I don't want to be old
It's my birthday
This post is also available on my new website liamporr.com you will start receiving emails from there as well instead of substack.
Me at 18 vs me at 22
There comes a point where birthdays are no longer exciting. Everyone looks forward to the big milestones— On my 16th birthday I recieved freedom in exchange for taking a drivers test. On my 18th birthday we went camping in Big Bend National Park with my cousins. On my 21st birthday, we were all sent home because of Covid, but I got one great night in at the bars and got on a 7am flight home to Texas with no sleep.
On my 22nd birthday, one week ago, I got my Covid vaccine. Best present ever.
But now, the birthdays will come more quickly and with less celebration. In other words, I'm entering adulthood.
I’m a harsh self-critic, and I’ve always taken myself way too seriously. Throughout highschool and college I wanted to accomplish a lot as fast as possible, so others would take me more seriously. I wanted to reach the “serious accomplished adult” phase as quickly as possible. The younger the better.
I think I felt this way because I wasn’t very good at the “be a fun kid” phase. I was geeky, unathletic, and awkward. So, instead of trying to fight that loosing battle, I decided to try and beat everyone to the next phase. Then I’ll be on top and we’ll see who’s laughing.
For my first job, I worked as a landscaper for my dad’s friend. It was not a glamorous job. Working outside in the South Texas summer is about as shitty as it gets. The heat and humidity are brutal, but hey- you get payed a whole dollar above minimum wage, for your troubles. In other words, it was the perfect place to start my career.
Fast forward to my first summer in college. I came to California to become a software engineer, and I manage to land my first real internship. I’m getting payed over 4x the salary of my first job as a landscaper, and I’m working in Silicon Valley. Nice as it was though, things didn’t work out.
There’s something very unsettling about working at a large tech company in the valley. It felt like one of those office cubicle nightmares you see on TV shows. The people I worked with in the landscaping company had.. troubled backgrounds for the most part, but damn if they weren’t way more entertaining than the people I was working with now. One of the guys I worked with back home once told me he was working on a cargo ship before he started landscaping. While docked in Columbia, he smoked so much weed with a guy in a hut that he forgot the ship was leaving that afternoon, and nearly got stranded in a foreign country. I don’t think anyone at this new place could’ve told me as good a lie as that one.
But hey, this is just one company. Let’s do another internship and maybe it’ll turn out better.
Nope, nope, and nope. This one was even worse. Bigger company, same problem. I didn’t admire my bosses or mentors. I even met the CEO at one point, and felt equally disappointed, thinking “this guy is the head of a massive company, the physical embodiment of a Silicon Valley success story, and I have zero desire to be like him”. They just seemed very.. different from me.
Expectations
As an adult you have certain expectations— get a job, save up for retirement, get a spouse, make more money, get a house. These expectations are totally made up of course. Nobody is forcing you to do any of these things. The more we play into these artifical games the more they suck us in. Suddenly, it becomes about living in the right neighborhood and having the right interior design, making your kids go to the right schools.
These expectations are all inherently restrictive. For every “expectation” you seek to satisfy, the ability live uniquely in your own life decreases.
I dont think this is news to people, but I also don’t think people are trying to restrict their lives on purpose. Nobody wakes up and thinks “ah I cant wait to keep allowing societal expectations implicitly dictate the way I live, time to go get a keto bagel”. Its something that happens because of our instincts as social creatures. To survive we must fit in.
Social media makes this even worse. Pick your poison: compulsively use instagram and mope because you’re not a world-traveling fitness health influencer, or use twitter and start telling people ten things you learned about being a total tool (a thread) :down point:.
Sorry that twitter one was a little mean. I like twitter. But, like all social media, it hijacks your social instincts—tricking you into believing that everyone lives a particular way and you have to conform to survive. But, in reality those people live unrealistic lifestyles, and you dont see what happens behind the scenes
I think people do this because it’s the easiest thing to do. When you’re young, its easier to ignore those expecations because you’re in the process of changing, your personality is more fluid. Once you start to settle into an identity though, you begin to restrict your goals, aspriations, hobbies, basically your entire life in ways that satisfy that identity
I think this is why we admire youth so much. Young people have the fluidity and courage that we loose as adults.
Courage is a finicky thing. It’s important and essential, but it’s bolstered by ignorance. I think when you’re more ignorant you tend to be more couragious. Because you don’t have a firm grasp on the consequences or the risks involved in your actions, there’s very little to restrict you from acting. As adults we understand the consequences and we have more to loose, so we tend to take fewer bold actions. But, we want to take bold actions, and we admire those who do.
It seems like the wisest people tend to embody characteristics of youth. It’s almost as if they’ve circled back: they no longer feel the need to take themselves seriously and impress people. They understand the consequences of bold actions. In fact, they understand the consequences so well that they know that the negative parts are mostly meaningless.
We spend our adulthood in the process of accumulating things: wealth, reputation, a career. We avoid anything that could risk loosing those things. Contrast this with the brazen 22 year old, with nothing to loose and the world at their fingertips.
For the last couple years I wanted to accumulate those things quickly. Proximity to Silicon Valley did not help in this regard either. Everyone at Berkeley wants to be young and rich. You either flipped sneakers and made thousands of dollars in high school or wanted to create a startup and be the next Zuckerberg.
You either had the right internships at Facebook and Google or worked in IB and made boatloads of money working 100+ hours a week during summer “vacation”. Are you in the right consulting or CS clubs? Machine learning at Berkeley has a two-phase interview process and probably accepts around ~2.5% of applicants. Blockchain at Berkeley has made so much money from consulting jobs that they created their own startup accelerator (https://www.xcelerator.berkeley.edu/). They charge upwards of 50k per gig (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meet-the-hottest-blockchain-consultancy-a-berkeley-student-group).
I’m not here to tell you money wont make you happy. Anyone with money could tell you that. Many students here seek accomplishment more than money. They want people to know their reputation and admire their skills. So, they work just as hard (if not more) than those who just want to be rich.
We jump into these 40 hour a week jobs right after college because we want to be taken seriously and thats what serious people do. Then when we realize its not what we expected, but we stay because leaving is scary and we might loose the comfortable lifestyle we’ve come to know. So instead, we suffer through our desperation quietly.
I think we can learn a thing or two from young people. We cant live ignorant and free of responsibility forever, but there’s no reason why we have to so eagerly toss them aside.
As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. - Thoreau