Installation by Zach Lieberman
Hi again. I've been going back and forth between a bunch of different places these past months. Spent some time in New York, in different parts of Los Angeles, in Arizona, and soon will be in San Francisco.
Most recently, I went home to San Diego for Easter. While travel is said to expand your perspective, coming home does the exact opposite of that for me. My world shrinks. Nothing matters at all. I become content with the small circles and locations I frequented for years and the same-old conversations I've had time and time again with familiar faces. Coming home is nice when you're from a warm beach town and people you've always known are there to welcome you with open arms. It's comfortable.
There's a part of me that wants to cave in. I know I can stay at home with my parents. I know my friends will inevitably meander their way back to our spots. I've been struggling with the idea of ~accepting mediocrity~ or whatever that that means for some time now. (Who decides what is mediocre, honestly?) Why put so much effort into your life when you know that you can just ride the wave, try a bit less and still end up alright?
When I was 15, 16 years old I didn't put much thought into my life's trajectory. My philosophy was pretty simple: get some A's here, do that business club there, meet the standardized testing threshold. I checked every box one by one until I ended up at a college I felt okay about. I wasn't one of those kids who had aspirations of starting a company or becoming a famous artist or a doctor. I saw what was directly in front of me, and I tried really hard to do it well. That’s it. No innate talent, little self-direction. I worked as well and as efficiently as I could in order to get more time to play video games. Not exactly savant material lol.
Even now I have a hard time distinguishing between the things I want to do because I truly want to do them, and the things I want to do because of external pressures or because people are watching. As a freshman in college, I deluded myself into believing working as a consultant was my dream because consulting clubs were the most prestigious at my school. I went through absurdly rigorous interview rounds (keep in mind, for a club…) to be whittled down to the final candidates of huge applicant pools. I completely bought into it, but fast forward a year and I dreaded the idea of touching another slide deck or doing more market sizing questions. It wasn’t for me.
As you might conclude, I'm still trying to move away from the checklist approach. The habits remain the same despite working as a designer. One portfolio piece here, one job offer there. Just one more, one more, and I'll be in the clear... Separating myself from my environment to grasp my innate desires while surrounded by people who are doing so much is difficult. Like many people entering their post-grad crisis, I'm trying to delineate what a fulfilling life looks like apart from my surroundings.
Back to coming home — it's interesting because when I go home I don't care about any of this at all. I don't care about how my friends are working in web3 and living in high rise apartments, I don't care about having the most impressive portfolio to land a big company name, I don't care about making sure I size up with how I dress and how I act. Where I’m from, people don't care about any of these things. Tech is not a dominant industry. Fashion and culture are not even concepts the average person thinks about. Product design as a career does not exist in the mental space of anyone within a 25 mile radius of where I live. It's a banal observation, but the majority of people in my town don't think about if you're cool, on trend or doing something impressive. Life is slow and pleasant. Intros consist of what you actually like to do outside of work. Not to say that those working in tech aren't nice, interesting people, but it's just a different world altogether.
When I work in my home city I almost have to force myself because I don't feel that energy, that sense that everyone else is working and pushing and moving towards a goal. I have to lock myself up in a coffee shop frequented by other young people to get that feeling. This is why I start to doubt myself: What's the point of placing all this stress on my life? Am I the one determining my goals?
I've been churned through the funnel of self-help and hustle porn and swept up in big city dreams. I've grown accustomed to the goals and lifestyles of people who work in urban jungles and sustain themselves through business and tech and building personal brands. Two years ago I didn't know there were tech micro-influencers on Twitter, or even about the tiniest basics of the tech ecosystem like funding rounds or product-market fit and stuff like that. I am one of a handful of people in my high school graduating class working in tech. So why am I here at all?
Fun fact: this is where my newsletter's name comes from. It comes from a sense of disorientation at the stage of life I'm in. I feel like I keep searching and searching for the next thing that will anchor me, that will make me feel secure and content as turbulent waves rock my existence. Like the rest of us, I’m piecing it together. There are a million unseen paths that I can choose in my future, and I have already chosen millions more prior to them. I just have this feeling — I'm looking aimlessly for a path I have paved many years ago.