Searls of Wisdom for November 2024
I found myself in need of a post-election palate cleanser, which is how Becky and I found ourselves spending most of November traveling Japan again. As always, I learned a lot. Like that the rhythm game Chunithm is probably too difficult for me to ever become good at. And that the Kawasaki Brave Thunders have a tremendously loyal fanbase. And that driving cross-country in Japan wasn't quite as nerve-wracking as my fears had made it out to be. (Though it's hardly cheap.)
Oh yeah, I also learned that every room's TV in the Toy Story Hotel is set in an Etch A Sketch frame:
As it happens, my grandfather was an executive at Ohio Art and played no small part in bringing the Etch A Sketch to market. He sadly died before I was old enough to ask him for that story, so all I have are bits and pieces I learned from my dad. It's too bad that so many people who've touched my life in such profound ways remain complete mysteries to me. Writing this newsletter is one of a dozen ways I strive to avoid the same fate.
To be honest, this is perhaps the most personal essay I've published so far, if not the most emotionally vulnerable. It's certainly the most detailed account of "who I am", in a certain sense. I have no idea what you'll think or feel after reading this. If you find that it speaks to you, I'd be lying if I were to say that was intentional. The primary audience of every story I tell about myself is myself. And there's never just one story. And those stories always change upon retelling.
Here goes.
The third phase of life
Everybody knows this, but there are three fundamental phases of a human lifetime in modern society:
- You're useless (from birth to whenever you're done being educated)
- You're working (up until you either can't or don't have to)
- You're dying (this is the part we're all meant to look forward to)
Personally, I really hated the Useless phase of my existence because I'm driven by a compulsion to feel self-reliant. (Nothing makes me happier than believing I don't need to depend on the good graces of others to have my wants and needs met.) As a result of this temperament, I white-knuckled my entire education, only allowing my conscious mind to come up for air as needed to steer my trajectory towards a career that would maximize my future earning potential. My thinking as a child was that, for as miserable as school is, all the adults I know tell me that work is somehow even worse, so I ought to organize my life around minimizing my time spent in either of the first two phases of life.
That initial emphasis on such a distant future-tense outcome is probably how, at 23 years old, I woke up one morning and began my Working phase as a programmer (despite not being particularly skilled in the field) working for a consulting firm (despite loathing the sort of "group work" the job required). More white-knuckling. More contorting myself to meet the needs of the job. Seemingly rewiring who I was to a profound, identity-altering degree. All for the purpose of min-maxing my waking life to reduce the number of years I'd be required to start feeling sad at noon on Sundays.
At age 38, I successfully entered the Dying phase of my life. The first salmon in my cohort to swim all the way upstream and be content staying put in my gravel bed. (As opposed to all the complete sociopaths I've met who earn more money than they'd ever be able to spend, only to ride the current back out to sea and start the process over again—working themselves to the bone and making themselves miserable.) And I'm happy to report that as my first full year in Phase 3 draws to a close, literally everything has played out exactly as I hoped, and I couldn't be happier. I'm dutifully executing a plan I conceived half a decade ago to gradually unwind the over-torqued work ethic, the anxious people-pleasing, and the pathological denial of self I had intentionally adopted as who I was in order to get ahead in my career. I'm starting to feel like myself again. I'm clearheaded. I'm driven. I stop myself and smile once or twice a week when I remind me of myself at 18 years old—during that magical summer between senior year of high school and first semester of college when nothing fucking mattered. It was the only other time of my life in which I felt free.
The reason I'm writing this to you is not to boast or proclaim this as a profound achievement in the annals of capitalism—though I admit it is extremely unusual—but because one thing life has taught me is that whenever your answer to a question is unorthodox or unexpected, leaving it unanswered will lead others to fill in the blank for themselves with the wrong answer. And that's been the case with virtually everyone in whom I've confided that I am successfully retiring at such a young age.
What I'm referring to is the following exchange, which I've now seen play out dozens of times:
Their question: What's next?
My answer: Nothing.
Their reaction: Yeah right, you'll be founding a new company or applying for CTO roles in no time.
This reaction is so utterly and completely wrong that it's caused me no small amount of grief. Does literally nobody really understand me? I've been telling many of these same people for years exactly what my plan was! Why don't they believe me? To know me at all is to know that I am constitutionally incompatible with Phase 1 and 2 of life and I would never in a million years willfully go back. Did nobody notice that I was speed-running my life to this point, and at considerable personal cost? It's why I don't have kids. It's why I don't have many close friends. It's why I don't have much of a hairline. I have spent most of my days worrying or stressed, most of my evenings unable to relax or unwind, and most of my nights failing to sleep or having nightmares. And I've been doing all this to myself on purpose!
I am disappointed by this reaction but not surprised by it. It's only natural that people assume the Justin Searls they've experienced for the last 20 years is the "real" me. And for people to think that I enjoy working long hours, solving challenging client problems, or glad-handing and speaking at conferences is entirely reasonable. As people get older, they tend to only lean harder into whoever they already are—idiosyncrasies tend to deepen with age like wrinkles crease into skin. Intuition probably tells people that a retired Justin Searls would only be Justin Searlsier.
So, today I'm here to set the record straight and directly answer, "what's next for you?" Not because it's any of your business, but because I'm sick of repeating the same depressing conversation referenced above.
Speaking of having been my true self at eighteen: in 2024, I'm finally beginning to execute on a game plan for Phase 3 of my life that I initially drew up in 2003 when I was choosing where to go to college and which majors to pursue. So I'll use those consequential decisions to explain what I plan to do with the rest of my life.
Scale life horizontally with an Asian Studies major
When I was in high school, I simultaneously worked for a gaming website, my town's Blockbuster Video, and an EB Games store at the local mall. This allowed me to play an absolutely obscene number of videogames while managing to finish approximately zero of them. It caused me a bit of stress at the time: if I switch to a new game before finishing this one, when will I come back to it later? (Answer: never.) But eventually I realized that there was no problem here: if I were forced to choose between playing the first level of ten games and ten levels of one game, I would gladly choose the former every time.
I landed on this "play the field" approach to gaming for two reasons:
- It's less total effort, because the first level of any game is much easier than the tenth
- It's more enriching, because I get to experience ten user interfaces, graphical engines, and gameplay systems
This is a horizontal, breadth-over-depth strategy. It requires a bit more upfront futzing, to be sure, but in exchange I receive a much wider array of experiences than I otherwise would have.
When I was in high school and thinking about adulthood, I saw that most people focus only on the cultural context they were born into. One spoken language. One mass media. One political identity. To experience "more" of anything requires one to climb ever higher up a single ladder. Eventually, one reaches a point of diminishing returns. It's most clearly apparent when it comes to advancing in status—if you only care about the value system that governs a single community, you'll find your own value constrained by it. If you try to impress your neighbors by buying ever-fancier cars, for example, you'll eventually run out of money before you can buy some even-fancier one. Maybe you'll be very successful and drive a Porsche one day… but you'll never be allowed to forget that you failed to make enough money to afford a Maserati.
To wit, the only way to get ahead is to keep doing whatever it is you're already doing, except harder.
This is our society's dominant way of encouraging people to push themselves, and it reminds me of trying to vertically scale a computer system. If you're a programmer and have ever found yourself trying to vertically scale a single-server database, you know how painful it is to reach the inflection point beyond which scaling further becomes unprofitable, if not impossible. In his (ultimately prescient) book Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes drew a similar analogy, comparing the pursuit of wealth to climbing a Mayan step pyramid: as soon as you reach the next level of status by ascending the stairs in your line of sight, any sense of achievement is quickly overcome by the realization there is yet another step full of stairs standing in front of you. It's why I've encountered so many "serial" founders—people with 10 million dollars who think that all they need is 100 million. Until they realize they need more. Without a limiting principle, they'll never be satisfied.
In software, escaping the limits of maximizing the horsepower of a single-computer system requires putting in some work up front to factor things in such a way that the system can be run on multiple computers in parallel. We call this "horizontal scaling." It's doubtlessly more challenging and error-prone, but doing the hard work to figure out how to build a search index by doing nothing but plugging in more and more hard disks is also the only reason Google exists.
What does it mean to horizontally scale your life? My answer was to figure out how to engage with multiple worldviews at once. When I reach the point of diminishing returns climbing the ladder of advancement in one society's eyes, having an awareness of (if not membership in) other societies is all that's needed to harvest the low-hanging fruit available in some other community and worldview. Or some other country and culture.
This is why I decided before going into college that I wanted to put in the work while I was young to learn a challenging language, expose myself to a wildly different culture, and keep at least one toe's worth of my identity in a worldview that was separate from the one I was born into. By majoring in Japanese language, studying abroad, and visiting frequently, I could not only escape the fate of having "more" be all there is to my life, but I could effectively double the number of novel life experiences available to me for a marginal increase in effort. Twice as many ways to communicate concepts. Twice as many delicious meals. Twice as many incredible musicians. Twice as many ways to live a life.
The beauty of horizontal scaling is that if you can do it once, you can do it again. Once a system is capable of running in two places, it can run in arbitrarily more. By figuring out how to exist as a curious, earnest, and respectful human in Japan, I know I could do it again. Maybe I'll spend time in the Middle East someday. Or Africa. Or South America. Point being, scaling one's life horizontally is a much more cost-effective way to experience the full range of human experience than settling for scaling life vertically. So ultimately, that's why I decided to pick a college with a strong Asian Studies program where I could major in Japanese.
So when I'm asked what's next, one top-of-mind answer is to dive deeper into aspects of Japanese language and culture I didn't have the time or headspace for previously.
Invent selfish solutions with a Computer Science major
If you've followed my work pertaining to the business of programming computers, you may have noticed a few recurring themes:
- Results-oriented planning, to ensure whatever we build actually solves a meaningful problem
- Tenacious problem-solving, to never be inhibited from performing the most important task
- Automated testing, to establish confidence that the code will do what it says on the tin
These themes didn't come out of nowhere. They are software principles built on my core value of self-reliance. I never want to waste a day of my life building the wrong solution to a problem—and I have no patience for building the right solution to the wrong problem, either. It doesn't matter whether the most pressing obstacle is technical or social, I will solve it without respect for process or authority and without needing someone whose specialized skills I lack. And once I've made something, I want to be able to change and improve it without becoming captive to the fear of breaking it.
How would those areas of focus aid me in my Phase 3 retirement? They add up to a generalized competency for independently and durably solving the most vexing problems I face in life.
Apart from having been a smart financial decision to become a professional programmer, software competency has the unique advantage of enabling humans to accelerate their individual capability ("a bicycle for the mind") and to work around extrinsic impediments (namely, all of the shitty software we're surrounded by). This combination of factors is why I chose to major in computer science. Programming computers opened two doors: earning enough to retire earlier than I otherwise could, and equipping me to singlehandedly solve whatever problems came my way that money alone can't solve.
So if you ask me what I plan to do next, the first thing I want to build is an app to supercharge my own Japanese language-learning ability that's completely unlike anything that's ever been done before and uniquely designed to meet my needs. I literally don't care if such an app earns a billion dollars or ends up costing me money—I could see myself happily spending the next ten years of my life building it. And whenever it's done, I have a list of other apps I want to build to selfishly improve my life, which (last time I estimated this) would take me several centuries to complete in aggregate.
Contrary to the reaction of most people who hear about my retirement: no, I will never be bored. Unless the millennials are the first generation to achieve immortality, I am not remotely at risk of ever running out of fascinating things to do.
Share the journey with a liberal arts core
One thing I inherited from my mother is a deep and abiding need to feel understood by others. She was a telecommunications major when I rudely interrupted her education and career. And for as long as I've known her, she's been a preternaturally gifted communicator. Many things in life are a mystery, but what my mom is thinking and feeling never is. And I'm sure a lot of people—many of you, for better or worse—feel the same way about me.
When I think of my favorite creative types, they all have three things in common. First, something that drives them to extract thoughts out of their head and inject them into the brains of others. (Which, for me, is that insatiable need to feel understood.) Second, an understanding of their audience to arrive at the most appropriate medium and message. And third, the skill and charisma to stand out and be rewarded with the attention of that audience.
I brought the first piece of the puzzle to the table by simply being me. And I didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but choosing to enroll at a liberal arts college handed me the second and third.
To graduate, I had to take 17 additional courses that had nothing to do with either of my majors and everything to do with making better use of them. Philosophy. World history. Contemporary literature. Shit, one of the most impactful classes I ever took was a monthlong intensive on the tragic decline of Taoism in the villages of communist China. You do not need these courses to program computers. Or speak Japanese. In fact, having such a massive liberal arts core made it much more difficult for me to be any good at either of my majors by the time I graduated.
That initial skills gap (namely, that I didn't know how to program computers when I started my first computer programming job) ultimately didn't hold me back for long, thankfully. Today, when I marvel at where I've ended up—that I even get to write this newsletter and that anyone bothers to read it—I give two-thirds of the credit for that to my liberal arts education.
If it's not abundantly obvious how choosing a liberal arts school over a (more highly-rated) engineering school back when I was eighteen would serve me well in the next phase of my life, I'll spell it out for you: I will be a more complete human being. I better understand the world I exist in. I am in possession of a treasure chest full of tools I can use to improve myself and grow as a person that I wouldn't have otherwise. If the ultimate goal is a life well-lived, then a good liberal arts education can offer a significant leg up in figuring out how to live one's life well.
And as for how this factors into what's next for the present author, the answer is this: I'm finally living the sort of rich and multi-faceted life that I always believed I was capable of. Embracing the present moment. Taking the time to follow curiosities and dive deeper. Exploring the unfamiliar instead of labeling it a distraction. It's been the easiest and most effortless transition in the world for me. A switch flipped, and I'm no longer suppressing large parts of my true self in a mad dash to get rich and get out. I am genuinely happy.
While writing this, someone stopped to tell me I have "beautiful chi", for chrissakes. That isn't the Justin Searls you had in mind when you subscribed to this newsletter, I guarantee it.
What's next for you?
So anyway, that's my story.
Where does that leave you? The truth is, I have no fucking idea. If you came here looking for advice, I don't have much to offer.
If you're looking for some direction, the book The Courage to be Disliked (and its more marketably-named sequel, The Courage to be Happy) was the first thing I've ever read that resonated with my outlook on life, and it helped me fine-tune my mindset over the last year or two, which has proven utterly invaluable. If you read it and it doesn't do anything for you, then I would genuinely encourage you to either (1) read it a few more times or (2) shoot me an e-mail to tell me about the superior way you've found to navigate through life. If one exists, I'd love to learn about it.
Until we meet again. 🫶