LSANKAR

The bugs in our thinking evolve as we get older.

One I've seen more frequently recently has been irrational insistence that a once flowing well can be drunk from in the same way. I see this in myself and my peers.

It comes in many shapes but always has the same shadow.

hero's journey part 1

You've gone through an iteration of the hero's journey already. Perhaps in your early twenties.

You learned to interface with your world early and felt confident about 'just making it by'. But of course, that wasn't enough to truly live. Stability be damned, you sensed adventure just around the corner. The challenge was just big enough to both titillating and scare you. And the rewards loomed large.

You pulled yourself together and answered the call. With the gusto of youth, you crossed the threshold and faced the uncertainty. As adventure always is, it was a struggle, but you passed the trials and seized your rewards. And you brought those learnings home, bettering your tribe.

You're in your 30s or 40s now. Of course, circumstances have evolved. Your role in others' lives has a different contour. But the call to adventure always beckons.

You remember how good it was before. Of course, you romanticize. You assume things will be as they once were (although, of course, they never are).

You have deep memories of the rewards available to those who dare: both spiritual and economic. You reconnect with your old colleagues, you draft a business plan, you send in a job application, you DM an old friend...

meaning and career

Life and careers in the modern world are long and varied. You don't have to do what you did before and in fact probably shouldn't.

But if you approach your life honestly, you can almost certainly have multiple great meaning-making careers throughout it.

Two things are probably true:

your brain isn't where it was when you embarked on the last adventure
the world is a different place than it was when the last adventure emerged

It's weird to be burdened by good memories. You can't deny that you were lucky to have been there and done that, but you need to fight the feelings emerging from that luck if you want to make the right decision now.

Even if all you care about is money ('meaning' be damned!), you can't just repeat what you did last time. Opportunities rhyme but they never repeat. Getting in before the IPO and experiencing hypergrowth was divine, but it doesn't ever happen the same way.

Maybe liquidity never happens this time. And maybe your new obligations and energy levels won't permit the same approach to work. But you are a human endowed with the same greatness you were endowed with last time and god knows you'll will something great into existence again.

All of this is insanely self-evident, but I can't help seeing crowds of my peers living their second life expecting the rewards of the first.

Mid-life crises but for techno-capitalists.

relationships and love

Same goes for revisiting old friends and flames.

We're all different people now but you want them to represent what they were. There's a reason that The Great Gatsby is such a revered piece of Americana.

Jay Gatsby's bootlegging empire was inspired by an image of Daisy Buchanan. Not who she was in reality. If we interpret his actions as his internal state, he was ambivalent to the real Daisy, to the end. His absurd demand that she renounce Tom was the bug in his thinking showing its ugly head.

I've recently had the pleasure of reconnecting with some of my best friends from my 20s. In almost every case we picked up many of the pieces as we'd left them, but we're all different now. Parenting is replacing partying.

I consistently catch myself slipping into buggy mental patterns that prevent me from seeing these people from who they are right now. I expect it goes both ways. The neural pathways we developed so carefully last time run deep and tug us into old conversations even though neither of us live there anymore.

Unoriginal as it is, I want authenticity. I want to see you for who you are today and I expect you want the same.

If you're an old friend reading this, just know that I'm trying my best!

transcendence

There's that great lindy Heraclitus quote about the impossibility of stepping in the same river twice. Yet we keep trying to.

Enlightenment and transcendence seem to be about living in a twilight stage where both the past and future hold deep meaning. Yes, 'presence' and all that, but also honoring the past and future commensurately.

There's still time and space for great things.