7.16.24 - Just doing things sometimes
The young professional's ability to delay gratification, simulate the future, and think longterm is what makes them able to be a white collar professional. You gotta go to school, get the internships, do graduate school, yadda yadda. And then maybe one day you can make money and do what you really like, but not right now. (Can you tell I'm a law student?).
This trait is useful across many domains, and what I think is selected for most in the great "middle" of the professional class. But it's also something that can be weaponized against you, that can turn you into an instrument of someone else's ambitions, until your whole life has passed you by. A trait that is important to earn a living, but not good for living.
I'm remembering a quote that talks about how higher IQ people often can be less entrepreneurial because they simulate too many eventualities, and get frozen. I feel that we see that in the young professional class today, across personal and professional domains.
People in the professional class wait a long time to have kids, to select a partner, and to get married. These are things that are treated like rewards after you've set up a life, not just part of living. You'll often hear people bring up divorce statistics and all that when they talk about it.
Young people in the professional class embrace ideas like FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early), or selling out for a period so that they can do what they "really want" in the future. There was a great NYT article about Harvard students who increasingly go into management consulting and finance thinking they could do something pro-social once they've made money.
In contrast to millennials, who I think had a bit more of a raw online presence, Gen-Z really curates their online brand——soft launches of relationships, different tiers of access to different content. It's like your life is a little enterprise.
I think the story here is that a set of values that are adaptive in the professional sphere--high conscientiousness and the ability to delay gratification--leak too much into other domains of life.
I believe I've fallen pray to this general trend, and have been trying to balance it out. In other domains of life impulsivity and risk-taking is highly rewarded. I'm thinking about the romantic sphere. If I thought about approaching women the way I thought about my career I would be cooked. But maybe there are other areas life where I'm inappropriately applying white-collar values and getting cooked.
Where I've gotten cooked, and others have in the past, is probably the creative sphere. In high school and early college, when I had an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex, I would generate more random content——photos, paintings, writings——and a lot of it would be good. A lot of it would be shit. After steadily being indoctrinated into white collar values, that ability has eroded. Before doing something or putting something out there I would think "well what would someone think of this" or "what's the end game, how does this advance my objectives." Anyone who has done anything creative knows that those sort of thoughts just kill your soul and your ability to make anything.
I think I have rediscovered this truth on twitter dot com in recent years, where the most interesting and thought-provoking accounts are unhinged and anonymous. Many of them are just white-collar professionals who want to blow off steam and have interesting observations they can only share under a pseudonym, and that pseudonym allows them to remove the inhibitions of white-collar values and just think out loud.
So I will embrace that tradition and use this little HTML site and twitter dot com to think out loud. It takes me 10 minutes to put one of these together. I can make money and advance my interests and delay gratification in other areas of life. Who cares.
Enjoy my word vomit.