A Letter to my Young Self
I am turning 30 later this week, which has put me in a reflective mood. I thought a nice way to process some of my emotions surrounding this birthday would be to write a letter of advice to my younger self, at no particular age.
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Hello there! I hope this letter finds you well. I felt it appropriate to pass along some pieces of advice I think might be useful to you. I’ll divide these into categories as best I can, but there’s going to be some inevitable overlap. I’m not sure when this letter will find you, hopefully early on. Here goes.
On romantic relationships
You are going to be interested in girls pretty early on. From a very young age you are going to experience a crushingly strong desire to have a girlfriend. As the years go by, should everything remain the same, that desire isn’t going to be satisfied until college. This will be very difficult for you, and, should this come to pass, you are going to emotionally struggle with it. Part of this will be a genuine desire for companionship, some of it will be due to sexual urges, and some of it will be a desire for the social acceptance that a romantic relationship signifies. In your mind, getting a girlfriend will be the ultimate indicator that you’re “ok”, which is a pretty formless emotion comprised of a lot of factors, but you know what I mean I think.
To my knowledge, there are two main reasons why you will struggle with romantic relationships and securing yourself a girlfriend. The first issue is this: you are under the impression that the trick to getting a girl to like you is to be impressive. I’m not….exactly sure why that happened. Something something media, something something movies implying male hero protagonists deserve sex (or at least that it is the inevitable outcome of acting heroically), something something toxic masculinity. I dunno. The point is, you have it in your head that girls date men they are impressed by. And that….has some degree of truth to it I suppose. Certainly being able to impress a girl can help land a first date, and it can serve (but is not always necessary for) as an initial catalyst for a girl noticing you. However, you will severely miscalculate the degree to which impressiveness is a factor in securing and maintaining a romantic relationship., and your attempts to be impressive will most often end up just being off-putting. What you actually need to be able to do is to relate to girls. Talk with them. Find shared interests. You will not find a girlfriend just based on how many push-ups you can do. Don’t treat opportunities to talk with girls as opportunities to impress. Just talk and make friends and see where it goes.
However, this approach is going to be complicated by a secondary factor, which is this: you are going to end up kind of thinking about women as if they’re sort of a different species then you. You’re going to absorb so much “Men are from mars, Women are from Venus” type stuff that you’re going to be trained to see women as incomprehensible, alien, and driven by emotions and instincts that are so different from yours that your man-brain could never hope to find common ground. This is all bullshit. This isn’t to say there aren’t any differences whatsoever, there are. But these differences are going to so over-emphasized, by culture and media and religion, that it’s possibly not surprising you had a hard time relating to girls. Just….they’re people ok? Humans, doing human stuff. They got baby teeth that fall out, they got birthdays, they got bills to pay, they have heartbreak and joy and loneliness, just like you do. Treat them like people and you’ll do fine. Treat them as the same kind of thing as yourself.
Note: How one conceives of impressiveness will have an effect on how one engages with the above passages. As a young man I thought of impressiveness largely in terms of athletic prowess, intelligence, and rhetorical skill. I suppose you could imagine a scenario in which someone says of their significant other “I was impressed by how good of a listener they were” or “I was impressed by the kindness they displayed” or even “I was impressed by how much we connected.”, which feels a bit different.
On balance, and avoiding extremes
You will have a tendency to go to extremes. You will have an enormously black and white view of the world, breaking as many things as possibly into binaries of good and bad. Your thinking will follow the lines of: “If X is good, then more X is always good. By extension, less X is always bad.” This kind of thinking is going to wreck you. On some level you’re going to feel that balance is…inauthentic somehow? Or that it’s a manifestation of relativism or something? Well, also you have OCD and depressive tendencies. Yeah, sorry, probably should have told you that earlier on. Sorry about that. At any rate, the OCD and depression have, as a symptom ( maybe cause?) that you see the world in black and white. This way of thinking is going to cause you to have a bad time, and I recommend disengaging from it as soon as possible.
Consider your physical health. In many ways maintaining your health relies on you maintaining a balance between two extremes. It’s bad for you to be too hot or too cold. You can have too much Vitamin A or too little. In fact, probably most of the factors relating to your health rely on a balance. Now, there are certain factors relating to health that more closely resemble a binary, or at least a situation where moving the slider in a particular direction is always better than the other direction. While there are all kinds of nutrients you need, you don’t need lead at all. The ideal amount of lead in your system is 0, and the further from 0 you get the worse it is.
These two paradigms, finding a balance between extremes and adhering as close as possible to an extreme, mirror the ways you have to interact with the world. Time and wisdom and experience will help you figure out when to apply each paradigm. For example, there is a tension in the human life between spontaneity and order, between flexibility and rigidity, between impulse and discipline. Your life can be too spontaneous, devoid of schedule and routine and order. Your life can be too rigid, with no room for the inherent randomness of life and none of the joy of newness and change. Find a balance. Where that balance is will change throughout your life, and it may look differently for different people. On the other hand, consider the emotion/impulse of cruelty. Everyone has a bit of cruelty in them, but there really is no need for it. The ideal amount of cruelty in a person is none at all. You don’t have to strike a balance between cruelty and kindness (although you may have to find a balance in the compassion you extend to others and the care you extend to yourself, which is quite different). Don’t be afraid of balance.
On school and your education
Your life is going to go a lot better if you take your education more seriously. People are going to be telling you to take school seriously all your life, and most of that isn’t going to land. Part of this is because they’re going to try to motivate you by telling you about the importance of getting a good job. However, you don’t have any bills to pay, you haven’t a clue what a 401(k) is, and you’re blissfully ignorant of “the struggle.” It is impossible for you to be motivated by what is, to you, a far off and unrelatable experience. Don’t get me wrong, doing well in school can absolutely help you financially down the line, but that’s not the only reason to take schooling seriously.
It’s going to be difficult for you to internalize the gift you’ve been given. The education you’re being given for free is something kings would have paid fortunes to give to their children. You have the opportunity to read more literature, know more about the physical nature of the world around you, gain more insight into mathematics and history and art and so much more, then even the most prestigious scholars of just about every past century. it’s an incalculable gift, and it’s only the weird brain glitch humans have, where we think things are less valuable depending on how many other people have them, that’s stopping you from realizing this.
Look, knowledge is sacred. Knowing about the world, being able to have perspective on it, having a depth of understanding, is one of the greatest abilities humans possess. Education can elevate your mind in incredible ways, can help you see meaning and beauty and joy and cleverness in everything you see. Don’t squander this gift.