Many of my similarly-aged friends graduated college recently. Having finished school over three years ago (long story), I wish I’d expected how painful and overwhelming adult life starts off feeling. I have vivid memories from around this time of walking around aimlessly late at night, wearing sunglasses to hide my tear-stained face and unmistakable look of utter lostness. Looking back, I realize now how much of the pain I experienced came from the crushing mismatch in expectations between what I’d promised myself adult life would look like and what it ended up actually feeling like.
Adulthood felt like living with a perpetual heaviness that I’ve come to learn is just the weight of assuming full responsibility for yourself. I resented this deeply. Where was the feeling of lightness and limitlessness I’d promised myself? Instead, all I felt was a deep sense of directionlessness and an omnipresent guilt about all the things I wanted to do and be but hadn’t and wasn’t yet. It’s much easier to feel comfortable with yourself as you are when you can blame a system like school for holding you back from becoming the better version of yourself you’d be otherwise.
The real problem though was that I had no idea how to forgive myself. Even after I’d figured out tentative answers to a few of the big burning questions on my mind about what I wanted to do with my time and took large risky leaps toward these dreams, I was constantly agitated by the uncertainty I found myself living in and excruciatingly cruel towards myself whenever I made missteps.
I’ve since learned this about forgiveness: the feeling of forgiveness follows the action of forgiveness. Your curiosity about understanding and seeing beyond yourself needs to be a stronger force than your aversion to experiencing shame as you mine your mistakes for lessons and patterns. “Growth mindset” is real and good and imperative to develop if you want to do anything risky in the world (or grow respect for yourself).
Everything feels tenuous and uncertain in your early twenties because it is. Choosing mediocre options because of their downside protections is silly when you yourself are the source of great uncertainty you’re trying to mitigate. This is instead the time to take seriously your job of pulling quickly and swiftly on every thread that captures your mind and heart, then pulling much harder and longer on the threads that simply feel more natural. You will learn much more about yourself and the world around you by doing things than by trying to be someone. Watch as the shape and edges of your preferences for life emerge through experience — this is the opposite of lostness.
Links
The Case for Risk by Rebekah Cox (essay)
"Risk creates an environment where employees should act like a filter where only the best visions targeted at the right markets can pass through but this only works when everyone agrees to think critically and embrace reality.”Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process by Henrik Karlson (essay)
I second every word of this. Describes to a T how I found the work I do today.How to Skate a 10k by Nils van der Poel (essay)
I love hearing how a person was diabolically disciplined (tactics and psychology).Better Living Through Group Chemistry by Santi Ruiz and Lydia You (essay)
Astute 2010s on Silicon Valley anthropology is hard to find. This is that.Diane von Furstenberg profile by Maureen Dowd (essay)
I loved every word of this. If I could sum her up: tenacity and utter shamelessness.The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (book)
A careful study of the incentives of journalism (hint: they aren’t pretty, see Civil War also) and the relationship between interviewer and subject.The Rising Importance of the Great Art of Storytelling by Bill Gurley (essay)
Funny how the term “proxy valuation” is now just called “valuation” in VC world.Charlie Munger on Incentives (notes)
I’ve been taking notes on why VCs behave the way that they do and like everything else in the world, the explanation can be boiled down to incentives.A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith (book)
Financial memory bank of a book with lots of examples of how humans make things weird.Yi Yi by Edward Yang (film)
Everything you’d want in a movie: compelling characters, gorgeous visuals, touching themes enacted over multiple generations, plus an adorable kid.My Potion by Kuomo (song)
A song that feels exactly like a good hug after a very long week.
Parting thought
Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
you can argue that longing is what makes us human.
this so clearly articulated the feelings I had— and still have (!)— following college graduation, thank you for putting those feelings into words <3