7 Quotes That Every 20-Something Needs to Think About

The unexamined life is not worth writing blog posts about.

When I was 22, I was all over the place.

I get that it’s “normal” to be that way in your 20s, but for me, my life was built on extremes. I needed extreme highs to feel good, extreme lows to change my behavior, and extreme goals to get myself out of bed in the morning.

This picture sums up 22 pretty well for me. My gold medals and goofy smiles hide my craving for self-destruction, reinvention, and a different kind of growth. I just wanted to burn shit, and I channeled that “burning desire” into martial arts. I was pretty lucky I got hooked on something.

At 22, I was succeeding in most aspects of my life, but I was also an idiot. I could fight, but I couldn’t have meaningful personal relationships, I wasn’t super kind, and I didn’t like myself much, no matter what I achieved.

I liked to think I was smart because I was reading Solzhenitsyn, Nietzsche, and Viktor Frankl when my college classmates were discovering weed and going out for “thirsty Thursdays”, but not even my scholarly behavior made me “smart”. It just made me my own special kind of dumb.

From ages 17–23, I was one minor injury away from binge eating and drinking, hurting…