Nobody hands you a manual when you arrive.
You just open your eyes somewhere on this spinning rock, surrounded by people who happened to get here before you.
Different countries. Different tribes. Different languages. Different gods. Different customs. Some of these customs are older than the countries carrying them.
And before you can even form a sentence, the world starts explaining itself to you.
This is how we eat.
This is how we dress.
This is what a successful person looks like.
This is what you should be embarrassed about.
This is what you should aspire to.
This is when you should marry.
This is what respectable work looks like.
This is what a good life looks like.
And naturally, you believe it.
You're five.
What the fuck else are you supposed to do?
When you're young, adults seem like the architects of reality. Your parents know where you're going. Teachers have answers. Governments have buildings. Companies have headquarters. Religions have scriptures. Universities have degrees. Everybody older than you seems to be participating in some enormous system whose rules were established long before you arrived.
So you assume somebody, somewhere, knows what's going on.
Then you get older.
And one of the strangest realizations of adulthood is discovering that there isn't really a backstage.
It's people all the way down.
Your father was figuring out how to be your father while raising you.
Your mother had never lived that year of her life before either.
The CEO has never run his company through tomorrow.
The seventy-year-old has never been seventy-one.
Even the people with enormous experience are still encountering parts of existence for the first time.
That doesn't make their experience worthless.
Quite the opposite.
Human beings have been running this experiment for thousands of years. People have already discovered plenty of ways to ruin a life. They've also discovered remarkably good ways to build one. There is wisdom buried in tradition, religion, family, science, institutions and the accumulated scars of people who came before us.
You would be an idiot to throw all of that away simply because you want to feel original.
But wisdom is not the same thing as a manual.
That's the distinction.
Because think about something strange.
If you had been born a thousand years ago, your conception of a normal life would be almost unrecognizable to you today.
Move your birth two thousand miles east and it changes again.
Change your parents.
Change your century.
Change your language.
Change the amount of money surrounding your childhood.
Change the god worshipped in your village.
Change whether you were born into a city of twenty million people or somewhere with two hundred.
Keep changing the coordinates and this supposedly obvious blueprint for human life keeps changing with them.
Which should tell you something.
A surprising amount of what we call "the way life works" is simply the way the people around us learned to live.
And once you really understand that, reality becomes a little less rigid.
You can interrogate things.
Why exactly do I want this?
Would I want it if nobody could see me having it?
Why is thirty considered late for this?
Why do I need to live there?
Why does work have to look like this?
Why am I chasing something I don't even enjoy?
Who decided this was embarrassing?
Who decided this was prestigious?
And my favorite:
Does this rule actually exist, or have I just never seen anybody around me break it?
That's where life gets interesting.
Because you realize there are far more ways to arrange a human existence than the handful you've been shown.
You can borrow the tools without copying the building.
You can listen to the OGs without becoming them.
You can respect tradition without surrendering your curiosity to it.
You can learn the rules, understand why they exist, and still decide that some of them have absolutely nothing to do with the life you're trying to build.
Of course, reality still has boundaries.
Gravity doesn't care about your individuality. Mathematics doesn't care about your philosophy. Decisions have consequences. Other human beings have rights. Your body has limits. Time keeps moving whether you've figured yourself out or not.
You don't get to bend those things simply because you want to.
But inside those boundaries?
There is an absurd amount of room.
More than most of us will ever use.
And maybe that's the strange joke underneath all of this.
For thousands of years, generation after generation has arrived here, looked at the generation before them for instructions, figured some things out, gotten other things spectacularly wrong, grown old, and eventually become the generation that somebody younger mistakes for having all the answers.
Then they leave.
And the next group takes the room.
We're doing it right now.
The elders. The billionaires. The philosophers. The priests. The professors. The twenty-year-olds. The people who look completely lost and the people who look like they have everything figured out.
Different amounts of experience.
Different amounts of information.
Different amounts of wisdom.
But still, every one of us, first-timers.
Nobody has lived tomorrow yet.