I heard talking in the hallway. A moment later, my mom entered the room, turned on the light, and sat on my bed. “He didn’t mean it like that, you know.” She rubbed me on the shoulder. “Your father can be a bit insensitive sometimes.”
“He did mean it like that.” I sat up and hugged my legs to my chest like a child. “He meant exactly what he said: I’m twenty-seven years old and have nothing to show on my resume. No breakaway success, no university degree, no neat stack of job titles and achievements. Nothing. I’m uneducated and have no specific skill set. I should take any job I can get because I’m basically worthless to society. There’s no need to sugar-coat what he meant, just because it upsets me.”
“You’re just a bit different, Nik.” She continued rubbing my back. “You’re a free-spirited creative and your father is a disciplined doctor. He loves you very much, and he does what he needs to do for this family. You know he is always standing right behind you, ready to support you. You know he is your number one fan.”
“I know.” A tear ran down my cheek. “And I appreciate that. I just wish I was actually good at something. You both worked so hard to give me the best education and every opportunity in life, and I’m not even good at anything. I have nothing to show for all Dad’s sacrifice, and all the years he woke up at four a.m. every morning so he could afford to send four kids to boarding school. Here I am, standing on the world’s tallest podium of privilege, and I’m still a fuckup.”
“You’re not a screwup.”
“I said fuckup, Mom. ‘Fuck’ is just a sequence of letters that society has arbitrarily agreed is inappropriate. And I’m sick of being fucking inappropriate to society.” I sniffled. “Your daughter talks like a real lady.”
“You’re not a fuckup, then.”
I held up my finger in protest. “Technically, I am. Despite my privileged circumstances and all my natural talent, all I do is fuck up. Therefore, I’m a fuckup. It’s very simple logic.” I choked back another tear. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this world! I just — I just — I just feel like the world doesn’t want people like me in it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, my burrito is too full! There’s too much in it. It’s just an overflowing chaotic mess. I wouldn’t have asked for all of these ingredients if I knew they wouldn’t fit. I want to be a nice, neat, orderly burrito, but I’m not.”
“I don’t underst-”
“Nevermind,” I shook my head. “I just don’t know who I’m supposed to be, Mom. I don’t know how to be happy unless I’m being creative and following my curiosity. But the world doesn’t want my rogue creativity, and it doesn’t care about my various random interests. The world just wants the same, specific, predictable shit done incrementally better. The world just wants me to sit down at a desk and sell a tube of lip gloss. That’s what people pay for: diet tea and lip plumping kits. I can’t work on pointless drivel. I just can’t! Like, I literally can’t focus on something my mind doesn’t want to focus on. I try really hard, and I just can’t.”
“That ‘pointless drivel’ is valuable to someone.”
“Ugh, I know. I’m such a snobby hypocrite. I buy lip gloss too. It just seems so meaningless, though. I don’t deeply care about all these things society cares about, and the stuff I do care about has no monetary value. No one wants to pay for my creative chaos. They only want to pay for order. I just can’t work on mind-numbing, purposeless tasks.”
“People do it every day, Nikki. That’s life. You have to survive.”
“I don’t want to survive! I want to live. Otherwise, what’s the point? If I can’t exist in this world by being myself, then who am I supposed to be? I may as well just kill myself now. I'll just run off to another dimension.”
“Don’t joke about that,” she said. “Please don’t joke about that. You have a family that loves you and a very good life.”
“Sorry,” I sniffled. “I meant that as a philosophical question, not literally. I’m not literally going to kill myself. It’s just — I dunno. I just look at some people and they seem so happy doing nice, orderly jobs in their nice, orderly life. And I just wish I was born like that. I wish I could be happy doing that. I really do. Sometimes I get so envious that that’s enough for them. I wish it was enough for me.
God, I just — I just — I just really hate myself sometimes. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but that’s the truth. I hate my mind. I hate it. Why won’t it function like a normal person? I just wish I was passionate about, I dunno, being a nurse or something lovely and admirable and useful like that. Or being a sales rep, and just being passionate about selling stuff. You can always make money if you’re good at sales. I dunno. Ugh.” I held my head in my hands. “I’ve never said that out loud before and now I sound like such a snobby, judgemental, holier-than-thou bitch. Not that those people aren’t... ugh. I dunno. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
I lay down on the bed and crossed my arms over my eyes to block the light. “I know I sound like a brat and shouldn’t complain. But I just don’t know how to live like this! I obviously suck at being an entrepreneur. I don’t even think I want to build these tech products anymore. I just feel complete apathy towards it all. So then what? I’ve spent ten years building up a useless skill set?” I uncrossed my arms and looked at my mom. “Oh wait — I forgot. I don’t have any skills. I’m twenty-seven years old with nothing to show on my resume. Self-taught skills don’t count in Dad’s eyes.”
My mother grimaced.
“I just want to be successful at something, Mom. I feel like all I ever do is fail, and fail, and fail — all the goddamn time. And the only thing I’ve ever been successful at was becoming the poster child for fucking it up with some semblance of grace when I was twenty-two. Awesome. That’s what I always dreamed of for my career: being that girl who failed really well, and told the world about it.”
“Look, Nik,” she said. “You are incredibly talented. You just haven’t found your niche yet. Your father and I have always said you’re a good writer. You used to love creative writing as a child. Maybe you can write a book. A story.”
“About what?”
“Whatever you want. You’re full of ideas. I always told you you should’ve written that compilation of failure stories after your blog post went viral. So many people reached out to you with their story, but you never followed through.”
“I know,” I sighed. “I was enthused about it at first, but then I quickly became the poster child for failure. Did I tell you I had agents reaching out, wanting to get me on the speaking circuit? I did all the media interviews that came my way, not because I wanted to, but because I thought it would help people, and no one else was doing it. You know, I just wanted to disappear. And then I looked around at all my friends who were charging forward in life and finding success, and the last thing I wanted to do was focus on my failure. I did my bit for society, and then I just wanted everyone to go away and leave me alone.”
“But you’re not a failure, Nikki. Your business failed, but you’re not a failure. You just need to pick yourself up and try again. Maybe try something different this time. You need to play to your strengths, and you’re not a very methodical, detail-oriented person. Either team up with someone like your sister to do the practical stuff, or get out of startups and channel your creative energy into something you can do on your own — like writing.”
“I’ve tried teaming up multiple times,” I said. “I just build these things, and then I feel trapped inside my own creation. Once I’ve learned how to do something, my interest in it wanes, and I become obsessed with something completely different. It’s like I’m building these structures around my passion, but my passion and curiosity are changing way faster than I can build them, and I can’t keep up. Society keeps telling me I need to stick with one thing and do it well, but I just — I dunno — I just can’t. I can’t focus properly. My mind literally will not focus. I’m being pulled all over the place. And it’s not like I’m not doing anything. It’s not like I’m watching Netflix all day. I’m working, but I’m just working on stuff that no one is paying me for.”
Mom looked concerned. “Are you still spending your time researching this holographic idea you keep talking about?”
“Yes,” I sniffled.
“Nikki,” she sighed, “you’re twenty-seven, and I worry about you. I’m not saying you have to make a lot of money, but your father and I need to know that you can support yourself consistently. How much are you paying yourself right now?”
“About two thousand a month,” I replied. “I like nice things as much as the next person, but I don’t need much to live on. I put everything else back into the business.”
“Do you have any savings?”
“No. I spend all my money on learning new things and paying for basic living expenses.”
“And yet you’re spending all your time on unpaid work? Nikki, come on. Your father and I want you to be happy and chase your dreams, but you need to be practical about it. I don’t understand why you’re spending all your time and money on something that doesn’t have an ROI. Maybe you can work on fun projects that don’t make any money once you’ve got savings and passive income sources, but you’re putting everything into something that makes no sense. Why do that?”
“Because I can’t not do it, Mom!” I cried in frustration. “The entire scientific establishment is obviously wrong, and no one is doing anything about it! God! What is wrong with people?! Why is everyone so blind?! The physicists are mad! It’s like they’re standing in a crystal clear lake full of simple answers, but they choose to kick up the mud because they love wallowing in their own self-created complexity. I just care very deeply about the world, and it frustrates me that no one is doing anything!
Have you even been watching the world lately? Have you been observing it? Something sick is brewing, and I don’t like it. It’s like society is developing an autoimmune disease. I just get this queasy feeling in my stomach when I think about it. I don’t like where this is going. I don’t like it at all.
A real zero-to-one technological breakthrough is the only hope we have for saving humanity from itself, but we don’t even understand our own source code yet, and the clock is ticking. If no one is working on this problem, then what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to just turn a blind eye and earn my money selling lip plumping kits, then turn around and spend that money on another pair of shoes that I do not need? Am I supposed to do that while the world goes to shit? I can’t. I just can’t be complicit in society’s ignorant scheme. Humans are going to completely fuck up the world one day, and it will be my fault if I just let it happen. There is a big difference between what is good and right, and what is comfortable and practical. So I don’t care if this riddle drains me of every cent and every hour of my life — at least I’m going to damn well try. Because if not me, then who? And if not now, then when?”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Well, if you’re set on this path, then you need to think about how you’re going to support yourself while you do it. You can keep it as a side project if you get a job to fund it.”
“But it’s so hard to do that,” I moaned. “It’s like trying to run high-level abstractions in my mind while wasting compute cycles on low-level, mundane programs. My brain doesn’t work like that. I can run both high-level and low-level programs, but not at the same time. Something’s inevitably going to break. And CodeMakers is still running, so I’ve got to maintain that too.”
“Why don’t you fully focus on CodeMakers?”
“I just feel complete apathy towards it, and I don’t know why. It doesn’t make any sense! I’m hoping I can try something else to get my creative mojo back, then refocus on CodeMakers. The teachers are running the whole thing at the moment, and I can still complete my existing commitments part-time.”
“Go and sell it then.”
I shook my head. “I just can’t look at it right now. I just can’t.”
“Okay,” Mom sighed. “What about-”
“And the annoying thing is,” I interjected, “that normally you can raise money to fund high-risk, long-term chaotic projects like this.”
“Why don’t you do that, then?”
“Because the market can’t price this properly. Academia has been trying to solve this problem for the past century, and the brightest minds in the world are stuck. If they can’t solve this problem, why would anyone believe I can? You don’t even think that I can do it.”
“I never said that-”
“I can tell you don’t understand it. You don’t see the value in it, but you’re going to support me because I’m your daughter, and you’re the world’s best mom.”
“I-”
“You’ve seen how Dad chuckles at me, as if my weird ideas are cute and whimsical. You’ve seen Hamish roll his eyes at me. And that’s just in my own family. What you haven’t seen are all the times I’ve sat in a cafe, in a pretty dress, working on my laptop, when a man sits next to me. We start chatting, and he finds out that I run an online coding school, and that I can actually write a line of code myself. You haven’t seen the look of surprise on his face — like something is not quite computing properly. Every. Single. Time. It’s the same look. They subtly try to marry the image of a somewhat conventional-looking female with a bubbly personality and a lovely feminine summer dress, with the stereotype in their head. And they can’t do it subtly, even though they know they shouldn’t make assumptions about my intelligence or my interests because, you know, sexism and all that fun stuff.
I can always see it. Usually, they don’t believe me. So they ask again, just to clarify that they interpreted the situation correctly: this female in front of me is simultaneously feminine, friendly, and perhaps even on par or surpassing my own intelligence.
And I know if Dad was in this room right now, he’d say, ‘Well that’s very modest of you, Nikki.’ Dad doesn’t like it when I say I’m good at something, because humility and modesty is a virtue when you live in a small country town. It’s okay if everyone else tells me what I’m good at and who I am, but if I say I’m intelligent or good at something, then that’s inappropriate — even if it’s true.
So, circling back to this idea of getting all my creative chaos funded by someone else. It’s not worth the trouble. I have zero credentials. I approach the problem in a completely counterintuitive way, which is very difficult to explain in a short pitch — it just makes me sound ‘woo woo,’ delusional and mad. Plus, nine out of ten physicists are men, so everyone thinks the answer is going to come from someone who looks like them and has their physics background. That’s just basic Bayesian rationality. I don’t even have a successful track record to rely on, because everything I’ve touched has failed. There is literally nothing about me that would indicate that I can solve this riddle, so I’m very easy to put in a box. The message I get from society is crystal clear: leave this difficult problem to the big boys and go back to working with fashion, or children, or something lovely and feminine like that.”
