre-pubescent febrility. The bloke I became in my 20s owes the teenage me a serious apology, in fact. By any measure, I was a more intelligent, self-aware, considerate, creative and positive human being at the age of 19 than the one I’d become at 29. There was a period towards the end of my 20s where I could afford my own cocaine, where I didn’t have to chip in with a few other people to afford a gram — other than that, I have nothing good to say about those years whatsoever.

Jonathan Sumption, Historian and Former Supreme Court Judge

Remember that people’s prejudices are surprisingly resilient and their habits resistant to dictation. The world will not be changed by a few individuals or even a whole generation. In the development of mankind, a decade is the blinking of an eye and a lifetime is a brief interval.

Sarah Ditum, Author and Journalist

Here are two things I did at university, one of which I’d generally advise and one of which I’m not sure I recommend but which definitely wasn’t bad for me. The first is: I read everything I possibly could that struck me as interesting. People think the point of university is the qualification. No. The point of university is the massive library. Go into the stacks. Read some dusty pamphlets no one’s touched for 30 years and aren’t on the internet. Learn something nobody else knows. It’s so much fun, and I wrote some of my best essays on things I found that way (more importantly, I discovered things that shaped my thinking forever).

The second thing I did is: I had a baby. This definitely made things harder that they could have been (and my partner and I had a lot of support from family and friends, and needed all of it), but it worked out, and I think one of the reasons it worked out is that university (or early adulthood in general, if you’re not going to university) is likely to be one the last times you’ve got some leeway from the fixities of adult life — if I hadn’t done it then, I think I’d have been trapped in the life plan and not got around to it till I was 35. So don’t necessarily have a baby when you’re 20. But do give the freedoms you’ve got a hard workout, because if you don’t take chances now, you might be waiting a long time for the opportunity to come round again.

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

My only advice to anyone in their teens and early 20s would be: ignore the advice of anyone over, say, 25. They will offer you nothing except a tiresome and irrelevant justification of their own existence. Life has to be experienced, and for advice on how to navigate it, peer education is the only way. They say that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. Well, if you want to improve this shit show, read proper researched and critical history books. Not stuff written by establishment lackeys or two bob grifting conspiracy merchants with their go fund me pages; look at the world created by all those old fools over thirty. They don’t understand it, so they certainly don’t get the one you’re bringing into existence. Get them to fuck.

Jason Williamson, Musician (Sleaford Mods)

My 20s were still under the relative cushion of adolescence and the reality of survival had yet to fully kick in. The thing I most depended on as some kind of compass for sense and reason was not to panic and trust that life, so long as I got up every morning and faced it, would clear a way for me.

I don’t mean to parent here, but I will say that if you can largely avoid cocaine, weed and alcohol and do a bit of exercise, it will make the ability to face life so much easier. And contrary to popular belief, such sensible behaviour will not dent the power of whatever ideas you have for your own contribution to the world.

Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher

Going to university is a transition of unmasking false appearances, of mercilessly demystifying fake authorities from parents to political leaders, of bringing out the hidden reality of domination and corruption. In your early 20s, a shift takes place which should not be dismissed as mere conformism. We become aware that appearances matter, or, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous: fake it till you make it. Often, there is more truth in the mask, in what I pretend to be, than in (what I think is) the real face behind the mask. Freedom is in our societies is often an illusion which justifies domination and exploitation; however, only if we remain faithful to the idea of freedom we can we hope to come closer to actual freedom.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Writer and Activist

In 1997, I was in university. On the summer break some Dutch friends and I settled on going to the Gambia and Senegal. I remember early discussions about appropriate behaviour; how to deal with risk; did we read the relevant sections of the Lonely Planet? They were white, wealthy and young. None of them had visited a developing country. Inevitably, they were shocked by the heat, the chaos, noise, filth and constant warnings of theft and robbery.

Dirty toilets, swarms of flies everywhere, the smell of cooking food in the air was mingled with odours of decaying trash and wafts of open sewers. The only thing that seemed to cause excitement was the white tourists who were pestered by hordes of young men peddling useless items as souvenirs. None of this was new for me. Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia are full of scenes like that. It is daily life for millions of Africans.

I watched my young friends transform from rosy-eyed adventure seekers to ill-tempered complainers.

It was interesting to watch my friends from the very wealthy Netherlands not only survive in Africa but also to hold heated debates about the IQ of the locals and the role colonialism played there. They were strangely ignorant when they arrived, but in a way it was refreshing to hear them acknowledge that the poverty and discomfort they witnessed were the products of culture. They left with an awakened awareness of difference, and a fresh understanding of how lucky they were to have been born in a culture that generated wealth and comfort, and respected human integrity. So take a Lonely Planet trip to Africa and have your eyes opened.