One moment you’re in college—sporting flip flops and fearlessly leading your frisbee team to regionals—when out of nowhere, you meet Craig, a 24-year-old entrepreneur at the career fair.
Craig is vaguely handsome. His neckbeard leaves just enough to the imagination, and a pair of baby biceps peek out at you from under his short-sleeve button-down. Craig has vision and charisma. You have impending student loans.
He has a gut feeling about you. And according to him, his gut is never wrong. Craig wants you to join his startup. You don’t really understand what his startup does, but he seduces you with unlimited vacation and Nature Valley bars. You decide to follow Craig and his trail of crumbs to San Francisco, where he has promised you a job with competitive pay and a “top-notch” equity package. Your journey into Silicon Valley begins.
Year 1
Your first year flies by in an endless stream of coworking spaces, standing desks, sitting desks, leaning desks, and rolling whiteboards. It’s all very exciting.
The company is scaling quickly, and you’re one of the original employees, a relic of its storied past. Fresh out of college and you’re already considered senior. At your quarterly meeting, Craig says you’ve been “crushing it” and you’re promoted to team lead! You’ve tasted power now, and it’s richer than a tepid bottle of Cafe Mocha Soylent.
Year 2
You’re hiring like buck wild, but the most coveted positions are still being held by more seasoned workers in their late twenties. You’re hungry for advancement. Also, you’re just hungry. You toddle to the snack room and fill your little raccoon hands with peanut butter-filled pretzels.
A year into your tenure as a lead, Justine, the head of your department, is injured in a freak accident at a sunrise silent rave on the top of Bernal Hill. Justine loses herself in the music and is deeply moved. No, she is literally moved. She stumbles on a rock and tumbles down the side of the hill. Her frictionless body gains speed like a Nerf ball and doesn’t stop until she meets the pavement and thwacks into the side of a Frenchman on a JUMP bike. They are in a relationship now.
With Justine out of the way, you apply for her position. You make your case. You’re hella prepared, and you dazzle them with your slideshow. There is applause. You get the job.
Year 3
Your startup is arguably not a startup anymore, but no one actually knows the definition.
On a foggy Thursday in late August, you and your team attend a team-building offsite to a ceramics workshop in the Mission District. You spin yourself a mug, shape the handle into a whale tail, and glaze it a lovely shade of seafoam green.
“So clever!” says everyone.
“You could be a ceramic artist,” says someone irrelevant.
You feel validated and special and creative. You realize it’s been a while since you felt that way.
That night you wake up suddenly at 3 a.m., choking on your own spit. You’re sweating heavily.
It’s disgusting. Is it a fever? Are you detoxing?
No, it’s the realization that you’ve just spent the last three years making someone else’s dreams come true at the expense of your own (admittedly vaguely outlined) dreams. Precious years have flown by at a company whose mission you could barely even explain to your friends. You watch the fog roll over their eyes as you slur out the mantra “dynamic data quality control.”
But before that fateful career fair, before Craig flashed you his Invisalign smile, you had figured yourself an artist, a creative, one who dabbled in textiles. What happened to that person?, you ask yourself.
At the behest of your co-workers, you spend three transformative months in Bali reconnecting with yourself. You sit languidly on swings overlooking dense forest, you swim mermaid style in crystal pools, you learn how to make veggie spring rolls. You are Instagram.
You return from your very first vacation, renewed. You decide to quit your job. The pressure, the 80-hour workweeks, the lack of sleep, the wind lashing your face as you Scoot to work have aged you significantly. Your face, once radiant, luminous even, now resembles a melted candle. It’s time you start spending time pursuing what matters to you, like sleeping.
One month of sweet, sweet freedom passes. Your complexion clears up now that you aren’t subsisting on meal bars and Soylent. Your bowel movements improve.
Year 4
People start contacting you, offering to pay you hundreds of dollars for startup “consulting.”
A woman from the New Zealand government comes all the way to San Francisco to interview you about your experience. She asks you questions like, “What’s the secret sauce?” and “What is the bubble, and when will it burst?”
Afterward, you watch as she boards a ship piloted by country sheep, returning to the motherland with the secret sauce safely stowed away.
Then, random men from LinkedIn start requesting consultation calls. You think to yourself, I’m only 25. I can’t charge $300/hour. They’ll see right through me!
But thankfully the men on the phone are even younger than you and believe that age is a construct. Either that or they’re over 50 and are also being overpaid to engage in this phone call.
Both will ask you questions they could have Googled.
Unbound by calendar invites and one-on-ones with your team, an indeterminable amount of time goes by.
You update your LinkedIn. You’re officially a consultant. You have an LLC and everything.
You live in Tulum.
You take calls for three hours in the morning and spend the rest of your splendiferous days in the ceramics studio or on the beach eating tacos in slow motion with your lover.
You are 26.
