Things should be harder than they are.
Or, perhaps it's better to say, things are often much easier than you believe. But you feel like most things are hard. And that's why they are.
Most things you want to achieve are tough. Most places you want to go are far. The road is long and thick with thorns, but mostly because you make it so.
People keep telling me they can't afford to have children. And I understand the feeling, even if I'm not sure it's quite true. Or, at least, it's only true because they believe it must be.
There is this sticky sludge with which we shroud all the things in life we want. Sometimes we invent the sludge ourselves, but most times we watch as it is poured on for us, the way a waiter pours gravy until you say 'when'.
You want to have children, and maybe you can't afford to. But why can't you afford to? Well, you see, you might begin to explain, before unpacking a whole heap of things you have taught yourself to believe, which could be summed up much more simply as:
"because I want life to be perfect."
Because I'm only prepared to allow myself to have this thing that I want, if I know it will be perfect – exactly the way I imagined it in the fantasy of my mind's eye.
Because we do want perfect lives. And we want everything to fall into place. And we want to cut through the layer cake of social expectation and find happiness at its core.
Instead, because we dilly dally and dither in the pursuit of true desires, we often find that the juicy cores we seek have otherwise rotted, swollen with maggots, or they evade us entirely.
We never quite get to where we're going, because our destination is the horizon itself.
People used to fart out kids, two and three and four at a time, and then work two jobs and take three buses and somehow just figure things out. I'm not wishing that future on you. I'm just explaining how easy it was to take some things for granted when we didn't start with the assumption that things had to be perfect before we began the journey. The journey simply unfolded, turn by turn, while we were on the road.
My wife and I got legally married – not quite in secret, but at a ceremony so small that it was just our parents, and my sister had to wait outside, and then we all went out for dinner after with some friends. We initially dreamt of a grand wedding in Italy. And many relatives eagerly awaited a big party.
We did, in the end, have a big party. And we did, in the end, have a white wedding. But the party was months later in Ghana, where my wife is from, and where costs could be better managed. And our white wedding reception, months after that, was simply a grand dinner where most of the budget could be drained into food and tasteful aesthetic touches, and other things we value more than being forced to dance or taking forced photos.
If we listened to the story we'd first told ourselves about how weddings should be, we would never have been able to afford or enjoy the wedding we ended up having, or it would otherwise have been severely postponed (though I have my in-laws to thank for the ceremony in Ghana).
There was no towering cake, just a flat, delicious, rectangular one. And nobody suffered.
Of course weddings can be far more wild and avant-garde, but it's all about how strong the mould is set in your mind about what the outcome should look like.
Similarly, I decided at some point as a teenager that I wanted to work in corporate law. I had, of course, never met a corporate lawyer. Even in the first year of my law degree, I didn't know anyone who had gotten an offer at a top firm let alone worked at one.
At several junctures in my journey the path still wasn't clear, and at one point the fear of not being able to get an offer from a top firm led me to drop out of university entirely.
The one thing I did do, however, was dedicate myself to reading about finance, corporate dealmaking, and geopolitics – obsessively, exclusively – because those were the things the job actually required.
When I eventually joined my dream firm, I was the youngest and least formally educated person in my cohort, and the only one who could answer every question in our finance training sessions. I worked on over $10 billion worth of deals in the half decade I spent before transitioning to technology startups. I still don't have a degree.
The assumption was that the pathway to that career required particular credentials acquired in a particular sequence. I drove myself crazy with the fear of that spectre – the pool of sludge poured over my dream. And, in the end, it was just a spectre. The requirement to open the door in a unique way for me was simply a genuine knowledge of the work itself, which I'd built directly, almost entirely through Bloomberg articles and membership at my local library.
Michael Faraday is probably the most striking historical illustration of this. He was a bookbinder's apprentice with almost no formal education, but was interested in science and attended open lectures.
Eventually, attending a lecture of Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, he simply wrote him a letter asking for a job. He got taken on as a laboratory assistant and taught himself science through direct engagement with experiments.
He didn't bypass the expected institutional pathway as a philosophical statement – he just didn't have access to it, so he went straight to the work. It turned out the work was the important thing, while the societal scaffolding around it was largely optional.
He became one of the most important experimental scientists in history.
Ralph Lauren, whose namesake firm is famous as a pioneer and proprietor of the Ivy League prep lifestyle, is a famous impostor, though this fact gets harder to imagine the more he cements himself into his own lore.
Young Ralph, born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents, simply decided one day that there was someone he wanted to become. There were lives he might otherwise have lived. And, he surmised, he could inherit them through clothing.
He had no connection to the preppy WASP aristocracy he became synonymous with. There was no country estate, no Ivy League education, nor inherited access to anything in that world.
All he had to start with was a simple job selling shirts for a company called Brooks Brothers. And yet he started a company with a famous logo of a sport he'd never played: Polo.
Likewise, Issa Rae, whose story I also explored in Sovereign, made Awkward Black Girl as a YouTube web series with no budget, or crew, or acting chops to speak of. She just started making a thing, and recording with friends.
She completely ignored all the stories one would otherwise become engrossed in, about what it takes to become an actor. Or the prerequisites for a storied Hollywood career.
But she cut to the chase and made what she wanted, and cast herself as the lead in her little internet thing that nobody cared about until everybody cared about it. And now she's a multi-award-winning actress and media mogul.
Travel is another thing everyone seems to want and few seem to meaningfully experience in any enjoyable way that doesn't drain their pockets dry prematurely.
People tend to treat travel as a distinct and sacred thing. To 'travel the world' is a dream recounted by many. To do so, we tell ourselves, requires a sabbatical, significant savings, and months of planning.
In 2016 I taught myself to take decent pictures on my phone and organised group trips for young people who had places they wanted to go but no one to travel with. A few people were eventually willing to pay me for my phone photography, and I was soon able to buy an old camera from a friend I met playing basketball at the park.
When furnished with sufficient pictures, it turned out that brands, hotels, and airlines were happy to work with me, and people wanted to see the places I'd captured, so I largely travelled for free, as long as everyone else got what they wanted out of it.
I didn't have any fame or followers, just a lot of gumption and a willingness to reach for things.
I managed to visit 20 countries in two years while working full time, and with holiday days to spare, simply by arranging these trips around weekends and bank holidays and being happy to travel cheaply in order to explore more.
Some of my best trips came from finding fifty-hour layovers and spending a few nights in two different countries for a fraction of what people assume travel costs.
It is, of course, much easier to go vagabonding in your twenties, but you only have to grow out of it if you choose.
If you start from the assumption that you need to spend a certain amount, or be somewhere for a minimum amount of time, or have everything perfectly arranged, you'll barely go anywhere. The starting assumption is everything.
The horizon will never be within reach so long as you postpone it. Your desires will always evade you if you believe the preconditions must be perfect.
Social scaffolding is everywhere. So are assumptions. They are very sticky things, hard to untangle yourself from, and they'll trap you if you let them.
Fortunately the road to freedom is a simple one.
It just requires that you stop asking, "What would I need for this to be perfect?" and to ask instead, "What do I need to make this possible?"
Those two questions lead to very different life outcomes.
