"Live a bit longer, make a few more mistakes, and you'll be good at it too," Sam assured him, amused. "Though if what I'm saying is useful, maybe you can learn from mine. I've learned all of this the hard way, I hope you won't have to."
That was really the point of giving advice, from his perspective. No one else should have to fuck up as badly as he'd done, multiple times over. He couldn't even count how many times he'd been kicking himself over the years, but the one benefit of all his experiences was that he found it easy to relate to people. Grief, guilt, anger, blame, pain, sadness, crushed hope, self-loathing and self-flagellation: those were all emotions and states of being with which Sam was intimately familiar. He wanted to spare other people from experiencing them as much as possible, which was why he reached out to people like Carl at times like this. At the least, they'd have someone to share their misery, and sometimes that made all the difference. Feeling completely alone was the worst of all the most terrible emotions, as he'd learned just before his arrival here.
"Funny the things you miss, isn't it?" he said. "I spent most of the last year eating fresh fruit and vegetables, I don't regret that at all." The additives that the leviathans had put into most foods had made 99% of America significantly less healthy, but for him and Dean, it had forced them to eat even healthier. Particularly Dean, since Sam's diet had already been fairly healthy to begin with. "My brother usually survives on that stuff. He wasn't too happy to switch over to 'rabbit food'."