Things I’ve Realized As An Adult
There are sometimes these funny moments in life when you revisit an opinion you formed at 14 years old and realize you don’t actually believe it anymore. These moments can be pretty gratifying: they are like finding an old peach, mold-covered and rotting, in the darkest corner of your fridge, then throwing it away and replacing it with a new one.
Here are some of my favorite realizations I’ve had as an adult. I might change my mind on these in the future, and if I do, I’ll update this essay and explain what my new opinion is and why I changed my mind.
Doctors
I used to think that all doctors were basically the same. As I’ve grown older I have realized that being a doctor is much like any other profession, in that you will find people at all levels of competency and with all levels of passion for their job. There are bad doctors, mediocre doctors, and great doctors. Some of them hate their jobs and view you as another painful box to check before the day concludes, and some actually want to help. Some doctors are lazy and resist learning new information. Some doctors love their practice and stay focused on the latest discoveries.
As a result, I treat going to a doctor sort of like evaluating a candidate to hire. Do they seem ambitious? Where did they study, and what was their focus? Where have they worked? These are not perfect ways to judge someone, but they can point you in the right direction (like how so many startup founders went to Stanford, MIT, and others). In person, I’ll judge whether it seems like they care about their job and weigh their advice to be based on all the information I have about them. All of this then determines whether I listen to them and continue visiting them, or whether I find another doctor.
You might think this is silly or overconfident. I’d say this: the difference between a smart doctor who’s paying attention and a mediocre doctor that doesn’t care at all about you can, in some cases, be the difference between life and death.
Footnote: Most doctors, off the top of their head, know less about specific pains, conditions, treatments, and medicines than your average LLM (like Claude or ChatGPT). Doctors have the advantage of experience and education, though, which can help them take a bunch of information and chart a path forward. But if you just have a question about something, you can probably get more detailed information from artificial intelligence. This is not doctors’ fault: there are millions of ailments and diseases and treatments out there, and your doctor has very little time to take care of you. Don’t be afraid to do your own research and ask your doctor what they think.
People Underestimating You
If you are an ambitious person, or at least like to do some crazy things sometimes, then you are going to constantly get underestimated. People will throw around the words ‘impossible’ or ‘risky’ or ‘unlikely’. You should listen to them and then make your own judgement.
By default, being more ambitious or ‘crazy’ than average means that people who are average or below-average ambitious will view your ideas as unachievable. From their point of view, they are.
I do not mean to say that there is anything better or worse about being ambitious — just that less ambitious people will underestimate you.
Getting Hired
I used to think that the way you got hired was by applying for jobs. I’ve since realized that’s not actually the case. The best ways to get hired are actually 1) to get a warm introduction from someone who knows the hiring party, or 2) to send an email to either the HR person who’s running the hiring process or the person you’d be working with on the team. You can do this in addition to a traditional application, if you like.
Getting Famous
I used to think that it would be cool to have a big audience, to get famous for writing or music or YouTube or some other creative pursuit. Now I know the only audience I actually need to be fulfilled is myself. I know this because I write a ton of things that only I ever see, and they make me happy. Maybe I’ve just become more self-absorbed (hopefully not), or I just trust my own taste more (I think it’s this). But if I am happy with something, then in my view it’s good. And the thought of having an audience is more anxiety-inducing than anything else. If I ever publish a book or do something more public-facing, I’ll probably use a pseudonym.
Eating Alone
As a kid, when you eat outside of your home it’s always with people—usually friends or family. This vestigial idea stuck with me even after I’d graduated high school. At some point, though, it clicked with me that you really can just go to any restaurant and enjoy a meal by yourself, at your own pace. This is one of those “well, duh” things that I think a lot of people haven’t fully accepted. Eating alone is nice!
Corporate Incompetency
I used to think that getting hired at a big, legacy company (like Apple) was an impressive sign that you were really great at your job. I’ve since decided that I actually think it’s harder for truly great people to get hired at big companies. This is because, before you can talk to someone in the department you’re applying for at a large company, you have to first go through a wall of 1 or 2 or 3 HR people who are probably incapable of recognizing greatness in the field you work in. The heuristics they use tend to be vanity metrics; somewhat correlated with good-ness but not indicative of it.
This compounds if the ways in which you are great are unconventional ones: many of the smartest people I know would never make it past the HR smell test at somewhere like Apple, because those HR people wouldn’t be able to recognize unconventional greatness (greatness being something that is, often by definition, unconventional). This whole thing is how you get generic corporate higher-ups.
If you were running a big company, one way you could get around this is by hiring HR people and recruiters who are intuitively good at identifying talent; people who don’t need to see a resume or CV to know whether or not it’s worth continuing the process with someone. A simple way to do this is to hire people with prior experience in the field they’ll be screening applicants for (e.g. hiring a software engineer to be the HR screen for software engineers). Some companies do this.
Partially this was inspired by a recent call I had with an HR person at a mid-sized startup. This person knew nothing about the kind of work I was pitching, nothing about the department he was supposedly screening candidates for, and repeatedly brushed off my questions about the company’s priorities with follow-up questions like: “How many years of experience do you have?” — which, as it happens, is the next item on this list.
Years of Experience
When I was much younger, I used to think that “years of experience” actually meant something. And I wasn’t totally wrong: it does mean something. In the context of work, 13 years of experience means you have been able to successfully convince someone to pay you for your job for 13 years.
But convincing someone to pay you for something and being good at that thing are not the same thing. So while there might be some mild correlation between years of experience and competency, it’s overblown. We know it’s overblown because almost any job posting anywhere will show “X+ years of experience” as a main qualification for a job. Which is just silly.
Antidepressants and Therapy
I’m somewhat confident that too many people take antidepressants (plus other mind-altering medications), and I am very confident that too many people pay for professional therapy.
The former point is more of an intuition about the nature of our healthcare system, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert at it. Just my opinion.
The latter is more interesting. Culturally, therapy has gone from something you do when you have uniquely difficult problems to something that everyone should do. At various points on social media there has been viral discou that everyone should be going to therapy, that people are more attractive when they go to therapy, or that you should only date people who are actively in therapy.
This is a weird, and probably damaging, way to view therapy. The people who practice therapy are often talented and well-trained and professional, but that does not mean you should be paying them at all times in your life to deal with regular human things. This could probably be its own essay, but here are a few reasons I think not everyone needs therapy:
1. Absolving responsibility: Imagine if you said you wanted to become a great tennis player and, instead of training often, paid a coach for one hour a week. I’ve met many people who treat therapy similarly — as a way to absolve themselves of responsibility. This is of course an improper use of therapy, but the current cultural narrative around therapy implies that you can kind of just do it and your bases are covered.
2: You are the protagonist: A sneaky side effect of therapy is that you are the only one presenting the information. People are very good at, consciously and subconsciously, making themselves look like heroic protagonists even when they are not. And I think therapy often gets used as a confirmation bias tool, in which you air your grievances about people in your life and your therapist affirms that yes, they were gaslighting you or yes, they were being toxic.
Unlike what would happen if you were talking with a great friend, most therapists will rarely challenge your version of events or call you out on bullshit. I’d imagine partly this is because you are paying them, and the kinds of people who spout bullshit to someone they’re paying are not the kinds of people who want to be called out on that bullshit.
In this way I think therapy for people who don’t need it is sometimes just a way to validate toxic behavior instead of actually talking to the people in your life.
3: Overthinking. As someone with a persistent tendency to overthink things I think that therapy, in many ways, can cause you to think a lot about things that don’t merit thinking all too much about. It is a space to stretch problems out like bubblegum or bread dough, inspect every inch of them, knead them back together again, stretch them out once more. Any problem can be a 60-minute conversation. Therapy is a great way to convince yourself that small problems are actually big ones, and that you should be really worried about something you shouldn’t.
All of these reasons are generally side effects of doing therapy improperly and/or with bad therapists. If you are a therapist and read this, I do think your job matters.
Thinking About Doing vs. Doing
I’ve come to realize there is a distinction between people who think (and talk) about doing things and the people who just do things. The person you know who’s constantly reading a book like Atomic Habits and The 4-Day Work Week is probably not the most productive person you know; the person who keeps telling you about the novel they want to write is probably not the person you know who has written a full novel; the person who keeps talking about all the startup ideas they have is probably not your friend who’s going to start a great company.
This rule isn’t always true, of course—sometimes people really do practice what they preach (or read). I think, though, that doer personality types tend to get to straight to the doing, when possible.
I myself am a culprit here. A few years back I fantasized about writing a fantasy novel. I listened to the Brandon Sanderson podcasts and Neil Gaiman interviews, read books about storytelling, wrote down broad-strokes plot arcs, told my friends and family about the ideas I was having, thought about what the cover art of my book might be, and so on. Then when I sat down to write, I gave up ~10 times on the first or second chapter. Finally, one June, I made a promise to a friend that if I didn’t have a novella (~40k+ words) written by the end of August, I’d pay her $100. And I did actually write the novella. It was the longest thing I had ever written.
This has been true in my work, too. The most productive I am, whether working on paid work or personal projects, is when I’m heads-down and just doing things—not telling people about what I’m doing. The mind-change here is that, in the past, I frequently thought of the big thinkers as the people who were going to go on to do great things. In real life, that hasn’t been the case.
Paying People for Things
Growing up, I think most middle- and lower-class people view paying for help with life tasks as some kind of unattainable or undesirable thing. As an adult, I’ve realized that paying people for things you don’t like doing is often more affordable and more beneficial than it might seem. A few examples:
• Paying someone to clean your house
• Paying someone to do your taxes
• Paying someone to do some part of your work that you don’t want to do (outsourcing)
• Paying someone to fix something in your house instead of DIY’ing it
• Paying someone to fix your clothes/shoes (instead of buying new ones)
This a win-win because you’re creating paid labor, and that labor is directly helpful to you. Lots of these things are cheaper than you might think they are, if (like me) you grew up in a house where you definitely wouldn’t pay someone to, for example, clean your house.
Dealing With Humans
When I was around 12, I loved sending angry emails to companies so they would give me free stuff (usually based on some exaggerated version of a real complaint). It was all the way until I got a job at a retail store that I realized the humans on the other side of your complaining are just that: humans. They’ve got shit to do, people to feed, and plans after work.
This is helpful to remember when you’re talking to people in customer service, like when a flight of yours has been canceled and you’re calling your airline. The simple act of remembering that you’re talking to a person just like you can help you reframe the conversation from “this person is an obstacle between me and what I want” to “this is a real person who probably doesn’t even like their job that much, and I should talk to them normally”.
Speed
For all our lives, we’re told that certain things need to take certain lengths of time. Tasks at work, engagements, learning new hobbies, working on creative endeavours (like writing a book), finding an apartment, and so on. For a lot of my life, I believed these things: it should take 2 weeks to write this blog post for work, it should take a year or two to become proficient at guitar, it should take at least a year to write a book, it should take a month or two to get a good apartment.
The way that society has landed on these numbers, though, is by taking the assumed median number for how long it takes to do something from a dataset of everyone who has tried to do that thing. But you don’t have to be a median person—at least not when you put your mind to something.
Now, when I take on new projects in life or tasks at work, I forget about preconceived notions of how long something “should” take and just start doing the thing. I often find that things get done surprisingly fast.
People Caring About You
The longer my career gets, the more I realize that most people you work with do not actually care about you. On a human level, they don’t give a shit. They aren’t concerned about whether you’re happy or not, they would rather not hear about what you’re going through. Instead, they view you as an agent to help them move towards something they want. And so it’s not that surprising when they fuck you over, or make unreasonable asks of you. They don’t care!
If you have the luxury, try to only work with people who you care about, and who care about you.
This applies to life in general, too, though I think most of the people you will meet in life (your friends, family, and so on) do care a bit more.
Meeting New People
I’ve gone through a few phases in my life with regard to how I think about meeting new people. As a little kid, I loved it. Made friends all the time. When I made it to high school, I become more awkward and socially-aware—there were more unwritten rules to follow and more closed-off groups. It was more complex. After high school and during college, the pendulum swung back around: I loved meeting new people. When I traveled I stayed in hostels and toured cities with complete strangers, I’d sometimes introduce myself to random interesting-looking people at coffee shops—you get it.
Now, I’m less excited about meeting new people every time I get the opportunity. Partially this is because I have a solid friend group and happy life. It’s also because experience has taught me that ~95% of the new people I meet are not going to be people I really enjoy spending time with and are likely not going to become good friends of mine. Under this framing, meeting new people becomes more of an entertaining exercise to fill the time—not something that is usually meaningful. So I treat it that way, and prioritize it the way I might prioritize playing video games or watching a T.V. show (which is to say, not that much).
Historical People
This is a silly one, but for so long I had this idea in my head that the people you read about in history books were some ‘other’ types of beings. Like, yeah they were humans, but they weren’t humans like I’m human. This dehuminization is easy to do because these people had different cultures, languages, and technologies, and because they are so far away from us in time.
It’s often hard to imagine what the Medieval version of a Twitter shitposter would be. But those people did exist, because people are people and have been people for all of time. The reason we don’t do public guillotine executions today isn’t because we are somehow better. We are, after all, the same as them.
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