11 Things I Learned in 2024

This year felt like a video game where I finally put down the controller

Once, before our group played LIFE, my friend said, “I’m so tired of trying to win at life. It feels like we do that every single day. Can we please play to see who can have the worst one instead?”

And so a group of girls from top investment banking programs in New York gleefully tried to rack up as many kids as possible while skipping college altogether. It was more fun to play with fresh rules and an irreverent attitude.

Modern Life™ six months ago felt like a rigid, hollow game with arbitrary rules and rewards. A dystopian panopticon nightmare: Collect badges of yourself at F1 races and exclusive “it” destinations, gain points in the form of cash, and rise through the levels with job promotions and milestones involving a white dress and a baby. The fundamentals of the game didn’t seem to change at the top, but those who got there on the leaderboard could unlock new final Big Bosses like ‘Colonizing Space’ and Death.

Trying to grasp what changed this year to shift my mental state has been like making a presentable bouquet out of a bunch of slippery, wriggling eels.

It’s been both liberating and alienating to hear a friend brag about their new luxury car but experience it like they just told me they bought a “Goblin Turbocharger” on World of Warcraft, an item I could not care less about.

It’s not exactly a comfortable place to sit and write from. I’m not where I used to be, but I’m nowhere near fully “awakened” either. I’m somewhere in between, comically early on this journey, like Columbus trying to describe the "New World" while millions of people are already living there.

But here’s my attempt:

1. Clarity can be weaponized.

   If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. - Joseph Campbell

   Robert Frost might have made us forget that humans are naturally drawn to the path most taken. We are biologically wired to prefer systems with clear objectives, predictable progression, and rewards, which is part of the reason video games are so addictive. Sasha Chapin writes, “My friend DR MacIver calls video games “clarity porn,” a beautiful phrase.”

   Meanwhile, finding your purpose is like hacking through a dense jungle with a machete as your ears roar with the unsettling sound of something slithering across the forest floor.

   It’s a hard-wired survival strategy to join herds for protection, no matter which direction they’re traveling. But today, many will exploit this vestigial feature to persuade you to leave your path and trudge along theirs. Marisa Keegan wrote a great essay about this in Opposite of Loneliness, seeing all her classmates at Yale go into consulting and banking:

   “I want to watch Shloe’s movies and I want to see Mark’s musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe’s nonprofit and eat at Annie’s restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff has reformed and I’m just scared about this industry that’s taking all my friends and telling them this is the best way for them to be spending their time. Any of their time.”

   The craziest thing is that the predictability and security of the “safe path” is also an illusion. Most CEOs can’t guarantee their company will still exist a year from now, so how can they promise you guaranteed upward mobility? Just look at “sure things” like Lehman Brothers.

2. Your home is a living support system.

   I grew up with a parent who had a hoarding disorder, and only this year did it finally hit me how deeply that mindset had seeped into my relationship with space - physical, emotional, conversational. For example, I’ve always been hyper-sensitive to taking up space, even in group conversations.

   The biggest realization, though, was my broken relationship with my home. I dissociated from every place I lived, convincing myself that since I was renting, it wasn’t worth the effort to invest extra time and money unless it would be forever.

   While studying interior design this year, it finally clicked that the ultimate goal isn’t a status symbol that can be beautifully captured in 2D in Architectural Digest but a unique living system. Somewhere beautiful and functional - and uniquely tailored to your quirks and needs. A home that is like a snug, safe shell.

   My first breakthrough was buying a vanity desk and giving myself a dedicated space to take my time in the morning. Enjoying the morning ritual instead of rushing to apply mascara over a bathroom sink.

   The second was creating a “coffee station” on my kitchen counter. Before, splashing creamer and cold brew into a mug never felt indulgent enough to compete with the pull of the $9 latte at the cafe two blocks away. Romanticizing your life is underrated, and it matters.

   See also: Why, in hindsight, I’d gladly eat the lease break fee for toxic roommates. It made recharging my batteries impossible because I would dread returning to a space of passive-aggressive comments.

3. Make negative space in your calendar.

   Someone once described this to me perfectly: Committing to too many good things is like being at a buffet and first spotting lobster. You think, I love lobster! So you load up with three or four. Then you see chocolate cake. And then a carving station. Suddenly, you regret the four lobsters hogging all the real estate on your plate.

   In Japanese art, Ma is the negative space and quiet that supports and offers a respite from the rest of the composition. The more negative space there is, the more notable each design feature. Lives and calendars need their version of this, too. Without it, everything feels exhausting and chaotic.

   

   For years, maybe in an attempt to catch up from the lost time of COVID - or to avoid the void that doom scrolling could easily expand to fill - I signed myself up for so many “good things” that I barely had any breathing room.

   When the day came, instead of feeling excited about my beautiful cornucopia of plans, I’d feel stressed and resentful, scrambling from one thing that was organically running over in a lovely, spontaneous way to make it on time to the next thing. I was always late and always frazzled. My life had no space to breathe, and I couldn’t enjoy any of it.

4. Processing grief raises your ability to feel alive to new heights.

This year, I grappled deeply with grief. I joined a Dinner Party in my new city, a bereavement organization for people in their 20s and 30s who have lost loved ones. I wrestled in essays with why I hate hearing ‘Sorry for Your Loss’ and how I struggled to navigate grief without the framework of religion.

Death, the existential boogeyman—the “scary, bad ending” we will all face—shapeshifted for me into a reintegration with the rest of existence.

Two podcasts featuring women who work with death daily did much of the heavy lifting. I’ve included time stamps below that capture the anecdotes that impacted me most - each section is about two minutes.

• A Crematorium worker recounts a sign she received from her late Uncle Vinny (23:50).

• A Death Doula shares her friend’s sheer glee after glimpsing the other side (36:34).

I really can’t overstate how much shifting my view of death expanded my capacity for connection and joy. It’s not like I’m looking forward to it, but this invisible ceiling of dread and terror is gone. People who work closely with death are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met and now I think I know why. If the Grim Reaper did exist, I bet he would have a hell of a Netflix Special.

See also: A theory I want to explore in a future essay is how grief and sexuality are two sides of the same coin. It would explain why everyone’s having less sex than ever right after a global pandemic killed millions and lockdowns shredded the social fabric of our lives.

5. Feelings Decide, Logic Justifies.

   Maya Angelou should have gotten more love from the ‘Business’ section of Barnes and Noble when she wrote, “At the end of the day, people won't remember what you said or did; they will remember how you made them feel.”

   Credibility is important, but if you’re unlikeable, meaning you drain energy for your emotional regulation and relationship maintenance, you’ll hit a personality ceiling.

   When I interviewed for jobs at the beginning of this year, I focused like a robot on logically laying out all the ways I was the most qualified. Yet over and over again, the job went to someone with less experience.

   Everything changed when I realized people make decisions with their gut and emotions and then use logic and evidence to rationalize their feelings. Not the other way around. I started to focus more on connecting with people first and laying out qualifications and accomplishments only as buttressing for the decision they already wanted to make.

   See also: Why you shouldn’t discredit a personality hire.

6. Information consumption and creation is the mental equivalent of Diet and Exercise.

   I deleted my traditional social media accounts two years ago and experienced how, naturally, more “nutrition-rich” formats: books, podcasts, etc. came to fill the space. But still, it was like dieting without exercise. I wasn’t malnourished and obese anymore, but I wasn’t “in shape” either. It took creating and sharing new things to feel like the flywheel in my head was finally firing as it should again.

7. Having the kind of desperation that money can’t buy is a blessing.

   I spent an unfortunate amount of time on LinkedIn when I was laid off, so I couldn’t escape the great LinkedIn debate of 2024 on whether the “Open for Work” green banner is beneficial or “desperate.”

   A friend posted that desperation is a human condition, and choosing to pass over someone because they are “desperate” and not based on their qualifications is extremely stupid.

   I agree with her, but I also think that desperation is hugely underrated.

   Desperation is unproductive when it makes someone frantically pursue the same methods that aren’t working - just at a quicker, more voluminous speed - but it’s life-changing when it finally reaches high enough to breach the wall of fear. Often, desperation is the only thing that makes people question their assumptions and default operating patterns, breaking them out of their “factory setting” trance.

8. I Don’t Know How to Breathe.

   I’m alive and typing this. Therefore, I’m breathing. That doesn’t take a genius of deductive reasoning.

   But until this year, I had no idea how much burnout and PTSD were destroying my ability to actually exist in my body. A therapist described working on my back as “cracking a sheet of ice” and my spine as “caught in a tangled fishnet.”

   After my first trauma processing session, I sat up, and it was like my right lung had unfurled. The surface area had expanded, and suddenly, my breathing felt deeper without exerting any extra effort. After that appointment, I easily walked up a nearby hill that, the day before, I had been so winded climbing that I had to pause halfway up.

   It has to be felt to be believed, but The Body Keeps the Score was absolutely true for me. I only wish I’d sought out treatment sooner.

9. No matter how intelligent, everyone sits in a “Partially Obstructed View” seat.

   When I had fantastic insurance, I saw no less than a dozen highly qualified doctors after a bad fall. Mind you, I walked into their office with my head stuck tilted to one side and one leg shorter than the other.

   None of them noticed. (Now, everyone, I’ve shown the previous X-rays to recoils in horror.)

   • The orthopedic surgeon saw a hematoma that would resolve and didn’t need surgery.

   • The dermatologist had a tool to break up the scar tissue he typically used for microneedling.

   • The insurance company saw it as a cosmetic issue.

   • The physical therapist saw it as a broader ‘strength’ issue.

   • The family doctor seemed generally confused but had a great bedside manner and said everything in a very reassuring, ‘we’ll figure it out’ way (we didn’t).

   It would have all been comical if I wasn’t in so much pain and seemingly no one could figure out how to help me. (Don’t worry, someone finally did; they had experienced a similar injury and created a custom curriculum to heal themselves.)

   It taught me that Doctors, and more generally, people, can only see a problem through what they’ve studied and experienced up until that point.

   The world you experience depends entirely on the mindset you’ve acquired and honed - probably why so many wealthy people trying to buy their way to happiness fall short. They should have tried poetry.

   See also: A vibrant living ecosystem of this is trolling in the comment sections. They see everything through the rigid politicized tribal view they’ve calcified - sometimes in ways that stupify me how they even got there.

10. “You can go on any ride in this amusement park, and you’re crying because you can’t go in the utility shed.”

    After being laid off, I ground through job interviews for months; each time, I would get so close, only for it to collapse at the last minute.

    Offer rescinded. Budget cut. Leveling change. “We went with someone else.”

    Part of the insight was what I mentioned above about feelings before logic. But the blunter truth was that I just did not really want any of these boring ass jobs.

    I was quickly spending down my finite levels of energy to fake interest and enthusiasm, and it wasn’t convincing me or the recruiter.

    One day, I saw a vision of life as this gorgeous, luscious theme park, whirring with incredible rides and experiences just waiting for me. I realized I was upset over not being allowed to spend half my waking hours doing something I didn’t care about, with people I hadn’t clicked with, for a paycheck and insurance.

    I was crying over a utility shed.

11. Writing is social.

    For years, I resisted writing, even though it called to me, because I didn’t want to hole up with a blinking cursor and miss out on living. But this year, I learned from Write of Passage that writing is inherently social.

    Accountability groups, writing gyms, and sparring partners have helped me grow as a writer while deepening my existing friendships and leading to new, completely unexpected ones. It’s hard to ignore the feeling when you’re writing around something you don’t want to say or writing down what you don’t believe. Writing challenges people to be their interior selves rather than the “based on a true story” aspirational persona we see all too often in digital spaces.

    In this way, long-form writing is a correcting mechanism for your thoughts. It forces you to confront and wrestle with what you believe. It’s easy to post a passionate, short take in a comment and fire it off. But with long-form writing, I’ve often started out with a strong opinion, only to quickly run into one of my underlying assumptions and think, Wait, do I even believe this? The real work begins when I dig deeper, question assumptions, and sometimes end up in a completely different place - somewhere far more nuanced, unexpected, and interesting. It is a wild and humbling ride to change your mind.

    This newsletter started in a really, and I mean really, humble place. I still haven’t focused on distribution while I’ve grappled with brushing the rust off and sorting out my writer identity from my day job one. And yet, it’s grown 50X this year just through people sharing and discovering it organically. So thanks, Substack and all of you, for following along in 2024!

Knowing you’ve spent your time reading this is something I truly don’t take for granted. It’s a dream come true for people to read my work.

If you enjoyed it, please like, share, or comment - it signals to the mysterious algorithm Gods that my work deserves to be seen - and it really makes a difference. If you feel called to a different offering, you can (very literally) fuel my creativity by buying me a coffee.

Here’s to a rich and wonderful 2025 for us all!