Your parents were once sixteen and clueless too. They just don’t have the photos on their phone to prove it.

The confident adult handing you advice was once as lost as you feel now, with worse haircuts and stranger decisions, and almost no record of it survived. Missing evidence makes them look like they were always this way, which turns your own uncertainty into a personal defect instead of a stage everyone passes through.

Ask one of them about being your age. Not the lesson version, the specific one: who they liked, what they got wrong, what scared them. Most tell more than you expect, and it changes how you hear everything else they say.