Young, Restless And A Little Lost

Image credit: Answers In Genesis

In the last few issues of this newsletter, I wrote about the art of choosing what to do with your life, expressing yourself, and taking on side hustles to explore your passions. In this week's issue, I'd like to talk about young people in their twenties feeling young, restless and a little lost. In the past few months, I have met a few young people suffering from mental and emotional fatigue, usually accompanied with a general sense of loss and helplessness. As a soon-to-be forty year old, I am old enough to have clarity on what drives me, but young enough to remember what it feels like to be in your twenties and not know what to do with your life.

According to a nationwide poll in the UK, 89 per cent of 16- to 29-year-olds believe that their lives have no meaning or purpose. 30 percent believe they are stuck in a rut with 84 percent saying that they believe they are failing to “live their best life”.

AngelList founder Naval Ravikant is known for writing profound threads on Twitter. His thread How To Get Rich (without getting lucky) is one of the most widely shared threads on Twitter. Figuring out what to do with your life ≠ learning how to get rich, but here are a few tweets from Naval's thread which will hopefully bring clarity to some of the younger readers of this newsletter.

Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.

I like to play the long game. Preferably with people with long term thinking. If you know you're in it for the long haul (whatever it might be), you don't wake up every few months wondering what you are doing with your life. I want to help kids learn skills and dispositions to make their way in the world because education is stuck in the industrial age. That is a a long game. It's not going to happen in one year, three years, or even five years. I've been at it for ten years and counting. It's a long time, but I also save a lot of time and energy not thinking about what I am doing with my life.

The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet.

Over the next five to ten years, millions of jobs will be made obsolete by a combination of AI and robotics. That is the bad news. The good news? Millions of new jobs that don't exist today will come on the market. If I were in my twenties, I would spend time with people who can peer into the future. Shoot the breeze with these people. Ask them what they are most excited about, what new skills they are learning, where on the internet they are hanging out.

Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Wealth, relationships and knowledge compound. When you are in your twenties, you probably don't have a lot of wealth. Focus on relationships and knowledge. On relationships, see paragraph above. Hang out with curious people. Learn from them. Build things with them. On knowledge, see paragraph below.

Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.

Most knowledge is one google search away. This is not the type of knowledge you want to build. Build specific knowledge. How? Find two or three domains you are genuinely curious and passionate about. Be an expert in each of those domains. Where the domains intersect is specific knowledge. I know a fair bit about progressive education. I know a fair bit about startups. And I know a fair bit about the future of work. My specific knowledge is where learning, startups and future jobs intersect.

I hope this issue of Education & Catastrophe helps some of you find your way.

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Till the next issue!