Draft Four: How old are you in your head?

Hardcore sentimentalism about growing up.

There is a joke in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about finding the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”. A supercomputer is the one tasked to figure it out and it delivers.

42.

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I just turned 42 on June 1. The day didn’t start with the ultimate answer revealing itself, but I’m holding hope AI will provide something by the end of the year. That would be a good way to wrap up its mainstream debut season.

What did happen that day is that I took a run along the water in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. The last time I ran this route was January 1, 2015. I spent New Year’s with my friend Cipri, who I met 30 years ago when he transferred into our sixth-grade class.

That winter, eight years ago, he made me a banana chocolate cake from a recipe he had from my mother, and we made plans, many of which have shaped our next few years. He’s also the reason I’m wrapping up my US trip in California – I’m here for his wedding.

As I ran, eyes stinging from the sweat, I was thinking of the twists & turns of our lives. Thirty years ago, we were in my room in Târgu-Mureș, listening to pop charts on the radio and trying to record the songs we liked on cassettes and write lyrics in notebooks. (The quality of both was atrocious). A few years later, we created the high school newspaper. Then we each left to study abroad. He built a tech company. I built a magazine. We exchanged stories of highs and lows, of wins and failures. And now, we’re once again writing new chapters.

The Golden Gate Bridge as seen on my running route.

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There’s this quote I like from Williams Bridges’ Transitions, which I read last summer. “Each person’s life is a story that is telling itself in the living of it, and each requires others to play certain kinds of roles. (…) Each of us resists transition because a story is a self-coherent world with its own kind of immune system, and alien characters are out of place.”

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Successful transitions require us to challenge our assumptions. Cipri was always good at this, always looking for the next best thing, the next city, the next project, not as much jumping from one to another, but finding his way into what best fit his ever-changing narrative. His consistency is the search.

“So in the end”, writes Bridges in Transitions, pondering Odysseus, “the homeward journey of life’s second half demands three things: First, that we unlearn the style of mastering the world that we used to take us through the first half of life; second, that we resist our own longings to abandon the developmental journey and refuse the invitations to stay forever at some attractive stopping place; and third, that we recognize that it will take real effort to regain the inner home.”

We long for a destination, an end point. Which is why there are few siren songs as tempting as the idea that we have arrived, that the developmental journey has stopped. There are even multiple names for us not straying from the selves we’ve become: continuation bias, path dependence, the self-consistency fallacy.

I might have quoted my favorite Harvard study in these letters before, one that says most people think they won’t change much in the next 10 years. But the same people always admit they actually did change in their last 10. Daniel Gilbert, who ran the study, put it best: “human beings are works in progress who mistakenly think they are finished”.

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I was talking with my friend and mentor Jacqui Banaszynski, and she mentioned she doesn’t see me stressing too much about my future. It’s true. I’m just trying to pay attention, I told her. I notice what sparks my interest, what doesn’t, and I jot down answers.

In haphazard ways, I ask myself versions of questions I’ve asked many others over the years: What do you wake up in the morning for? When are you at your happiest? When are you in a state of flow? What would you do if you there were to restrictions on your choices? If you had to start from scratch, what would you do?

I’ve shared some of these answers in this letter, and I’ll keep doing it.

For example, I know that I still feel at home in journalism or, better yet, that I found a way to look at journalism that fits who I am today. And that’s because I believe in choosing based on questions and interests, or personal missions, rather than industries or titles.

What is your personal “why”, as Simon Sinek would say. Once you’ve figured that out, you might be surprised to see that it can be pursued in various fields, in various places.

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Ten years ago, I read How Do You Measure Your Life, which is technically a business book written by one of the world’s most prominent business thinkers and strategists, Clayton Christensen. (Here’s the article version). When Christensen wrote it, he had just recovered from a life-threatening stroke, which required him to learn to walk and talk again. The books deals with finding your strategy, adapting, about understanding the jobs to be done in people’s lives by the product or service you’re selling. But it also says strategy is easier when there is a mission behind it, and metrics attached.

For Christensen, who died in 2020, the mission was making a difference in other people’s lives – investing, helping, teaching, advising, coaching: “The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people”.

That resonated deeply, and it’s still one of the joys of my life, and my greatest source of energy. I love editing, I told Jacqui, because I get tremendous joy out of the joy of the reporter or the team working on the project. Sure, I love reading thousands of words and finding ways to improve a piece, but I only love the work when the person I am editing loves the work, and feels we’ve come out with something better.

Same with teaching and coaching – I enjoy them for their sake and what they demand of me, but they nurture and sustain me when I hear from others our time together was an extra boost in helping them do something they never thought they could do before.

How do you measure your life?

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My friend Carla sent me a message early on my birthday – sit down, download this file, and watch it. It was a 20-minute video of 42 people wishing me happy birthday. (Yes, corny, but highly effective – be a friend like Carla and do this for people). It featured friends, students, colleagues, people I admire and look up to.

Some told me I helped them do things they never thought they could do. Others said they think of me when they get scared of trying something new. Let’s just say I cried.

I sometimes struggle to believe and enjoy the beautiful things that happen, but I’m getting better at taking my own advice to just celebrate these moments, rather than ask whether there was something I could have done to make it even better.

So here goes: Thank you. What a blessing to be able to show up for people on their life journey. What a privilege to be able to hear them say you did.

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I know I’m sentimental and melodramatic; these letters are too. I found the best descriptor for this: “hardcore sentimentalist”. It’s the Twitter bio of Max Porter, a British writer I discovered only recently, and he’s been blowing my mind. Porter is 42.

This is him in the astounding Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, the story of a father and two boys mourning the death of their wife and mother alongside a foul-mouthed crow who moves in with them. (Yes, I’m serious): “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”

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Here’s a cool thing stories do – especially the fairytales we read growing up.

They teach you that life is full of obstacles, or, as Rebecca Solnit has written, that the core of most of the stories is “the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.” They also teach you that these obstacles are ones you can overcome or at least negotiate with the help of others – magical creatures, wise men and women, grand wizards, your odd stranger.

This is one of the lessons of Our Missing Hearts, a beautiful book by Celeste Ng I read this week (It’s available in Romanian, too). It’s about a dystopian future where the banning of books and the othering of people (Chinese immigrants in the US) creates a police-state similar to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. In the book, one of the ways that Margaret, a Chinese-American poet, fights for truth is by telling stories to her son, Bird.

“There’s one thing he remembers from stories, it’s that people who offer help along your way – whether directing you to treasure or warning you of danger – should not be ignored.”

I get to write these lines today because of the many people who offered help along the way.

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One last thought about growing up.

What if, in a way, we don’t?

I laughed throughout Jennifer Senior’s article that asks this simple question: what age are you in your head?

Don’t think about it. There is your real age, and the age that pops up when you think of that question. Jennifer is 53. But in her head, she is 36. Her mother is 76. In her head she is 45. I am 42. In my head, I’m no older than 32.

I’m 32 probably because it’s around that time I felt I had figured things out – knew what I wanted to do, knew how to get things done in life, came to terms with most strengths and weaknesses. I accepted what I could control, and what I couldn’t (most of it). „I was professionally established, but still brimmed with potential”, as Jennifer writes.

There might be a benefit to this “proprioception”: we feel we have more things to learn and discover. We also still believe we have a few pivots left in us if things don’t work out.

Of course, the downside is that others know very well how old we are.

Just this week a brilliant 20-year-old from Romania that I had dinner with in San Francisco told me she “doesn’t get to spend much time with older people”. I also spent some serious time last fall convincing my students to stop calling me “mister”. Why would they do that, I wondered, feeling closer to their age. Then I realized that some of their parents are my age. Oh.

The great thing about being younger in my head is that I’m still curious. I’m also born on June 1 (International Children’s Day), and not an anniversary goes by without a few people wishing me to “not grow up”. I know, I know, it’s a trap.

Here’s a little story about being a kid. My dad told it to me. When I was almost kicked out of high school at 14 for missing a horrendous number of classes (I skipped because of fear), he got called in. The school told him I wasn’t “a good kid”. In their mind, “a good kid” didn’t miss school, he followed orders, you know the drill.

For my father, a good kid was first and foremost one that stayed curios. That’s what he tried to teach me and my brother. You did well, dad.

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As you read this, I’m most likely enroute back to Romania. For now, it remains the place where I feel I can have the most impact. It’s also where I feel that on the spectrum between cynicism and Instagram motivational quotes, we can make more room for “hardcore sentimentalism”.

I’ll close the way my birthday video did. The last “happy birthday” came from Eyedrops, a Romanian band I’ve always loved, who recently put out the perfect soundtrack to my year of drifting. Their album is called Găsit. Rătăcit. Regăsit. Pierdut. (I wish I could do the translation justice. DeepL translates it as Found. Lost. Found. Lost. But it’s more like Found. Strayed. Retrieved. Lost.)

In the video, they perform their opening track from this record, Fii simplu (Be simple). It features this line: “I have everything I need to get lost in peace / People, and better, and worse things to feel.”