Thoughts on Life Right Now as a 30 Something Millennial – A Video Essay

I dedicate this post to every child that will turn 30 and beyond, today and tomorrow.

Last year on my birthday when I turned 30, I was with my mom and my fiancée, to whom I hadn’t proposed for marriage at the time and didn’t know that I would as soon as January 2023.

On that day I got a few birthday wishes on call and social media from friends and relatives but no one was present for the celebration. My fiancée Rutuja and I just took an idle stroll across the neighborhood and then went out for dinner with my mom.

Rutuja had got me a cake that had Happy Birthday Elden Lord written on it. The moment I read that I knew I would marry her. Just kidding, there are a thousand other important reasons before that but yes this makes the list as it signified, that she understood my love for gaming.

I was playing Elden Ring at the time and the end goal of the game was to become the Elden Lord. Writing that on my birthday cake she sealed the future for us and that I would indeed become the Elden Lord. Which I did. As you can see in the video.

Turning reflective on my life I thought about my adolescence, my teens, my school years, my early twenties, my college days, my late twenties, and to this moment. I realized that my life has changed so much to the point that a guy who never wanted to marry is now engaged and just months away from his marriage.

I even took my last bachelor photo with my mom just hours before my engagement to mark the occasion and it’s just surreal to look at now. If you had asked me back in 2021 whether will I get married in 2023 the answer would have been never. This just proves how life is surprising in innumerable ways.

Coming to the present day, the wild energy and enthusiasm of the 20s seem to have settled down. It was still raging until 2021 which was the final year of my 20’s the 29. It has now however transformed into a focused and committed steady stream of energy that is trying to keep up with the promises made to myself and to the people I love. Even though I am highly dedicated to my goals and dreams as I was even in the wild 20s life now is also more about family and the people in my life. Life has mellowed me I will admit it, no shame there.

If the 20’s formed my personality, the 30’s it seems will capitalise on everything I have learned and experienced. The learning however doesn’t stop, that’s a part of life, but now it has moved on to different things. The work with my vocation and its learning has become more subtle and experiential. I am more focused on my collective portfolio and work rather than its immediate visibility.

As a side note, I want to tell you that I am pursuing photography, writing, and filmmaking as a serious vocation and no it did not start with social media. I have written my first stories in school and I have made my first photos when phones just started getting cameras. Films and storytelling have always been a passion.

I am self-educated on all those topics, thanks to the Internet. The dawn of the internet gave wings to my learning, growth, and development. I am employed because of the skills I built around all of that. My website soulomotivation.com which I run since 2017 is a complete representation of everything I just said.

Coming back to the topic… Everyone has a unique timeline in life. No two people will share the milestones of life at the same time. Circumstances you and I are born in are quite different and so the development arc of our story will be that different. Einstein once said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” I heard this quote first in a Ted Talk titled “The Real Relationship Between Your Age and Your Chance of Success” by Albert Lazlow a physicist who is a proponent of network science.

In the talk he says, that the greatest performer is not 10x better than the second best, giving us the example of Usain Bolt but the success he receives after winning is considerably higher than the second best. Continuing he said that Performance is about you, and success is about us. Performance is bounded but success is unbounded.

So, what he meant was, as an individual you can do the work and it could be nearly as great as someone at the top but unless others recognize it and decide to reward you for it you won’t get success. The magnitude of the success is also decided by others. Recognition by the community is what creates success. Your performance alone won’t create success.

A sobering and calming thought.

Also coming back to the quote of Einstein, Lazlo and his team scanned the lives of thousands of scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists and determined when they made their most notable contributions and found out that sure enough most did so from their 20s to their early 30s but Lazlo’s team thought the research would be incomplete without having a comparable statistic. They used the same research sample to measure when these people were most productive in their lives.

Astonishingly, the productivity graph turned out to be nearly identical to the contribution or achievement graph. What it said was that people achieved the most when they were the most productive. As productivity declined with age so did their graph of success. From a probability standpoint Lazlo said, the chances of your first or last project being successful are the same but what changes is the productivity.

He gave examples of two scientists from whom one got a Nobel prize for his very first paper as a student and the other got a Nobel prize during forced retirement at 72.

He says it’s like buying a lottery ticket, the more you buy the more your chances of winning go up. So, the more you work the chances of your work getting recognized go up and so does your chance of success.

Concluding he said, success is not bound by age because creativity has no age but productivity does.

It was reassuring to hear that all hope is not lost for me at 31 and for you. Whatever your age is.

So, while not everyone can be a Bieber or a Zuckerberg, many hold the possibility to be a Tolkien or a Julia Child. People who got success late basically.

Or even like the mission Chandrayan of ISRO, which had a major breakthrough on its first attempt, partially failed on its second attempt, and based on the learning’s of the first two, achieved astounding success on its third attempt.

Entering a new horizon of discovery and exploration.

Understanding that makes you realize you are neither ahead nor behind in life. You are right where you should be based on the choices you made and the life that was given to you.

I have made peace with this idea and that lets me enjoy the moments of life without worrying too much about the future.

I do what I love, I have my people, and hopefully, everything will work out well.

While it’s reassuring to think that life is meant to be cherished, rather than compared or competed there is still one troubling thought which plagues a lot of people my age.

That thought was well expressed by an American poet named Sylvia Plath who was one of the early writers of confessional poetry. A type of poetry that expresses the poet’s story. As you can make out from the genre’s name, it’s confessional.

Sylvia Plath wrote, “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” For her sadly, she didn’t make it past 30. She only became extraordinarily famous after her passing. While her passing was tragic, her writing still comforts her readers and the legacy of her name is still alive.

She definitely wrote something worth remembering.

There’s a clip from Ghost of Tsushima on poetry in the video here. An action game based in 13th century Japan it often provides exposition on Samurai and Japanese philosophy.

Coming to the topic, we all know of so many people of renown who passed away too soon. And people who only got recognition after their passing. Vincent Van Gogh immediately comes to mind.

With utmost respect to the names I just mentioned, I want to say that we are incredibly blessed to have this gift of life. When we know it’s a gift there’s no point in meeting each day head down or hopeless. This is not a time to be filled with regret or despair. Everything can change for the better with one positive decision you make with commitment. The past is the past but now is the time to be bold and lively.

This is the time of our life.
The time of our blessings.
The time of our adventure.
This is the time when I should ask you, why so serious, son?

Jumping off that, I turned 31 today on the 28th of Aug and this year 2023, coincidently has been a serious grind that aligned me with all my goals. By grind, I mean hard work and not hardship. Hardship I have had plenty in years past but this year is different.

Traces of it started appearing in early 2022. I made choices that demanded me to get disciplined and work on things I said I would urgently. Choices don’t necessarily translate into actions but this time I felt it was high time. Some choices are high stakes.

The ability to differentiate between high-stakes and low-stakes choices is invaluable.

So even though 2022 was quite indulgent, 2023 immediately started off with me getting all my habits in check that I had picked up in my 20s. From there one by one I just kept doing the things I said I would no matter how tired I got or how boring it felt. I didn’t give my best every day but I kept most things balanced.

Now I just keep feeling thankful and blessed by the higher power to have the ability to work on my dreams. The ability that I had sought throughout my life until this point. The ability to take a call and the means to act on it. My life right now is a complete 180 from what it was just a few years ago. Life truly is surprising and rewarding if you just stay aligned with what you believe in and work hard for and around it to build something one day at a time.

It would be an understatement to say that this decade started on a good note. Good but matched with arduous adulting that feels mismatched with our still 20s rebellious soul.

Is this what adulting is?

That you make peace with your wild days and think about community, contribution, and collaboration.That you think about health and family.

That you let go of the anxious curiosity of the young adult days and embrace the quiet uncertainty.

That you are more grounded in your reality than ever before.

That you look fondly at pictures you took even though the people, places, or things in it are no longer with you.

That you smile at the young naive you who thought the world is like you.

That your involvement and practice with the things you do gets deeper.

That your relationships get deeper.

That your commitments are firmer.

They say, 40’s is the new 30’s and 30’s is the new 20’s. But hey, believe me, that’s not the case. I can’t randomly dance on the streets like I did before. Nor can I break the rules and find it funny anymore. Am I taking myself too seriously? No! Am I finally indoctrinated by society? No! But I am just trying to make sure that my personality doesn’t disrupt public activities and acceptable norms.

I am still crazy but that part of my personality is reserved for my friends and family only. So, appreciate it if you find me being crazy. And I also don’t care if someone thinks I am not cool.

Cool to me now is consistency. Consistency in words and action. Consistency in character. Consistency in friendship. Consistency in values.

Some people nowadays don’t take pictures of get-togethers or the mundane just to feel a part of the cool elite group that doesn’t take pictures in the age of smartphones. That’s so rudimentary. In an age where you can document all your life on the move with a device in your pocket, you decide not to do it? This would have been the dream device of anyone in the age of film cameras.

I don’t post everything I shoot on social and nor do I spend my life on my phone around people but I still spare seconds to take a lot of pictures of the food my mom cooks, my fiancée cooks, my family sits together chatting, just simple everyday things.

I do this because to me these moments are precious and I want to capture them.

This is happiness captured in pixels. All of us are aging and each year is special.

I look at a video I made just 6 months back and I feel like I look like a baby in the video, no I am not exaggerating this, and I look at myself now and I feel like damm son you have aged.

In my early twenties I was slightly uncomfortable about coming in photos, forget about being in videos. Now I wish I had more videos of myself from that part of my life. Not just photos but it’s so easy to even take videos now.

So maybe take more pictures and videos because the years are flying by and when it’s all done and said we will have these memories to cherish.

Don’t worry you won’t find it cringy or awkward to look at because when you glance back at the past everything appears through gold tinted glasses. Even times that were hard.

Fun fact, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also born on the 28th of August. He and I share many interests.

80% of my waking time now is spent working. Maybe most working people’s day is spent similarly. I remember just a few years back I used to be out in the wild the moment monsoon clouds started gathering. Now I just stare at them from the window by my work desk.

This makes me wonder about how my mom felt when she returned from work day after day and dealt with many stresses on her own while I stayed home enjoying life as a kid. Oblivious to this reality of life.

My mom once told me that they felt grateful to be employed and that their generation did not have FOMO like ours. They were just happy that life was comfortable.

Btw one time I took my mom to my office and shared that photo on LinkedIn and it went viral. That’s my first experience of truly getting crazy viral. A superb gift and memory for me and my mom from the community. As I mentioned earlier, success is given to us in recognition of our work by the community.

It got nearly 5M views and nearly 150K reactions. Mind-boggling and humongous. Thank you lord and thank you, people. Reading the caption will help you make sense of this whole story.

And so I am glad that there was a time where I could just run out and enjoy the monsoon, I miss it, truly, but I am also glad that I have the opportunity to work. The opportunity to chase my dreams.

I sometimes also wonder what if one day I am old and still just staring at the clouds from a window?

A grim thought but what to do, you at the minimum have to earn your own bread without fail.

But this could also be just a phase and I am overthinking it. Like the phase before this when I had all the time in the world to do what I want. I believe life works in phases. You get the opportunity to do everything on its own time. Also, even if not completely outdoors I still enjoy cycling in this weather 2-3 times a week in a green space near my house and that’s my way of reconnecting with nature.

I remember Sadguru of the Isha Foundation saying this once, that humans are very peculiar. Stomach empty one problem but stomach full humans have many problems. Earning money doesn’t stop at just food.

But what I find solace in is the stories of other humans. I often listen to podcasts that have historical stories. It gives me a feel of how life is always moving. How many lived their whole lives before us and are now gone. And how even the mundane from those tales is now romanticized. This introspection makes you cherish life more and helps you put your life into context in the larger scheme of things. It’s beautiful.

As a human, you have the right to dream. The right to chase your dreams. And the will to take deliberate action for their attainment.

But while we have those abilities attainment of those dreams is not guaranteed.

Coming back to what I said before, it’s a beautiful world, it’s an unpredictable life, and having your people around you is what makes it worthwhile.

Looking back on my life, the nostalgia is strong. I feel life was way simpler back then and that there’s a lesson there. Each moment is precious because life only moves in one direction and to be honest do you really want to go back to those days? Leaving behind your awesome life now? Maybe I would like some elements of it to be a part of my life again but in totality now is where I want to live.

You can be daring in the pursuit of the life you want but we cannot say where life will lead us next. We can do our best to steer it in our preferable direction but ultimately it has its own plans.

Life is a great mystical drama. Waiting to delight the seeker.

Everyone ages but for millennials it has been a surprise. And so, after completing 31 years on this magnificent planet, as you must have figured out, at this point in my life I am thinking about my career, my people, and my dreams. All three of these can branch out into a million thoughts of different colors. I am sure most people my age must be thinking about at least one of these.

Also, as a conscious citizen of the 21st century, I am worried about issues like Climate Change but that’s for another video. This one’s just about my life as a 31-year-old 90’s kid.

For now, for my birthday, I have put down leaves to enjoy it wholeheartedly. This is a pocket of excitement that all of us get to experience every once in a while. This is when we travel, explore, eat, and make merry.

As for life, life is a big mystery and until it’s revealed with time it’s a big cosmic question mark. Just like the one spotted by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in deep space.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)/post-processing inset image Daisy Dobrijevic