Ask your grandma what she’d tell her sixteen-year-old self. You’re getting decades of hindsight for free.

Hindsight is expensive to produce and cheap to pass along. Somebody who is eighty has already spent sixty years finding out which worries were pointless and which decisions mattered, and they will usually hand the summary over for the price of being asked. Most of it never gets asked for. The questions stop, and the answers go with the person.

Ask one older relative what they would tell themselves at sixteen, then stay quiet long enough to get the second answer, which is usually the honest one. Write down whatever lands. You do not have to take the advice to be glad you have it.