258 - the life of the (mario) party 🌟
Dear Past Vince and my Future kids,
I'm pulling you both in to give you some advice. Yes, sure, I'm only 31, but I know some things that aren't just about boardgames. or Gen Z slang. or where to get the best fried chicken.
Pssst - Past Vince, if you get this, this is to help you jump to a more successful parallel universe after getting advice from your future self (because now my past / your future is changed by talking to me. Responsible time traveling!).
Future Kids, you're stuck with me, so get ready for a ramble.
This one is about how to work out what you wanna do with your life.
Small topic, right?
Since I don't know when you're actually going to be reading this, stop at this point until you're, hmmm, I'd say like 14? 16?
Regardless, you should watch this first as a primer
Okay, so you've played Mario Party before, right?
You roll a dice, you land on a square - it can be good, or bad, or an item, or BOWSER and every so often you'll throw your controller at someone because they're winning too much.
We're going to use this badly drawn version of it to explain your life:
(I suck at drawing, so bear with me while I experiment with a new form)
You've lived for a bit, and you've experienced a bunch of stuff. Maybe you like school, maybe you don't (Past Vince didn't for a while, and then found good people to be friends with. Yay for Past Vince!).
You're slowly coming out of the tutorial that was just your parents taking over the controls for a bit and now they're slowly sharing it, but it's hard for them to let go, y'know?
Phew, so now that you've got control...
...what next?
"So what are you going to do with your life then?! Where are you going??"
Well, you're probably not sure, so you take your turn and you roll the dice, and it tells you to take another few steps forward - perhaps it's school, perhaps it's uni, perhaps it's sport, perhaps it's chess club - whatever it is, you've moved along.
As you move forward, you can see other paths branching off in all different directions, obscured by the ~ Fog of Uncertainty ~ oooOOOOoooo
You can't really see where all of them end up (it's fog, duh), but they all look so interesting, and for the ones right in front of you, it looks like you maybe could do some weird twister-looking shapes to do all of them at once!
And as you go, you start hearing, "You're getting older! Stop wasting time on things that don't matter - we know the safest Path!"
I mean, I'll probably tell you this too. Safety is cool.
They (society, conventional wisdom, the old people) know the low risk paths. They can show you exactly what the path ahead looks like through the Fog of Uncertainty, and it's safe, and it's perfect, and it's golden, and it's foolproof.
There's nothing wrong with that Path - it's one others have taken for years and decades and generations - and look how successful it's made them!
(Okay, imagine it. I don't know how to represent happiness in a drawing yet)
But look, there are all these other paths - paths that look a bit less travelled, or ones that look a bit shit in terms of the next steps, or ones you've heard lead you to many riches (in this, metaphor, stars!), or ones that look kinda good but super unknown later on.
What should you do? Well, let's take a look!
1. I know what I want to do:
Well, if you already have something in mind that you want to do, right now, then congrats! Having clarity at this point in your life is great - I'm 31 and I still don't know if I've got my life goal set.
If you've got it, follow that path with as much gusto as possible. Get to the reward you're aiming for, and hey, though they tell you it's a one-way trip in Mario Party, you can always just take a detour and head back to another path if you need to later. Lakitu always waitin' somewhere to take you elsewhere if you fall off the path.
Some advice I have for this way of going:
- Find a guide to show you a little bit more than you can see right in front of you. Even if this is asking chatGPT or looking online, you gotta be prepared! Make sure you're ready to go before embarking on a new adventure - always.
- Work out what you would stop for, and stop and turn around when it comes up. E.g. if you're going to be asked to do something you're uncomfortable with, or you think is a danger to yourself, then just turn around. Or find an alternate path. There are hell of a lot of them. Note: this will change the more that you experience and do, but that's fine - just keep it in mind for now as something to look out for.
- No-one can force you to do something you don't want to do. You'll be so tempted to keep going if you've already gone so far - but you have to stay true to what you want and what you believe in. If you don't want to keep going, you don't have to - one door closes so another one can open. But don't give up just because it's hard. Take one more step, just to see if you can do it, just to see you can do better than your mind thinks you can do, and then you stop if you want to.
2. I don't know what to do and life is overwhelming and what if I make the wrong decision ah ah ah ah ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh:
It's normal. And people pushing you to think about things is probably a societal thing that we'll get over never:
It's actually a good thing to be open to all the different types of things that you're going to experience while you're young.
There are so many spots left until you get to the big black one at the end of the road when all your turns are done - you may as well try everything you can!
(Psst Past Vince, pay attention. Cos if you don't, you'll end up on an episode of Paramedics (spoilers).)
I know how important it might feel to know exactly what you want to do now, and to make the right decision (Past Vince, trust me, I know), and you see others with so much confidence going after exactly what they want...
...when actually, they could be...
It's a little secret you'll have to experience to really understand it, but most people don't know whether what they're doing is the best way to do things. Even your dad is just doing his best, but probably is screwing up left right and centre with you. Forgive me, as in, your dad. Or my dad, if you're Past Vince. I dunno - both?
And by the way, Past Vince, the solution you're looking for for life, the golden path for you, the Way...it doesn't get clearer - you just kinda get more of the same in your life in terms of the paths you head down, and gain more experience and realisation that no-one knows what the hell they're doing.
Stop waiting around for something to show up; please, just go and do things.
And look, I know it's scary, but with all these paths up ahead, take cheap bets. If it doesn't take up a lot of your time, or effort, or money, or there isn't much downside to the decision, then say yes to things - if they suck, then you've only taken a small bite out of the big cloud, and you can spit it back out.
If they're bad, then you back out, and try something else. Decisions aren't irreversible - unlike Mario Party, in life you can just cut across to another path, or track back a bit to take a new one - you keep going and looking for different things, different experiences, different people.
Sure, it sucks to suck, but it's worse to suck forever.
And if you're lucky, and you stumble on something good, then keep going!
Take more steps, take more bets, follow where your nose is leading you to and keep chomping away. Maybe you'll find some people you never knew in the cloud - or they'll teach you something new and then move on.
Maybe you'll find something about yourself you never knew in the clouds. And the more steps you take, the more you can see how you might navigate through the rest of the Mario Party i.e. your life.
So then, kids...where to next?
Notes for readers that aren't Past Vince or my Future Kids:
- This is an abstracted form of the exploration-exploitation problem (Exploration-exploitation dilemma - Wikipedia) - which is something I stumbled upon in reading about the secretary problem for dating. It also applies to the design of games, which I want to write another piece about!
- I'm planning to make a few of these letters for my future kids. I got nowhere else to put all these thoughts so I thought it would be a good exercise to use a new format of explanation a la WaitButWhy and all those other great internet storytellers! It's all I'm good at, anyway :D
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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The Intouchables - 4 stars - good movie, very slice of life again. It was kind of like a French version of a talky film (like Before Sunset) but platonic, funny, and didn't take itself too seriously. It's very wholesome! Highly recommended.
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Chicken and Jokbal - recommended by Alex/Kerny, a nice Korean place in Camberwell where we had both fried chicken AND this other korean dish I've never had before - Jokbal (recommended by Kento) - which is a pork hock or trotters or something, braised in this lovely sauce. Everything was really nice - very lovely vibes (we were the loudest there LOL). As I have been recommended it, now I recommend it to you <3
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Mushroom Color Atlas - um what the hell there are so many mushrooms and corresponding colours??? This was such a cool find!!
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Tickets are for remembering - a nice perspective on the tangibility of physical goods and what we give up in the name of making things 'more convenient' through digital experiences. Is the loss of this human experience worth the convenience, but discardibility, of pixels?
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Uncle, You Don't Make Sense - an article that helps to clear up why others might fill in the gaps of their life with the wrong stuff.