My dad is 57 years old. When he started working, the official retirement age was 65, but actually, most men retired at 62. Today, the official retirement age is 67, and most men retire at 64. Politicians are even discussing pension at 70! Who knows when he’ll actually get to drop the proverbial hammer.

Luckily, my dad likes his job. Ever since a publicly traded company bought his medium-sized firm, however, they’ve been accelerating the pace. Calls with China in the morning, calls with Europe after lunch, and calls with America at night. More revenue! Higher share price! Faster, faster, faster!

I don’t think at 57, you want to be accelerating. You want to slow down. Transition gently into the second half of your life. You needn’t stop working altogether, but cranking up the heat probably isn’t the best idea. At my dad’s company, the entire management team is around his age. Some have already quit for health-related reasons. Others are showing signs of burnout. Within ten years, they’ll all be gone, but I doubt any of them will get a golden watch.

Nowadays, the golden watch is a meme. Millennials often make fun of boomers for aspiring to so little. “How boring is it to work for one company for your whole life? You shouldn’t work for any company! You should be an artist/freelancer/entrepreneur!”

In my third semester of college, I saw a video called “All Work and All Play.” The narrator spoke of a “forever-beta” world in which nothing is ever finished. Work is now permeating every aspect of our lives, he said. We must adapt, travel lightly from gig to gig, and maintain up to date social profiles. If we do all that, we’ll get to do what we love. That was the message.

Ten years later, I look around the world, and I can’t help but think that, right now, a lot of people would probably kill for the prospect of a golden watch. They’d take a portion of golden fries, I think, if only they could count on the promise of job security.

“Prior to the 1980s, it was common for people to work a lifetime for one company,” Simon Sinek writes in The Infinite Game. “The company took care of them and they took care of the company. Trust, pride and loyalty flowed in both directions. And at the end of their careers these long-time employees would get their proverbial gold watch. I don’t think getting a gold watch is even a thing anymore. These days, we either leave or are asked to leave long before we would ever earn one.”

My dad has been at his company for 23 years. I’m fairly certain he’ll get to stay for another ten, or however long he needs to stay until retirement. That’s more than most people starting to work now will ever get to say. “Screw the watch! Just tell me my laptop will still be on my desk tomorrow, please.”

All work and all play. That life can be fun for a while. But not at 57. And unless you feel financially secure, the party ends pretty quickly in any job.

Life is a cycle of cycles. Everything returns. What once represented a steady, slow-growing, meaningful career came to be known as a symbol of drudgery and oppression — until any stability whatsoever went out the window. Suddenly, the golden watch once again seems like a dream.

Whether you’re set to retire in 30 years or three months, remember: There’s always someone who thinks the grass is greener on your side of the fence, but if we want the ups and downs to balance out, all we have to do is water the ground right where we stand.

I’m beginning to understand why so many people view publishing a book as the crowning achievement of one’s life. It is an accomplishment revered beyond most others, sitting on a pedestal way, way up there. Why? I think it’s because few other pursuits will remind you as strongly that what you’re trying to do is absolutely impossible.

When you write, you must filter, structure, group, sort, clarify, and polish your thoughts. Given the tens of thousands of ideas floating through our head on any given day, many of them making little sense at all, every single one of these steps borders on a miracle. How did you pick that line to write down? Why do these paragraphs work so well together? And that’s just writing.

To write a book, you’ll need thousands of paragraphs. My guess is that the scope of any book surpasses the comprehension of its author. You just can’t hold on to that many words at the same time. You’ll need plenty of work, sure, but also luck for every piece of the puzzle to end up in exactly the right place.

Nowhere is it more clear to me, however, that writing a book is doing the impossible, than in the last round of editing a manuscript. I’m doing it right now. First, I printed a proof copy of the book, because looking at it any more on the screen wouldn’t have gone anywhere. Then, I tried reading my own words through the eyes of someone else — and that is, by definition, impossible.

Sometimes, I got lucky. For a sentence or two, I saw my writing with neutral eyes and could point out sensible corrections. But as soon as I did my initial pass of a paragraph, I was right back in my own head. If you want to torture someone, make them read the same sentence a hundred times. It becomes hard to focus. The words blur together. It’ll always sound the same, and yet, it’ll start feeling totally incomprehensible.

After six years of writing on Medium, I felt I had a decent sense of how an article’s lines would feel in a reader’s mind. Either I was wrong or I reset my gut with books, and now I just need more time to train it. Regardless, going through my book one last time with a fine-tooth comb felt pretty hopeless. As easy and obvious as it is to me what I like and don’t like about any, literally any, other person’s writing, as impossible is it to tell what other people might like or not like about my own — and that’s the whole point! Were the impact of art not unpredictable, it wouldn’t be art.

If getting into a reader’s mind was as easy as peeling a carrot, writing wouldn’t be the universal, incredibly valuable, all-penetrating skill that it is. Written works would be a commodity, which, today, despite what it may look like, they are not. Some of us may try to treat them as such, but in the end, great creative work still outshines mass-produced drivel, often dramatically so. Why? Because the writer pulled off the impossible! They put themselves in their readers’ heads, and they got it right! At least right enough for the work to spread.

Your work may not give you as many stark reminders that what you’re doing is pushing a boulder up an insurmountable hill, but you too are doing the impossible. Wherever you summon your imagination in hopes of achieving a result in the real world, you are facing unbeatable odds. Will your daughter like the gift you got her for her birthday? Is the design you chose the right one for this presentation? What will people think about your next podcast episode? You don’t know, but you’ll march on anyway — and that is exactly as life should be.

We do the impossible, and then we get lunch. May your ideas always find their invisible targets, and if you ever write a book, don’t despair: Others have succeeded before you. You are not alone, and you are fighting one of life’s most honorable fights.

When we want to say someone’s a little cuckoo but endearing, we might call them “a free spirit.” In my parents’ generation, a lot of “68ers” — people involved in the civil movement of 1968 — fit that description. Initially, they might have made their own laundry detergent, stopped washing their armpits, or refused to eat anything that’s not green. Later, they were instrumental in bringing about social change.

A free spirit is someone who can’t be contained. They will live by their own rules. It’s a tempting attitude, especially for the young, but it bears consequences.

If you keep sampling the dating market because new relationships and casual sex are so much fun, you might stay a bachelorette forever, even if you don’t want to. If you always insist on being the square peg in a round hole at work, be it via your outfits or your contempt for “the man,” you might forever struggle to make ends meet. Free spirits are free to be everything but consistent. Any “system” rubs them the wrong way — but sometimes, systems are both comfortable and useful.

I was never a free spirit. I usually choose compliance. Whenever there’s a path to avoid hassle, stress, and confrontation, I try to take it, sometimes at my own expense. I enjoy systems. I like my routines. I don’t mind quiet and repetition. That, too, has its ups and downs.

If you marry the first person who seems into you, you might end up in a long yet unhappy marriage. If you keep your head down at work too much, everyone will start dropping their unwanted tasks in your lap. When consistency feels comfortable, it’s hard to know when to break it, but sometimes, change is the only good way forward. Systems are great as long as they function, but when they fail, they usually fail altogether.

So, what are we to do? A free spirit or a compliant worker bee? Too much freedom or too little? I can only speak for myself, but I feel there is a third path: Even if we decide to fall in line, we can still be free in spirit. We don’t need to wear all of us on our sleeves at all times. We can practice freedom in private and, maybe most of all, in our imagination.

I don’t travel as much as I used to. Every change of location puts a serious dent in my output, and I’ve got books to write. But I explore the world all the time. I listen to Korean pop music, a China-themed movie soundtrack, or go to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl right on Youtube. I can see pictures from other people’s travel experiences, and when I want to visit a zen garden, all I have to do is close my eyes as the little waterfall ripples along in my WeWork’s back yard.

Your thoughts are yours. No one can tell you where to go or what to do in your mind. Sometimes, it’s important we demand a change for all of us. In moments like that, people like the 68ers must come together. Most of the time, however, it’s perfectly okay to swim with the crowd, yet be free in spirit.

Yesterday, a friend organized a group dinner with eight people. I only knew the host, and I don’t think the others knew everyone else either. At first, the conversation was open but a bit slow. You know, one person telling a story while the remaining guests throw in one-line comments here and there.

Eventually, however, the discourse broke into smaller groups, and I always find it fascinating how that transition happens. In my case, the woman next to me had mentioned seeing an orthopedist, and at some point, I just turned around and asked her: “What’s that about?”

You would not believe the two hours of conversation that followed. We talked about her foot issues, sure, but I also learned she ran marathons, and triathlons, and considered sports the anchor keeping her life together. We talked about what that means, “keeping one’s life together,” what emotions meant in that context, and how neither of us had really learned to process theirs well as a child. We each shared personal moments from our family histories, brushed on philosophy, psychology, and faith, and in the end, we agreed that our experiences shape us but needn’t define us.

That’s pretty amazing, don’t you think? For two strangers to have that kind of interaction. And all it took was one question. “What’s that about?” A single string of conversation, unraveled into a million colorful threads. This is humanity at its best.

I didn’t go out on a big limb by asking her that question. It felt casual — but it would have been easy not to ask it. To stick with the group discussion. You never know who you’re sitting next to. Chances are, they are fascinating. The right question might open a million doors, and behind those doors, you may find inspiration, connection, and astonishment.

Listening is great, and most of the time, it’s also the right thing to do. But the most interesting stories you’ll ever hear will most likely be the ones following a curious question. Ask more questions.

Publicly criticized for one of the myriad regulations introduced to handle covid-19, a German politician came up with a clever phrase: “The absence of evidence proving an effect is not evidence proving the absence of an effect.” In other words: Just because you can’t see it’s working does not mean it’s not working.

This is the epitome of a political statement today. It’s glib and uses big words, but it doesn’t really say anything. Worst of all, it’s true, but at the same time, it’s so benign and self-evident as to be pointless. A perfect example of bullshit.

If you do a “wealth dance” every day, hoping it’ll make you rich, no one can tell you it’s not working, but unless it works out within a month or two, sooner or later, you’ll start doubting your theory — and that’s perfectly appropriate!

If we had infinite time, we could try every strategy under the sun, no matter how harebrained it might seem. But we don’t, do we? Our time is limited and, in the case of a global health crisis, quite severely so. Evidence matters. The sooner you can prove something is working, the better. And if you can’t, it’s only a matter of time before someone will call you out on it.

This does not mean that every choice must be reversed, should it not yield results immediately. But the duration of the experiment should be determined in advance. By and large, that’s what German politicians did with covid-19. “We’ll have these new rules for three months, and then we’ll revise.” But sometimes, they threw their plans into the fire too quickly. At other times, individual figureheads insisted on the benefit of measures where the data long suggested otherwise. But covid is a complex problem. Our lives are usually simpler.

Instead of throwing stuff at the wall and hoping for the best, plan with evidence in mind. Set a timer for your art session, and select projectiles you think are at least likely to stick. If you want to grow a website, write one article a day for a year. If you want to get promoted, focus on a different high-impact project each month. And if you’re unsure why you’re gaining weight, cut out different foods in rotation.

It’s true that we’ll often have to show faith where we’d much rather quit, but we also can’t drive blind and pretend everything’s fine. The real world requires evidence. It’s up to us to decide how and how long we’ll try before giving up, but they’re decisions we’re absolutely capable of making.

Don’t settle for “innocent until proven guilty.” Be a good detective. Insist on finding evidence, and whenever we tweet nonsense, please remind the rest of us to do the same.

It’s okay to feel empty at times. You won’t always have something to give. When you feel hollow or tired or drained, don’t try to squeeze more paste out of an empty tube. Cut off the top and refill it! Open a creative window, and let the rays of inspiration in.

Spend a day watching three movies from three different decades. Go to the networking event at your co-working space. Eat sugar, read a book, or just go back to sleep. Whatever it takes to reconnect you to life.

It’s a big game of give and take. You give so much every day, it’s easy to forget receiving is part of the balance at all — but it very much is. Life wants to give back. Nature doesn’t hide berries in tree trunks. She puts them right on display, ready to be plucked with just two fingers. She even color-codes them to tell us when they’re ripe for the taking!

Your berries might be a bag of Skittles, a long bike ride to your favorite lake, or three hours of reading up on the lore of Lord of the Rings. Whatever they are, make sure you eat them when you need something fruity.

If you open a window, sooner or later, the wind will come in. Open your mind, and it’s only a matter of time until you’ll feel re-inspired.

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a writer is when people tell you that your work made an impact on them. It rarely happens. People are busy. Most don’t read your stuff, and of the ones who do, most don’t finish reading. Fewer still care to comment, let alone send an email. “Engagement,” as marketers call it, is a long, ever-narrowing funnel, so at the end of it, only a trickle will be left. That’s just the nature of business, but it makes your feedback all the more precious.

Once every blue moon, someone tells me they made a big life decision because of something I wrote. They might have quit their job or applied to a better one, left a bad relationship, or finally started taking their art seriously. Those moments are powerful, humbling to the point of almost being embarrassing — but the best comments are one-liners.

“Your post made me stop and reflect.” “Not everything one feels can be put into words, but somehow you did it.” And, the crowning achievement for any creative: “I needed this today.”

Creating, writing in particular, can be a lonely battle. Just because we choose a solitary task does not mean we always enjoy struggling alone. It’s us against us inside our own heads, so whenever someone breaks into that shell and says, “Hey! I see you! It matters what you’re doing here. Please keep going!” that’s more than a quick morale booster. It’s a reminder that our existence as writers is justified (at least in its current form), and that feels…wholesome.

If you enjoy someone’s work, tell them. Not every day, but at least every now and then. Your “I needed this today” is someone else’s “I needed this today.” If we all admit it to each other, no one will walk alone.

The first time we stand at the grave of someone we loved, we might cry our eyes out. The hundredth time we visit them will look very different.

We may stand in silence, quietly smiling at the thought of what their presence felt like. We may dig through our fondest memories, shaking our head in disbelief that they actually pulled off this one thing. We may even have a lively chat about what happened at work that week. “You should have seen me, Mel. You’d have laughed yourself silly!”

This is the good kind of sad. It’s not the sadness we’re most familiar with, but it’s important to remember it exists. Sadness is not a universally negative emotion. Over time, it can transform. What feels sad-sad now might one day feel good-sad.

There’s a How I Met Your Mother episode in which Marshall holds a BBQ next to his father’s tombstone in order to continue their New Year’s Day tailgating tradition. At first, Marshall is all alone, enjoying some quiet conversation with the ghost of his dad, but then, more and more people show up. “Can I get a hamburger?” “Do you have any more beers?” “Would you mind passing the chips?” Before he knows it, Marshall is hosting a full-on “grillfest,” as we call it in Germany. For a second, he gets annoyed at all the visitors intruding on his space, but then he remembers: Tailgating with his dad was always a party. “The more the merrier,” he’d say — and so does Marshall, handing over the pickles. The good kind of sad.

In The Comfort Book, Matt Haig describes it as “a gentle sadness that almost feels good.” It could be nostalgia or a dream that almost came true. Good-sad is life’s way of reminding us that it is “capable of such warm things,” and that, astonishingly, “we were there to witness them.”

When my uncle died in his sleep at 52 years old, my cousin chose to play See You Again from The Fast and the Furious at his funeral. It was an emotional song to begin with, bidding farewell to Paul Walker, the star of the franchise, who had died in a car crash before the latest installment was finished. But now, to this day, I can’t listen to that song without feeling the cold January air filling that graveyard, warmed by the few perfect rays of sunshine illuminating my uncle’s grave. It’s a complicated feeling for sure, but six years later, it doesn’t just contain grief. There’s also serenity, gratitude, and even a hint of peace. The good kind of sad.

Sadness can only exist where there once was a reason to be happy. Just because that reason is no longer there does not mean the happiness we felt is diminished. Nothing can take those memories from us, so unless we belittle them, present sadness can never tarnish past joy. To the contrary: It makes that joy all the more precious. Sadness is an occasion to cherish what we have lost.

It may take a hundred visits to the graveyard for sad-sad to turn into good-sad, but remember: It is never too late for something good to come from something bad — and every sunrise is a new chance for our emotions to change.

My shower has a curtain. As anyone with a shower curtain knows, they don’t like to stay still when the water is running. They’d much rather stick to your leg, or arms, or anywhere, really. It’s an air pressure thing, and the best way to avoid it…is to not have a shower curtain.

In my little “how can I soap myself curtain-free?” dance after my initial water-only rinse, I’ve tried everything over the years. I’ve turned the shower head away. I’ve blasted the bottom part of the curtain with water, trying to get it to stick to the tub. I’ve opened the curtain halfway, hoping it would equalize the air pressure. I’ve even tried folding the curtain in just the right places so it’ll stick to itself instead of me — all to no avail.

This morning, however, a miracle happened. When I opened my body wash bottle, a little voice spoke up in my head. It only said five words: “Just turn off the water.”

Oh. My. God. What a revelation! Of course! Just turn off the water! Instead of creating this weird air pressure imbalance and then trying to tiptoe around it, I can cut it off at the source! How have I not seen this before? I was flabbergasted. I turned off the water, and lo and behold, the curtain stayed perfectly still. I soaped myself in pure happiness, turned the water back on, and voilà: the perfect shower.

Now, I know what you’re about to say: “Welcome to life, numbnuts! We’ve been doing this all along! Every ten-year-old knows this is the way!” And to that I say, you’re right. I had no idea. It was a total, embarrassing, all-overshadowing blindspot.

Case in point: I turn the water off all the time in my parents’ house. There, we have one of those overhead rain showers, and pausing the water is pretty much the only way to soap yourself properly. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

I’ve lived in my flat for over four years. I’ve showered in that shower a thousand times. Literally. Yet not once did it occur to me to “Just turn off the water.” Until today.

No matter how smart you are, how familiar you are with something, or how long you’ve been performing a certain task, there’ll always be things you miss. Things you don’t see, despite them being right in front of your eyes. No one gets through life without blindspots. We’re all prone to bias and error.

It’s a noble pursuit to try and eliminate mental flaws from the get-go, but even though we can make progress, it’s a craft we’ll never perfect. Therefore, the best thing we can do when a blindfold is ripped from our eyes is to not get angry. Be thankful. Accept the new reality, and move on with your day.

Why didn’t the little voice tell me to turn off the water sooner? I have no idea. I wish it did. But it chose today. There’s no saying when the little voice will speak up to share its wisdom. We can’t force it to spill its secrets — but we can listen when it does.

Life humbles us all when we need it. Remember to turn off the water, and pay attention to the little voice.

When Mark Zuckerberg urged the Facebook team to “move fast and break things” in the early days, he really could have omitted the second half of that motto. After all, when you move fast, things breaking is an inevitable consequence.

If you’re just starting out, be it in a business, a project, or a relationship, speed may not be a bad idea. How much can you really destroy in an empty warehouse?

Chances are, the first widgets you break on your website weren’t that good to begin with. Now, you get to set them up again, except this time, you’ll do a better job! Why not find out if you work well together on a one-week kayaking trip? Sure, you’ll probably both land in the water, but at least afterwards, you’ll know a lot more about each other than after three more coffee dates.

In his book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb explains that many systems actually benefit from “shocks, randomness, and stressors.” Evolution, economic markets, certain companies, even our bodies and minds need a certain level of challenge to thrive. However, for an antifragile system to gain from adversity, its parts need to be allowed to break, Taleb claims. Free markets are efficient because individual companies can die. Evolution works because each animal is a genetic test subject. And so on. Therefore, it is in the very breaking of things that growth is to be found — at least in the early stages.

As our endeavors mature, however, we must grow with them. Over time, antifragility will be reserved for more rare and extreme events, whereas day-to-day operations must be marked by robustness. How long could you run around your carefully furnished house before knocking over a lamp? A day? Two? A week? Sooner or later, you’d break something you have painstakingly assembled with effort, skill, and experience — and now, you won’t be excited at the chance to do it again. You’ll just be annoyed.

In 2014, Zuckerberg officially dropped the company’s motto for the first decade. A 10-year-old must slowly learn what it means to be part of a larger community! Nearly another decade later, however, they are still struggling. As it turns out, not everything they broke so quickly is easy to fix.

At the end of the day, life is not about speed. It is about pacing. Sometimes you’ll need to be fast; sometimes you’ll need to be slow. Keep asking yourself when’s the right time for each setting, and remember: You can’t spell fragile without agile, but you also can’t spell dash without ash.