๐ถ Link Click OP - Dive Back In Time (Lofi Remix)โ
I'm gonna be honest with y'all--I procrastinated on launching this newsletter because I had no clue where to start. I'm prone to "productive procrastination," i.e., I delay doing the things that actually need to get done by instead doing things that kinda-sorta-ish need to get done. This week, I cleaned out the cabinets under my kitchen sink. I almost started setting up my skincare fridge* (yes, I was ~influenced~) instead of writing this, but I decided to stop acting from fear and just do it.
Anyway. Welcome to the first edition of my first newsletter! Y'all are the real OGs, and I appreciate each and every single one of you ๐
* This is an affiliate link, which means I earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.
no one is ever set for life.
With college and grad school deposits submitted and graduation season upon us, it's high time we talked about the concept of being "set for life." When I found out that my college application was accepted by Yale, I thought I was set for life. I then received the worst grades that I had ever received in my academic career thus far, and I was rejected from the majority of consulting summer internships to which I applied. I ended up hating consulting anyway and, feeling lost senior year, studied for the LSAT because I at least loved my law & technology classes and Legally Blonde.
When I received my biglaw summer associate offer and subsequent return offer, I thought I was set for life. A $180,000 salary was more money than I had ever seen before. Fast forward eight years, and... well, you probably know how this story goes. I'm now self-employed (or unemployed, depending on whom you ask), mostly living off of my savings, and hoping with all my heart that my life looks very different in one year's time. I am, in all ways, not set for life.
Given how many times being set for life is followed by a complete 180, why are we, as a society, so obsessed with this concept of being "set for life?" Our brains evolved to be uncertainty-averse. As a result, we have to lie to our brains to assuage their evolution. If I just get into X college, everything will be okay. If I just get this summer internship, everything will be okay. I just make partner, everything will be okay. Except there is no guarantee in life that everything will be okay.
Our parents certainly don't help, either, but it's not their fault--their brains want to believe that once their beloved children achieve XYZ, their children will be set for life, too. Isn't that a nice sentiment? Raising children and seeing them go out into the world may be one of the most uncertainty-inducing activities possible, and I can't fault them for wanting to believe that certain life events (their children graduating from college, marrying, having their own children, etc.) indicates that everything will be okay.
This isn't to be depressing. Maybe you're never set for life, but on the flip side, you're never ruined for life, either. That C won't ruin your entire future career(s); getting fired doesn't mean you'll never be hired again; and not having a ton of close friendships in the past isn't an indicator of the friendships that you will have in the future. Our certainty-craving brains might like to believe that past performance is indicative of future results, but if the Securities and Exchange Commission won't even let investment firms say that to potential investors, should we be telling ourselves that?
Balancing optimism with realism is challenging. HBR summarized it as:
Believe you will get there, and acknowledge to yourself and everyone else that uncertainty involves having to experiment to get things right. It means not everything works right away. It means that if we hang in there, eventually it can be better than it is now.
Because that's what really matters--recognizing that "set for life" isn't an adjective, but rather a verb.
๐ open tabs
โI'm not lost; I'm in my Odyssey Years. After 25 years straight of grades in school directly to biglaw billable hours, I've never had a period in my conscious life where I didn't know exactly what the key metrics and goals were--until now. I've been taking the Odyssey Planning course on edX (it's free!) to help orient myself during this era of uncertainty, and I've enjoyed it so much, I've even ordered the larger book* from which the concept is derived and its accompanying workbook*.
โI love a good empirical law review article. When the Supreme Court's decision in Carpenter v. United States came out in 2018, it was lauded by privacy advocates as a landmark decision and a win for privacy in the digital era. Professor Matthew Tokson conducts a comprehensive review of federal and state decisions applying Carpenter from June 2018 (Carpenter's publication) to March 2021 to identify how the lower courts have used Carpenter in its wake. A good read for my fellow privacy and Fourth Amendment nerds out there!
โAre YouTubers (and creators writ large) really more individualistic and bitter than the average person? When I first entered the legal field as someone with no background in law at all, I loved theorizing about lawyers and why they were the way that they were--so much so that I'm writing a book about biglaw. As I enter the creator space anew, I'm doing the same. There's something to Rebecca Jennings' theory--"main character" energy is almost essential to creating and hate comments certainly can shift an individual's perception of the world, but I'd have to meet more creators to really form an opinion.