You’re 25 today. The past year has been difficult, but it doesn’t feel difficult in this current moment. You’re really good at adapting to whatever comes your way. Everyone is, but most never bother to flex those muscles and think themselves so much weaker than they actually are. But before I, the 25 year old snapshot of you, starts to go off on a tangent, let’s start from the beginning of 24 and work to the present day of September 4, 2015.
24 started off rough. Really rough. You’ve recently ended the best relationship of your life. You listened to all of the advice passed on by those older than you that it’s better to be single than to be in a relationship that isn’t working. It’s heartbreaking, but you’re strong enough to go through with it. If you didn’t, you might not have grown as much as you did in the upcoming months. Let this stand as a reminder for you in the future.
You also inadvertently became part of a love polygon, because that mess was way too complicated to only be a triangle. You probably ruined two potential friendships forever, and not only did you get almost nothing out of it, you took all the blame. You took all the blame for multiple people. You had a lot of secrets at the time, and that’s not something you enjoy because then you have to start lying to people. And while you can actually weave the web of lies well enough and keep it straight in your head, you dislike the actual act of lying to those you care about.
You’ll be laid off from work at the end of September. You have no idea it’s coming. You’ve been at Sapient for almost 1.5 years now. You’ve enjoyed it immensely. You’ve made a lot of friends there, and you’ve learned a bunch of things about web development. But you’ve started to stagnate. You aren’t growing as much as you used to. An inertia keeps you in bed in the mornings for an unreasonable amount of time. An hour one day, maybe 2 the next. You don’t want to go back to sleep, but you also don’t want to go to work. The joy of your work has been slowly sucked out from you.
But it’s not the end of the world. You’ve already realized this and you’ve started interviewing at other jobs in your evenings. You finish the two projects you’ve been working so hard on for the past few months before noon on Monday. You kill some time, go to lunch, and start looking for new work. But by 2pm, you’re sitting in an office with your supervisor and an HR rep, being told that “you don’t work here anymore”.
It’s an ethereal feeling. Like walking through your old high school after not being there for a few years. Everything’s the same, but everything’s different. You have some quick private meetings with your friends to break the news to them. They’re all outraged and are wondering how this could happen. You echo back what you were told from the HR rep about how the company isn’t projected to do well in the next quarter and did poorly in the previous one, so they had to make budget cuts across all the offices. That you’ll be given a month’s pay as severance. You tell them that even though you’ve been working your ass off to get your most recent project ready for the convention it will be prominently displayed at, it’s an internal project. And internal projects aren’t billable to a client, so your billability isn’t 100% like all of the other non-junior devs (I guess that promotion 6 months into the job actually ended up fucking you over). Basically a bunch of business bullshit.
So on paper, you’re underperforming. But in the office? You’re loved. And that’s what really matters. The people. The workplace is just an excuse to hang out with other people and build towards something. Anything. Maybe that’s why most people are afraid to leave their job, even if the actual work isn’t fulfilling. Because it’s hard to let the people go. Because building things together with others is one of the greatest joys in life.
You’ll learn in the upcoming months what the differences between work friends and (for lack of a better term) real friends are. I say this with no disrespect to my Sapient people, because you’ll know you made a lot of real friends at Sapient in the coming months. You’ll be invited to the company holiday party as Brian’s plus one. It will not be awkward, but amazing. Everyone will be happy to see you and will express their surprise at you being there and tell you how much they’ve missed you.
But I’ve skipped ahead. Let’s go back to the beginning of October. You have no job. You have no girlfriend. You’re in this strange love polygon. You’ve just turned 24 less than a month ago. This is not how you envisioned your life to be at any point in the past. But now it’s your reality. Everyone around you is freaking out, but truthfully you’re not all that upset. It’s a fresh start. You love fresh starts. The catharsis of killing your old self and reinventing yourself into someone new has always been something you’ve enjoyed immensely.
Maybe that’s why even though you were laid off on a Monday you were in San Francisco that Saturday. You had the gracious offer from Kyle, Jarvis, and Nick that you could stay with them for the whole month and look for a new job there. It was the most appealing thing at the time. You’ve been toying with the idea of leaving Atlanta for months if not a year at this point, and here was the golden opportunity. So you take it, and run to the other side of the country and try to start over.
You drink the Kool-aid. You chug every ounce that’s blasted into your face by the firehose that is Silicon Valley. You work 8 hours a day, applying, studying, stressing. You work harder than you have in the last 6 months at what was your actual job. And you do this all while sleeping on an air mattress in a 4 person apartment hardly bigger than your 2 person apartment in Atlanta, except you learn that the rent is 6k versus the 1.5k you were splitting with Daniel. You realize that if you moved here, you would be paying roughly double your current rent while getting half the space that you currently have.
But you don’t care. You’ve bought into everything else. The perfect weather. The freedom from having to own a car because you finally live somewhere where the public transit isn’t horse shit. The allure of some big name company hiring you to work for them, and of course the paycheck that would let you afford the insane housing market that is San Francisco.
I wish I could have told you that all of these things won’t matter to you 6 months later
You manage to snag a 3 month long contracting gig with a small startup within your first week. You’re feeling like a bigshot. This is easy! You play the field and eventually turn down the offer because it’s not guaranteed that you’d have a job starting 2015. All you saw were 10 hour days selling your soul, leaving you no time to look for anything better.
You interview with other companies. They all love you and think you’d be a great culture fit, but they’re looking for someone with a bit more experience. That’s the problem when you target smaller companies. They need people who already have experience and have no time to grow someone more junior. Multiple times you jump through the soul crushing hoops that is the current state of the computer science interview process, only to be turned away in the final round. You probably faced rejection over 20 times in those 30 days. And that much rejection really weighs down on a person’s psyche.
You return home fairly empty handed. But you worked hard, learned a lot, and had some fun along the way. One of your old ex-girlfriends even messaged you out of the blue, and you both bonded over the mutual struggle of finding a new job. It was nice to have someone to talk to during that period, someone who was going through what I was going through.
But now it’s November, and the holidays are here. Companies have filled their quotas and won’t be hiring until next year. So you just take it easy. You build up your relationships with your friends. You struggle with your family about long standing issues that have slowly eroded away the emotional rock that families are supposedly there for.
These struggles will culminate on May 10 of next year. Your entire family will be crying and yelling and fighting on Mother’s Day. And while that sounds terrible on paper, it was actually a good thing because those issues that have plagued us for however many years will finally be brought into the light. We won’t resolve them that day, but at least we will acknowledge them. It’s a step in the right direction.
December and January go without much incident. You go to the holiday party, you go to a new year’s party. You’re still studying and searching for a job, but you’ve lost some hope. You start interviewing in Atlanta just for the practice, but you land an offer at a company that seems pretty alright. You could use the money because your ego has been preventing you from taking money from your parents for the majority of this time. Pat yourself on the back for living a good 4 months or so without any of your parent’s help, whereas most of your friends would be completely fucked if they were laid off tomorrow.
You start your new job on February 16th. You temporarily stop searching for new jobs as you settle in and try to make a good impression. You figure you’ll be here for a few months at the minimum, so you make the best of it. You learn as much as you can and you start rebuilding your emergency fund. It ends up being a good experience for you. You now have the perspective of how two companies run. You are able to compare and contrast what you enjoy and don’t enjoy from each, which lets you pin down what you would like out of your dream job.
After a month or so though, your apartment complex tells you that they will be raising your rent by $200 if you want to renew your lease at the start of May. You come to the conclusion with Daniel that instead of renewing your lease, it would be better if you just landed a new job out of the state before that happened. So you decide to finally leave what you called home for the past 2 years.
Around this time, a lot of things start happening at once. Mansi messages you out of the blue, and you catch up and start trying to be friends again. You end up moving in with Brian (sort of) and Andrew, and you learn that your other ex who you were talking to back in October is moving back to Atlanta. You get dinner with her one night to try and rekindle a friendship, but slowly you stop talking because she starts doing that thing where she doesn’t respond to your messages until 4+ hours have passed constantly. You notice the repeat behavior that caused you so much emotional and mental turmoil when you dated, and like the terrible addictive drug she is, you cast her out of your life cold turkey. She is Tammy and you are Ron Swanson, and nothing good has ever come from her so keep her out of your life at all costs.
In the meantime, you become good friends with Andrew and his girlfriend Caitlin who are both amazing people. You start the job search back up and it wears away at your mind. You spend 8 hours working a job you don’t really enjoy, only to go home and spend another 2 to 3 hours applying, studying, interviewing, and being rejected. A notable interview with Qualtrics almost landed you in Provo, Utah. But once again, you make it to the final round and are turned down without much of a reason as to why. Probably lacking experience again.
You’re in a mental hell around this time. Your social life is practically nonexistent with all of the time you put towards finding a new job. Combine this with most of your friends being wrapped in their own relationships (some new, some ending) and you don’t really have much going on in this area.
But there’s a light here. And that light comes in the form of LSD. You’ve already written extensively about your first time, but the experiences you have while tripping are some of the most profound and life altering you’ve encountered at this point in your life. You experience ego death and shed away all of the pressures of society, your family and friends, and even yourself. It’s glorious.
You come away with a renewed sense of self. You know who you are on such a deeper level. A level that is unshackled from the input of outside influences. You leave behind those desires that were thrust upon you by your parents, your friends, your society. Literal decades of other people telling you what it means to be successful. What it means to be happy. And what you “have” to do with your life.
Fuck. Them. All.
You solidify the goals that are core to you as a person as you see them as the things you truly want out of your life, distilled into the quintessential hopes and dreams that sum up to be you. This is the privilege you have been given, so always remember to appreciate those that have enabled you to be yourself. Number 1 being your parents, who constantly give up their lives so you can live yours.
But do not abuse this privilege. Just because you are finally in tune with yourself, you are not granted free access to be a dick to those who around you. While you enjoy your solitude, be wary that you still crave social interactions. Make more attempts to be the one who sends the invitation. That’s something you’ve always been terrible at doing.
Your empathy for others is also raised to new heights. You become even more tolerant of the decisions and shortcomings that plague everyone, including yourself. You start believing in the innate goodness that is inside everyone to a naive fault. You envision an idealistic world that you later have to accept can never exist.
For you see, even though your faith in humanity has been refreshed, you are also reminded that humanity is terrible. For nothing is truly good or evil. And the laws that are set in place to protect us are there because there was some asshole who ruined it for everyone else. Or some other asshole who had a little bit of money and power didn’t like something so he outlawed it for no good logical reason. Indeed, all of our laws throughout history are based around preventing assholes from being assholes.
And that’s a shame. Because 100% of our problems boil down to miscommunication. The inability to capture an idea in its entirety and transfer it to another person, with all of the opinions, experiences, and knowledge that lead you to that idea in the first place. This is humanity’s greatest tragedy.
But you’re rambling now. Let’s get back to what’s happening. You’re at your wit’s end juggling your job and hunting for a new one at the same time. You catch a break with your housing situation though, because the landlord is terrible. This means that you’re moving out again, which turns out to be a blessing in disguise because without a place to live in Atlanta, you have no choice but to go back to live to with your parents. It’s an easy out from your prison.
With almost all of your close friends gone (or unreachable because they have lost themselves into their significant others), it’s not a hard transition. Juliana’s the only person you will truly miss having around, and you still only see her about once a week so it’s not a huge change. Of course when Daniel gets back that will also suck not being around him, but truthfully there’s been this strange divide slowly growing between you over the past year. And him being in San Francisco for the summer hasn’t helped.
You’re not as close as you were in college, but people change so it’s unreasonable to expect that you’ll be best friends forever. But best friends are born out of proximity, so it’s only natural that you’ve started to drift apart. Luckily, life friends don’t care about distance or time, so take solace in that you will always be a part of each other’s lives in whatever capacity you’re able to, big or small.
So here we are. You’re currently living with your parents. You’ve just turned 25. You’re looking for a job, but the American work culture is the most disgusting thing you can think of. You’re thinking about leaving the country, not just the state, because it’s absurd how much better almost every other country treats their employees. But you don’t know what you would do for a living. Continue coding? Maybe. The circle jerk of the narcissistic “elite” of Silicon Valley also repulses you. A bunch of kids solving first-world problems that they themselves created the year prior.
You’re not sure what you want to do anymore. But you have to do something. And I’m predicting that this is the question you will struggle with throughout 25. Having left The Matrix, you see right through the systems that have been set in place to prevent people from thinking about the questions that haunt them when they’re alone in the dark without the warm glow of a smartphone to distract them. But being out here comes with a whole different slew of problems. While you’re no longer planning your days around your next meal like the majority of people, you ache for the simplicity of that life that you’ve left behind.
Because it’s familiar. Because it’s what you yourself have done all your life until now. Because it’s what everyone you know does.
Because it’s lonely.
Welcome to the path less traveled by. The question now is will you continue to make your own way, or will you get back on the “ideal” path? That is to say, go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, and die. I don’t think either choice is wrong.
But neither feels right.
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