23 Things I Know At 23

1. Buying flight tickets and running away will work as a short-term solution, but for crying out loud make sure you have something sweet to fly back for.

2. Nearly every advice list for 20-somethings is written by someone in their underwear, eating stale ramen in their shitty one-bedroom flat. You should take from them what you will.

3. You need to stop imagining your own funeral when you can’t sleep at night because it’s self-perpetuating narcissism. Try imagining your best friend’s funeral instead because that is real sadness, and it’ll teach you that sometimes it’s better to be asleep.

4. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach earth. If you’re taking longer than eight minutes to decide on anything you’re certainly over-thinking it.

5. You need to know what you want to drink before you get to the bar. Spend less time staring at menus and more time knowing what you want from life.

6. Taking Facebook too seriously is to compare a series of your friends’ very contrived highlights with a mental gag reel of your biggest fuck-ups.

7. Films are the modern cave paintings that future generations will study to see how we lived. Watch as many films as you can and keep checking the status quo.

8. If you stare at a stranger’s bag of crisps for long enough the laws of attraction dictate that they will eventually walk over and offer you one.

9. Instagram literally puts filters on our lives. You can play the game all you want but there are no winners here, just losers who need you to validate their brunch.

10. You will make poor choices, but at least you will never be the girl who got Drake tattooed on her forehead.

11. Life is what happens when you’re busy saving money for other plans.

12. You can make a good day into a great day by assessing the amount of wine you’ve drunk and doubling it.

13. We accept the hangovers we think we deserve. If you can’t turn up for work with three hours of sleep and crease marks on your face then you’ve got no place in the 21st century.

14. If you need someone to be honest with you, get them to take you for a drive. People really open up once they’re in the driving seat.

15. If you see an elderly person walking past, the very least you can do is smile at them. They have lived through world wars and your biggest problem is your cracked iPhone screen.

16. Life is too short to watch TED talks that aren’t immediately captivating.

17. You have the same number of Oscars as Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s good to know that everyone gets overlooked sometimes.
18. If a sales associate is acting strangely towards you, it’s because the staff have private jokes and weird games that they play to make their shift go faster. Just play along and get out of there.

19. People love hearing the sound of their own name, even people called Keith.

20. You should always carry a lighter with you, even if you don’t smoke. It’s a universally accepted form of social currency that will buy you a conversation with a beautiful girl who doesn’t really want to talk to you.

21. If someone punches you in the face then you have already won the fight because violence is for reactive sons of bitches with weak vocabularies.

22. Apologizing to someone should be a relief for both parties. If it doesn’t feel good then either you don’t mean it or you don’t know what your apologizing for.

23. You can’t trust people who say that Pulp Fiction is their favorite Quentin Tarantino movie because how could you even begin to choose a favorite.