Yeah, I understand that in hindsight but young people usually don't realize that and that's why they shun advice majority of the time. They take the person's advice for granted. The person that actually went through those troubling times were allowed to experience it and go through that so why can't I? is the mentality.

That wasn't my mentality when I was a teen. My mentality was, "that won't happen to me". Of course, it did, and it does.
The problem with the youngest of us is that we're generally the least experienced, so there isn't that rate of failure to ground our egos and tell us we're not infallible.

The positive thing about making mistakes is that it does exactly that... grounds our egos and proves to us that we're not infallible. But I think that it's not really an across-the-board thing.
It's not like we make a single mistake and say, "Oh sh*t, guess I'm not perfect. Gonna take all advice about everything from now on and never make a mistake again!"
We say, "Oh sh*t, f*cked up on that one specific thing, but all the rest of my decisions and perspectives are good to go. Just that one part of it wasn't"

Then we proceed to prove ourselves wrong again and again, because we're not looking at ourselves and our perspectives as inherently fallible and in need of guidance. We're only checking our egos on a case-by-case basis. The rest of the time, it's running its unstoppable show, making bad decisions left and right.

Eventually, we see a pattern, gain a little humility and realize that maybe we're not as perfect as we thought we were. Maybe we're even flawed on a basic level. At that point, when we're able to accept that, we're able to accept the help and advice of others, knowing that just because we think we know what's going on doesn't automatically make it so.

To me, that's just growing up.
And to be honest, I don't think it ever stops. At this very moment, my future self is shaking his head and saying, "if I only knew then what I know now".
It's just something we have to accept.
And I think once you do accept such a thing, it makes your life a lot easier, because there are plenty resources around us that can make sh*t a lot easier in the long run.
We will all still overcome plenty enough mistakes if we're worried about building character. We don't have to make every mistake in the book to do that.
In fact, I think that if we made every mistake in the book, by the end of our lives, we'd feel pretty sh*tty about our inability to get a damn clue.

Exactly, it's part of life and growing up. There is also a learning curve issue. Some people don't learn from their past mistakes and tend to end up repeating them until it finally clicks and they figure out what they have been doing wrong.

I say all that to say, though, that the mindset of "making my own mistakes, ad infinitum" is neither a reasonable nor a practical mindset, and should (hopefully) be grown out of.
Because once it does "click", then we're more open to utilizing the advice of others rather than the pain of our own self-inflicted failures.

Yes by that time we have had enough experience under our belts that we learned through the process of failing and not listening to the advice of people that have went through the same things.

Please stop making sense. That shit is unwelcome here. This is the music banter Lounge, goddamnit.

Hmmm. I think that I did pretty well as a teenager. I didn't worry about being cool, I had a great best friend and we used to say such funny things and laughed basically all the time. I went to lots of parties, got plenty of male attention and spent a lot of time online. I would basically say to my teenage self to not worry so much about school as it had little relevance to my degree (other than maths which I was already good at). I think my biggest issues were in my early 20's because of my health both physically and mentally. Number two would be to be nicer to my mom and not argue with her. It is hard to control teenage hormones though.

If I was 40, I wonder what I would say to myself now at 23.

I wish I could be 23 again?

Most people on here are adults? I'm 15 and I assumed people on here were a similar age. I know it's stereotypical, but most adults I know don't use the Internet, especially not for forums. Mainly based on my parents but watever.