WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE????
What are you going to do with your life? I wrote an essay about this back in my freshman year of college, and now I'm in my last semester at Rice with absolutely no answer to what I'll be doing in two months.
I've had a weird time. In my three and a half years at Rice, it's felt like a new chapter since going abroad. It hasn't been the same school in my eyes, most likely due to a lot of changes in my life and in the world, including AI.
I find myself in a strange position because I felt like just yesterday I was a 18-year-old kid in Boston going to college, even if he didn't really know what that entailed. He knew he wanted to think about what the next thing was. That was the guy who wrote that essay, not knowing anything his freshman year and just assuming something would work out. It has, in a lot of ways, and I've progressed in ways I never would have imagined.
My question is still unanswered. My mom is visiting for Families Weekend and was saying I should go live in Singapore, or New York, or Boston, all these things. It seems easy to just tell people one thing is going to happen because then it shuts them up. But with my mom, you have to be more specific. I don't want to give the half answer.
The truth is I don't have an answer to this question still, and we're past the time where I'm a 18-year-old kid. I'm someone who has to make decisions now. I have to do something when I lose the structure of this school in only two months.
I don't spend a lot of time, I'd say, on classes here, though. There's one class in particular where I feel like, when I attend it, it really benefits me. It makes me think in a new way, and that's the type of thing I really enjoy spending my time on. The others seem more like means to me: means to graduation, means to an end. I can't say I truly enjoy them every day, and I won't miss them when I graduate in two months.
When I hear that I need a certain level of structure, that I need to be taking classes, it doesn't make a ton of sense to me, because I try to avoid that structure now. I want more time to build the things that let me propel myself in my own direction. I suppose you need some sort of grounding, something that keeps you from falling into the loops, the bad habits that take you away from that. That's a fine line, and an unclear one.
I don't see myself as a guy who starts a job after graduation and has that be his everyday. I can't visualize that for me. I've recently accepted that I'm not that 18-year-old guy anymore, and I grieve him, because I don't feel like him. It's not that I partially live in denial. I literally don't feel like that guy. I feel old, and I'm not old, I'm 21, but it's like, holy shit, I've had four years of my life where I could have done so much, and it feels like it was only the last year or so where I really got to do that.
I want to restart. I often say that if I could restart college, I'd be a mechanical engineering major and a philosophy major and a film minor. When I say that, people tell me, "well, you can do that," but I need to move on. I need to go on to the next stage of my life and roll with the punches. I don't want to restart an education. I don't think I'm capable of it anymore.
I think I'm reaching the point where you're just tired and you need a new way of learning. I'm exploring that way of learning in my own products, my reading, and whatever issues exist in the world. As I do all of this, the common thread underneath, and what has always been there, is how to solve the problem of my own well-being.
A lot of people ask me how you land on some objective solution to well-being, and I don't think that's the case. There are a lot of ways to improve your well-being, and a lot of them are subjective to the person. The means by which you arrive at those places can overlap in a lot of ways.
What I've continued to learn through my struggles in trying to solve the anxiety that comes to me, no matter how much I examine things, is that applying your own thinking, your own reasoning, to different aspects of your life is insanely difficult. Even with a system where you can note everything down, process everything as the feelings arrive, switching your thinking takes time, care, and focus, and sometimes means stepping back. You don't know when that means stepping back, and that in itself can cause stress and anxiety, and it can ruin the process. It makes you feel like you're falling in your head again.
In more ways than one, it has felt like I'm continuously failing at solving my own challenges. The difficulties I face in ninety percent of situations get resolved. I'm able to be myself in most situations. But when the bad times come, they come just as hard, arguably harder, when you fail.
There's research on this by Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri. He calls a goal that's actually yours self-concordant, and he found that reaching one raises your well-being, while reaching goals that aren't yours has little or no effect. I felt genuinely happy to hear that. But he also says, as his own view and not something the data confirmed, that "failing to reach a self-concordant goal can sometimes leave you feeling worse than before." That's not proven, but it's close to what I've felt a lot more recently, especially since so much of how I improve my well-being is exploring what it means to do so.
When the challenging times hit, the effect on me is tremendous. It's not just a situation that stresses you out, or a trauma you're trying to recover from. It's a coherent desire you've formed over years of your life, something you truly want to be doing. You fail at that, and it lands so much harder, and it piles on you. I don't know a way around it. I know I can try to isolate the feeling, isolate when it's coming up, so it isn't embedded in the situation.
There's a phase of incubation, where you're just experiencing things, and that's what scares me most about this next step. I'm going to lose that, because that's what college is for. College is for the incubation. You experience things. You have so many different things going on that you just live in it, and it's a really important part of your life. It can't replace thinking, but it needs to exist alongside it.
For me, that experience just started, and now it's already ending. Not for bad reasons. It makes sense for me to graduate, to keep proceeding. But in losing the structure, I risk losing the incubation too. I lose the experience of meeting people, of meeting the ones who can appreciate the person I feel I really am and the person I've spent the last few years becoming. That adds a different kind of pressure, because in every situation, with every person you meet, you want to be yourself, because there's so little time left. You don't want them to think you're someone else.
You want someone to click with you, and to spend more time together, and just get started. There's a line from When Harry Met Sally: when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. I feel that way in a lot of cases, not because I've met someone, but because I want that phase to start. I want to be at the point where I'm with someone, meeting new people, who help me live better.
I fear I'm at an inflection point. If I leave in two months without further incubation, I'm not going to get this kind of experience again. I get to see a lot of people right now, and that number has already gone lower as I've gotten older, with fewer new people to meet at school. When I lose the opportunity to be in those high-probability places to meet people, the chances get lower that I will. I think it's important to make your own luck, and I feel like my own luck is the thing being driven down here. The chances just get lower, and that's what I really don't like about aging.
I don't want to get rid of this. What I've felt in doing short-term, full-time jobs is that they take up all your time. The job becomes your life. You stop noticing the desire to see people, to do different things, to live a multifaceted life, because you just want to solve the one you're in right now: an efficient way to get to work, good food, all the immediate things in front of you. They distract you from the things you actually want, from the intrinsic desires that take real time to focus on.
That applies to people too. You look at the immediate problems in dating, in meeting someone, instead of the ones that are actually relevant and important to you.
I'm terrified to do that. I'm terrified to just accept the next opportunity, to accept what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, even if it means years of it, because I don't know that I'll get the chance to return to myself again. I'm scared. I don't have an answer to this. If any of my own thinking on this is right, the only way to find it is by:
- asking the question
- acknowledging my own fear
- living and incubating in the time I have left
- staying open to how that applies to the doors that open in the future
Yet again, as I probably should have ended my last paper, I don't have a solution to what I'm going to do with my life. But whatever it is, I hope it doesn't take this away.
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