I watched a guy at Vital Climbing Gym explain his training schedule to someone who hadn’t asked. He said he climbed three days per week, did ceramics on Sundays. He loved Strava, and he was getting into natural wine. Among the software engineer class, there seems to be some competition around play.
Striverification begins young, with rote memorizing Chinese characters and hot summers inside of Kumon, and it follows one into college. Land the grades, land the job, become a software engineer at Netflix. And then what?
The striver elite has grown to maturity, which means they have disposable income to throw at becoming a Renaissance man. In today’s terms, this seems to be reinvented as someone who is very good at both pickleball and wheel-throwing.
Hobbyism is an eternal youth, a Peter Panning one’s way out of the obligation to choose one’s own life and suffer the consequences. In no other time in human history have we had so much leisure, and now, in our Sisyphean way, we ape the struggles of our ancestors by pretending to climb rocks.
The only thing sadder than a place without struggle is a place full of software engineers pretending to struggle. By place, I do not mean a plane of existence. I mean Do Clay, on W 32nd St.
They (the Asian-American New York hobbyists) say that by the time you’re 25, you’re supposed to have a sense of style, a hobby that you’re moderately good at, a friend group or loose roster of individual friends, a community (which is separate from the friend group), and a copy of Michelle Obama’s Becoming.
These checkboxes are arbitrary. By transforming the 20s to a playground, we’ve destroyed the pillars that drive meaning. We need not a partner! Or a family! Or a career! We need only a good time, carefully strategized between enough sleep to keep the Apple Watch happy and a few friends from college and a solid consumer habit.
Your life is not an investment portfolio, carefully balanced to derisk all outcomes. It is a single, irreversible bet. The people who make it tend to look a little unhinged: too intense, too unwilling to balance. They are also, quietly, the ones who seem most alive.
The key to happiness is anti-diversification. Time should not be parceled evenly in different categories. Your life is not a coward's way out, an investment portfolio carefully measured to derisk all outcomes. It is an adventure, one which can only be done whole-heartedly. And I can promise you, that adventure is not in rock climbing.