I spent most of my early twenties waiting for my life to start.

I had this vague sense that fulfillment was somewhere out there, hidden behind the right career choice // the right city // the right relationship. I treated my days like a dress rehearsal.

The problem:

I was thinking about my life entirely and indefensibly wrong:

The point isn’t to be blessed by purpose, having found the Right Path by trying everything.

The point is to devote yourself to something fully and monastically. To work, to create, to lock-in and go deep.

That level of absorption is almost religious. When you're caught up in creating something, the normal boundaries of self start to dissolve. You stop checking the time. You stop procrastinating in your inbox. You “forget” to doomscroll.

I've come to think that this capacity for self-forgetting is central to what makes us human.

We're at our best when we're not thinking about ourselves at all.

Your twenties are meant for exploration and experimentation, but I think we've grown confused about what that means. We treat it like we're supposed to sample everything, trying on different identities like clothes at a store. But exploration isn't breadth, so much as depth. It's choosing something that pulls you in deep enough that you forget you were “exploring” in the first place.

For me that depth can only, will only come from making things. I've felt it most strongly in writing, where I can spend hours wrestling with a single paragraph, trying different words and different rhythms until something clicks into place. The finished piece isn't really the point. The point is the process of solving the puzzle, of taking something fuzzy and half-formed in my head and turning it into something concrete and real. This is what people mean when they talk about flow states or being in the zone, though I think those terms make it sound more mystical than it actually is.

The hardest part is giving yourself permission to genuinely and uncompromisingly care.

We're not used to that.

We’re trained to be ironic, to hedge our bets, to smirk and side-eye, to keep our options open. Falling in love with your work is a ritual of closing off and saying goodbye to your options; deciding that this particular thing matters more than the hundred other things you could be doing. Every hour you spend getting better at one thing is an hour you're not spending on something else.

This feels dangerous when you're twenty-three and worried about making the wrong choice.

But I think the real danger is the opposite.

The real danger is spending your twenties in a state of perpetual optionality, never committing fully to anything because you're afraid of foreclosing possibilities.

You wake up at thirty having dabbled in everything and mastered nothing, still waiting for your real life to start. The people I know who seem most alive are the ones who picked something and dove in, even if it wasn't the "optimal" choice according to some external scorecard.

The act (& art) of making things seems especially important. I don't entirely understand why this is true, but the people I most admire tend to have some craft they practice regularly. They build things or grow things or fix things. It’s a sanity of tangibility that comes from working with your hands, from seeing the direct connection between effort and result. You write a line of code and something happens. You plane a piece of wood and it becomes smooth. You revise a sentence and it becomes clearer. The feedback loop is immediate and honest in a way that most modern work isn't.

Permission to ignore what everyone else is doing and follow your own curiosity wherever it leads. The best work comes from people who are pursuing a synthesis - absurd, weird, surreal, nonsensical, non-financial - that only makes sense to them. They're combining things that aren't supposed to go together, or applying tools from one domain to problems in another, or just asking questions that nobody else thought to ask. You can't plan this. It emerges when you’ve gone deep enough into something that you start seeing connections other people miss.

I won’t claim any of this leads to conventional success, though it might.

What it does change, what it inevitably reshapes: the quality of your days.

You experience time differently. Instead of feeling like you're marking it (or killing it) until some future payoff, you become genuinely interested in what you're doing right now. The work itself becomes rewarding rather than instrumental to some other goal. You stop needing external validation quite so much - because you have your own internal standard of what good work looks like and feels like.

I wish someone had told me this when I was twenty-two and paralyzed by indecision about what to do with my life. The answer to life (aside from 42) isn't to make the perfect choice. The answer is to pick something that seems even remotely interesting and throw yourself into it completely. Let yourself get obsessed. Let yourself care too much. Stop protecting yourself from disappointment by staying detached. Your twenties are for learning what it feels like to be fully committed to something, even if that thing changes later.

The alternative is spending a decade in a defensive crouch.

Which is no way to live at all.