I’m about to turn another year older, and honestly, I have never felt more ready. My 23rd lap around the sun has felt the longest—and not in a bad way. Maybe it’s because I moved three times within the year, making it feel as if I lived three years in one. It was a very full year, for which I am very grateful. But to be frank, I feel much older than I am and I think that’s because this year I’ve done the most learning.
Since graduating college, I’ve made friends with people outside my year of school. Sometimes I feel closer in age to my mid-20-something-year old friends, or even those over thirty. In many of my conversations with my closest friends, they often say, “Kayla, sometimes I forget you are just 22.” And I agree with them.
Everyone always says that you shouldn't be in a rush to grow up and I’m not; but I do feel a pressure to continue learning, training my brain to reach peak optimization in retaining the maximum amount of information. I’m in a race with myself. A volume game so to speak. How can I perform better at work, build more relationships, churn out more Substack articles, and continue checking off my bucket list?
In what may be a cliché metaphor, I view my life much like running. Haruki Murakami writes in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be”. The same is true in my firm belief that the only person you should compare yourself to is previous versions of yourself. A year ago, I was running at full speed. I had just graduated from college, started a new job at an esteemed academic institution, and was preparing to move internationally to start another fellowship.
running at my own pace
Well, I have just returned from Germany, and I can definitely say that it was the most relaxing yet adventurous year I’ve lived. I like to tell my friends that I’ve “disassociated” from my American identity and fully embraced the European way of life. I let my high-strung nature take a year off (though parts of her tried to come out still) and leaned into the enchantment and novelty of living on a new continent.
A friend I made in Germany recently told me that the way I “traveled around the world, the fun and spontaneous person that I am” inspired her to take off her “blindfold of fear” (MT, you wrote it much more beautifully). Previously, I never thought of myself as “fun” and “spontaneous”, but I welcome this positive personality change, for I strongly believe in social investment theory. It’s the notion that becoming involved in the world around us is how we grow, and the easiest time to do this is in our twenties.
As I turn another year older, I’m especially primed to do some deep self-reflection. In truth, I love reflection. I do it every day when I journal, write down my story worthy moment as part of my Homework For Life, and biweekly when I force myself to sit down at work and evaluate my progress towards my goals. I recommend the practice of reflection to everyone. Growth only comes when we extract from our past to inform our future. Reflection promotes continuous self-awareness and research shows that in a world where devices are impairing our reflective abilities, introspection is a scarce resource. In an effort to do some inward exploration, I offer a dive into my resonance calendar of the last year, with all the learnings from my very old 22-year old self:
How to Make Peace with Feeling Less Ambitious - If you’re used to thinking of yourself as a high-achieving person, it may feel counterintuitive to have that identity brought into question through your own desires and actions. But downshifting your ambitions doesn’t mean that you’re wasting past efforts or becoming more lazy. It may actually mean that you’ve recognized what it takes for ambition and achievement to be sustainable.
In a world that is becoming increasingly digital and ever more lonely, invest in your relationships. We should all try to become what David Brooks calls “Illuminators” in his book, How to Know a Person, or “Supercommunicators” as Charles Duhigg’s recent book advocates for.
“I’m sure you’ve experienced a version of this [Illuminators]: You meet somebody, who seems wholly interested in you, who gets you, who helps you name and see things in yourself that maybe you hadn’t even yet put into words, and you become a better version of yourself.”
Illuminators are those with an innate curiosity of those around them. In most conversations, I never stop asking questions. I like to ask deep questions that trigger emotional connection and receive people’s answers in a way that allows them to be who they are. In life, social skills can be summed into one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through and make them feel seen.
The art of asking good questions is a seriously underrated skill. The happiest couples, friends, and relationships mirror each other’s speaking style. They know when to ask questions and when to make a joke. We need to work on asking open-ended questions where “How was your trip?” becomes “What was the best thing about that trip?”. Questions that get people to talk about their values.
Let your friends leave you once. The good ones always come back - In meaningful relationships, people get in touch when they think of you. Your true friends will always find their way back. In the past, if they only reached out because they wanted something from you, then it was most likely a transactional friendship.
People are in your life for a season, a reason, or a lifetime.
A good friend is someone who you go to for deep conversations and makes your friendship a priority. No matter how busy we are in life, time is a constant presence and our most valuable asset. We always complain that there’s never enough of it, but yet, it’s always here for the taking. In other words, we all have time. It’s just about how we prioritize that time. Good friends will carve out just enough for you. They’re someone who you share enough inside jokes with that you immediately think of them when a relatable reel appears on your feed. DMing does not replace quality interaction, but it does show the familiarity and some level of a bond within your friendship. At the end of the day, you won’t remember the memes you DMed but instead, the conversations that moved you. Partners and jobs come and go, but true friendships stand the test of time. It might be worth investing in them.
Value your independence. I’m living alone for the first time in my life and it’s strangely amazing. Living alone in our 20s is the perfect exposure therapy to solitude. I love my own company. I’m at a point in my life where I have low responsibility, no serious attachments, and seriously love being single. I’m currently watching Sex and the City and have taken great inspiration from the women in the show. When all your time is devoted to your own pursuits, you are completely liberated to take that cross-country job or uproot your life by moving to Europe as I did. Plus, studies show that single people exercise more, are overall more healthy, have a more diverse social circle, and better attend to their friends—they look for friendships that are more meaningful. Single people also have lower credit card debt. I don’t know if that last one necessarily pertains to me but I can say that I am more emboldened to take risks and build what Meg Jay calls, “identity capital”. Do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next.
“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent” - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
The power of knowing what you don’t know
"If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom" - Think Again, Adam Grant .
The faster you can admit to being wrong, the faster you can move towards being right. Recognize that opinions are tentative. Values are more fixed. Don't make your opinions part of your identity because the point of learning is to continue updating your beliefs. A lot of times, we’re scared of the things we have less knowledge in. It’s the same reason for why in the past, I turned away from books on technology and science. Now, I relish getting to train my brain in use of these subjects. I respect the opinions of experts. But I respect the people who are willing to admit when they don’t know something, more. They’re cognizant of the fact that they can improve, learn. After all, learning requires a belief that you have something to learn.
“Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded. It is a willingness to confront counter evidence and to have a feel for the vast spaces beyond what’s known”. -The Social Animal by David Brooks
Pay Attention to Your Attention. My friends and family know that this has been my fixation over the last year. At this point, they might be tired of hearing me bring it up again and again in conversation. But I’m sorry, it’s too important to not talk about it! This is the stuff that makes me tick. On April 11, 2024, I journaled this:
“A gnawing frustration that I’ve felt this whole year is my inability to focus deeply. I’m not the person I was a year ago. My disciplined routine is gone.”
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. A burgeoning field of research is being dedicated to studying our inability to pay attention. In 2004, the average attention span was about two and a half minutes. Around 2012, it was 75 seconds. And in the last five years, that has almost halved again to where we are now, which is roughly 47 seconds. I’ve relied on social media and messaging apps such as WhatsApp and FaceTime a lot to stay connected to friends while abroad. And while it has allowed me to maintain relationships across vast social distances and consume information almost instantaneously, I’ve seen it do more harm than good at times.
I’ve written in the past about smartphones and social media, and I cannot emphasize enough how much I believe that these technologies are sidelining authentic connection and deteriorating our relationships. Teenagers and young adults today are dating less than they used to, playing less youth sports, and making fewer friends. Our intimate relationship with phones has made it difficult for young people to be lured away from the screen. We’re competing for each other’s attention and the technology is winning. When we pay attention to what we pay attention to, it offers us some insight into what we want to do with our life.Turn off for a day - To give myself a respite from the doomless scroll and social comparison, in the last year I committed to taking a social media sabbath on Sundays. I don’t check my email and go offline from my networking apps on this dedicated day. I reconnect with the activities that replenish, renew, and reinvigorate me like going to the cinema, completing a long run, and doing a solo walk around my city.
The importance of a personal project - I was watching an episode of Chicken Shop Date the other day and a guest asked the host, Amelia Dimoldenberg, “What hobbies do you have?”. She replied, “Hmm…not many. Just being on the internet”. This answer is representative of the mental health malaise among Generation Z. If we’re getting the same amount of dopamine from seeing other people do cool and rewarding things on social media, why would we need to do it ourselves? And the reason why, is that we need purpose.
I’ve learned that finding hobbies and personal projects is what gives me purpose. The feeling of challenging myself, asking if I’m progressing toward anything, and doing activities that are engaging and help me feel proactive are what make me tick. I of course still do my scroll at the end of my day as a way to unwind. But I want to keep encouraging myself to think about what things I would be happier putting time into; building identity capital.
Being unanchored is okay - A sign of adulthood is having friends in multiple cities, across the world. This year I traveled to four continents and I’ve lost count of the number of countries. I met incredible people in each place and discerned that there was something beautifully transformative about consciously upending everything about my normal life.
As I’m reacquainting myself to the US, I’m training myself to stay in a growth mindset. The 6-month rule tells us that when you move to a new place, it takes about 6 months to feel settled. It’s still far from easy, and I miss Germany terribly. But I know that I’ve done this before and keep telling myself the same thing I would tell my younger self or anyone who should come to me for advice in the future. I have high expectations and I’m confident you can reach them. Every time I voice my anxieties to a friend or family member, they say that I told them the exact same thing before my last move and look how well I turned out. It proves that while my living conditions have mostly been transient, the only stable relationship you have in your life is the one with yourself.
I’m not sure if I like feeling older than I really am. When I hang out with friends my own age, I enjoy getting to hear how equally lost we all are. Even if we seem like we have it all figured it out, we all face doubts everyday. Because part of aging is that with each day, we draw closer to uncertainty. We’re all in a sampling period, trying to figure out different choices until we find one that fits. This next year I want to work on feeling my own age. To me, that means allowing myself to make mistakes. I sometimes worry that if I don’t make them now, I’ll have some huge f*ck-up later on in life. Well, let’s worry about that identity crisis later and focus on building identity capital for now.
I’ll let Miley take us out:
Thank you for making it this far.
Kayla’s favorites from this year:
“The Quarter-Life Predicament” - another laudable piece from Scantron’s Substack on aging and the meaning of life.
“Moving to a new city in our 20s” - from the podcast, “The Psychology of your 20s”. One of my favorite podcasts. This episode came to me at a very transitory phase when I was living at home for 3 weeks in between Boston & Germany.
The Defining Decade by Meg Jay - Eighty percent of life’s most defining moments happen before age 30. In this book, Jay teaches us how to think about work, love, and our body/brain, and prepare intentionally for these developments.
Beautifully introspective and thoughtful Kayla! No. 5 is something I’ll be thinking about until my cake day. Happy birthday 🥳🥳
Kayla I LOVED reading this— so thoughtful and inspiring and motivating