Every older person in your life is a time machine you can talk to. Ask what the world was like when they were your age.

Someone who was sixteen in a different decade holds a first-hand version of a world you can otherwise only read about: what things cost, what the music meant, what was expected of them by Friday night. That knowledge is unusually detailed and almost entirely undocumented. Most of it never gets passed along because nobody thinks to ask for it.

Ask one older person what a weekend looked like when they were your age, and what they were worried about back then. Let the first answer be short, then ask again. The second answer is usually the good one.