On turning 30

Contra my previous Thoughts on 29, I did not just turn 30. I started being 30 almost a year ago, and I will soon stop being 30 and start being 31. This is a new writing technique I recently learned of called the non-prophetic perfect tense, in which you describe past events that are so certain to have happened that you refer to them in the past tense as if they had already happened. Because they did.

Turning 30 was the best thing that ever happened to me, in large part because it implies I also successfully turned 1, 2, …,and 29. If past trends continue to predict future trends, turning 31 will be the best thing that ever happens to me in about a month, and then 32 after that. It is an opulent feast to be here, among Earth, and I truly without a hint of irony or cynicism mean that.

We had a baby.

A beautiful, healthy, smiling baby boy!

Finland has some of the highest paternity leave on Earth and I am taking full advantage of it as we speak. Anyone who knows me knows that ever since I was a young teenager being a family man, wife and kids, has been like, Priority Numero Uno on my list of life goals, and now I have that. And… You know how there are people who say stuff like “I’m happiest chasing the goal, but when I actually achieve the goal I’m kind of like meh about it?”

Yeah, not a fucking chance with this one buddy. I am so much happier to have a smiling, wiggling, pooping, drooling, laughing, eyes-shining and mouth-wide-open little bundle of joy in my life. By all accounts, so is my darling wife Jenni. My only wish is that I could have had both of them in my life 5 years earlier!

I reached 1000 days without drinking.

I don’t have much to say about this here! Precious few lives are straightforwardly better without alcohol in them, given its importance in fostering social connections to the point where the ethanol molecule might as well be its own semantic prime - but mine absolutely is. I was not a social drinker. I was a “My life sucks and I refuse to put in the work to make it suck less” drinker. If this resonates a chord with you, I suggest you read Hotel Concierge’s “Shame and Society”, then everything else they ever wrote, then figure out which player character you are:

Incentivized nihilism is not unique to our when, 
where, or who. Through my Campbellian analysis 
of godawful coming-of-age genre fiction, I have 
determined that tests of ingroup loyalty allow 
for three deferrals:

1. “I’m too naive to respond.”
2. “I’m too angry [at the outgroup] to respond.”
3. “I’m in too much pain to respond.”

: And finally get to work on being less that way.¹

I reestablished contact with my parents.

Now this is an interesting turn of events. This one I’m going to talk about for a little longer, just to tie things into a neat little bow.

Reader, I first want to be up front with you and say I do not regret going no contact with them for the time that I did. They heard nothing from me whatsoever for two years, and when I finally reached back out I was both embraced with open arms and - more importantly - embraced with an explicit understanding that if any of that REDACTED bullshit happens again, the next time I’m not coming back. You’re still allowed to insist others treat you the way you treat them.

Part of the reason for the landslide that happened was, fortunately, money-related. I say “fortunately” because any time you’re dealing with money and family, it’s pretty easy to work things out to some nontrivial degree, compared to e.g. substance abuse (haha…) or misalignment on what is most important to achieve in what order in life (haha… oops).

My Finnish career arc has fostered a surprising amount of conflict resolution and negotiation skill development for someone who still thinks of himself as an upgraded sysadmin. I brought all those refined techniques to bear when I finally broached the topic. Probably the most important such technique was not broaching the topic at all until almost a full year of good, solid, non-resentment-filled rapport has been rebuilt. Fortune favors the prepared mind, in a way at least.

Lo and behold, with a cool head and a few note cards, we were able to reach a satisfactory conclusion on the financial front after about ten minutes of talking, and now we are all considerably happier. Sometimes you have to accept the other person screwed up and can’t offer you full recompense, and sometimes you have to accept that you screwed up and shouldn’t expect full recompense. C’est la vie, e pur si muove, ei yksi kauan naura.

Ultimately the money was a side issue, though. The real reason I came around was because I didn’t want to bring a child into this world² and cut them off from 50% of their family tree just because grandma and grandpa were kind of assholes about REDACTED and REDACTED (and maybe dad himself about REDACTED). Sometimes that is justified if they are real monsters, but that just wasn’t the case here. It would feel downright dismissive to the future child’s own powers of good future judgment to make that choice for them in this case.

Anyway, yeah, we’re back in touch. If you are in the Boston area feel free to let me know. We may well end up visiting in a few short years.

I got back on Twitter.

https://x.com/hiAndrewQuinn for those of you not yet in the know. I’m actually on summer social media holiday right now, or somekesäloma as we call it here in Suomi, so I’m not posting there currently, but I’ll be back soon enough.

I’ve had a handful of tweets and threads go viral since starting. My aim is simple: I want to say things which lead to important or interesting thoughts, in ways I haven’t quite seen done before, and in ways which I myself would actually want to read.

That last part is crucial if you haven’t been on Twitter before. Anyone who is interesting there is playing up an at least partly fictionalized version of themselves, like a smart guy’s idea of a dumb guy’s pantomime of them. I am not only no exception to this, I am in some ways its final form. In many of my most popular tweets, if you read between the lines, you will find all kinds of subtle errors and disses hidden for the very kinds of people who love them. Some scant few of those are intentional. I relish the feeling of seeing a thread start to hit 100, 200 likes, and then seeing one guy who actually Gets It go “wait what the fuck this actually makes no sense”. Being wrong in obscure and terrible ways on the Internet has always been my ikigai.

I found the soul is a gift.

I don’t have much else to talk about, so I want to close on this point. You might disagree with it in its entirety philosophically, but I think you’ll at least agree it’s a charming sentiment.

Fundamentally, I think consciousness is a gift. Nothing else has ever come close in explanatory power for me around this topic. I have felt it in my bones from day one, the only true source of all our supposed knowledge if we were to dig deep for it. I have never found a satisfying deflationary argument to the contrary.

There is absolutely no reason consciousness “has” to be here. Every machine would continue to hum along like clockwork. Every businessman would continue to make their deals. And the world would continue to elaborate, folding over and over its riches upon itself like a delicate French pastry. But there would be no one at the table to eat it. A museum with no visitors.

I want to point out one thing the gift hypothesis has going for it: If you have been given a gift, it means someone gave it to you. Presumably because they like you. And the bigger the gift is, the more they like you. What is the biggest gift of all? The gift that allows all others - existence, itself.

I don’t think such a gift giver would force this gift upon those who they think truly would not want it. It seems against their nature. I don’t even necessarily think the gift is always wanted. But neither do I think I get to bite the hand that feeds. The receiver of a gift has no ground to take it back and say “This is nice, but I wanted one in blue.”

All I can do is wake up every day and choose what I want to do with it. Throw it away? Cherish it? Cherish it I will, for as long as I have legs to carry it.

I’ll see you on the dark side of 31, everyone.