What I've Learned in Thirty Years on Planet Earth

INTRODUCTION

I turned thirty today and decided to take my best friend's advice and write up some lessons I've learned. Most of these are responding to experience from my twenties. Some disclaimers before you dive in:

- I have a bit to say about money but I am in no way a financial professional, so take this advice at your own risk.

- Likewise, I am not a doctor, just a guy who has carefully observed and learned from my own numerous mistakes.

- Furthermore, all of this advice is shaped and shaded by my experience being a cisgender, heterosexual, middle-income white Millennial American man. I hope something here is useful to someone, but inevitably it won't all be useful to everyone.

- Finally, if any of this seems like common sense to you, see #40 below.

SCHOOL

1. The goal of college is to get a job, period, full stop. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about (well-meaning high school teacher trying to encourage you) or is lying (college admissions officers at an information session). You may want to believe otherwise in spite of the evidence—I certainly did, from the middle of high school well past the end of college. If this sounds like you, it is worth asking yourself what prior assumptions in your heart are making you not want to accept this simple and obvious reality. See also #16 on wishful thinking.

2. Don't head off to college still in a committed romantic relationship with someone from back home. Don't enter into any committed romantic relationships for at least the first two years of college, ideally the first three.

3. Don't go for a Masters degree unless you are absolutely 1,000,000% sure it is preparing you for the career you really want.

4. Don't go for a PhD unless you have a clear non-academic career path in mind for your degree. I say this because I've known a lot of PhD candidates and they all lament how very, very hard it is to get an academic job (i.e. tenured professorship) nowadays. If that's your dream and you think you are competitive for that kind of job, by all means go for it, but be prepared to jump ship to non-university employment if it turns out to be a dead end.

WORK

5. It's never too early to start aiming for your next career. I'm working on my third now, personally. If your idea is really out-there, like becoming some sort of artist or performer, starting as soon as possible is even more important so that you have plenty of runway to do a lot of mediocre work and build your base of experience for when you're finally mature enough to do something great.

6. Never, ever start a company by yourself in China if you are a non-Chinese person.

MONEY

7. The greatest freedom is living below your means.

8. If you prefer to live beyond your means, learn how interest rate arbitrage works. You will come out ahead if you pay the minimum on your student loans (average annual interest rate of 5.8%) while putting as much money as possible into retirement accounts and index funds (if you Google the top index funds they all grew 6%+ in just the past month).^[1]

9. Chances are that at some point in your life you will have less money than you would prefer. An abundance mindset helps in this situation. You might have applied to 50 jobs for the past six weeks with no answer, or have emailed 20 people on Craigslist about apartments. The only way out is through; you need to make yourself believe that your effort is going to pay off. Keep applying, maybe even broaden your search to non-ideal jobs and neighborhoods. This doesn't guarantee success, but it will keep you sane and properly focused during the difficult period. If you just put your head down and keep trying, when the day finally comes that you suddenly start getting emails every day inviting you to interview or tour, you will be able to feel that your hard work was not in vain. The point is, trust the process. (This assumes you have a good process—obviously you have to figure that out before doing anything else. You can't get a job as a brain surgeon if you haven't even been to medical school.)

10. Always, always, always (even if you are living beyond your means) try to keep an emergency fund. Once, while living in Shanghai, China, my bedroom in a multi-room apartment was literally demolished (as in, they took away my wall and removed my bed) on government order because it was an illegal sublet (which I did not realize when I signed the lease). I packed up my entire life in an hour and then lived in Airbnbs for three days while I looked for a new place under duress and at great personal expense. I pulled through primarily because I had set up a financial cushion for exactly this sort of unforeseen disaster.

11. Understand orders of magnitude (1 order of magnitude is 10^1, so any number that is counted in tens i.e. 10-99; 3 orders of magnitude is 10^3, or any number that is counted in thousands, i.e. 1000-9999, etc.) and use them to keep perspective at all times of where you actually stand in the world of wealth. The median American has a net worth of ~$120,000, making them 17x richer than the median human globally (net worth ~$7,500). On the flip side, the richest 50 Americans own approximately as much money (~$2,000,000,000,000) as the poorest 50% of Americans, which is about 165,000,000 people.

As of today, November 12, 2021, Elon Musk is the richest person on Earth, with a net worth of $279,800,000,000. Chances are, if you're reading this, you are not even within 6 orders of magnitude (1/1,000,000th) of Elon Musk's net worth (this would put you at a net worth of $279,800, more than double the American median). Now, suppose the height of a one-story suburban McDonald's represents your wealth (total height ~20 feet). The Empire State Building is 2 orders of magnitude taller than your one-story McDonald's (total height 1,454 feet), representing a net worth of $27,980,000. Mount Everest is 3 orders of magnitude taller than the McDonald's (total height 29,032 feet) representing a net worth of $279,800,000. If you go to 4 orders of magnitude higher than the McDonald’s you've entered outer space according to international treaty (total height 327,360 feet, or 62 miles) representing a net worth of $2,798,000,000. Elon Musk's net worth is an additional 2 orders of magnitude beyond that (total height 20,000,000 feet, or 3,787 miles). The International Space Station orbits at 254 miles up. In this analogy, Elon Musk's wealth reaches 15x higher than the orbit of the ISS—as tall as a one-million-story building. And remember, this is assuming that your McDonald's already represents more than 2x the median American net worth.

The point is, the world's richest people are not like you and me. Their concerns are not like our concerns and their priorities are not like our priorities. Next time you see some news story or hear some talking point from an uncle at Thanksgiving about how such-and-such politician is going to reduce everyone's personal freedom by "raising taxes on the rich," be aware that neither he, nor you, nor I, are "the rich." The rich are literally astronomical compared to us.

TRAVEL

12. Travel.

13. No, seriously. Travel to places where you don't speak the language and have never encountered anything like their food, where their customs are unfamiliar and the currency has a lot more zeroes than you'd expect. Go alone, once, as cheaply as you can manage, for the experience (lots of people have discovered the affordability of backpacking through Southeast Asia, for example). Later, go with friends or a romantic partner. Go as often and for as long a time as you can handle. You've surely heard the cliché about "getting out of your comfort zone." Well, chances are, if you're a middle-class American, your comfort zone will not be in Phnom Penh. The adversity of travel is the single best way to find—and then overcome—your limits. It forces you to take your ego down a notch and rediscover the joy of not knowing how to do super basic stuff, like operate a Japanese bidet or order breakfast in Beijing. When you finally do that super basic thing in the unfamiliar language/culture, the elation of that moment will make you feel like a child again, when the world was strange and full of mystery and you learned constantly not because school or your job told you to, but because that's what human children do.

MENTAL HEALTH

14. Once again, I am REALLY not a doctor and these are just my lay opinions. With that in mind: don't start taking any medication you cannot safely get off later unless it's going to save your life. For example, certain SNRIs (like Effexor) are addictive and unsafe to stop taking without professional medical supervision. Don't start taking one of these drugs unless you're really, really sure you've exhausted all other options, because chances are you'll be taking it for the rest of your life. I only mention this because two people close to me are on drugs like this and have expressed frustration that they can't get off of them.

15. Leave your house/apartment at least once every day and walk somewhere. If you're in walking distance of somewhere worth going to, like the grocery story or café or park, walk there. If you're not in a walkable community, force yourself to walk for the hell of it. Walk your dog (if you have one) down the street and back. Aim for 20-30 minutes. Do it regardless of weather—humans are waterproof and coats exist. This is not so much about the exercise as it is about breaking the pattern of being indoors all day, which can make you feel trapped.

16. Distinguish between wishful/magical thinking and making choices. Just because you tell yourself you can study effectively while stoned doesn't mean it's true. More likely you just like being high and want to get stoned. And that's fine—who doesn't. But you should be honest about that fact and then make decisions from there. You can't live a good life if you aren't seeing this desire clearly for what it actually is. A perhaps more common example: don't tell yourself you aren't exercising because you don't have time. Everyone has time. However, exercising sucks, and deep down you know this, and therefore you probably don't want to do something that sucks. The point is, don’t fool yourself into thinking that your life is the way it is because of reasons that conveniently absolve you of responsibility for your choices. If you chose to exercise, you would exercise.

INTERPERSONAL

17. You should probably get off Instagram and TikTok. Twitter too, assuming you don't need it for your work. The screen is not a person, not your friends, not real. You are alone in a room, staring in silence at a screen. That is not the life human beings were built to live. You can aspire to more. (If you feel like you simply must be on these platforms to maintain relationships or because they improve your quality of life, see #16 above.)

18. Somewhat relatedly, just because a lot of people seem to like something doesn't mean you have to like it. It took me until basically age 29 to realize that the fact that I hate night clubs is not a defect in myself that I need to overcome to get along with others. It is simply a fact of my life that I should honor rather than fight against.

19. Speak up when talking to service people/strangers in public, especially behind your COVID mask, and especially when asking to pet someone's dog. If people can hear you clearly, they will be more at ease around you, and you will signal to yourself subconsciously that this interaction is okay and you aren't doing anything wrong. As a socially anxious person, this is really hard for me but the benefits are immense.

20. Tell your family members you love them. In my family growing up my dad did not typically verbalize that he loved me (I knew he loved me, I wasn't neglected, we just weren't in the habit of saying it aloud), and vice versa, until I was like 26 because something something toxic masculinity. But now we say it at the end of every phone conversation. Same thing with my sister. It was weird at first, but we all sort of silently decided to start pushing this change a few years ago and now it feels normal and right.

21. Tell your friends you love them, too. Text them right now. What are you waiting for?

HEALTH & WELLNESS

22. If you're doing intense workouts like Olympic weightlifting or high-impact cardio, make sure you warm up, stretch, and observe good form. If something hurts, STOP IMMEDIATLEY and try to figure out the problem (including asking for help from a professional). Do not simply "power through" a minor injury, because chances are you'll turn it into a major injury by repeating the same errors that caused the minor injury in the first place. I did this with barbell squats and now my knee hurts a little every single day even after physical therapy and remember I'm thirty.

23. Wear a sunscreen facial moisturizer every day to slow down the aging of your skin. SPF 10 or 15 is plenty. Your face is one of your most precious bodily assets. Do your utmost to protect it. As far as I can tell most men have never heard this advice.

24. Hydrate.

25. Try not to binge drink (alcohol). If for some reason you must binge drink, remember: "liquor before beer, you're in the clear." And if you can eat something starchy or bready during or immediately following the drinking event, that will go a long way towards mitigating the eventual hangover (your digestion will probably still feel gross, though). Also, hydrate.

26. If you have a hangover, there's a beverage I've seen at convenience stores called Electrolit that is absolutely the best hangover cure. Chug one or two of those with an ibuprofen in the morning (even better if you can chug one directly after drinking and before going to bed), and keep hydrating as usual, and you should be functional, if not 100%. Gatorade achieves sort of the same thing but is not as good. Coconut water works too but is also less effective.

27. If you have a larger build like I do, embrace the fact that the waist size of the jeans you wore in college probably isn't going to fit you anymore ten years on. In particular, get rid of those undersized jeans you're keeping in your drawer that no longer fit but you're keeping them anyway in the hope that you “are going to lose weight at some point” and fit into them again. That belief is dumb and not actually helping you lose weight. Just inhabit the body you have now and take care of it as best you can. (I know body image is popularly considered a problem for women but I promise you it affects men, too. Wearing right-sized clothes that fit comfortably is the easiest way to feel good about the body you actually have right now, which is the body that matters.)

28. Vitamins are bullshit, except Vitamin D, particularly in winter (assuming you live in a non-tropical latitude where sunlight is significantly reduced in winter). For Vitamin D, 4000 IU per day is plenty to avert deficiency in winter.

29. If someone encourages you to have sex with them without a condom, you can safely assume they have done the same with their previous partners. Seriously reflect on what this means before agreeing. Corollary: don't ask people to have sex with you without a condom unless you're completely sure that you are disease free. Not "pretty sure" by your own reckoning based on lack of visible symptoms, but completely sure as in you have had a recent negative STD test. As with COVID, don't be the person who infects other people out of sheer laziness. (I did not come up with this but it really speaks to me. H/t to my podcast hero Merlin Mann for this one.)

30. Get an air purifier for your home, or at least the room where you sleep. Recent research on the negative health effects of indoor air pollution is pretty damning. In ten years, I believe people will look back on the era when we didn't all have home air purifiers as a dark and backwards age. You can make your own like this. You should also dust and vacuum your sleeping space at least a couple times a month (your whole house too, but I’m trying to set achievable goals here!).

31. Drink less coffee. It's not helping as much as you think and is almost certainly undermining your sleep and dehydrating your muscles and brain. Two cups a day max is more than enough for anyone, though ideally you would drink just one. If you're a habitual drinker, that "good" feeling you get from coffee is not actually the caffeine working. It's your brain being spared from the painful caffeine withdrawal you were just sliding into. I can attest to this because I had to stop drinking coffee for medical reasons this past summer after being a 3-4 cups per day drinker. When I had caffeine again for the first time (in the form of a half-caff Americano from Starbucks) the experience was practically psychedelic. That is the feeling of caffeine.

32. Floss every night. If your gums bleed, it means you aren't flossing often enough. If you floss every night for a week, you'll stop bleeding. If you skip a few days after that you'll start bleeding again. Just suck it up and make it a habit. It takes like two minutes tops. Why would you want to live with strawberry seeds and chicken tendons and popcorn kernels stuck in your teeth?

33. If you feel like shit first thing in the morning, it's because you didn't sleep well. There are many possible reasons for this. The most likely is that you didn't sleep long enough. But it's possible you were in bed a solid 9 hours and still slept poorly because of something self-inflicted (like looking at your phone in bed right up until you fell asleep), something environmental (excess noise, excess light, wrong temperature, a bad mattress or pillow, a guest taking up your accustomed bed space), or something medical (like sleep apnea or a neurological condition). If you are going to seriously attempt to fix your sleep, I would recommend trying to solve the problem following the order of this list.

34. Regarding the use of phones in bed, I strongly advise against it. Before you go to bed, you should put your phone down to charge somewhere out of reach of your bed. Not on your nightstand, but on a desk or dresser across the room, or even better in a separate room entirely. If you like to know the time while in bed (I do, personally), get an old-style clock radio (I have one, it's great). Don't do this and then cheat yourself out of the benefits by bringing an iPad or similar screened device to bed (having a TV in your bedroom is bad too)! My ex would do this with an iPad and she was so groggy and late and pissed every single morning and she never did figure out why.

SELF-CARE

35. Make your bed. It doesn't have to be military-neat, just straighten it enough that, come bedtime, you get to enjoy the small, delightful gift from your past self of pulling back the covers and climbing into a nice, made bed.

36. Try keeping a journal. Once a day is a big commitment (I certainly don't journal daily), so try once a week and see how that feels. You don't need to document everything that happened in your day. Just a couple sentences, or even just bullet points, reflecting on what went well, what you're grateful for, what you're looking forward to. If what you're writing feels cheesy, you're on the right track.

MISCELLANEOUS WISDOM

37. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. That is, it will be easier on you to forgive someone than to stay mad at them forever. This does NOT mean you should try to be friends with someone who really hurt you, or whom you are trying to cut out of your life. All I am saying is that you have the power to let it go, whatever "it" is. The injury is over and done with. Forgive the person and allow yourself to stop experiencing it and move on. (Obviously, the science of trauma belies this for major incidents. I'm talking about “little” things like a falling out with a former friend. If you have experienced genuine trauma, a therapist is far more qualified to help you than I am. Although I tend to believe that pretty much everyone could benefit from seeing a therapist now and then.)

38. Dance at weddings. Nobody is going to interrupt their good time to tell you how bad of a dancer you are. The worst dancer at the wedding is having 100x more fun than the guy who's sitting over there looking at his phone.

39. Just because a good person gave you advice, doesn't mean it's good advice. Always double-check it against your common sense.

40. There is no such thing as common sense. At least, not a fixed, universal common sense that exists externally to human beings. "Common sense" is just a word people apply to the set of things a large enough group of people like them have come to understand through a shared experience of life. This is why rich or powerful people sometimes say stupid things that don't make any sense or relate to the lives of you or anyone you know (think: the joke about Lucille Bluth asking how much a banana could possibly cost). In the other direction, it is why working-class non-white people are frequently labeled by middle-class whites (or at least some of the white adults I knew growing up) as "lazy," "financially illiterate," and simply not smart enough to "get" basic concepts about how to live correctly (to be very clear, this is racist, dumb, and not my view).

In short, what counts as "common sense" is determined entirely by the community you are in. And since in adult life you are most likely to spend your time in proximity to people socioeconomically and culturally similar to you (family, colleagues, neighbors), the things that you and everyone around you "all know" will appear to be universal facts, when in fact they are just shared conclusions drawn from similar experiences that do not at all represent the totality of the world.

I am not a diversity expert (although I used to work as a diversity program coordinator at a university) but I think the above is a big reason why diversity (in education, politics, business, etc.) is important and valuable. Things that are not obvious to members of a given social group tend to get overlooked when that group is in charge. Think: public buildings before the ADA that had no entrances for people in wheelchairs.

Of course, diversity is also important as a matter of justice, but I think that's both obvious to anyone with a heart and less persuasive to the numerous people in this world who don't have hearts and are more likely to care about the practical benefits of diversity than about abstract notions of justice.

41. Be mindful of when you are thinking for yourself, versus letting other people think for you. The latter isn't intrinsically bad, but you should recognize when it's happening and make sure to compare other people's ideas and wishes to your own sense of what is right and best for you. I still struggle with this, especially when it comes to doing the things I believe my parents want me to do. This is similar to, but distinct from, #39 above.

42. In general, regularly challenging yourself (that is, your ego) will make you friendlier, happier, more patient, and more confident. It seems to me that a major problem for individuals and society in the age of the Internet is that everyone's ego is allowed to run absolutely wild and never get challenged. You can spend all day never being challenged if you want: consuming agreeable social media content, playing easy, rewarding games that are designed to be beaten (which real life, critically, is not), watching porn that presents some of the titillation of sex without the hard work of dealing with real people. I am absolutely vulnerable to this; the best cure I have found is travel (see #13 above).

CONCLUSION

This is far from everything I've learned in the past three decades, but it's a good representation of the kinds of things I have been thinking about in the past year. Overall, I have to say I am surprised how much my mind has opened compared to what I felt and believed when I was, say, 25. On the other hand, some things I have long believed seem more certain than ever. I have shed a lot of my youthful fighting spirit and desire for revolution, not out of laziness but because I've tried revolution a couple times and fallen short, which is demoralizing. Now I find myself much more focused on preserving my own health and happiness and that of the people immediately around me. This looks on the surface like an admission of defeat, but I would argue it is actually empowering. I have homed in on what I can actually affect and achieve—the difference between dreaming of a feast and waking up to the eggs in my actual fridge. It is inordinately hard for one person alone to change the world. But you can always change yourself, becoming an ever-stronger and more positive influence on your family, friends, and community.