There's a particular kind of quiet you only get at 22. It usually shows up around 11 PM or 7 AM (for graveyard folks like me), after the work messages stop and you've closed the last tab, and you find yourself sitting there with the unmoving weight of the question you can't actually answer: am I doing this right?
In my version of that moment, the screen is usually still glowing with something about AI. A new framework. A new model release. A headline about a job category that didn't exist five years ago and might not exist five years from now. I'm trying to learn a platform I'll be expected to teach in two months. I'm reading about something that will probably reshape the way I do my job before I've finished onboarding into it. Underneath all of it sits the same low, persistent hum: everyone else seems to have a plan. I don't have a plan. The plan doesn't exist anymore.
We diagnose this feeling, collectively, as anxiety in your twenties. We treat the absence of certainty as a personal failure. Proof that we aren't adapting fast enough to a world that has somehow, uniquely, fallen apart on our watch.
But the world hasn't uniquely fallen apart. We're just uniquely new to it.
Uncertainty isn't new. Adulthood is.
The trick of distance
It's easy, from the inside of your twenties, to look back ten years and see something that resembles stable ground. 2016 looks settled. 2010 looks downright pastoral. We assume the people who became adults in those years were handed a coherent script. School, job, ladder, home, retirement. We assume the ground only started moving once we stepped onto it.
This is a trick of distance.
The twentysomethings of 2016 were stepping into an adulthood being rewritten in real time by the attention economy, mass platforming, and a politics nobody had vocabulary for yet. The twentysomethings of 2009 graduated into the wreckage of a financial collapse so total it ended entire industries. The twentysomethings of the early 2000s walked into the dot com crash. The ones in the 70s walked into stagflation and the quiet death of the postwar dream. None of them experienced their decade as stable. They were guessing. They felt late. They were terrified that whatever script their parents had used was no longer running.
The ground has always been moving. The only reason it ever looked still to us is that we weren't the ones standing on it yet. We weren't paying rent, or holding a career together, or watching an industry mutate in real time. We weren't responsible. It wasn't our turn yet.
The world was never stable. We just weren't responsible yet.
What feels unprecedented isn't the chaos. It's the proximity.
The alarm underneath the dread
Knowing this intellectually doesn't actually turn the feeling off. You can read every essay about historical instability and still wake up at 2 AM convinced your industry will be unrecognizable before you've had time to find your footing in it. Knowing why you're afraid doesn't make the fear smaller. So what's actually happening in there?
Think about what happens when you accidentally touch a boiling kettle. You don't decide to pull your hand away. Your hand is already moving before you've even processed what happened. Your body doesn't ask for your opinion. It rips you away from the thing that's going to hurt you, and it does it in milliseconds, because the version of you that thinks first and acts second doesn't survive a hot stove. Pain isn't your enemy in that moment. Pain is the only reason your hand is still attached to your wrist.
Your brain runs on the same logic for almost everything it considers a threat. It wants the world to be controllable. It wants situations to have predefined conclusions. And when something refuses to behave that way, when something is uncertain by nature, like a career or an exam or an interview, your brain doesn't say this is uncertain, sit with it. Your brain says this is a hot kettle. It floods your body with the same alarm system it would use to save your hand, and it tells you to do something. Plan. Prepare. Worry. Refresh the inbox. Rehearse the answer. Anything that resembles control.
The anxiety you feel about an unpredictable future isn't a malfunction. It's your body trying to protect you using the only tools it has, applied to a kind of threat those tools were never designed for.
Understanding this is the part that actually changes something. Not because the alarm gets quieter, but because you stop mistaking it for the truth. When you know your body is running a survival program written for hot kettles and approaching predators, you can start to notice the difference between I am in danger and my body thinks I am in danger. You can let the alarm go off without obeying it. You can feel the spike of dread before an interview and recognize it as the same wiring that once kept your ancestors alive, now slightly miscalibrated for a Zoom call.
And when everything starts to feel like an emergency, you can remember that when everything is an emergency, nothing is. A body in constant alarm stops being able to tell signal from noise. The cost of treating every email, every deadline, every comparison as a predator is that you lose the ability to react when something actually deserves it. Composure isn't the absence of fear. It's the discipline of letting your body's alarm system run in the background while you, the part of you that can think across more than the next five minutes, decide what to do next. That is what it means to act with intention. Not to feel nothing. To feel the alarm, name it, and move anyway.
A few months ago I stood on a TEDx stage and tried to explain it. The short version is that our brains are running software written for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Thousands of years ago, when our ancestors felt the environment shifting around them, when the herds moved or the climate turned or the predators got closer, that feeling wasn't called anxiety. It was called survival. It was the alarm system that pulled them out of complacency and forced them to move, adapt, migrate. Without that alarm, they died. The people whose alarms went off too loudly stayed alive long enough to pass that wiring down to us.
Now multiply that across a few hundred thousand years. The wiring never changed. What changed was the environment.
We don't get chased by leopards anymore. We get chased by hiring cycles, performance reviews, model releases, and algorithmically curated evidence that someone our age is doing better than we are. The brain doesn't know the difference. It reads "your industry is changing faster than you can keep up" as the exact same signal our ancestors got when the river dried up. Move. Adapt. Or you will not survive this.
The modern world has, in a sense, industrialized our survival instinct. It has taken our evolutionary dread of instability and fed it a steady diet of push notifications, layoff announcements, and comparative timelines. The alarm hasn't gotten louder because the danger is real. It has gotten louder because the inputs are constant.
Imposter syndrome is part of that same system. When our ancestors migrated into a new valley, the unfamiliarity itself was useful information. You are not from here yet. Pay attention. Stay alive. When you walk into a new job, or a new room, or onto a stage, your brain runs the same routine. Feeling like you don't belong yet is not a bug. It is your survival instinct correctly recognizing that you have entered new territory. It is, oddly, proof that the system is working.
The instinct is not wrong about the stakes. It is wrong about the strategy. No amount of planning beats an instinct, and no amount of planning beats a moving world.
The lone wolf trap
The natural response to all of this is to try harder. Plan harder. Optimize harder. Lock down the variables. Read every newsletter. Take every course. Build every skill. If the world is going to keep changing under your feet, you reason, then the answer must be to outrun the change. To become so prepared, so polished, so individually capable, that no amount of instability can knock you over.
I tried this. It almost broke me.
A few years before I ever stood on that TEDx stage, my father had a stroke. I was on the edge of starting college. I didn't have language yet for what I was feeling, so I did what a lot of young men do when life suddenly stops making sense. I decided I would handle it alone. I would be the lone wolf. I would figure it out by sheer force of will, and when I had figured it out, then I would let people back in.
I shut the world out for about three months.
The lone wolf strategy is seductive because it sounds like maturity. It sounds like ownership. It sounds like the kind of thing successful people on the internet recommend doing. But biologically, it is the exact opposite of what our species was designed for. Our ancestors did not survive predators by going off alone. They survived by taking turns sleeping so somebody was always watching for danger. The lone wolves in our evolutionary history did not pass their genes down to us. They got eaten.
Three months of being alone with my own alarm system did not make the alarm quieter. It made it louder. Because the thing the alarm was actually asking for, the thing it had been asking for since the savanna, was not a better plan. It was other people.
The free food event
I broke the lone wolf streak almost by accident. The first thing I did was join something called the Jollibree Project (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094425204258), feeding street children. I told myself I was doing it to be useful. I think I was actually doing it because I needed to be around people again and didn't know how to ask. What I learned, with some embarrassment, was that you do not need to have your own life fully figured out before you start showing up for other people. The two things happen in parallel. Sometimes the second is how you survive long enough to do the first.
Later, I went to a tech event for the free food.
The story I usually tell when I'm telling it well is that I was 20 and broke, and I went because dinner was included. What I found at the event wasn't the food. It was the conversations. People talking about cloud platforms and certifications and architectures in a way that nobody at my university was. I went home that night thinking less about what I'd eaten and more about what was missing back where I came from.
As my mentor told me: "We go for the swags and food, we stayed for the community"
And I told to anyone who wants to join to any communities: You don't attend to contribute, you attend to belong.
What I ended up building out of that gap became, eventually, a national tech community of almost 10,000 members across dozens of chapters. None of that was planned. It came from noticing something missing and walking into it. From mentors like Raphael Jambalos, Raphael Quisumbing, Joshua Arvin Lat, and Jon Bonso who reminded me, repeatedly, that nobody scales anything alone. From the slow, accumulating realization that everything I was most proud of in my twenties had been built with other people, not in spite of them.
Our ancestors didn't cross continents because they had a map. They moved because the environment moved first, and they were responsive to it. They didn't solve uncertainty. They survived it together. That is not a metaphor. That is the literal mechanism by which our species made it this far. Connection wasn't an emotional luxury. It was, and still is, a survival technology.
The two things at once
So there are actually two things to hold here, not one.
The first is that the world was never stable. Every generation before us walked into a version of this same room. They felt late. They felt unequipped. They felt the ground move under them. They were not given a plan, and they did not figure life out. They navigated it. The reason it feels unprecedented to us is not that the chaos is unique. It is that the responsibility is.
The second is that we were never supposed to navigate it alone. The same biology that makes uncertainty feel like a predator also gave us the only real defense against it, which is each other. The brain that screams at you to control the uncontrollable is the same brain that, if you let it, will calm down the moment it realizes it is not the only one keeping watch.
You are not failing because you don't have a clear plan for a world that's mutating in real time. You can't solve an ongoing mutation. You can only stay close to it. Keep learning. Keep adapting. Keep building the small handful of relationships that will let you read the terrain you can't see yet. That is what your twenties are actually for. Not figuring it out. Learning, slowly, that figuring it out was never the assignment.
The world was never stable. We just weren't responsible yet.
And we were never meant to face it alone.
That is not the bad news. That is the part that makes it survivable!
Find your people. Keep watching for each other. The rest is just the work!
A version of these ideas also became the foundation of a recent TEDx talk I gave on uncertainty, migration, and why humans were never meant to survive alone.
You can Watch my TedX talk that complements this blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAlC4lVCsNw
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