WHEN YOU'RE BECOMING YOURSELF

6. What We Value in Life, and How They Change

"When you're 20 you care what everyone thinks, when you're 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you're 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place." —Winston Churchill

Dear Kids,

Here's something I've noticed about values, kids: the moment you start examining yours honestly, they refuse to hold still. The thing you swore you couldn't live without at twenty becomes politely irrelevant at thirty. The thing you barely noticed at thirty becomes the thing you're quietly building your whole life around at forty. You think your values are fixed. They aren't. They are slowly, almost invisibly, rearranging themselves underneath you all the time.

I want to tell you about how that's looked in my life so far, while I'm still close enough to twenty to remember what it felt like there.

The horror of suburbia, at seventeen

When I was in high school, the single most terrifying future I could imagine for myself was a quiet life in suburban America. The white picket fence. The manicured lawn. Two-and-a-half kids. One dog. One cat. A reasonable car in a two-car garage. A barbecue on the weekends with neighbors whose names I would have to keep relearning.

I genuinely thought this was the worst possible outcome. Not because it would hurt — because it would be small. Average. Mediocre. A life lived inside the lines drawn by other people, with none of the achievement, none of the prestige, none of the distinction I had been raised to chase.

I'm thirty as I write this. And I look at that exact same picture now — the lawn, the kids, the dog, the cat, the barbecue — and what I feel, to my own surprise, is something close to longing. I see a quiet existence surrounded by the people you love. I see protecting your kids from the corrupting noise of the world I work in. I see being known, deeply, by a small number of human beings who'll be at your funeral. I see all the things seventeen-year-old me thought were code for mediocrity, and what I notice is how much they overlap with what most people, on their deathbeds, say they wish they'd valued sooner.

What changed? Not the suburb. Not the lawn. Me.

What twenty-year-old me valued, and what thirty-year-old me values

Looking back, I can see the rearrangement happening in real time, and I want to name some of it for you because it's the same rearrangement that I suspect every thinking person goes through — the question is just whether you notice it while it's happening, or only thirty years later.

When I was twenty, I valued how impressive people looked on paper. The school, the firm, the title, the photograph. At thirty, I notice I quietly value people for their integrity, their optimism, and their plain niceness — and I find that I will reorganize my calendar to spend more time with the kind ones and avoid the impressive-but-corrosive ones, even at real career cost.

When I was twenty, I valued standardized tests and the games I had been taught to win. At thirty, I value intellectual curiosity — the quality of someone who keeps reading, keeps asking, keeps being surprised by the world — way, way more than the credential they happen to be holding.

When I was twenty, I thought a career was a ladder. There was a top. The point was to climb it. At thirty, I see careers as multivariate, mostly nonlinear, sometimes recursive — the people whose lives I most respect have lived four or five different ones, and the through-line was not the title but the curiosity that connected them.

When I was twenty, I treasured things. At thirty, I treasure experiences. The watch wears out, the car gets scratched, the apartment gets a new tenant. The trip I took with my closest friends, badly planned and full of small disasters, will be with me until the day I die.

When I was twenty, I valued how I looked. At thirty, I value how I feel — sleep, energy, mood, the absence of low-grade dread. The shift is total. I would now trade almost any cosmetic improvement for an extra hour of real sleep.

When I was twenty, I wanted absolute control over my life. At thirty, I'm slowly learning that the moments that have shaped me the most have almost always come from spontaneity — the dinner I almost canceled, the trip I almost didn't take, the person I almost didn't talk to.

When I was twenty, I dwelled. I replayed. I rehearsed the past until it grooved into my chest. At thirty, I'm trying — imperfectly — to live more often in the present, because the present is where the actual life is happening.

When I was twenty, I was afraid of failing. At thirty, I'm afraid of stagnating. Failing turned out to be cheap. Stagnating turned out to be expensive.

When I was twenty, I engaged in every conflict I got invited to. At thirty, I cherish healthy boundaries. Most of the fights I picked were not worth the energy I spent on them, and the ones that were have stayed with me without my needing to relitigate them.

When I was twenty, I needed everyone to like me. At thirty, I need me to like me. The first is impossible. The second is, slowly, possible.

When I was twenty, I valued popularity. At thirty, I value originality — and I notice that the most genuinely popular people I know are popular because they're original, not because they tried to be popular.

When I was twenty, I compared myself constantly. At thirty, I'm learning to compare myself only to who I was last year, because that's the only comparison that has any information in it.

When I was twenty, I valued the quantity of my relationships. At thirty, I value the quality — and I would rather have three friends who can show up at 3 a.m. than three hundred I exchange holiday photos with.

When I was twenty, I needed to be right. At thirty, I need to be understood — and I'd rather lose a small argument and stay in real contact with someone than win it and lose the contact.

When I was twenty, I needed approval. At thirty, I'm slowly learning to trust my own gut — and most of the times in my life I've ignored my gut for someone else's approval, I've regretted it.

When I was twenty, I lived for instant rewards. At thirty, I find that the most reliable joys in my life are the ones that compound slowly — the morning training, the weekly call with my parents, the long reading nights.

When I was twenty, I valued a busy schedule. At thirty, I value a calm mind. I will defend an empty Saturday morning the way younger-me would have defended an important meeting.

When I was twenty, I chased hedonic pleasure. At thirty, I'm chasing — and intermittently catching — something quieter that I think is what people mean when they say peace.

I won't pretend this list is finished. I'm sure forty-year-old me will laugh at thirty-year-old me the way thirty-year-old me laughs at twenty-year-old me. That's the point of the letter, in some sense. The values keep shifting. The work is not to land on the final answer; the work is to keep asking, and to honor whatever phase you're in without mistaking it for the end.

What gave me the cleanest theoretical handle on this was something Frankl — the same Frankl from the letter on staying human — pointed out in a chapter I didn't notice the first three times I read him. He talks about his own value system pre-camp, in-camp, and post-camp — three completely different value architectures within the same lifetime, in the same human being. The pre-camp Viktor cared about ambition and reputation and the polished life of a Vienna physician. The in-camp Viktor cared about a piece of bread, a glance from a fellow prisoner, the act of mentally walking through a memory of his wife. The post-camp Viktor cared about something different again — about meaning itself, about helping others locate theirs. The values didn't fail him in each phase; they reorganized themselves to match what life was actually asking. That's the part I want you to hear. Your values aren't a moral spine you fail to live up to. They're a living thing that grows around the shape of the life you're currently inside. When they shift, that isn't betrayal. That's responsiveness. The danger isn't the shift. The danger is pretending it isn't happening.

The Mexican fisherman

There's a parable I love so much I've thought about getting it tattooed somewhere, except that I'd be the kind of person who gets a parable tattooed on himself, which would defeat the parable. Here it is.

An American investment banker is at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docks. Inside the small boat are several large yellowfin tuna. The American compliments the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asks how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replies, Only a little while. The American asks why he didn't stay out longer and catch more. The Mexican says he had enough for his family's immediate needs.

The American, now intrigued, asks, But what do you do with the rest of your time?

The Mexican smiles. I sleep late. I fish a little. I play with my children. I take siestas with my wife, Maria. I stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.

The American scoffs. I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA, and eventually New York City, where you'd run your expanding enterprise.

The Mexican asks, But how long would this all take?

Fifteen, twenty years, the American replies.

But what then?

The American laughs. That's the best part. When the time is right, you announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You make millions!

Millions — then what?

The American says, Then you retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.

The Mexican fisherman was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled, and asked the only question that mattered:

But señor — isn't that exactly what I am doing right now?

The Harvard MBA had no answer.

I love this parable so much because the banker spends an entire imagined lifetime — the boats, the cannery, the move to New York, the IPO — sprinting toward a finish line the fisherman was already standing on. It is the cleanest illustration I know of everything in this letter: the things we spend our lives chasing are so often the things we were already holding. Our values don't actually change as much as we lose sight of them in the striving.

I should be careful here. I'm not saying ambition is bad. I'm not saying don't build the boat. Some people genuinely want the boat, and the cannery, and the office in New York, and they would not be happy as the fisherman — they would be bored, restless, miscast. The point of the parable isn't be the fisherman. The point is: ask whether you're already where you're trying to get.

Because some of you, kids, will read this and find that you actually do want the boat. Good. Build it. Build it consciously, knowing why. But check the answer to that question — isn't this what I'm already doing? — at least once a year. Because the most expensive mistake a thinking person can make is to spend fifteen years sprinting toward something they already had.

What I'm still figuring out

I don't know what my values will look like at forty, or sixty, or — if I'm lucky — eighty. I suspect a few of the ones I've named here will turn out to have been local truths of my late twenties. I suspect a few will hold. The honest answer is I don't know which is which.

What I do know is this. The work is not to lock in a final answer. The work is to keep asking. To notice when something you used to want has quietly stopped mattering, and to let it go without nostalgia. To notice when something you used to dismiss — a quiet morning, a small house, a long lunch with a friend — has started to feel like the actual point, and to honor that, even if it doesn't make for an impressive story.

My hope, kids, is that you won't need fifteen years and an IPO to learn what the fisherman already knew. That you'll keep checking. That you'll let your values change without panicking when they do. And that one day, when someone asks you what you're chasing, you'll be honest enough to say: nothing. I'm already here.

Love,

Dad