Today, I turn 30.

I have been getting a lot of “You are 30 now! How do you feel?” and my answer has been simply “older”. This blog is an attempt to understand what getting “older” and especially what turning 30 means. This essay might make more sense if you are already like 25+ and I hope it is useful otherwise too.

Almost a decade back, I had written a similar blog about turning 20 which made for a fun read a few days back. Hopefully this blog is less embarrassing than that.

[12 minute read]

Thousands of Decisions and their Consequences

Turning 30 does mark a significant milestone in your life.

It concludes the first decade of a completely independent life. At this point, you have made thousands of decisions (large and small) affecting things ranging from yourself to your family to your career and to the society at large. Besides MAKING those decisions, by the age of 30 you’ve had the opportunity to witness and respond to the CONSEQUENCES of thousands of such decisions. No, I do not exaggerate when I say “thousands” of decisions. Imagine the gamut of decisions you have taken since your early 20s, which in your teens someone else was deciding for you:

On Education and Work:

• Which university should I apply to?
• Got admits! Which one to go to?
• Should I get an education loan or see what luck has for me with on-campus jobs?
• Which team should I join for the group project?
• Hmm, I don’t have a side hustle yet and I don’t have money for next quarter’s tuitions – should I silently go back home after this quarter?
• Everyone in college looks so cool and confident. What should I do to feel less awkward?
• Should I get a 6-inch from Subway and look cool in front of my new friends or get a foot-long and secretly hide half of it for dinner?
• Which career path should I take after graduation?
• Which shirt should I wear for that job interview?
• Which of these opportunities promises a happy life and secure future?
• Yay! First salary! Should I spend it on traveling or save it up for rainy days?
• Where should I put this $100 - retirement account, stock/options trading, mortgage payments, better health insurance, 6-month emergency fund?
• Do I need external monitors?
• Its 9 am, check email or get some work done?
• Should we hire X or not?
• Suggest this design or that?
• Attend this meeting or skip?
• Its 3pm, should I have a second coffee now?
• …

On Personal Life:

• What should I cook for dinner tonight?
• Who should I watch the next Game of Thrones episode with?
• Which class do I try? Piano/Triathlon/Tennis/Skiing/Swimming?
• What to do this weekend? Movie/Clubbing/Sleepover/Board Games/Birthday Party?
• Best friend is getting married! Vegas or Los Angeles for Bachelor Party?
• Should I get married?
• Wow, she looks good, could she be the One?
• Repeat previous question N times.
• Woohoo! I am getting married. Should I invite 10 people or 1000 people to my wedding?
• Where should I go for a vacation this July 4th weekend?
• Skyscanner.com or Kayak.com?
• Canoeing or Kayaking?
• AirBnb or Holiday Inn? Car camping or RV?
• Is Top of the Rock worth the money?
• Damn, I broke my legs! Drop-in at my doctor’s place or urgent care or emergency or call 911?
• Should I get a pet?
• Should I have a kid?
• Which of the 8 different genetic tests do I want to take?
• Huggies or Pampers or Cloth diapers?
• Cocomelon or Word Party?
• Disney or Universal Studios or both?
• Should I sell the crib and donate all the baby clothes now?
• Should I have a second kid?
• Should I rent a bigger place then?
• OMG $3000! Should I consider buying a house now or will the market crash due to a second deadly wave of CoViD?
• Which school district do I want?
• …

Well, you get it. Hopefully you are convinced now that I was not exaggerating about the “thousands” of decisions. And yes, you made all those decisions! How cool is that? And all these decisions, though simple and innocent in appearance, have significant repercussions on your life. These decisions define who you are. And that is exactly why turning 30 is a significant milestone in the formation of your own identity.

Now, nobody really trains you to make these decisions. You sort of stumble upon them and figure it out on the way. By the time you are 30, you have automatic responses to many of the above questions and spend your precious mental energy on the remaining new and exciting questions. No big deal, life moves on and you stumble on more unseen experiences. And as you might expect such a way of life will have ups and downs by design leading to moments of pride and pondering. On that note, I would like to contemplate on the top two life lessons from my decade of independent decision making: Logic Can Fail and Embrace Grey.

Learning #1: Logic Can Fail

Logic fails in surprising ways. By logic, I mean being too smart.

This is how I would describe my 25-year-old self: I have lived for 25 long years now and amassed tons of personal and vicarious life experiences. I have read voraciously from verified, reliable sources. I am trained in logical and critical thinking. I am up-to-date on politics, sports, finance, technology, science etc.. I can articulate my points with impeccable logic backed by undeniable science and powerful personal/historical anecdotes.

In a nutshell, I felt simply invincible. Each time I crushed an argument, and put the other person out of words, the implicit feedback I got only reinforced my already strong convictions. I was right. I was right EVERY SINGLE TIME. Except that… I utterly failed. Turns out, each time the argument ended, the other person had simply given up on me or in case of my parents, punted the discussion to a later time when I am more mature. You can be right, and still fail spectacularly.

Logic Fails… Due to Lack of Full Information

This is probably the biggest class of logic failures.

Logic provides guarantee of correctness when provided with complete information. But in real-life you never have complete information on anything you make decisions on. Even when you have all the relevant people in the room, there is no reason they should share all their knowledge, their feelings and more importantly, their deep-rooted insecurities with you. And many times you just won’t have the time and resources to hunt down all the relevant information. Logic can only do so much in this setting.

Turns out as you grow older you naturally build an extensive graph of probabilities and useful mental models on what can and cannot happen in life. This makes decision making more accurate and easier over time. You stop judging people and see yourself saying “it happens” often. So, keep learning from your own and others’ lives and when it comes to decision making, stay open to the fact that you could be missing/misunderstanding critical details.

Logic Fails… Due to Band-Aid Situations

There are times when you feel you have all the information in hand, but you simply don’t want or don’t have the time to fix the problem. This shows up a lot in relationships in life and work.

In engineering, there is a method of problem solving called Root Cause Analysis which involves identifying the root cause of a problem and then performing corrective actions to prevent re-occurrence. Some problems in life could take months of Root Cause Analysis and then could take years to fix. Yes, you read it right, YEARS. And depending on the thing or (more likely) the person you are acting upon, this could be completely worth the effort. However, you will often run into cases when you should deliberately accept failure of logic owing to lack of time where you disagree, shake hands and move on without fixing the root cause. When the problem surfaces again, you do the same – just patch it and move on. I call these band-aid situations.

Applying a band-aid does not mean lack of courage or perseverance on your part. In fact, more often than you think, this is good for both yourself and the others involved.

Logic Fails… Due to Deep-Rooted Beliefs

In the last decade, I’ve moved from making fun of deep-rooted beliefs my parents espoused, to convincing myself that I would recommend the same to my next generation (and be that “out-dated, unscientific, illogical” parent for the next couple of decades). I like to call this class of logic failures as “subconscious safety nets” due to their ability to protect you from your conscious, rational self.

On the topic of buying Gold, following used to be a very typical conversation between me and my dad.

And I couldn’t fathom how I would have a chunk of my net worth sitting in a safe deposit box with no apparent purpose. My parents, as they usually do, would just accept the ridicule and move on to a different topic. In a few years, this topic vanished from our conversations. Then I witnessed something.. which proved to be a turning point.

There was a 30-something affluent, happy couple named Raj and Riya. They were happily wed for 4 years and had a beautiful 2 year old daughter. They had a wonderful house, business was booming, and things simply cannot get better. And then, suddenly Raj’s behavior started changing and it changed rapidly with every passing day. He became short-tempered, was over-reacting and a dreaded dementia started setting in. He was not open to treatments and started making blatant mistakes in his business and investments. He made bigger mistakes to cover up previous mistakes. When he finally agreed to visit a doctor, to everyone’s horror, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This had a huge impact on his confidence, and he turned to gambling to find the much needed acceptance. Before Riya could react, all their hard-earned money including their sprawling, coveted primary residence at the city center… was simply gone. Riya finally made peace with the situation and moved out with their daughter to her parents’ place and started off a new life from scratch. Raj continued visiting her asking for more money to gamble. After being told off a few times, Raj stopped bothering her. And in a few days, she learnt that he was… dead. Amid the devastation the family was going through, Riya was purging all their bank accounts to ensure it cannot be misused further by Raj’s business partners. To her surprise, there was one account which was still untouched.

The account was their safety deposit box with.. Gold.

This experience, though second-hand, was so powerful to etch the importance of having an absolutely untouchable asset, an asset which can endure catastrophes of our own pristine minds and protect families and generations to come from our own selves. As you can see, you can replace Gold with any financial asset here, but in my family’s case and in Raj’s case Gold turned out to be the traditional choice for the untouchable asset.

One other subconscious safety net where I’ve gone from mockery -> ignoring it -> outright rejection —–> acceptance is the indispensable role of God in life.

Following are some of my own quotes from the past decade in chronological order on the concept of God.

Let’s leave it at that. If you are curious to know how the last transition happened, we should meet over coffee/dinner. That by itself warrants another essay.

So, when you find someone, especially smart and well-meaning elders, with an irrational belief or unexplainable practice – give them an opportunity to explain it to their best potential. There is a chance, however small, that there is an unconscious safety net waiting for you to explore.

Learning #2: Embrace Grey

By the time you are 30, most of the choices you are faced with are not as stark as black and white. If they are black and white, and you are still confused, talk to a buddy, get a cup of coffee or.. simply go to sleep and decide the next day. You got this.

Let’s talk about the Grey between the black and white.

• On Conflicts: There are no Heroes and Villains: The famous quote from Aesop goes “A man is known by the company he keeps” and there is a lot of truth to it. You should assume people around you to be as smart/stupid and good-intentioned as you are. In that setting, when your friends John and Jane have a conflict, it is highly unlikely that one of them is a clear villain there and do not make haste to label them as such. In fact, it is easy and interesting to do so. The truth is usually somewhere in between a Hero and Villain. As you navigate the space of evidences and decisions to solve the conflict, you will come across many, many choices of Grey. The real skill there comes in assigning each of those choices different shades of grey, make a choice and articulate them effectively. So, get comfortable in thinking and communicating Grey.

• On Measuring: There is no One Metric to rule them all: Step count alone does not determine your fitness and year-over-year profit alone does not determine long-term growth of a company. Many times, society will lead you to believe that there is a single magic number to base our decisions on and provide you products and services around that magic number. This spans across various walks of life like health, personal finance, health of relationships, nurturing kids, measuring work, optimizing investing, buying a home, tracking CoViD, and even general happiness in life. When society throws such a number at you, put it in perspective with other numbers around it (in space/time) and deliberately move it to a grey zone. I promise your decisions will be much better than otherwise.

• On being emotional: Being Dispassionate vs. Passionate: One of the recurring themes of my 20s was experimenting between living a dispassionate vs. passionate life. You go about your life as usual - you meet your friends, you listen to their joys and sorrows, you go to work, you face ups and downs. But you can perceive these events either by deeply connecting with the event/person or dispassionately pass through those events emotionally unaffected. In my early 20’s I was heavily influenced by Stoicism and practiced living a dispassionate life. It worked really, really well in the USA’s individualistic culture for a long time. I had lots of very good friends and maintain excellent relationship with my family. I went from being single to getting married, and then one day suddenly the ideal of dispassionate living stopped working for me – the arrival of my daughter changed things quite drastically. I cared too deeply for my daughter that I simply couldn’t have my brain regulate my heart every time something unnecessary is enforced on her. I’ve moved considerably to the passionate side of the scale and I feel more human now.

• On thinking styles: Analytical vs. Creative: Analysis and creation fundamentally require two different mindsets. Analysis requires you to observe a phenomenon carefully from different angles, attend to its details, understand patterns, and come out with an insight which informs your next step. Creation requires you to do a wide-range of observations, completely disconnect and let your subconscious brain make connections which did not exist before. To be a successful and happy individual in life, you need both. Success, to some extent, can be chased by over-leveraging on analytical thinking. However, creativity is what lets your originality and authentic-self shine through leading to exponential jumps in career and in personal life. I am convinced at this point that you can’t be creative and analytical at the same point of time. The Grey here is to allot time for both creativity and analytical thinking in a given time interval so that on the whole your thinking style looks Grey.

So, get comfortable with grey and when given options A and B, choose C. Your identity is pretty much where you fall in this infinite-dimensional spectrum of grey. As you grow older you will add more dimensions and higher resolution to each of the spectrums, and continue taking a stand on where you fall within each of them making life richer and easier in the process.

Closing Thoughts: Living Fully

With the human life expectancy of ~79 years (CDC), turning 30 is a moment when you realize that life is short and long at the same time. I’ve always lived in competitive environments from my early childhood. I’ve forever been driven to reach some “goal” at any point in my life – get 100/100 marks, get that gold medal, get into a top university, get hired by a top company, get promoted every 2 years, etc. If I reach the goal I am awesome and acknowledged, otherwise I am a disaster and should rethink the purpose of my life. Interestingly, the society keeps manufacturing and surfacing these “goals” and has well-established, evolved multi-agent processes and reward structures around it. I kept my heads down and slogged tirelessly to see the end of this tunnel so I can finally start to… you know.. live, whatever that means. Somewhere in this daisy-chained rat race, my parents felt I was doing great on my own and let me drive by myself. Wait, what?! Where are you going?

By the time you are 30, you know a lot more about what you really want and what the world can offer. You realize that the world can give you a much richer and fuller life if you simply pause occasionally, look around, take a detour and smell those byway flowers rather than repeatedly devise optimized route plans and drive straight to the made-up destinations. It’s the journey that matters. Note that this does not mean you become less ambitious, in fact surprisingly you become highly ambitious on a lot of things.

Looking forward to the next decade of life!