Last month, I turned 25. To celebrate, I want to share 25 life lessons I’ve learned so far, divided into three parts. Below you can find the first part consisting of eight lessons*.
Adults are just teenagers with credit cards and fancier chaos
As I continue my venture into adulthood, it becomes increasingly apparent that adults are adolescents who pay credit card bills and book their own doctors’ appointments. Yes, hopefully, we are wiser at 25 compared to 15, but we will also be wiser at 35 compared to 25, and so on. The “adult” label doesn’t quite fit dynamic beings because it implies that our development reaches its full potential around the age of 20. In reality, our mental development is ongoing as long as we are alive. We fall into a trap of our own making – expecting too much from our inexperienced selves and depriving ourselves of the freedom to make mistakes. Overburdened with the idea that as adults, we need to have it all figured out – a house, a family, a career – we end up burned out or dissatisfied with our lives, or both. Our concept of “adulthood” robs us of our happiness, because it doesn’t forgive missteps or consider continuous growth and change. We should be wiser, however, and treat ourselves as we would our teenage selves – prioritizing continual learning and growth rather than rushing through life to conform to unrealistic notions of adulthood. If we want to live happy, fulfilled lives, we need to accept that it’s okay to still be learning how to live well into our adult years.
Declutter your life
11,507 unopened emails can be found in my inbox as I am writing this article. Translate that number to reflect a human settlement and you will get a town of a decent size – one with its own supermarket, police department, and town hall. The town is ever-increasing, there is absolutely no border control and there are at least ten new inhabitants each day. The inhabitants seem to mostly come from the land of Newsletters – a scary place from what I gather, because no one wants to stay there. Every newsletter email is looking for a way out, a new mailbox to call home. In short, my inbox is overrun with squatters and honestly, France might handle it better than I do.
Now that we’ve put the sheer scale of these emails into perspective, we can abandon the metaphors and call these emails what they actually are – clutter. The hundreds of pictures on my phone of the same object with slight variations in angles are also clutter. Clothing I no longer wear is clutter.
Surprisingly, despite its size, both physical and digital clutter becomes invisible the more it accumulates. Ten unopened emails multiply into thousands, hundreds of pictures turn into unintentional stop-motion features, and that one pair of jeans that seems to fit you weird gets buried under more clothing. Paradoxically, the more stuff we have, the less of it we use and enjoy.
Applying economics (as one randomly does online after not putting their degree to use), we can make sense of our predicament using the endowment effect and diminishing marginal utility. We value the crap in our possession simply because we own it, but each subsequent piece of crap brings us less use and more clutter. While marginal utility is often brought up in terms of successive consumption, it is obvious that we are unable to enjoy each possession, newsletter, trinket, whatever thing equally (cue Ms. Casey from Severance) the more we own. However, since our biases override the concept of marginal utility, we continue hoarding.
I admit I haven’t yet deleted the thousands of emails, but I’m learning to distinguish signal from noise, both in my inbox and in my life. I am beginning to see that value doesn’t come from ownership or history; it comes from use, intention, and clarity. Whether it’s a newsletter, a shirt, or an outdated self-concept, I want to learn to let go of things that take up space because having less, but choosing it, feels a lot better than having more, but drowning in it.
Good movies will expand your mental horizons – start watching them
I became a cinephile the summer of ’17, when I graduated from high school and had plenty of time to kill. I gave in to my mother’s unrelenting campaign to turn me into a proper movie buff.
“В кино вся жизнь,” she’d say in Russian, “надо только смотреть внимательно,” which roughly translates to “all of life is in cinema if you observe close enough.” We watched classics, neo-noirs, epic crime dramas, and psychological thrillers. Somewhere between the rotten suburbia of American Beauty and the glitz and glamour of Casino, I found myself, or rather noticed, in a movie of my own. My life turns out was full of plot twists, complex subplots, fated encounters, and hidden motives both good and bad. I was a main character – the main character – but not because I was special, I simply learned to see life as a movie.
Watching movies taught me to observe and to see beyond the singularity of action. Everything was a chain reaction culminating into interconnected, yet somehow accidental stories. Every decision carried cinematic weight – will the hero fall or soar into new skies? Will the hero entertain or bore to death? Who is the hero anyways and who will they become once the story is over?
Continuing the tradition my mom had started, I’m watching Big Fish tonight. Join me, even if you’ve already seen the film. Watch it alone. Watch it with someone. Watch it with someone who hasn’t seen it before. Scribble your thoughts. Share them with me. Maybe one day, we’ll have a movie club of our own.
Hug trees
Yes, I mean the trees outside. I too was skeptical at first, but after reading about the benefits of physical contact with nature, I hugged a beech tree in the woods and felt an unusual calmness. I stood still and listened to the erratic movements of the woods and its inhabitants, grazed the smooth bark of the young tree and felt the warmth of sunlight spilling through the gaps in the canopy. At some point, I felt safe like San in the Forest of Gods. I looked up and saw that this tree stretched 10 meters high – it was tall and strong, stable despite harsh Canadian winters and increasingly oppressive summers.
I was new to Canada at the time – it was my first summer spent in the country. I arrived in deep winter and was immediately met with harsh snowstorms and steady subzero temperatures. I felt pushed away and was reconsidering my move more times than I’d like to admit, but something changed that summer. I had estimated (or would have liked to believe) that tree to be roughly my age and felt happy and hopeful – after all, if this tree could survive and take root, so could I. That summer, I stopped feeling like an unwelcome guest and started believing that I too could take root.
People are seldom wrong
In their own heads, that is. You cannot convince your friend to break up with their partner, a smoker to quit nor make the blind see the big red flashing light no matter how bright it is to you. Our realities are relative, and while truth and facts remain objective, we may have a million subjective interpretations of the matter. The lesson here is quite simple – people are seldom wrong. And if you disagree, well – I would have to agree with you.
Do mental arithmetic for 10 minutes daily
Did you use ChatGPT to write an email today?
Ask the internet to summarize a book?
Reach for the calculator to figure out how much sales tax you’d be paying on top of your purchase ending with .75?
When was the last time you actually used your brain?
It’s become dangerously easy not to think. We can ask AI to write our emails, use our calculators to add any angular, weird-looking numbers (I’m looking at you, 7), and use our phones to record meetings and lectures. We’ve hacked life so well that we can “be productive” without engaging our minds.
As humankind, we’ve been quite innovative with addressing the externalities of our improved lifestyles – we’ve come up with modern gyms and health clubs to offset our sedentary lives, have picked up meditation to quiet the noise of social media, and invented entire industries of keto diets and neon-coloured supplements to balance out the junk we put in our food. So, how do we address this externality and get our thinking faculties in shape? We do math.
In short, math is a mental gym. When you “work out” those math problems using logic and mental arithmetic, you sharpen your reasoning, problem-solving, and analytical skills. You don’t just become better at math, nor are you training for that – you training not to be mentally flabby.
Floss at least once a day – don’t rinse after brushing
I’m not a dentist, but I am a 25-year-old who’s never had a cavity. Does that make me an authority on oral hygiene? Probably not, but this is my blog, and I’ll share my thoughts regardless. You need to floss at least once a day because you don’t want rotting food stuck in your teeth. Brush your teeth twice daily (for two minutes minimum!) with fluoride toothpaste. Never, and I mean never, rinse your mouth afterward because you want the fluoride to work its magic and protect your enamel, preventing cavities. Use a tongue scraper and mouthwash, but ensure that fluoride is the last thing that touches your teeth before sleep.
Go to your local art galleries and museums
Everyone talks about the importance of traveling, but few people mention that you can travel while looking at art. When I lived in London, I would regularly visit the National Gallery and embark on voyages to distant lands and time periods. Looking at Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, I would be in Tudor England. Observing Peter Paul Rubens’ landscapes, I would be transported to the countryside of Brabant. The artworks are gifts from the masters to humanity – carefully crafted windows into the past – and museums are time machines that transport us to distant, foreign lands.
This is the first part of 25 years of my life distilled into lessons. Some are practical, some are philosophical, some are just me begging you to floss. Part two is coming soon – stay tuned for more Ripe Reflections.
*These lessons aren’t ranked, nor are they in any particular order. Think of them as postcards from different eras of my life.