Life advice from afar (a letter to my niece)

When I was 13 years younger, I was moved by love and work. With job offers in hand, my Australian spouse and I sold our belongings in a slapdash yard sale and replanted ourselves in Sydney. 

Life is great here. The city is safe, and the weather is beautiful. My job is deeply meaningful, and we couldn’t ask for a better place to raise our family.

But there is one very palpable downside: my side of the family is as far away as it gets, on the east coast of the USA. If you overshoot your destination flying out to visit in either direction, then you’ve essentially started your return journey.

FaceTime and Facebook Messenger help shrink the distance, but every bit helps. And one of those bits — of all things — was my niece’s 12th grade English assignment.

Her class had reached the point in Hamlet where Polonius gives his mixed bag of life advice to his son, who is leaving home: “to thine own self be true”, “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, “give thy thoughts no tongue”. (If you’re more familiar with the recent works of Taylor Swift, Polonius was the nobleman whose eldest daughter was Ophelia.) The class assignment: to ask an older family member for a letter of advice, given that many of the students would soon be leaving home themselves. The honor was mine.

With my niece’s permission, I’m sharing what I wrote below, just in case you’re looking around for advice that someone in your life might find helpful. Take it for what it’s worth; I may be a psychology professor, but even mountains of book-learning don’t necessarily amount to a hill of wisdom in this crazy world. We all do our best.

December 12, 2024

Dear Abby,

Do you like computer games? I can’t say that I ever really have, with one exception. When I was about 12, I loved a game called Zork. There were no graphics. Instead, it was an interactive text-based adventure where you explored the Great Underground Empire by typing instructions: “Go north.” “Take the banana.” “Hit the gnome with the banana.” If the battery of your lantern ran out, you would find yourself in the dark and would read the terrifying words “you are likely to be eaten by a grue”.

Drawing by 18-year-old Uncle Steve. Could this be a grue?

(A grue, it was explained, is a “sinister, lurking presence in dark places of the earth with insatiable appetite. Of those who have seen grues, few ever survived to tell the tale. Grues have sharp claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle.”)

Anyhoo… there was a running theme to Zork that actually had a profound impact on my philosophy of life. Almost everywhere you went in the Great Underground Empire, you would find random objects that had no obvious purpose, like a placemat or a letter opener. You quickly learned that you should take these things and carry them with you, because at some point later they would come in handy for dealing with the hazards, challenges, and puzzles that came your way.

(Have you found your way blocked by a solid locked door, with something plugging the keyhole from the other side? Now would be a good time to think about how you might use the placemat and letter opener you've been lugging.)

What does this have to do with advice about life? Well, here’s the thing: as you – Abby – venture out on your own, life will throw a lot of puzzles, challenges, and hazards your way. But life also gives you tools that will come in handy for dealing with them – they’re just not always easy to recognize as such. Many people don’t, because you have to be clever and creative enough to recognize them as valuable in the first place, even if you don’t know what for yet. These tools don’t take the form of placemats, letter openers, or bananas. Instead, they take the form of experiences.

So my first piece of advice is to seek out new experiences to carry with you. Your life’s story is yours to write, and your experiences are the ink.

What’s more, you may discover that experiences that seem unrelated to other parts of your life wind up being important in ways you never could have foreseen. For example, when I was in college, I never could have guessed that the time I spent performing on stage or competing on the fencing team would eventually have as big an impact on my career as a professor as my actual academics did – maybe even more so. But they did, by helping me learn how to communicate with an audience and how to bounce back from defeats. Sometimes, the side projects we pursue out of passion wind up being far more than the distractions they initially seem to be.

Here's my second piece of advice: choose your regrets! Our big brains are great for imagining possibilities. But that means our brains are also talented at dwelling on things that could’ve been. The smarter and more creative you are, the better you’ll be at coming up with things to regret. But there are different kinds of regrets… things you wish you hadn’t done and things you wish you had. The second is worse than the first. All other things being equal, choose to risk regretting the roads taken rather than the ones passed by.

(Caveat: sometimes what seems like one opportunity is secretly a choice between two, for example between taking that promotion and spending time with one's kids. People don’t realize this if they are taking the “secret” second opportunity for granted. I think this caveat becomes more salient as people get older and maybe have a family of their own.)

Third piece of advice: people, people, people. Almost everywhere you go, there will be people. I think some people would be surprised to realize this because they have been seduced by their screens. Social media, streaming entertainment, and phone apps are designed to vacuum up our attention, but they are often empty calories. The more you share moments with others, become part of each other’s stories, and learn from their experiences, the richer your own world will be. The more you see through others’ eyes, the more you live beyond the sum of your years. In college, get to know your fellow students and your professors. Sometimes their experiences will change you as much as your own experiences do.

Final piece of advice: get lost. Sometimes, the best way to find your way is to lose your way. Sometimes, everything will seem to have gone wrong and you won’t know what to do. As you get older, the roads people have paved for you lead you to overgrown wilderness, where you have to beat your own path. That’s daunting but great, and in beating it you can pave the way for others. When things seem overwhelming, think of movies like Moana, Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, where everything came crashing down on the hero, making things seem hopeless. What happened next? Not only did our heroes finally find their way out of the darkness, but those moments of lostness were crucial to their transformation and newfound strength. It’s one of the most common narrative structures in stories from around the world, known as the “Hero’s Journey”. You’re on your own hero’s journey… if things ever seem hopeless, remember that this is the crucible where you can – eventually – find your own strength. When the world seems overwhelming, it means you’re seeing how big it is… and that’s pretty exciting.

So there you have it: Uncle Steve’s guide to life. Chase experiences, choose your regrets, forge connections with people, and get lost. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in the dark, but this is where I think Zork needs a tweak: When you find yourself in the dark, you are likely to have found that you grew.

Good luck!

Love,

Uncle Steve