one - reflections
when you're little,
you do things.
because you can.
because you want to.
because you want to see what happens.
when you grow a little older,
you stop doing some of those things.
maybe because it's a bad idea.
maybe other people don't like it.
maybe it doesn't seem worth it.
when you grow up even more,
the story splits,
if you realize what you stopped doing,
because you couldn't do it well enough before for it to be worth it,
but now that you've grown,
you don't need to be scared anymore.
if you realize that,
you can start doing things again,
and this time,
you'll know you're doing the right thing.
two - agency
The motivating example for the first part was agency1 : allowing yourself to do things that aren’t part of the flow, but that would be good for you anyways. Trying new things. Taking risks. Disregarding social norms.
The point is, when you're young, it’s easy to have lots of agency, because your mistakes are excusable. If you say something weird or do something bad when you're eight years old, the consequences are relatively small. When you get a little older, the consequences start ramping up. This means you don't have as much room to make mistakes anymore, so you try fewer things. You stick to what's safe, what's normal. But what I've realized is that, now that I've grown up, the pendulum's swung too far. In the past few years I had gained enough understanding about social dynamics and the world in general that I probably wouldn't make any catastrophic mistakes, and I didn't have to be constantly worrying about it like I had before. I realized that I could just see the world for how it was, and nothing bad would happen.
three - the big picture
There are some things you have to learn twice.
Once before you grow up, and once after.
One of those things is improv.
Kids are great improvisers—they're not afraid to just make up whatever they want and run with it.
When you grow up, you learn to fit in and stay grounded in reality, but this actually makes it a lot harder to improvise. You have to relearn how to do it, and this time it's a completely different skill. Now, you have to route around the barriers you've constructed in your mind—they allow you to fit in and get by in the world, but get in the way of improvising.
But this also means that once you've learned it the second time, your understanding of how to improvise becomes so much deeper.
Another one of those is talking to younger people.
When you're young, all of your friends are young, and it comes naturally.
But as you grow up, you learn how to fit in with adults, and the things you learn there actually get in the way of talking to young people. For example, adults really like small talk. I've learned to like it, and I do it so much now that I don't see how it could be any other way. But this isn't the best way to relate to young children. They could care less about what terrible weather we're having. What is? Well, if you had asked me a few years ago, I would've been able to tell you. But not anymore. I'm going to have to relearn how to do this. But the skill ceiling is so much higher now, since I'll be learning for the second time.
And perhaps another (more speculative) one is being nice.
When you're young, you learn about being kind, polite, respectful.
And that's important!
But a lot of things change when you're an adult.
I don't know what they are. I'm barely an adult yet. Lots of social dynamics definitely shift when you grow up. But one shift stands out to me as crucial:
When you grow up, you need to learn to be nice without being taken advantage of.
Young people have a really idealistic view of the world. And this is great! It's easier to focus on growing and learning before you learn about all the messed-up stuff going on in the world. So at least comparatively, it's easy to be nice as a young person. Most of the battle is just wanting to be nice. If you have the desire to be nice, you're pretty much done. Not many people want to take advantage of you, and you have people around you protecting you from the few that do.
But this changes when you grow up.
When you learn more about the world, it becomes impossible to hold on to the idealistic worldview you had as a child.
And now, people are Out To Get You2.
You're out of the tutorial now.
And this makes it harder to be nice.
Now, the simple desire isn't enough.
You'll just get walked over.
You need more than that.
And I'm not sure what that is yet.
But I'm learning.
Now, this example is a bit more complicated because it doesn't quite fit in as neatly into this framework. For example, even when you grow up, it still isn't too hard to not be mean. In fact, it's probably easier. And this is an important way in which you don't actually fully lose the ability to be nice as you grow up. So if being nice is all about not being mean, this example doesn't really fit.
But I want more than that. Being nice is so much more than just not being mean. Part of what I'm learning is what the difference is, and I'm still figuring this out. Part of it is just genuinely wanting the best for the important people in your life. Part of it is finding win-wins and generating value. And part of it is just listening, being a good friend. There's probably so much I'm missing, and so many things I could be doing to improve. And I have to balance this with social dynamics, not getting walked over, and also just life in general. It's so much more complex now, compared to when I was younger. But the ceiling is also so much higher. There might not even be one anymore.
It'll be so much harder the second time.
But if I figure it out,
It'll be worth it.
I actually wrote the first part right after SPARC 2024! Agency is one of the big themes of this camp, and this reflects in my after-camp thoughts.
See: Out To Get You by Zvi Mowshowitz.