7.8.26 - Bar Prep Day 3: An Insane Lack of Fear
This is "day 3" of studying for the Bar for real. coming up pretty close now. but i think i can do it. and does it matter if i cant? will try my best and see how goes.
something that has happened during law school and life is that fear has become a less effective motivator for me. nothing bad ever happens. and any time something bad has happened its turned out fine. worrying just hasn't gotten me anywhdre. but my genuine interest and curiousity have.
i think people should do what they like and see what happens more.
sometimes, I think about how the early Republic must have felt. I've been thinking about that more recently because of the 250th anniversary of our nation, and because I've been perusing a biography on Andrew Jackson. America was really an open world game.
You could show up, in a boat, with some money in your pocket, and some skills, and make a nice life. Does that America still exist? I am often down on that. But I think there's some evidence from my life and other's that it does. But as we age as a country and a culture, its harder to see, and our more "entrepreneurial" muscles atrophy. This isn't just a matter of economic policy, but the kind of mentality we're inculturating into the youth. We are becoming more spiritually chinese.
Now, there's a "success path" offered to us that's mostly credential/signalling based. At some level this is normal and fine in a complex society. We need skilling, and we need ways to signal that one has relevant skills. Schooling, certifications, and all that is an important part of that. BUt it would be bad if we became a country where that was the only way to achieve mobility.
My problem with the LEFT or just liberals in genral is that's the world they want to build. A credentialist America. Just make the credentials easier to get. Which are two objectives that are at odds. Make college more affordable! Make it easier to get into for people of different backgrounds--at the expense of other metrics! But then don't you degrade the signal that you're trying to distribute? It's silly.
These are the policy prescriptions of an aging country, and one where young human capital is locked up. We need to just unleash people faster. I've felt this way a long time, but then I realize, there aren't a lot of real policies stopping young people from just "unleashing" themselves. And plenty still do. The problem is the mental prisons we've inculturated them into.
Maybe I'm over generalizing because I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb filled with tiger parents who were aggressively and anxiously pushing their kids onto a very narrow success path. Maybe a lot of the country isn't like this.
However much this mentality has taken grip over our society, we need it to stop. We need to make America feel like an open world game. Tell kids to fuck off and just go DO things. Graduate high school and work on a boat for a year. Move to a new city and just figure it out (housing policies make this hard...its hard to show up to NY with 20 dollars in your pocket and figure it out when rent is 2000 dollars).
We need a lower entry barrier society. I hear stories about Gen X and before and how they moved in the world and I get very jealous. You talk to older folks and they'll say shit like "ah yes, I lived on the beach smoking pot for most of my mid twenties and then I just went and started a roofing company with my friends after getting married." What! What the fuck do you mean! Also, when you get a bit older, it seems that military experience created this werid moment of flux and mobility. Young men left the military after WWII/Korea etc. and then you just had this huge mass of people with similarish background flood the job market. Sorting wasn't that efficient. And people just ended up in weird places.
The stories that inspire me the most are those of entreperenuers rather than strivers. I've talked to a lot of lawyers and law firm partners and stuf about their lives. With some very notable exceptions, I generally never found their stories that interesting. Nothing is wrong with doing the responisble and right things and ending up where you want and making a lot of money. That's a good life! And they probably have other things int heir lives that are more interesting (I hope.) But that's not an inspiring story.
An inspiring story is my friend's dad. Who married a wealthy woman when he had money during the Dot Com era, got liad off, refused to ever work for anyone else, went very broke when he had an infant child, was divorced by this woman, then started his own firm on the technical side of securing patents (not an attorney), eventually became a multi-millionaire, and is now a happy and wealthy man who gets to do his side hobbies of flying little planes. That's fucking awesome. That's a tale!
A tale needs failures. A tale needs points where the hero refuses to compromise. My friend's dad had a tale. He got laid off and just said "fuck it I'm doing my own thing."
I think if you want to live an interesting life you can't be too afraid of failure. You have to embrace failure. You have to live for it. The more you fail the more resistant you become. I think the best things that has happened to me is becoming a little calloused to failure.
I failed tests in high school. I failed classes in college. I failed at getting certain jobs. I've failed in romance here and there. I've failed at all sorts of goals. And life is still great. We keep failing upwards.
If anything, what makes America great is that we really incentivize and insulate people from failure when they try and start their own thing. Through our bankruptcy code, tax code, how we insulate firms and people from liability. It's all inviting people to fuck up. Of course, I think we should expand on this a little more maybe with UBI, negative income tax, and stopping personal bankruptcies for healthcare. We should raise the floor more generally and add safety nets. But, as far as entrepreneurship, we do a pretty good job.
But we need to do more to make America feel like an open world game again. In addition to the social programs I mentioned, there hs to be some cultural upheaval. Most likely, reducing the status/signal of certain gatekeeping institutions, like universities, traditional media, working at big companies. These have to become anti-signals. We have to understand that in many respects, these things signal the wrong kind of qualities.
The MAGA maoists are actually doing this to some degree. So maybe the things I want are in motion.
If that's the case, how do adjust? Maybe we should stop chasing signals that are being actively degraded and that people are catching up with.
But aside from fitting to trends, I think that I want to just choose the kind of signal I want to send and see what happens. The signal I want to send in everything I do, my CV, the word of mouth I cultivate is, this guy i sjust cracked. He is autistically interested in XYZ subject area, he's not afraid to be wrong, he's smart enough to make competent work product about XYZ, and he's adaptable. I think if I can signal that quality then life will be just fine and I'll get the jobs I want and I'll get to do work that's meaningful.
So if there is a take away from this stream of consciousness, it is that one should pick the signal they want to send, and see how the world bends around it, see who responds, don't overfit to the signals that working right now, because when you do that you're degrading that signal anyways. It's how markets work in general. Oh everyone is making supernormal profits selling widget X, let me sell widget X. Then your market entry brings those profits down to zero. Meanwhile someone, just because they liked it, started making Widget Y and is doing better than you.
Just pick the widget you want to make! See what happens!
Cheers,
knxnts