legibility
Back when I was getting into product design, I accumulated extensive lists of portfolios. Some would consist of a simple tagline like "I'm a product designer studying X at Y school, and I recently worked at Z company", some would take more of a role + values approach, saying "I'm a front-end developer crafting experiences that blend functionality and delight," and a third category would describe more broadly what their interests are, "I'm interested in world-building and catalyzing the outputs of technology for social good."
It was this third category that I found particularly intriguing. I thought it was impressive how people so young could have such perfectly defined callings, parameters that they've constructed around their life to help focus what they do on a day-to-day basis — especially because I had no idea what direction I was going in, or what I was trying to focus my life around. It's so perfect, a neat call sign that could help me think of them and go oh right, that's the connection-obsessed VR-dating guy.
It didn't take me long to uncover that these taglines were typically reductive. I would have conversations and similar firsthand encounters and immediately it would become apparent that there's a lot more this person cares about than getting catgirls to fall in love with Sonic the Hedgehog avatars.
Overlegibility is a trap that I've fallen into, in the last year of commodifying myself online to appeal to the right executives and hiring teams. I was scraping together whatever pieces I could locate from every corner of my persona, delving all the way back to childhood to find out why I just had to be a designer, of course there was no other path. I viewed it as a necessity: if I condensed myself into a short pitch that I could weaponize upon the right person in an elevator, they would want to keep talking to yet another inexperienced, ~aspiring designer~. If a product team could visualize the shape of where I slotted into their company, if I could meticulously fill out the Common App-inspired application questions for fellowships with the right decorum, then they would understand the value of me burning down the minutes of their clock. And then I could have a job, maybe.
There's so much pressure to confine ourselves into a specific narrative arc. Many want to be autobiographically shaped into a sort of visionary (being mildly hyperbolic here) that was born with the intention of becoming a pioneer, blazing down the plains of the way finance works forever, or being obsessed with storytelling, or how communities form. I'm sure there are some people who do feel that intensely about a variety of topics, which is important if you’re being genuine, but I also think this level of visibility, and striving for lucid comprehension has reached a threshold of over-importance in the public eye. Today every LinkedIn-fanatic, ace designer, or starry-eyed startup pilgrim has developed their own strong story for what they're interested in, and why. Even if it's not the truth — which in many cases it isn't, in my experience.
It's much easier to assign any form of narrative to our life in retrospect. I find that truthfully, I stumbled into design and tech because I heard a friend was interning as a product designer (wait, she does what? I asked) and because of the one random time after a dorm party my friend B sat me down for ten minutes and showed me Figma. I didn't pick my exposure to any of this stuff deliberately, and in fact, I was totally oblivious to the reality that when it came to 'career', and things you can receive money for, the world is significantly more expansive than I had ever imagined.
Anyways, that's why I find advice like follow your passion to lead you to success to not be especially sound, because sometimes you just pick the best opportunity that's fortuitously available to you, and then you discover you actually enjoy it. Just ask Steve Jobs, who as far as I know is one of the first major proponents of the follow your passion ideology, which he didn't even subscribe to himself. If he followed his passion to begin with, he likely would have continued his collegiate delve into history and mysticism, to ultimately become a monk in Palo Alto or something.
The combination of all of these factors also makes me find the idea of being against narrative identity to be compelling. To careen the dial in the absolute opposite direction of the spectrum, what would happen if we could just do whatever the hell we want, without it aligning perfectly in some storybook? In what ways does our tendency to think longterm, to commit to callings pigeonhole us into cemented tropes that don't account for the constellated, fleeting nature of our interests?
The need for compression of information and identity is at the expense of ourselves, and our own hidden inner complexities. The need for a title, a tagline, or even choosing a major is often not done with your comprehensive interests in mind, it's done with the intention of becoming a more digestible entity, to lubricate yourself to be easily swallowed up in a great sea where power is given to the systems of selection that are supposed to place us where we need to be.
But what if we don't find something respectable to latch onto in our lifetime, this nominally infinite game, or if we don't want to compose another neatly crafted chapter that goes into our story? Is it truly that unhinged to decide to get up and soar off to some random location, to conduct ourselves in a totally-unrelated way to what we were doing previously? To whom do we owe the justification?
The containerization of self, the generation of plot and theme and topic, the roles that we fall into at every stage of this process — to me is overblown. I don't want to be forced to play a game or level up my skills in a linear fashion or try to painstakingly lay out all my options in front of me as if it was some RPG where I can see all the progression bars, conversation trees, and selecting the right ones will get me to the best possible ending.
As Hayley Nahman put it:
“When we over-index on documenting our lives, or infuse it with the aesthetic of cinema, scoring the climaxes, editing out the in-betweens that make up a life, we risk inverting its utility.”
“In our search for meaning we obscure it.”
Perhaps it would be more useful to take Rilke’s advice and live out our questions, to keep the doors in us locked until they voluntarily choose to open, rather than painting over everything with a grand white-out brush of a self-ordained answer. Once you cease the bowing and the omission of narrative inconsistencies, shake off the motion sickness, yes, you can run, now you're in pursuit of a one-off, restless impulse, doggedly hunting it down into the horizon, and it feels good. Once we're able to stand alone, unable to concisely explain what we do in drunken small-talk, is when we resolve the admission of our vagabond tendencies and — at least this is what I believe — allow what composes us to flourish.
Rather than subordinating to existing terminologies and donning convenient imitations, it can be forgiving to surrender to your internal discord: to admit that yes, it is absurd, it doesn’t make any sense, but I'll do it anyway.