A Big Buffet
Specifically within my 20s, there have been quite a few experiences that put me on the edge towards making significant changes in terms of what foundations to lay or visions to pursue.
I view the 20s as a bridge between figuring it out and knowing who you are, what you value, and what kinds of commitments actually suit your temperament and long-term goals.
This bridge is where experimentation meets pattern recognition. You try things, keep the signal, discard the noise, and slowly replace “figuring it out” with reliable preferences and routines.
Every now and then, it's not uncommon for me to ask my friends what they want out of life and the answer has been fairly consistent for most of them.
It’s interesting how often the answers cluster around stability, time with people they love, some creative outlet, and enough money to remove daily friction.
These wants sound simple, and often they are, but simple doesn’t mean easy. Simple things still require trade-offs, boundaries, and time invested.
Money often functions as a gatekeeper via unlocks of options and also concentrates worry. For many, I can tell that “enough” is ambiguous, and that ambiguity drives decisions that feel safe in the short term but may not align with bigger aspirations.
Recognizing what “enough” actually looks like for oneself is a quiet but powerful act of clarity.
Those who change their minds about what they want out of life share this characteristic of having more exposure to myriad of experiences that keeps influencing their perception of life.
Evidence of learning
This in itself is a good thing in my view, because one's mental model of the world will keep expanding in proportion to the breadth and depth of what they’re allowed to try and then reflect on. Mental models grow when you test them against reality, not when you simply admire their elegance.
We live in a small, interconnected village but the world remains vast in the possibilities it contains and the unknowns it hides.
That paradox (small networks, immense possibility) is both liberating and destabilising, in that information and options are everywhere, but meaning still has to be chosen.
That said, the attending conflict I've discovered here is not getting anything tangible done in the name of exploration, curiosity, or keeping options open.
There’s a subtle gap between “trying everything” and creating something that compounds.
The thought and implications of looking back and seeing only browsing with no building happening sometimes scares the life out of me.
I akin it to going for a lunch buffet, checking in on all the tables, roaming all over the place, taking a bite here and there, but without really sitting down to eat properly until the event has passed and you've neither finished a meal that fills you nor discovered which dish you could learn to cook well.
You leave hungry for substance and a little guilty about the scattered attention.
It's a precarious place to be in figuratively. And in a literal sense, I'd rather commit to something that doesn't end up working out than not commit because the cost of trying and failing is often far lower than the long-term cost of never trying.
I think for the most part, one can recover from a failed commitment. To recover the compounding years you never invested because you were always choosing between options is much harder to do.
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