Reasonable Life Advice for Twentysomethings

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

He who trusts in his own heart is a fool, but whoever walks wisely will be delivered.

Any advice is only helpful when used as a tool to build a framework for life rather than the framework of life itself. This proves true in a world of abundance, where coming across contradictory pieces of advice is not uncommon.

A 15-minute scroll through your Instagram or Twitter feed can verify this hypothesis. You will stumble upon self-appointed gurus who swear by their conflicting (will this go viral?) advice while blissfully ignoring the acute context where their advice applies. Blindly trusting advice from these gimmick influencers can leave you in loops of conflict or a state of mental gridlock, unable to act on your life.

Being a twenty-one-year-old college graduate does not help either. You are at your most impressionable. You are meandering on your own to carve out a path you think would lead you to the life you want. The untamed sea of advice can quickly drown this twentysomething.

Therefore, any advice should also be met with reasonable skepticism. If you spend a little time thinking, you will realize that most advice is only anecdotal and boils down to “this worked for me, and it might work for you.” This isn’t inherently bad, but it is important to package the advice in the context in which it worked.

This blog post does not present itself as a set of answers to the unfaltering problems of the twenty-year-olds but as a guide on what questions you can ask yourself to arrive at those answers. I cannot advise you on living your life with what worked for me because it worked for me. But it might also work for you, and it is up to you to decide.

The ideal way to read this post is to identify what could work for you, salt 🧂 to your taste, and use it to build a framework for how you want to spend your twenties.

Mind Your Impressionability

I underestimated how much I would change during my sevenish years at the twentysomething club. Many things I have held fundamental to my identity have now been replaced. It is likely that you, too, will underestimate your own impressionability.

With college, work, dates, and other social environments, your twenties might also be the time when you are among more people than at any other point in your life. Such surroundings can unwittingly influence your life decisions.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to change you is the greatest accomplishment.

This is an even greater accomplishment today, as most interactions exist in the influencer-follower realm (problematic for more reasons). The only possible way to completely avoid these external influences might be to bomb-shelter yourself from being a social human being.

However, the practical way is to accept your impressionability and find a sensible middle ground between the enthusiastic influencee and the reclusive non-conformist.

I accidentally found my equilibrium during the early days of the pandemic. I quit my job right before the world went into lockdown and took some “time off” to explore my next (ad)venture.

While everyone locked down closer than ever in the popular multiplayer game of that week, in a fortunate misfortune, my phone broke, and I was stuck with myself.

Looking back at this time four years later and on a much better path, it seems obvious that spending time with myself was the single best thing I could have done. It helped me figure out what I actually wanted to do in life and set me on the path I still follow.

Fail to Define

A consequence of being young is constantly thinking you have to define yourself to fit the well-designed archetypes of society. I believe this has two causes:

1. You don’t know who you are or want to be, yet, and instead of making an effort to understand yourself, you conveniently resort to external labels to define yourself.
2. You see people only through the narrow personas they present to society (which often fit these archetypes) and fail to realize they are complex and multifaceted.

Growing up in Kerala was no help. Everyone here is an “-ist.” Whether in politics, philosophy, religion (no religion is a religion here like Dinkoists and Dinkoism), or even books (we still have Marxists), people tend to label themselves in absolutes without even a feel for the grey in between.

You are a complex being with complex emotions and interests. It is ridiculous to think you must force yourself into these neat societal molds.

Similarly, society also makes us believe success is measured on a scale of happiness. While being happy is undoubtedly important, the pursuit of this elusive “happyness” will be riddled with sadness, anger, fear, frustration, and the spectrum of emotions that make us human.

[You] only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low.

Speaking of emotions, a severe epidemic affecting the current generation of twentysomethings is poor mental health. Managing mental health is often seen as neglected in the past, and the progress we have made as a society in understanding and treating this illness is remarkable.

However, self-diagnosing every difficult emotion as a mental illness will do more harm than good. The moment you label nervousness as anxiety, you start seeing insurmountable challenges instead of overcomable problems. To an extent, this tendency emerges from the familiar identity crisis problems (I’m not negating the fact that many people are seriously ill and require medical help).

It seems like we were too quick to label the older generations as ignorant about mental health. We can correct course by curbing the self-diagnosis trend.

Life only presents beatable challenges. In your early independent years, you won’t be conditioned to easily overcome these challenges. But making the effort to confront them will build resilience that no anxiety medications can provide.

Crippled by Ambitions

Ambitions vary widely depending on your background, interests, and the opportunities you can afford. It is also true that ambition emerges when people have their fundamental needs met. This is why we feel there are more ambitious individuals now than in the past—where most such endeavors were from the privileged upper-class elites.

This is also why the argument that countries like India need to focus on building economic safety nets to incentivize people to pursue ambitious goals (like winning gold medals at the Olympics) holds value. We don’t want our future Olympians stuck in survival jobs while they could be training. But I digress.

But being ambitious today likely feels more overwhelming than 10 or 20 years ago.

This sense of being overwhelmed stems from the fact that ambitious people now have significantly more opportunities to make an impact—opportunities that can, paradoxically, become paralyzing.

My ambitions have grown in scope as I got older. But constantly reaching for these ambitious endeavors has often left me crippled, crushed by long-term goals without a clear path to achieving them.

An approach I have found helpful is to think long-term and act short-term. With a north star to guide you, take the immediate action that would bring you a step closer to your goals. For instance, to impact technology policy, the best thing I can do now is to be a technologist and learn about policymaking. Eventually, these small, consistent actions will compound and help me reach my ambitions.

A final word of caution for my ambitious twentysomething readers: being ambitious means nothing without the pursuit. It’s like navigating a narrow canyon road—thrilling and treacherous—where one wrong step, born from a lack of passion, can send your pursuit into a freefall.

Opportunities Have Costs

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood

Every opportunity you pursue comes with the cost of not pursuing another—the opportunity cost. Successful people often frame these costs as sacrifices, made in pursuit of something greater. Throughout your twenties, you will make similar decisions—not necessarily involving sacrifices—having a lasting impact on your future, like picking a career, marrying a partner, choosing friends, and settling on a place to live.

While all these decisions have inevitable costs, the real problem is being fixated on these costs, leading to indecision that prevents you from making any progress. In my early twenties, I was stuck between two career paths, spending the better part of a year trying to pursue both because I couldn’t commit to one. I was jobless for a year.

Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.

It rarely gets simpler. The what-ifs and the could-haves will linger throughout your life. I have come to think of my opportunity costs as lives I’m living parallelly in alternate universes (there is surely a universe where I’m starring in Vinayan's adaptation of the Batman).

Some blame should fall on our educational institutions. As a child, you are limitlessly curious, and your life feels infinitely possible. You go through phases where you would want to be anything from a bus driver to a racer or a movie star to an astronaut, with little regard for feasibility.

Sixteen years of school and college gradually conditions this would-be Formula 1 cosmonaut to narrow their curiosity. You are in narrow streams by high school, and your degrees are even narrower. You expect to live your whole life working at a job with this narrow focus.

This approach to life could have worked in an age of scarcity, where for our parents, pursuing a narrow path meant financial security and stability—both rare in their time. So people got teaching degrees and engineering degrees and became teachers and engineers.

But we, the children of the age of abundance, realize after a while on the narrow path that there’s a lot more we can do in life. We realize we aren’t tied to our degrees or our past selves. We realize we can start again from scratch.

Schools have misrepresented this reality for a long time. It nurtures a false narrative to present fewer opportunities than actual ones—much closer to the range of opportunities we perceive as a child.

The bottom line is that there will always be choices and confusion. It is unreasonable to think that you will pick a path when you are 21 and will forever be interested in following it.

You have been reading this for around 10 minutes. Take a break and listen to this popular Malayalam song where the protagonist pleads with the gods to help alleviate his confusion (totally reasonable).

Money Buys Time

Rich people saying things like “mo money, mo problems” is an age-old tale. The rest of us frown at this attempt at patronization and shout, “That’s easy for you to say!”

Well, it is indeed easy because rich people are likely more qualified to give advice on money.

I don’t know what they want from me
It’s like the more money we come across
The more problems we see

While I understand the intent behind the “mo money, mo problems” mantra, for most of us, money still has a positive marginal utility despite diminishing returns, i.e., having a bit more money can be useful when you have less. But for the rich, extra money has fewer tangible benefits.

What money really offers you is time. Time is more valuable than money, but money buys time.

To be more precise, money gives you periods of productive leisure (or “active unemployment” if you prefer a more compelling term). It affords you the slack needed to pursue your interests rather than grinding a soul-crushing 9-5 (I love my job, BTW).

I used the money I saved in 2019 to build a mental safety net, giving me the confidence and freedom to quit my job, pursue my interests, and transition to my current career.

When you are stuck between opportunities for the fear of opportunity costs, it could be helpful to pick the opportunity that helps you build a similar safety net. This safety net would expand the range of opportunities you can afford later in life.

Manage Intersections

For most people, no single skill will get them to the top (unless you’re LeBron James and can dunk from half-court). Instead, success comes from combining skills to uncover unique, niche intersections.

You don’t need to master each individual skill either. Finding the right combination and working at the intersection will fare better.

Take me, for example. I am not the best engineer, nor am I the best marketer. But I’m better at engineering than most marketers and better at marketing than most engineers. This intersection has defined my career for the last four years.

A better example is Steve Jobs. Jobs wasn’t the best designer, engineer, or businessman in Silicon Valley, but his ability to blend those skills into a unique combination positioned him to lead the personal computer revolution.

Similarly, you can pursue several goals, but optimizing for distinct goals simultaneously is a challenge. Even in mathematics, optimizing a function with many variables takes a lot of work.

It is also apparent. You can’t seriously have a career as a microbiologist while also going on a world tour as the new lead singer of Linkin Park.

Continuing with the maths analogy, it is important to understand your “life function” before you take action. What are you trying to optimize for? What aren’t you optimizing? What variables matter to you? Answering these questions—and revisiting them regularly—helps you prioritize your actions.

To stretch the analogy even further, don’t get stuck at a local maxima. It’s easy to think you have it all figured out and reached the peak in your twenties, but that’s highly unlikely. You might be at a local maximum, thinking you are at the top, while your real mountain is still ahead.

Mind the Uncertainty

The key to finding useful intersections is experimentation. Thankfully, in your twenties, you have the energy and enthusiasm to experiment.

That said, you must be privileged—inherited or earned—to experiment. But if you have the privilege, embrace uncertainty. Embrace quitting jobs. Your future selves will be indebted to you as responsibilities grow.

Quitting my job to pursue a different path was the best thing I ever did for myself. I had the privilege of taking that risk, and I was young enough for it to have an insignificant effect on my future. It opened doors to opportunities I had never imagined. I can’t even picture how my life would have been if I hadn’t taken that leap—certainly not here giving life advice.

Relatedly, it’s unfair and wasteful for the people who could be out there exploring and building the future on their own dime to be either working normal jobs or simply managing their money for profit. This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, uses a framework called “regret minimization,” which I have found quite helpful. The idea is simple: When presented with an opportunity to do something, ask yourself, “Will I regret not doing this in ten years?” If the answer is yes, absolutely do it, and if not, don’t bother.

My framework to assess regret is similar but more actionable:

1. You are more likely to regret not doing something than doing it.
2. If you regret doing something, you can fix it through future actions.
3. But if you regret not doing something, the price of inaction will have increased to a point where it becomes impossible to act.

However, don’t confuse regret with the sunk cost fallacy—the reluctance to quit because you have already invested time and energy. What often feels like anticipatory regret is the baggage of our sunk costs.

Experimentation is the key to finding useful intersections, and acceptance is the key to minimizing regret. Accept your choices and move on. If you can’t fix it, don’t let it affect your future.

The Master Procrastinator

Procrastination might just be among the top five most popular hobbies for people in their twenties. This isn’t really surprising when you think about how easy it is to find ways to procrastinate.

The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread.

I have often invented reasons to procrastinate or disguised unproductive tasks as useful. I’ll tweak my developer environment to just how I like it before I start a big coding project, postpone my workouts after my “busy” weeks (I don’t have non-busy weeks), or wait until after my friend’s wedding before I really get into my next project.

I have learned that perfect conditions rarely exist and that striving for perfection is futile. This becomes problematic when your brain tricks you into thinking procrastination is productive.

Now, I don’t have a solution to stop procrastination, but I have found a way to use it to my benefit. At any given time, I have around 5-10 different “projects” on my plate, both at work and in my personal life. To keep myself from slipping into unproductive procrastination, I procrastinate on one project by working on another. Over time, these small bursts of productivity allotted to each project add up, and I manage to finish everything.

Tim Urban’s essays and TED talk helped me understand why I procrastinate, which is most important. Knowing the “why” makes it easy to pull back and not leave my goals in the dust.

Get Good, Get Exceptional

You know what else is crazy? Wasting your time. The reason, decades later, I frequently think of this unpaid weekend adventure sifting through a year of garbage, hardware, and knick-knacks is because it is when I discovered the compounding non-obvious value from doing exceptional work.

All work can be done exceptionally. Almost always, exceptional work is rewarded.

Getting better at what you do increases your range of opportunities. This additional sample space of opportunities improves the likelihood of finding one you are genuinely interested in.

For example, a mediocre software engineer might only find underpaid work in large service companies (you know who they are). But if you level up, you can leverage your skills to work at any company and earn a significantly better salary. Mediocrity will never get you here.

This is a significant differentiator when you live somewhere with limited opportunities. I live in a small rural town in Kerala, where my ambitions rarely match the local taste. My way out was to get good at my job. This led to better opportunities and eventually to my current job (where I get to work on cool stuff!).

My strategy for getting a job is:

1. contribute to the company’s open source project (often aggressively 😅)
2. make an impact with my contributions and
3. ask for a job to do this full-time

So far, it has worked EVERY time.

Doing exceptional work will undoubtedly lead you to the opportunities you deserve.

To be exceptional is to treat everything in life as a project. You pick projects and then learn how to do them. You learn it top-down, i.e., you actively pick tools and learn things to help you complete the project instead of the traditional way, where you passively collect random knowledge and degrees (I have two).

I’m sure you will also see how the education system made us ill-prepared. You reach twenty-one with a lot of textbook knowledge, and you spend the entirety of your life trying to fit into existing projects while you should have been pursuing your own projects all along.

It will then seem silly to think you can’t learn new things. Nearly all human knowledge is on the internet, and the bits you need to complete your projects are probably compressed into a minute-long YouTube Short edited to Subway Surfers gameplay (I prefer the “sharp knife cuts soap” videos).

Can’t Catch ‘Em All

Pursuits often become their own rewards, making it difficult to feel truly satisfied with what we have accomplished. This isn’t to say greed is inevitable, but our animal brains are predictable—we are programmed for continuous pursuit.

This is precisely why FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is not right for most of us. I have seen people retire into their newfound freedom, do well for a year or two, and then struggle when they realize they have nothing to pursue. The happiest retirees often have other meaningful pursuits outside their work.

In the popular anime series Pokémon, the 10-year-old protagonist Ash Ketchum starts his immortal quest to catch every Pokémon. The crux of the show is this pursuit to “catch ’em all,” a goal that Ash never reached but kept the show running for 25 years (and counting), entertaining generations of Pokémon fans, including me and my 12-year-old niece.

Accepting you can’t “catch ’em all” alleviates the burden of merely reaching goals to instead focus on their pursuit.

After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?

Life is continuous self-discovery. People think that the more they travel, read, and experience life, the more they learn about the world. But in truth, they learn more about themselves.

Writing this post was also an attempt at self-discovery. My original intention was to publish it on my 26th birthday—nearly 10 months ago—but reflecting, reexamining, and refining myself took longer. What you see here is, at best, a transient documentation of my ongoing self-discovery journey, which is far from complete.