Most high school students don’t go out to real restaurants on their own—if you do go to sit-down dinners, typically an adult is paying for everything. So the first time you head out with friends and have a fun, chaotic dinner where everyone orders different stuff and drinks different amounts and some people have the dessert and some people don’t eat the appetizers, splitting the bill can become a migraine-inducing puzzle. Does everyone just pay the same amount even if they didn’t eat as much? How is it possible that no matter how many times you crunch the numbers you’re always $10 short?

It’s surprisingly difficult—but you can teach yourself the basics (starting with videos like the one above), which is a balance of math and social skills. After all, you don’t want to ruin friendships over a few dollars.

While there’s some indication that younger folks are less in love with car culture than older generations, there’s also plenty of reason to believe this has a lot more to do with the grim financial outlook facing Gen Z and Millennials than any lack of desire to own a car. Most people still see owning a car as the ultimate in freedom and adulthood—but something that gets lost in all those driver’s ed classes is the simple fact that buying a car is probably the single worst investment you can make with your money. New cars depreciate like a bad joke, losing more than half their value within the first five years. There are compelling reasons to buy a new car, but it’s essential to understand the financial repercussions of the decision, and most high schools skip it.

Typical high school students don’t think about buying a house—but they should, because eventually most people want to own their domicile. But even if your high school dipped into the basics around mortgages and private property, it probably didn’t dig into the true cost of home ownership, which everyone who buys a house discovers terrifyingly fast after closing the deal. This includes the fact that paying the interest on your mortgage can nearly double the eventual cost of the house, and the fact that in addition to the loan interest and principle there will be property taxes and insurance to pay every year. And we haven’t even discussed the cost of maintenance and repairs. If you’re getting to an age when you’re contemplating buying a home, start educating yourself on those costs immediately.

Compound interest is one of the most important concepts any adult in the modern world needs to understand, because it’s a superpower. This shouldn’t be hidden away in some elective class or program—it should be a basic concept taught to everyone. Essentially, compound interest is the snowball effect in real life. It’s the interest you earn not just on the principle of an investment (that’s simple interest) but also the previous interest you’ve earned. Understanding this earlier in life would influence a lot of decisions—including the decision to start saving for retirement much, much earlier, because most people don’t start until they’ve been working for a decade or more, and that’s a huge mistake.

One of the most important wellness lessons people need to learn is obvious in retrospect: There is no guarantee that you will be happy. Everything from the socioeconomic circumstances of your birth to your brain chemistry can have a say in how happy you feel at any given moment, but too many of us come out of high school believing that happiness just sort of happens. The fact is, happiness requires effort. Learning what it means to take a proactive role in your own wellness and happiness is a key life skill. The sooner you internalize this fundamental rule, the happier you’ll be.

It’s kind of mind-boggling that in today’s day and age kids aren’t being taught the fundamentals of consent at an early age. This is partly due to the fact that we tend to relate the concept of consent to sex and assault, subjects most people aren’t too comfortable addressing with high school-age kids. But as you can see in the video above, consent isn’t just about sex—it’s a life lesson on how to live in a society with other people and respecting their space, their boundaries, and their own right to feel safe.

There’s no doubt that we live in an age that requires us to think twice before we speak. There’s always been an art to giving someone a compliment; it’s so easy to sound insincere, or creepy, or to be completely misunderstood entirely. But sincere compliments, wherein your express admiration or wish to support people you like and care about, shouldn’t be a challenge. If we taught people how to express those positive feelings in constructive, encouraging ways in their formative years we’d be living in a much nicer and more optimistic world.

Opportunity cost is a powerful concept that can improve your decision-making in every facet of your life. In a nutshell, every time you make a choice in this life, you are forfeiting whatever benefit you might have gotten from the road not taken. For example, if you choose to leave a good job in order to go back to school and get a better degree, the opportunity cost is the money you would have earned (and the debt you would not have incurred) if you’d continued to work. It can get a lot more complicated than that, but just having a basic understanding of opportunity cost helps people consider their choices more deeply.

Every year millions of adults wake up and wonder why they feel so terrible all the time, and eventually some of them figure out it’s because they have never hydrated properly. Almost every high school has some sort of health curriculum offering the basics of a good diet and exercise. But few actually make clear just how crucial it is to be properly hydrated in life—and how many aspects of your physical being will be negatively affected by a lifestyle that includes energy drinks, coffee, alcohol, and soda but precious little water. Learning how to hydrate shouldn’t be something that only comes with a midlife crisis.

When you suddenly find yourself living life as an adult in training, some of the most stressful and terrifying moments your experience will involve purchasing things and dealing with salespeople. Many of us solve that problem by buying everything online, safe behind the anonymity of our screens. But learning how to haggle and negotiate will not only save you money, it will improve your life because you’ll feel more in control and more confident. And these skills go beyond purchases—you’ll find yourself negotiating over everything from salaries to relationship dynamics, so learn how to do it sooner rather than later.

Credit scares people because they don’t understand it. Conversely, some people aren’t scared of credit also because they don’t understand it. If your life plan is to simply never use credit and thus never be forced to understand it, you’re in for a lot of pain, because everyone needs credit sometimes—even Elon Musk relies on credit to get through life. One of the biggest challenges is how to build a credit history when you need a credit history to get credit—but there are ways it can be done without falling into an ocean of debt that you will be paying off until the day you die.

Cars are complex machines with a lot of moving parts—and any of those parts can break down at any time. Learning to drive and owning your first car are key moments in our journey into adulthood, but the final step is realizing that machines and devices will betray you, and learning how to deal with that. Many high school programs offer some form of driver’s education, but not many delve into the basics of car maintenance that will keep your vehicle running at peak efficiency, or the fundamental things you need to be safe, like changing a tire when you have a flat.

Insurance is one of those things that you don’t think about—not even once—when you’re a kid. And it’s often not addressed in any concrete way in high school classes. And that’s a shame, because insurance is a kind of a big deal in the modern world. Aside from basic car insurance, which you’re required to carry if you operate a car, and health insurance, which is absolutely necessary in modern-day America, there’s life insurance, homeowners insurance—basically, you can insure anything. Understanding how insurance works and why it’s so important is a crucial aspect of risk management and running your life like a boss.

Part of raising a child is encouraging them—our parents wanted us to be confident and to believe in ourselves. Unfortunately, this often leads to people graduating high school without being terribly familiar with failure. From participation trophies to social promotion, many of us enter our adult years with a bit of unearned confidence—and are usually brutally schooled in reality very quickly. This can in turn make failure seem like a catastrophe instead of simply one outcome among many. Learning how to deal with—and capitalize on—failure is a life skill we shouldn’t have to learn on our own.

Critical thinking skills are essential in a world plagued by disinformation, propaganda, and an internet populated by armchair experts creating a circle of dubious sources. Learning how to organize and direct your thoughts, how to think logically, and how to recognize (and combat) cognitive biases and logical fallacies can make a huge difference in your life. It will give you confidence, it will help you convey your thoughts more effectively, and it will protect you from falling or scams and disinfo campaigns. If you didn’t learn it in high school (and you probably didn’t) there’s no time like the present to start.

For most kids in high school, education around the law and police is confined to simplistic advice to respect and obey police officers and to stay out of trouble. But we live in a society built on laws, and we live in a world where obeying the police is actually not always the best course of action. But too many people don’t understand their legal rights in even the most basic ways, and this knowledge can literally save your life. If your high school didn’t bother with this basic info, you should definitely take it upon yourself to do so.

If you shake your head and smirk when you read a story about someone getting scammed, you shouldn’t. Getting scammed has nothing to do with intelligence—every single person is capable of being scammed under the right circumstances. Pressure, stress, confusion, emotional instability—a huge matrix of experiences can influence your vulnerability to being scammed. The best way to defend yourself from the seemingly infinite number of creeps trying to take advantage of you is to learn how to spot a scam before you get sucked into it.

At some point in your life, you’re going to experience an emergency. But most high school programs seem to assume the opposite—that you will lead a long, safe life where all that algebra will definitely come in handy, somehow. If you escaped high school without ever learning the basic stuff like first aid that could save someone’s life (or your own), it’s on you to bridge that gap. Because you never know when you’ll be faced with a medical emergency or a small-scale catastrophe where some basic survival and emergency training will make all the difference.

Conversation seems to come easily to come folks—who go on to dominate every party or meeting—and that makes it seem like conversation is a natural ability you’re either born with or ... not. But like just about any skill, you can learn the art of conversing—how to start a conversation, how to be a good conversational partner, and, perhaps most importantly, how to listen. Being able to make conversation is key to making friends, networking, and developing a healthier and happier mental state that avoids feelings of isolation and loneliness—and yet it’s something we’re all left to fend for ourselves.

The typical high school experience is pretty regimented—in fact, childhood in general has become an arguably overly-scheduled, calender-ruled period of our lives. This results in folks graduating high school with very little experience—or education—in the fundamental skill of time management. Learning how to use your time more wisely and being aware of the time actually required for tasks (instead of estimating everything to take “about five minutes”) is the key to having time for everything you want to do, instead of seeing every hour of your day used inefficiently, leaving you no time left for fun, socializing, or self-development.

Making friends as a child and young adult isn’t all that challenging. You’re constantly surrounded by peers who share your interests, you have plenty of free time, and there are tons of social activities planned for you. Adulthood is a shock in that regard: Suddenly you’re not only losing touch with the friends you had as a younger person, you’re finding making friends to be next to impossible. Learning how to forge new relationships when all the artificial structures that made it easier as a kid are taken away is something every single person could use.

Finally, there is really no reason that every kid in this country shouldn’t graduate high school with the basic ability to feed themselves without hitting up a delivery app. Ordering out every single meal is not the ideal way to keep yourself alive—it’s expensive, makes it more challenging to have a healthy diet, and makes you reliant on a rickety technological infrastructure that can and often does fail you. Learning how to cook basic meals gives you so much freedom and power over your life while saving you money and offering a sense of satisfaction and self-sufficiency. Plus, the food you’ll be eating will be fresher, better-tasting, and better for you in general. There’s no need for anything fancy—feeding yourself and your family isn’t about being a gourmet, it’s about having a few practical skills, some basic knowledge, and overcoming a fear of screwing up.