Transcription
Have you ever had a moment of unsettling clarity where you're standing in your kitchen with a cup of coffee or something and nothing's uh technically wrong? I mean, you've got the bills under control and you have a job that you mostly tolerate and yet you have this realization that um there's this persistent I guess background awareness that the life that you're living it somehow feels different from the life that was described to you when you were younger.
Now, I wouldn't say this was catastrophically different or anything. It's just your life feels off in some way that's hard to pinpoint. Um, it's kind of like a a song that that's played slightly out of key and you can't unhear it once you notice it, but once you do notice it, you can't ignore it. And the more you listen to it, the more you notice.
So, I guess I became aware of this gap earlier than most people I knew, but I wouldn't necessarily call that an advantage because what this meant in practice um was that I could see enough of the machinery that's running society to know that I didn't want to be fully inside of it, but not quite enough to figure out how to actually live outside of it. So I ended up in this uncomfortable and sometimes miserable position of being too aware of the system to be at ease within it. But uh a little too practical to abandon it entirely, which is its own special kind of exhaustion that nobody seems to have a name for.
Because all right here's what adulthood actually um turned out to be. Uh it's ultimately an administrative position. Uh but there's no job description or there's no training. There's no performance reviews except of course from the IRS which reviews your performance every year and then charges you for the privilege of uh of having it reed. And you notice that nobody warns you about things like um well the calls for instance. you are always, it seems like you're always on hold. Um, you will probably die being on hold. And then of course the there's the um the diabolical music that they play while you wait, which was probably selected by somebody who who's clearly never been on hold in their life and who also possibly hates you personally for some unknown reason.
So, all right. Here's the thing about the first 20 or so years of your life. All of this, all of it, the the schooling, the uh the grades and the extracurriculars, um the college applications, the the degree, if you get that far, all of that operates on this implicit promise um that at some point the preparation will end and the actual thing begins. And after all the time and effort that you spent building towards something that there's finally this moment of arrival where the training wheels come off and the uh the so-called your so-called real life begins and then you finally arrive.
But this uh this real life it turns out to be just more preparation except now there's a higher cost for it. And the people who prepared you for this, it's not that they were lying to you. Um, I mean to be fair, they were just working from their own experience, which was a different economic reality than the one that you inherited. They had pensions and uh, yes, typically um, they had one employer for 40 years or whatever and they could buy a house on on one income that appreciated immensely over that time period. So, I think it would be fair to say that they were provided a deal that more or less delivered what it it was advertised as it was advertised. And so, they handed you pretty much the same brochure that they received. Um, but I don't think this was done, they didn't do this out of, you know, in a malicious way. They just didn't they didn't really check the expiration date. And um well, the expiration date was somewhere around 1987.
So, for whatever reason, I remember noticing this reality a lot earlier than most of the people around me seem to notice it. And I watched my peers who they enthusiastically embraced the whole this whole sequence, you know, the the the the degree, the career career path in the 5-year plan and whatnot. Um, while privately, I felt like something in the arrangement didn't quite add up. Something about the whole thing smelled a little fishy to me. Actually, it smelled a lot fishy to me. But at the time, I just I didn't I didn't really have a way to articulate this. Plus, had I tried to articulate it, I'm I'm certain that I would have been um met with all kinds of push back and ridicule. I guess it was um kind of like the feeling that you get when someone explains a magic trick and the explanation somehow makes um less sense than the trick.
There's a psychologist by the name of Eric Ericson who did some work in mapping out um the stages of of uh of adult psychological development. And now for the most part his framework makes sense except it was built during the 1950s and it it does assume a level of institutional stability um that hasn't exactly been the defining feature of the last 30 years. Now, he also never had to do things like um you know update his LinkedIn or or explain that gap in his resume or uh figure out what a side gig was.
And then at some point uh and I think this this moment arrives different it arrives differently for everyone but it does arrive sooner or later, you start noticing something about the systems that you were handed. Um, you start to realize that they weren't really built for you. And I think one example where you uh where you notice this is is with um health insurance, particularly in the USA talking about now. Personally, I view any kind of insurance as um some form of legalized extortion because you're paying every month for this thing uh that's supposed to be there if something goes wrong. And then well, let's say something goes wrong uh and suddenly you're you're in the ninth circle of hell because um you're navigating a system that is so obviously deliberately complicated that you genuinely cannot tell if you're covered or not until after the fact when the uh bill arrives. I mean you are dealing with uh things like prior authorizations um in network versus out of network and and you're given these various explanations of benefits documents that explain nothing really. Um, then there's the the deductibles that are so insanely high that the insurance doesn't actually it doesn't actually activate until you've already spent more than most people can afford to spend in the first place. I mean, make it make sense. And of course, this isn't an accident because the complexity is the point, right? And a confused person is a lot more likely to give up. You ever been on the phone after being on hold for 30 minutes trying to figure this out? So, a confused person in this situation, they let's say they make a paperwork error, uh, and it basically it it it voids their claim. And meanwhile, we've got seven of the major insurance companies posting their $71.3 billion in profits that they made in 2024. And that in that same year, there were millions of people that were skipping medications because they couldn't afford them. Oh, and State Farm, one of these major insurance companies, they bought four private jets, by the way. This is the kind of stuff you figure out while you're being put on hold.
And um then how about the um the 401k situation? I mean, the more you look at that, the more crazy or weird it gets because you're putting money away for the future, which sounds responsible, of course, except there is the little issue of the fees that um uh 41% of workers apparently have no idea that they're paying. And those fees can end up costing a median income family something like $155,000 over a lifetime. Now, a lot of people can't even save up that much money for retirement to begin with. So, you're being charged to save your own money in a system that you have no control over. Um, but nobody leads with that at the uh orientation, right?
And then we have the career thing where you hear phrases like find your passion and the money will follow. Now, whoever came up with that is uh they're working from a completely different economy because what what actually tends to happen is the passion becomes a job and the job becomes an obligation. Um and then somewhere in that process, the passion it just it discreetly packs up its things and leaves without notice. And by the way, uh you can also find a similar pattern playing out in the 50% of marriages that now end in divorce.
And then now we've reached a point where into all of this arrives AI which has the um absurdly comical distinction of showing up right after the this an entire generation has spent decades building skills that they hope to use in the workforce. And then AI proceeds to replicate significant portions of those skills in in mere seconds while replacing a growing number of human relationships with artificial ones. Unfortunately, the um the brochure didn't have a section on this either. Go figure.
Um, let's not forget about the um the climate situation which is uh the gigantic elephant in the room. Uh in a way it that's just the macro version of this same pattern. Uh you know this is a system that's been running a deficit since the mid-80s around the same time that the brochure expired.
So, okay. Then there's the part that nobody romanticizes in the brochure. Uh because this is the part that I think actually takes up a lot more of your actual life than uh anything else. The maintenance. So, you know, adulthood, it's not exactly what I would call a series of peaks. Um, think of it more like a supply chain where you are the CEO of a very boring operation whose entire purpose is doing your best to make sure that nothing catastrophically breaks today. Not tomorrow. Today. tomorrow is that's a separate shift.
So maybe it's the it's something like the dentist or it's that inexplicable rash that may or may not be a case of the shingles or it's the ongoing car repairs, right? Uh or maybe it's something with the roof that that's probably nothing but also might be something terrible. Or how about it's the that mold that's been growing in the corner of your kitchen for a while and um and the insurance claim that you have to file about the mold and then the follow-up calls about the insurance claim which leads to the hold music from hell that you're now on intimate terms with. I don't know. You look, you name it. There's a million things it could be, right?
And you know, whatever it is, at some point in all of this, your body, which is which you were led to believe was a relatively passive vehicle that would just take you places. It starts behaving um like a piece of equipment with a grudge and it it has it has an itemized list of complaints. Let's say you um slept wrong. Uh meaning you slept the exact same way that you always sleep, but now for no apparent reason whatsoever, uh you you wake up one morning and you can't turn your head to the left for the next seven days. That's always fun, right, when that happens.
Oh, and then of course there's your relationship with food, which becomes like a negotiation of sorts. Um, so in your 20s, you were more or less invincible. Um, which meant that you could eat and drink whatever you wanted pretty much whenever you wanted and get like 4 hours of sleep and still show up pretty much totally functional. And then somewhere in your 30s or or maybe your 40s if if uh if you're especially lucky, that arrangement expires. And now doing something like eating pizza after 8:00 p.m. that that becomes a calculated risk. So you do um a a brief cost analysis and you decide to eat the pizza and then you regret eating the pizza. Not surprisingly. But lo and behold, you eat the pizza again the following week. Why? Because, well, you apparently learn nothing. And let's face it, you're also in denial.
And uh your 40s. This is where usually your body starts sending invoices for decisions that you made in your 20s with interest and late fees. And then of course we should discuss the feelings. Can't forget the feelings. Um, now these aren't the big dramatic kind of feelings that um that have names and support groups and you know memoirs written about them. These are the other kind of feelings that uh they they get overlooked and they're they're unnamed um and they just kind of sit there in the background of of a fairly functional life because nobody thought to name them. and you feel vaguely strange um bringing these kinds of feelings up at dinner.
So, one of these unnamed feelings is it's the the feelings of the loneliness of competence. So, what does that mean? Well, I find this one rather interesting because it's not this isn't really the the loneliness of isolation. Um, this is the loneliness of being good enough at your life that nobody checks in on you anymore because you've you've demonstrated being fine. So fine is now the expectation and the space between fine and actually fine that is yours to manage alone usually in the car um before you go inside in in the three minutes or whatever where nobody's watching and you don't have to perform anything for anyone. on.
So, okay, another example of these um unnamed feelings is is the exhaustion of sustained responsibility. Now, I want I want to be more specific about this because this isn't like crisis exhaustion, uh, which that at least has an end point and occasionally gets you soup or something. This is, um, this is more like the chronic exhaustion of being the person who always handles things. So, you know, this is the person who shows up um and remembers and who follows up on the thing that they said that they would follow up on. And this is the um tiredness of a person who's never once in their adult life been able to fully outsource the inside of their own head to anybody else.
All right. And then there are the feelings of grief of but this is a little different. This is this is the feeling of the grief of actually getting what you wanted which nobody really talks about this because socially well it's a little complicated. Um, so what does this mean? So, okay, let's say you worked for the thing that you wanted and you got the thing and it was a really hard thing to get. Um, and the thing is fine, right? However, you realize that it's not really what you thought it was going to be from the outside looking in. Uh, but you can't really grieve this out loud to anybody because well, you got the thing, right? So this is like people with boats for example, they don't get to complain about having a boat.
So this is a this is something that Ral May wrote about that he called the hollow life which is the so what this is is it's the anxiety of of a person who stopped showing up fully to their own experience somewhere along the way without noticing quite when that happened. And then eventually social media arrives. And what that did was that was like aiming a fire hose that shoots lighter fluid at a fire and turning it on full blast. So, it took basically what happened with the social medias is that it took all of these unnamed feelings and it made them significantly worse in a way that's arguably arguably this is impressive from a uh purely from an engineering standpoint I suppose because Well, here's what social media actually did. It gave everyone a window into everyone else's outside. Uh, while you retained full access to your own inside. And your inside has all the texture like the doubt and and the 3:00 a.m. inventory of everything that you haven't figured out yet. And it has the boats that you're not allowed to complain about that nobody else's outside shows. So you're not really comparing your life to their life. You're comparing your raw footage to their highlight reel. And the brain doesn't automatically correct for this. even when you know about it intellectually and that has its own special that's its own special kind of annoying because uh well knowing the trick doesn't make the trick stop working.
Okay. Uh then we have what I can only describe as the impostor promotion. So you spend your entire childhood assuming that the adults know something you don't. And uh you get this feeling that there's like um a special scroll somewhere with an orientation packet and there's a um there's a meeting that happened before you arrived where everything was explained and the notes were distributed to everyone except you. And then one day you are the adult in the room and you look around for whoever's actually in charge and guess what? It's you. You're the one in charge. And you haven't received the scroll. But neither has anyone else in the room. So everyone is waiting for someone else to do or someone else to know what to do while performing the the confidence of someone who definitely knows what to do. You know, here's the thing. Civilization is being run by people who are all privately convinced that they are the only one who doesn't know what the hell they're doing. Yeah. Now, they sure act like they know because their reputation and their life pretty much depends on it. So the water still comes out of the tap and uh you know the lights still turn on but um how exactly that remains somewhat unclear.
And on a slightly smaller scale and not you know though not by much um you know when someone says well we should get coffee sometime the meaning of this now is I like you, but neither of us is getting out of this alive with enough bandwidth to make that actually happen.
All right. So, while all of this is happening, time is uh it's going it's doing its own thing. which is to say that it is leaving. Because the thing about time is in your 20s a year feels pretty substantial, right? It feels like something that you can fill. And then eventually at some point the years they start to um move differently and a decade goes by but you are not entirely sure what happened to that decade. And that is a rather eyeopening experience once you reach an age to experience that because you know you were distracted managing all sorts of things, right? A lot of which you probably later realized didn't really matter. you were um basically on hold and the calendar it just kept flipping and the system kept generating new items for the queue and so somewhere in all that motion um the actual experience of being alive got compressed. Senica wrote something about 2,000 years ago to the effect of it's not that life is short, it's that we waste most of it. And I think about that a lot in relation to everything that I'm talking about here.
And when I think about all this, you know, the whole apparatus of it, I guess I guess I understand why people just comply and you know why they subscribe to every norm that they were handed and why they absorb every expectation and keep their head down and hope that the math works out. I get it. But personally, I just I I couldn't I just couldn't do it. I mean, I've tried to do it sometimes, but you know, I I saw enough of this situation early on, enough that I made I just I took a different path, I guess. And honestly, I didn't really have a choice. That's how I feel about it. I because I knew down to my core that I wasn't going to be able to take the road most traveled. Uh, and honestly, I didn't have, you know, I I just couldn't justify spending the one life that I could verify I actually had optimizing for a version of so-called success that was designed by and for someone else's interest.
So I had discovered within myself um I suppose a different set of priority priorities and I felt compelled to honor them at whatever the cost. I was prepared to deal with whatever consequences that meant and people drilled into me that there would be consequences. So, I learned to live on less. Um, and I basically opted out of as many of the norms as I could while still trying to be a uh debatably functioning person in the world, debatably. And I want to be honest, that choice, it did come with its own kind of suffering. uh you know it wasn't like some easy escape from difficulty. It was more like a a renegotiation of which difficulties I was willing to sign up for and to deal with. Uh I guess I just I guess I just wanted the suffering to be more on my own terms. I mean, let's put it this way. If I was going to suffer, and look, everybody in this world suffers in some way or another. I wanted it to be mostly coming from myself, uh, not someone else. uh because at least you know at least that way I could do the inner work necessary to learn about personal accountability and you know personal growth and uh and I and I felt that that would give me the ability to handle whatever the world was going to throw at me.
And sometimes, not always, but sometimes there's this moment um usually it's something completely mundane and ordinary like a typical morning with a coffee or whatever and there's nowhere to be. Um, you know, there's no you're not on hold with some hell hellish music. It's just this feeling that's it there's this feeling that's hard to define, but it lands somewhere between I guess um relief and recognition. Um, so you basically have this feeling of being exactly where you chose to be. on your own terms with your own set of problems um that at least you had some hand in selecting and that is a um that is a a a rather satisfying moment to have even though uh you know I realize that's that's a small thing it sounds like a small thing u but you know when when you've spent a significant portion of your life navigating systems that weren't built for you. Something small that's actually yours. It doesn't feel so small. And of course, of course, that was something else that was never, you know, discussed at the orientation. Uh, but you know, I guess this part I'm glad I figured it out on my own for whatever it's worth and still trying to figure out. I don't really have it all figured out. And on that note, I think that's all I've got today on that subject. So, thank you so much for listening.