The Philosophy of Turning 19

As I pen this two hours after the 12th strike of the clock announced my 19th birthday, I can’t help but think about my position in history and the meaning of all this. Jobs started Apple at 21; Nietzsche became a professor at Basel at 24; Lincoln joined Congress at 25; Hamilton wrote the Federalist papers at 32; Jefferson wrote the Constitution at 33. These were men who, despite their youth, fisted the world as if it were nothing more than a ball of wet soap and molded it such that their palm prints are forever etched into human history. They were geniuses who brought computers to our homes, injected society with radical new values, and built a great enduring nation. These giants should motivate us to use our youth thoughtfully, to not squander the opportunity to stand on their shoulders and work hard to provide our sons and daughters with an even higher vista to look out from. Unfortunately this writer, who somehow astonishingly still has the physique of a moldy PVC pipe even after another attempted bulk (bathroom 6 times a day), is not quite at the level of a Jobs, a Nietzsche or a Jefferson just yet. 

Much has remained the same since my 18th birthday: I’m still alive, for one, and mainlining the same dull O2; I’m still uselessly stressed about the future of humanity and how I might best be in position to influence it; and I still can’t talk to women. But much has changed: I’m 17 pounds heavier; I’ve read more than I ever did throughout high school; I faced a huge life decision, to move east or west; and I am soon moving away from the people who raised me. These are big and scary changes!—ones that deserve an equally large and, I hope, illuminating reflection. 

I published an article on my 18th that, in retrospect, reads like chudlite slop about the stresses of the college application and the grave injustices of the modern economy. (How dare we allow innately creative people to covet finance jobs where frat boys can “circle back,” “echo off that point,” and create mergers and acquisition powerpoints ten hours a day for $200k a year!!) I complained about feeling lost and directionless, and to speak truly, nothing in that regard has changed: I still feel like I’m clawing my way through a jungle without a machete, where vines and vicious insects cloud the sky. After all, how does one decide what to do and where to go when AI will supposedly eliminate the need for money, rebuild the financial system, and create mass abundance and deflation? Nevertheless, though I feel lost, I’d like to think that I matured in the past year and found some direction in the process. 

I believe now that what I should’ve been complaining about a year ago was not that I was losing the rat race to achieving superficial success and pleasure, but that in choosing to dedicate myself to that pursuit, in thinking that there was no way out, I willingly embraced a mask that blinded my perspective and made me incapable of gratitude and thereby any ounce of happiness. Of course there would seldom be nights where I would ponder my fortune, but I am ashamed to admit that only in this past year have I seriously thought about who I am as a sum of my parts. 

In another life, things may have been different. In another life, bullets would tear me to shreds in a war between powers I couldn’t understand. In another life, a massive mudslide would engulf me in a natural disaster I had no control over. In another life, a deadly epidemic would confine me to my bed in a microscopic attack I could not see or parry. In another life, my paternal grandmother wouldn’t have escaped Nazi Germany, and my maternal grandparents wouldn’t have survived the Korean War. But none of these things happened. In billions of other lives on this planet I would not even dream of attending university, of starting a company that changes the world for the better, or of raising a family. But in this life, in my life, I can dream, and maybe even accomplish, all of those things. Many of us in the West enjoy the privilege of food and shelter, technology and entertainment, family and joy; and it is quite easy to forget these basic facts when many of those around us share our incalculably large fortune. 

Thus it is abundantly clear that there is no savior. Man must be his own savior. He succeeds despite misfortune, not because of it. When Nietzsche’s madman told the villagers, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him,” he meant that the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution had created a new era, one in which humans were no longer irrationally scared by natural phenomenon: mental illnesses could be diagnosed, understood, and drawn back to a physical part of the brain; lightning and flooding were no longer God’s wrath but understood to be no more than electron discharge and predictable weather events. This idea that, in large part due to science, we no longer believe there is an almighty being in the sky who can smite us if we break the rules has proven true now more than ever, for we have almost created an all-powerful, all-knowing being with agency—traits that God exhibits, at least according to the traditional idea. Think about how amazing this has been for humanity! We no longer do human sacrifices to appease the sun, or burn cattle to prevent angry skies. 

But this “death of God” has, as Nietzsche predicted, had immense philosophical consequences. There is no longer a shared moral framework for societies and individuals to adopt; and if the world changes too quickly…well, I shudder to think of the consequences. 

We are entering an era where humans are no longer the most intelligent, most productive, or even most ambitious beings. AI may be programmed to address some of the most difficult physical problems humanity faces—disease, climate change, energy—but it is up to us to create a philosophy in which humans can still find morality and meaning in such a drastically different world, one in which there really will exist billions of all-powerful, all-knowing beings. This is a crucial time in human history and we should navigate it with extreme caution. 

In my opinion, the heart of this new life philosophy should be grounded in gratitude, especially on one’s birthday. To be clear, gratitude should by absolutely no means lead to complacency—quite the opposite, in fact. I shouldn’t consider myself lucky and be content with what I have just because I have it; rather, I should use my position in the world to aim for some higher good. That greater goal used to be heaven, some magical place up in the sky where everything is perfect for all eternity (what would that even look like?), but in the age of truth and empiricism, life’s goal should be something far nobler. How can we reduce the amount of suffering in the world? Is it through politics? Technology? AI? Does what we think reduces suffering, like raising the minimum wage or handing out cheques, actually achieve our goal? Does voting for a certain politician actually advance our goal? How can we most directly improve the world? 

Different people will of course have different answers. And, on my 19th birthday today, I am still figuring out mine. I hope to better find happiness in my current position while dedicating myself, in some ways, to helping others have a reason to be grateful. 

An irrational fear I have had for a while now, which I wrote about on my 18th birthday, is the phobia of disappearing into the annals of history as nothing more than a statistic. I say it’s irrational because history, when construed as man’s story and not as man’s truth, is, as I wrote in the intro, comparable to a wet ball of soap in that it can be molded by giants and it is of course shaped by the common man, but it is also influenced by many great thinkers and doers who at the time were greatly respected but now no longer exist in the public mind. Time is the most brutal monster that is itself the most powerful shaper of history—for it lets people forget the past and thus repeat the future. This is just the natural order of things. We may try our best to educate ourselves about what fascism really is, or what really happened in 1930s Germany, but it will be forgotten by many anyways. My hope is that I can reduce this fear of being forgotten and be content with influencing those around me in a good way. 

As I ended my 18th birthday rant: I’ve learned much about life in my 19 years of breathing unupgraded oxygen. And, unlike last year, I’ve now fully understood Kierkegaard’s wonderful quote: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Things will never go according to plan anyways, so here’s to another year of living forwards, this time with perspective, gratitude, and, so help me God, a successful bulk.