Let’s just get this out of the way now: things don’t get easier.

You currently spend your days going to school, eating junk food, and then coming home to watch Pokemon. Sometimes you make things interesting by adding in some gaming to your TV sessions. You don’t have a care in the world and your biggest responsibility is to finish that Math or English homework. It may seem trivial, but enjoy it. You’re in the good old days.

As your life progresses, you will slowly gain more and more responsibility. It won’t seem like much each time, but eventually it will add up. During High School, you will have to get a job to start saving money for continuing education as well as funding any purchases you want to make. During University, you will need to figure out how to balance studying, partying, your finances, and most importantly: the roller coaster ride of developing into the early stages of being an Adult. Post-University? It gets extremely overwhelming from here with a list that would be longer than this letter itself.

Eventually, it’ll set in that the world isn’t as easy as it once was. People depend on you, and you depend on people. You will think that you have your life plan figured out with career and spousal choices, only to have that shaken up every few years. You have bills, chores, and overall things that you won’t always want to do but have to. You will experience failure. You will experience heartache. You will lose people in your life. The worst part? It doesn’t stop happening, and will only increase in frequency as you grow.

Now re-read that last paragraph and realize that it’s not such a bad thing. Failure at the time can be very upsetting, but it’s the best way to learn and grow. Heartache can be more painful than anything physical you’ll ever feel, yet it means you had the chance to experience the true feeling of love. Losing people in your life is not easy, but you will become a better person by remembering the impact they had on your life. You could also lose people who may be toxic for your future but may not seem like it in the moment. As you get older, you will learn how to deal with different scenarios that won’t always be easy, but keep your head up! There will be periods of tough times that seem to go on forever, but always be thankful for what you have and not for what you don’t. You may not get that job you always wanted or the girl you thought was the love of your life, but you still have your family and friends to fall back on until that next job or girl comes. All the events you will go through will attempt to define you, but ultimately you need to define how you react and not how they impact.

At the end of the day, these roadblocks don’t matter in the grand scale of things. You’ll die, the planet will die, and the Cosmos will eventually die. Enjoy your time, be happy and keep moving forward on this floating rock orbiting an average star in an average galaxy. When the Sun decides to explode and engulf this planet (if Humans are still alive by that point) – nobody is going to remember that job you didn’t get at 25.