The biggest thing was the replacement of the "success script" with a more philosophical approach. The script is something that appears in all the big life deci

The biggest thing was the replacement of the "success script" with a more philosophical approach. The script is something that appears in all the big life decisions: what a good career, relationships, living well is supposed to "look like". I speak from the Millenial perspective but it's something roughly applicable to all generations - pressure to adopt a certain image. In adolescence the script, in some form, hits everyone really hard and becomes the life goal - and so by age 20, if you've had a stable life up to that point, you are groomed to be what society thinks you should be, and have internalised all those ideas. At some point between then and 30 the cracks start to appear in the script. You're supposed to do X, but you want to do Y. Doing X will make you a lot of money, but you hate it. You actually like X when you were supposed to hate it. It turns out you don't want to become someone with more power and responsibility, or 2.5 children, or living an outragous Instagram lifestyle. You want a modest goal, like getting better at a hobby. Or maybe you're really good at something and it gets you acclaim, but you don't really grasp why that would be and start to reject it. Being told you're successful is ultimately just a way of playing to the crowd, isn't it? How do you be true to yourself without also dying? And so, little by little, even if you seemed to have all that potential at 20, you probably get filtered out of the framework. Your life is something else, but how do you reconcile that? Some people mask to an increasing degree and find an addiction to help get them through the day. Others drop out and let themselves live more modestly instead of playing at being world-beating conquerers. For me personally, seeing my parents age has been on my mind a lot. They definitely wanted me to be "successful" by the script. I was not succeeding at it, I felt miserable, was not earning much, and their involvement became increasingly distant and disengaged, repeating old aphorisms without examining the situation. But I realized, in some definitive sense, that I had broken past that when I checked my crypto holdings one day in spring of 2017 and realized they had suddenly become worth more than I had ever earned by working. I needed a few years to reset after that, but I got to watch my parents continue on basically the same trajectory they had had before, trying to write me back into the script: My mom used to want to have talks about "my future". Now she will sometimes say something about how I should be earning into Medicare. But my actual goals are much more near-term: if I live in a healthy way as best I know now, that seems more viable than hoping that Medicare exists in the future and that it will do something for me. That's the kind of thing that's on my mind. I find things to study and pursue intensely, because that does seem to keep me focused and alive. The rest is just a means of getting there.