We emerge blinking and traumatised from our teenage years to be told, as indeed we are told with each new decade of our lives, that coming up, without a doubt, is the very best decade of all. .

Your 20s are THE BEST. Until you’re 29, when your 30s are AMAZING. But then it’s all about your 40s, I promise. Horseshit – just wait until your 50s! Huge lies, the lot of them. Designed, like everything else these days – from Tinder to the iWhatever – to make us feel just slightly more optimistic and less miserable about life.

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I entered my 20s just after my first stay in a psychiatric hospital. That hospital (which was to be the first of many) was the legacy of a difficult and painful previous 15 years. I got out shaken and stirred and mentally scrubbed, newly clean from alcohol and drugs and utterly, startlingly, terrifyingly crazy.

As I hit 20 and prepared for university, I felt as though I’d spent the previous decade deaf and mute in a stinking, solitary prison cell and had been thrown suddenly and unexpectedly into Disney World with sight and sound restored. And I basically just shat my pants for the next 10 years.

To be fair, my 20s were in some ways amazing. But they were only amazing because I was so goddamn blissfully unaware of everything important. Deep, intimate, loving, long-term relationships? No. All the sex. Studying for the pleasure of learning and bettering humanity? No: a masters in psychology to try (unsuccessfully) to fix what was wrong with me. A job I loved that made me and the world a richer place? Shut up. The City. Financial publishing. Money. Money. Lies. Money. More lies.

My job was deeply unfulfilling, extremely stressful and vehemently anti-life. The only thing I loved doing, playing the piano, I had cast aside aged 18 and refused to engage with beyond listening to music and going to concerts. So I wasn’t playing; I wasn’t doing anything remotely creative.

I knew that the real answers to life would be found in big pay cheques, bigger distractions, five-star hotels and avoiding any kind of self-awareness like the plague. And, honestly, it almost bloody killed me. Worst of all, by my late 20s I was doing this as a father – taking responsibility for another life when my own looked as though it belonged on a reality TV show. On Channel 5. It’s glaringly obvious to me now that the only good thing to come out my 20s was actually a great thing. To this day the single greatest miracle in my life: my son.

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I’m now 40. I have a career as a musician, which is what I’ve dreamed of from the age of seven. I understand more about who I am, what is right and how best to be me. I’m even approaching a fuller understanding of what love is. And in another 20 years I’ll no doubt disregard it all as plain wrong.

But in the meantime, here is what I’d tell anyone in their 20s:

Go slow. There is no rush. Take your time learning things that are important – learn how to listen: to people you want to sleep with, to friends, to bosses, to parents and even to people you dislike.

Whenever you are absolutely convinced of something, spend some time doing the exact opposite. Hate poetry? Do a course in it. Vegan? Eat meat for a month (and stop telling everyone you’re a vegan). Addicted to hip-hop? Binge on Stravinsky and Beethoven for a few weeks.

Leather trousers on men are never, ever acceptable.

Do not, under any circumstances, get married in your 20s.

Herpes actually is kind of a big deal, so avoid it if at all possible.

Learn to say “no” politely but forcefully if needed. Practise doing so regularly.

Do not waste time on small people who want all the success and attention for themselves while occasionally tossing you scraps.

Meditate.

Join/form a band. Mine was called The Mau Maus. It was spectacularly unsuccessful and made me ludicrously happy for a time.

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Learn that you are what you give. Give time, kindness, support, help, money, hugs and cups of tea as much and as often as possible to as many people as possible. And do it without any expectation of reward, recognition or gratitude. If you don’t learn how and why to do that now, and the immense, private happiness it brings, you will have to learn it much further down the line, when you’ve become itchy to look at in the mirror and there’s a black, tar-like, rock solid brick of gnarliness in your guts.

Remember that you’re pretty much invincible in your 20s. And act accordingly. Go out, stay up, travel, rise early, get your heart broken and battered and bruised almost beyond repair so that you’ll finally know how to treat it a few years down the line.

One of the quickest routes to happiness is understanding and accepting that you’re not entitled to anything other than a reasonable shot at the life you want. If anyone gets in the way of that or interferes with it too much, then run the hell away without explanation or apology.

Finally, remember that there’s enough of the really important stuff for everyone. So relax and be kind and focus on making memories and enjoying life. Because just maybe the best year of your life, the best decade of your life, the best time in your life, is the one you’re in the middle of right now.