seven

there's this idea that people need to "find themselves." go on a journey. try different things. read books about purpose. take a gap year. meditate. journal. maybe do ayahuasca in peru if you're really lost.

i think that's backwards. i don't think you need to find yourself. i think you need to remember yourself. because you already knew. you knew when you were seven. you just forgot, and forgetting felt so gradual that by the time you were twenty-five you thought you'd never known at all.

the unedited version

here's what i think is true and i haven't seen anyone say it clearly: childhood is the only period in your life when you are completely, unfilteredly yourself. not the version of you that knows what's cool. not the version that knows what pays well. not the version that's calibrated to the room. the raw version. the version that does things for no reason other than that the thing needed to be done, according to some internal logic that you didn't question because you didn't know questioning it was an option.

kids don't have hobbies. that word implies a choice. a kid doesn't sit down and think "i'd like to pick up woodworking as a hobby." a kid just does things. compulsively. without permission. without a plan. they follow some gravitational pull toward certain activities and away from others, and that pull isn't coming from instagram or career advice or their parents' expectations. it's coming from whatever they actually are before the world tells them what they should be.

that's the signal. everything after that is noise.

what i did before i knew what i was doing

when i was a kid i used to line up my action figures, my max steel collection, sit them next to my sister's barbies, and give them lectures. full lectures. i'd stand in front of these plastic people and explain things to them. i don't remember what i was explaining. probably nonsense. probably made-up science about made-up worlds. but the structure was always the same: i had figured something out, or thought i had, and i needed to tell someone, and if no one was around then twelve plastic people and a barbie dream house would do.

it didn't stop there. i would see patterns in everything. i mean that literally, not as a figure of speech. the way light hit a wall through blinds and made stripes, i would count them, figure out the spacing, predict where the next one would fall if you opened the blinds another inch. tiles on the floor. cracks in the sidewalk. the rhythm of turn signals when my parents were driving. my brain just latched onto the structure underneath things and started pulling it apart. i thought everyone's brain did this. it took me a long time to realize that most people can look at a floor and just see a floor.

and then there were legos. always legos. but never following the instructions. i'd open the box, look at the picture, dump all the pieces out, and build something else. the instructions were someone else's idea of what these pieces should become. i had my own. i didn't know that was unusual until other kids would come over and ask "but where's the manual" and i'd look at them like they'd asked me to explain breathing.

at the time none of this looked like anything. it looked like a kid playing. it was not playing. it was the earliest version of everything i do now, just running on different hardware.

the thread

what connects all of this, the lectures and the patterns and the legos, is something i only recognized much later. it's not that i liked building. lots of kids like building. it's that i liked understanding how things work so much that i'd rebuild them just to prove to myself that i understood. the explanation to max steel wasn't for him. it was for me. if i could explain it to a plastic action figure, it meant i actually got it. if i couldn't, i'd go back and look again.

same thing with games. i didn't want easy games. i wanted games that had deep, complex worlds with their own internal logic that nobody explained to you. you just got dropped in and had to figure it out. that's why elden ring is the greatest game ever made and i will continue to not take questions on this. it doesn't care about you. it doesn't hold your hand. it puts you in a world that runs on rules you don't know yet and says "good luck." and the joy isn't winning. the joy is the moment right before winning, when the system clicks and you can feel how all the pieces connect.

i played league of legends for years. studied every mechanic, every champion interaction, every patch note. obsessed over it like it was a final exam in a class i loved. i am still, to this day, not good at it. which is actually the important part. because it means the compulsion was never about being good. it was about understanding. i didn't need to master the game. i needed to decode it. mastery was a side effect that sometimes happened and sometimes didn't and either way i was satisfied because i'd seen how the machine worked.

books were the same. i'd disappear into one for nine hours and forget to eat. not because i loved literature. because a book was a world, and a world was a system, and systems were the thing my brain wanted to take apart. fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, didn't matter. if it had internal logic i could map, i was gone.

minecraft was the same. which is just legos with no box and infinite pieces. i learned to code because i wanted a modded server. not because i wanted a career. because the default world wasn't enough and i wanted to change the rules.

it was all the same thing. every single activity that i loved as a kid, the ones i chose for myself when nobody was watching and nobody was grading, they all had the same shape: here is a system. figure out how it works. then make something with what you learned. i just didn't realize they were the same thing because they looked so different from the outside. legos don't look like league of legends don't look like books don't look like minecraft. but from the inside, from the way my brain felt while doing them, they were identical.

the forgetting

so what happened? where did that kid go?

same place everyone's kid goes. school happened. social pressure happened. "what do you want to be when you grow up" happened, and suddenly the question wasn't "what do you do when nobody's watching" but "what should you do so that the right people are watching."

here's my version of this, and i suspect everyone has their own. for years i told everyone i wanted to be a doctor. not because i woke up one morning burning with the desire to practice medicine. because the adults around me had this formula: if your grades are good, you do medicine. it wasn't really a suggestion. it was more like a diagnosis. and i didn't push back because, honestly, it felt nice. someone looked at me and saw a future. i just didn't check whether it was my future or theirs.

and i really committed to it. i didn't half-ass the delusion. i watched neuroscience documentaries and got genuinely fascinated by how the brain works and thought see, this confirms it, i should be a neurosurgeon. i built a whole identity around this future version of myself in a white coat. told my family. told my friends. told myself so many times it started feeling like something i'd actually chosen.

and the whole time, right there, sitting in plain sight, impossible to miss if i'd been willing to look: the actual signal. the kid who broke into terminal windows because he'd forgotten his password for the tenth time and refused to ask anyone for help. the kid who modded minecraft servers because the default world wasn't enough. the kid who spent his free time, his actual voluntary unstructured free time, on computers. not because someone told him to. because that's where his brain went when it had nowhere to be.

i ignored that kid for years because he didn't fit the script. computers were what i did for fun. medicine was what i was supposed to do for real. and nobody around me questioned it, because the script made sense, because it was a good script, because it's a script that works for a lot of people. just not for me.

the day i finally admitted that i don't actually like biology, that biology kind of sucks actually, that i'd been performing enthusiasm for an entire field because other people's expectations had quietly become my own, that was the day i remembered who i was. not discovered. remembered. the kid was still there. he'd just been waiting for me to stop pretending.

i ended up doing computers. and i ended up not sucking at it nearly as much as i would have sucked at medicine. which might be the most important realization i've ever had, and it was essentially: stop lying and do the thing you were already doing.

the performance trap

i think about the specific moment when kids stop doing things because they want to and start doing things because they should. it's not one moment. it's a gradient. but somewhere around eleven or twelve, most kids start performing instead of being. they pick up activities that look good instead of activities that feel right. they stop giving lectures to action figures because someone told them that's weird. they stop counting the stripes of light on the wall because no one else is doing it.

and here's the thing that nobody says: the performance works. that's the problem. you start optimizing for what the world rewards, and the world rewards you, and the rewards feel good, and so you keep going. you get into a good school. you get a good job. people say you're doing well. and you are doing well. by every external measure, you're winning. the only thing that's off is this low-frequency hum in the background that you can't quite name, this feeling that you're playing a game you're good at but didn't choose.

that's the hum of your seven-year-old self, trying to tell you something.

the chubby kid problem

here's a complication. sometimes the thing that ends up mattering most is the thing you hated.

my parents put me in violin. i cried. i lied about hand injuries. i hid the case behind the couch. they put me in swimming. i was the round kid in the lane, the one shaped less like a swimmer and more like something a swimmer would pass on their way to the other end of the pool. i didn't choose either of these things. they were chosen for me, and i resisted them with everything i had.

and both of them ended up rewiring how i think. violin gave me something i can only describe as taste. this sense for when something is slightly off before you can explain why. you play a note and it's technically correct but it doesn't sound right and you adjust by two millimeters and suddenly it does. that sense, that exact sense, is the same thing i use when i look at a piece of code or a product and something feels wrong but i can't point at the specific thing yet. i just know. and knowing before you can explain is not magic. it's a feedback loop that ran so many times it dropped below conscious thought.

swimming taught me something different and maybe more important: your own signals lie to you. your lungs say you need to breathe. you don't, not yet. your muscles say they're done. they're not. your brain says stop. it is wrong. there is a gap between what your body reports and what it can actually do, and you only find that gap by ignoring the reports. i think about this constantly in non-swimming contexts. the feeling of "i can't figure this out" is almost never true. it's just uncomfortable, and your brain wants to stop because stopping is easier than pushing.

so the inner child thing isn't as simple as "do what you loved at seven." because at seven i loved minecraft and TV and would've been very happy doing neither violin nor swimming for the rest of my life. the fuller version is: pay attention to what your unedited self was drawn to. but also pay attention to what was forced on you that rewired you in ways you didn't appreciate until much later.

the things you chose tell you what you are. the things that were chosen for you, the ones you hated but that stuck, tell you what you're capable of becoming. and your actual work probably lives somewhere in the collision between those two.

the test

here's what i'd tell anyone who feels that hum. that background static of "this is fine but this isn't it."

don't go find yourself. go remember yourself. what did you do before you knew anyone was watching? what did you do before you knew it was supposed to lead somewhere? what was the thing you couldn't not do, the activity that didn't need a reason because it was its own reason?

now look at what you do now. not whether it's the same activity. whether it's the same motion. the same shape. if you spent your childhood taking things apart to see how they worked, are you still taking things apart? if you spent your childhood explaining things to an audience of plastic people, are you still explaining things? if you spent your childhood staring at patterns nobody asked you to find, are you still doing that?

the medium doesn't matter. the motion does. and the motion was set before you had any say in it. before the world told you what was practical, what was impressive, what was serious. before you learned to want things you don't actually want.

i spent years telling everyone i'd be a doctor. the whole time, the actual answer was sitting in a terminal window i'd opened because i forgot my password again. it wasn't hidden. it was right there. i just couldn't see it because i was too busy looking at the version of myself that other people had built for me.

you were your truest self before you had a self to perform. whatever you were doing then, whatever you couldn't stop doing, that's the signal. everything else is noise you picked up along the way.

the seven-year-old already knew. the question is whether you're willing to listen to someone with that little credibility.