Despite graduating undergrad in 2016 and starting work immediately after, it feels like I only finished school when I quit my job in late 2024. Before that point, I had always existed within some kind of structured container which handled different aspects of my life for me. The set of things considered a “valuable use of time” were either explicitly given or implicitly absorbed from the culture around me, and inertia kept those around long past their expiration date. Looking back it feels like I was outsourcing my emotional resilience to institutions.

To be clear, I don’t think this was necessarily a bad thing. School & jobs are useful social technologies that bundle many things like identity, pay, etc. You definitely don’t want to be negotiating all of that yourself all the time. I don’t really regret anything, I just think it would have been nice to have been more viscerally aware of how diverse and crazy the world is. The number of ways people make money & choose to live their life is effectively infinite, and it’s obvious now how narrow my vision was before.