I turned 27 last week. Inspired by my friend Shreyas’ excellent reflections on turning 29, here are a few things that I feel confident in beginning my 28th circle around the sun:
Always bring snacks.
Sleep is really important. Pretty much everything is better with enough of it, and everything is worse without it.
Sometimes, though, it’s worth not sleeping, whether that’s to stay up really late or wake up really early. As long as you’re properly selective, this isn’t contradicting the previous point.
It’s all relative. “When the perceived extremes of my peers overwhelm me, I try and remember: comparisons are odious. I also imagine that I contribute to others’ sense of extremity just as much as they contribute to mine.”
You are the aggregation of the people you spend time with. Choosing who to spend time with makes you who you are which means you have the ability to alter your life trajectory simply by moving around who you’re spending time with.
Investing time in meeting new people yields large and unexpected benefits, but it’s hard. By structuring introductions in a high-density way you can make meeting people (relatively) easy.
Corollary: since meeting people is hard, keep up with people you already know. That’s a lot easier. Call friends you haven’t talked to in years. Send them a long-form email. Mail them a letter. If you’re in a city with some time to kill, figure out who you know there and see them.
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can instead be attributed to stupidity. Not only is this a kinder way to live life—an easier way to keep ‘assuming best intentions’ in mind—but it’s also a funnier way to live life.
I’ve cut down a notable amount on how much I drink alcohol over the past year. I never drank all that much to begin with, but I’ve found the costs have grown—in terms of sleep, recovery, how I feel the next day—and the benefits seem less necessary. I spend my time with the right people to where I feel comfortable just hanging out. I don’t really feel like drinking much most of the time and I feel a lot healthier for it. For an interesting take on this point, see On Pausing Alcohol and its Followup.
Read. I find that the amount of reading I’m doing is a barometer for how put-together my life is; if I’m not regularly reading, it’s a sign to check in on myself. I am a better version of myself when I’m reading something regularly.
Important caveat: Read whatever you want to read. There can be a lot of pressure to be reading the “right” things, whether that’s catching up on the classics, digesting information about important world events, or otherwise challenging or bettering yourself. If that kind of stuff is what you feel like reading, read it. But—surprise, surprise—I’ve found that if I’m not enjoying a book or don’t want to read an essay that I feel like I should read, it tends to go unread on my bedside table or languish in a browser tab. Forcing yourself to read books is a bad strategy, and, furthermore, as I wrote in more detail in 2022: “While it may feel good to be able to say that you’ve read something, that doesn’t mean it’s the most effective way to learn something.”
Trying things is underrated. Most people don’t try things.
Relatedly, trying hard is good, actually.
My roommate of three years, Brian, no stranger to the blog, moved out this week to move in with my great friend (and his girlfriend), Kaleigh. Once, last year, he wrote on our kitchen whiteboard these lines from T.S. Eliot:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
April is over and it’s May now. It’s warm and sunny again, despite the occasional spring snowstorm doing its best to bolster our snowpack. I’m feeling the energy of spring open up my group of friends like blossoming flowers in the sun.
On my birthday, I went skiing in ten inches of unexpected powder at my favorite ski resort. In the past week, I’ve climbed the Second Flatiron three times, gone backcountry skiing off Berthoud Pass and in Rocky Mountain National Park, jumped in Boulder Creek twice, gone climbing in Eldorado Canyon, biked all over Boulder, had a few group dinners, and slept an average of 7 hours and 44 minutes per night.
I hope spring is treating you well too. Cheers,
Michael
Happy birthday! And thank you for the sprinkling of Michael Bateman pieces throughout this one... Here's to another year of insightful writing, and trying really hard.
Happy birthday. A quick gmail search says I've read 14 of your posts since subscribing in December ... not enough time to know a person, but enough to be reminded of myself when I was 27. I hope you keep writing for the next 16 years so I can check in on how 43-year-old you compares with current-me.