Love, friends, family, and a career I'm proud of | Can I have it all?
In the past year, I’ve taken 20 Amtrak train rides and 14 flights taking me from Boston, to Los Angeles, to New York City, to Chicago, and to San Francisco. Doing the math, that’s roughly 36,100 miles and 124 hours of time spent traveling trying to answer this question:
As a young adult, how can we have it all: love, friends, family, and a career we're proud of?
To begin even exploring how to answer this question, I knew I needed to gather some robust data. To me, this meant going outside of my normal routine and speaking with new perspectives. Reason being, for people who know me well, they’ll know that these big life questions are the ones I love to talk with them about. To find a truly enriching answer to this question, I’d have to have drastically different conversations.
For the sake of anonymity, I’ve changed the names + slight details of these people, but this is how a few of the most unique people I’ve met would answer this question:
- Joe Chan, a 25 year old living in Cambridge, MA, embraces the phrase “seek discomfort” in a way I’ve never seen before. Having gone to school in LA and moving back home to live with his parents, he woke up one day and decided to start the Stranger Project — where he would find at least one meaningful conversation with a stranger each day. 500~ strangers later, he would say that to have it all, you have to be discomfort-maxing. Joe’s incredible, he takes notes after each conversation to improve his recall of the conversation and can tell me about each and every stranger he’s met so far in his Project. Discomfort tends to breed unique experiences and unique experiences tend to be more memorable. Sure you can’t have it all, all the time, but unique experiences can make it seem like you’ve had a lot of connection in a short amount of time.
- Philz Coffee’s Right-Hand Woman, a retired 50-something year old former school teacher living in San Francisco’s Mission District, and importantly, a local at the skateboarder-friendly dive bar I was at on a random Tuesday night. Describing her in that one sentence was incredibly difficult, because she had lived and lives one of the fullest lives I’ve had the luck to learn about. I never got her name, but she’d tell you the answer to this question is trying to give the people you care about as much consistency as you can, for as long as you can. Whether it’s giving your favorite dive bar the consistency of a “bar local”, the founder of Philz Coffee countless years as his right-hand woman, or the children growing up in the Mission unforgettable memories as the “chill teacher, consistency is the greatest gift you can give and receive in life.
- Mr. Rick, a 20-something year old former startup founder turned engineer at a startup living in San Francisco, who had the most passionate answer to a question I’d tend to ask, “why’d you move to _____, and what’s made you stay?”. I remember the excitement with which he whipped out his phone, the speed in which he navigated to the Find my Friends app, and the cheeriness in his eyes when he told me, “friends.” In what felt like a throwback to the old image of America we grew up on, he told me about how he made way too many cookies for his housemates, opened up the app and within a few minutes had dropped off an excess of cookies to a good friend. Mr. Pickle would probably tell you the key to having it all is to try to have it all as close to you as possible.
This time last year, I theoretically had it all. I was in a loving relationship (albeit long distance), I had just started a new job I was excited to tackle, I was living with my parents, and I was able to see my college friends from time to time in my travels.
My greatest struggle in the last year has been what my favorite SF bar local would say is the meaning of life — giving people the consistency I think they deserve. Whether that’s my ex-girlfriend, my best friends who are spread throughout the country or my parents, I wish I could split into identical copies of me and stick them at every location I’ve travelled to in the last year.
This is what brought me to this idea that people don’t need to be in your life forever. How broadly speaking, I split the most meaningful relationships with people into two categories:
- A great degree of consistency
- An exceptional amount of influence
People who provide a great degree of consistency in your life are often under appreciated. Think of the friend who always checks in on weekends, the coworker you eagerly gossip with, or the cashier at your local family-run bodega. These individuals have witnessed your highs and lows, likely picking up on subtle cues that reveal your mood. Their impact often goes unnoticed until their consistent presence changes.
In contrast, some people exert an exceptional influence in a short timeframe. Examples include: the career mentor whose single conversation inspired you to pursue your passion; the stranger at a bar who shared invaluable life lessons; or the fleeting summer camp friend/lover who deeply affected you. These individuals leave a lasting impression, and while you might wish for more time with them, their brief but powerful impact often defines their place in your memory.
“the past year has been a beautiful tapestry of experiences – from the comfort of home to the excitement of new cities, from old college friends to strangers in dive bars. It's what excites me about being a twenty-something year old -- finding the people who will mean something to me, be it through the consistency or short term depth of influence they can give.” - from my piece on meaningful people
I wish that life was truly like a movie, where we can participate in every part of the world-building process and these things I crave for, love, friends, family, and a career I'm proud of, can be easily written into the plot. I wish that I was Will Smith in the Pursuit of Happiness, and I could tell you that pursuit of happiness is all that matters. I wish I could give you the clear answer to these big questions in life, but I don’t think that’s what it’s about anyway.
These big questions in life are the ones which glue us together. It’s what makes us experience the most beautiful emotions when we experience art and someone’s creation. I haven’t found the answer to this question, but in my journey to find the answer, it’s brought me closer to people I never would have imagined being in my life today.