I can say with some confidence, in the twilight of my twenties, that it is inherent nature that has guided my decisions, not the story I tell myself at any given moment.

Like my parents and extended family, I fall into intensive training and skill-building when I feel like it, not for the pragmatic reasons I was told to believe. I'm not enterprising; although I've done some business, I am not a founder, certainly not in the SV sense of the term. I am content with a simple life with many friends, find little pleasure in making deals or drawing attention to myself, and at the end of the day, would like to focus on building the world through the esoteric, not the popular.

Valuable things for me are not something I can weigh or measure like assets and work hours; neither are they idyllic stories and images, or carnal pleasures. They're weird stuff, and nobody particularly cares about weird stuff except other weird people. And so the startup narratives ultimately fail to work for me; I don't want to allocate that level of commitment into the marketplace. It feels like a distraction, because the market values the popular and the practical, at any level. Everything else slips through the cracks, and I like slipping through the cracks. The way to hook me on a get rich quick scheme is to tell me that I'm slipping through the cracks and need only make one small change.

I didn't come to this conclusion without lots of attempts over the last decade, though. If I had genuinely wanted to pursue a popular, practical approach, I had many chances to do so. I convinced myself, like many a confused young person, that I did want this, and I took some of them, and the experience was worthwhile, but not enough to stick around for. Successes tended to feel empty; failures felt delusional. The biggest satisfactions usually came when I walked away after getting bored with the idea - yes, bored. Not after a definite, final, concrete answer, but after simply being unwilling to take the next step forward and drifting off. I know that some of those things I walked away from could work, could still work now. I don't care.

This is a step that my parents stop short of acknowledging. They still live with the burden of "being successful" as a universal, and their struggle as one measured against that universal, tearing themselves apart a day at a time as their behavior mismatches their expectations.

What do I actually do? Today I met someone I've only known for an hour or two outside of the internet. We had coffee, and I met some of their relatives. They were on vacation. We had no business together. We just sat and talked, with luxurious pauses and lulls in the conversation. For three hours. It was fine, and now I have a closer friend.

And that is me, that is the type of thing I do and like doing. But it's not rational thought. I felt and did, and rationalized after. As such the way forward for me is to fuck off with planning my professional career in any more than a broad "make a little, save a lot" conservative generality. If I do anything more risky or ambitious, it'll happen suddenly, because it always has, but in most respects I value inner life more.

And that is not you, dear reader. Maybe you're similar to me. Maybe you're more like a founder. Maybe take some personality tests(that are not Myers-Briggs).