31.5 - Time

Embark.

You know, getting older is weird.

My grandpa turned 100 years old a couple months ago. He’s my last grandparent. When I think back to his wife, my Abuelita, I remember a woman who purely loved me. I was a child the whole time I knew her. Even when I was older, I was child around her. Her grandchild. When she died, I aged 10 years in a day.

When I turned 10, my grandpa, the now 100 year old one, asked me if I felt any older now that I was double digits. I emphatically said no, as we drove along a winding highway in the hills of some mountain in the Sierras. I asked him the same question on his 100th birthday now that he has triple digits and he laughed and said he felt no different.

But this time I felt different, and I imagine when he asked me 21.5 years ago if I felt different, he felt different.

It’s very sad how little time we really have. I basically remember everything, and in some ways that’s amazing because I can relive moments of my life, but in other ways it’s terrible. It’s terrible because I remember the deltas. I remember the days I wasted, and how it was most of them.

I was a kid once. An ungrateful, unhappy, ready-to-grow-up kid. And then I got exactly what I wanted. I grew, I became muscular, my OCD calmed down, I got to access all of my brainpower, I bought a house in SF, I dated pretty girls, I made incredible friends, I patched things up with my family. I started a f**kin’ rock band and we’re actually like really good. All that stuff happened. But in a lot of ways it all feels like it happened to someone else.

I remember the moments along the way. Basically 100% of the moments when those things happened, but they don’t sink in. And as soon as there’s a new goal they stop mattering. Life moves really fast, and you only stop to realize how fast when something big happens.

I’m not here to talk about gratitude because I learned that lesson a long time ago, but I’m here to talk about time.

Time is magic and scary and healing, but it’s also brutal.

When I called my grandpa to wish him a happy 100th birthday, I also felt like I was acknowledging that I am 31.

31 is old. Old enough to have done things. Old enough to have learned hard lessons and collected regrets. Old enough to realize you cannot go backwards.

I’m gonna be 100 one day if I’m lucky, and that’s not too far off. And what’s even less far off is 50, and 40, and 35. I’m 31. I’m a grown adult man.

I’m not writing this to wish that I could go back and be young and stupid again. I’m writing this because I am the youngest I’ll ever be, and I never get to go back.

I never get to be with my parents and siblings in the cramped house we grew up in. I never get to fight with my brother, or listen to rock n roll with my dad on the way to school, or chat with my mom about nothing, or ask my sister what she thinks of a song I wrote. I never get to pet my old cats, or cuddle with the family dog, or see my best friend who lived around the corner.

That’s all gone.

Just a day would be so special. And I wasted basically a decade of them dissatisfied and wanting to be here, where I am today.

That’s especially terrifying because 40 year old Jack is going to be saying the same thing about 31 year old Jack and all the beautiful things I get to experience right now—watching my nieces grow up, being single and living in a big city, building a startup with my brother and working out of a cool office, being fit and healthy, making music with my friends, being a nobody—and I know that already, and I’m still doing the same things.

This last 6 months I’ve been heads down building the company. I haven’t really done much recording. I’ve done even less dating (and the dating I did reminded why I’ve done so little). I haven’t done much living at all. I work, I maybe go for a bike ride or hit the gym, I play a show here and there, and that’s pretty much my life.

There are fun moments along the way, don’t get me wrong, but those don’t really feel like anything. They get erased as quickly as they’re written.

I’m writing this the day of my grandpa’s 100th because this is probably the only time in months that I’m going to realize that you can’t bottle this stuff up. This is the first day I’ve felt alive in months and I spent the entirety of it working, spending the last 5 hrs fixing a bug (!).

You extrapolate that out.

If the company fails, you could argue it was a good ride, but it’s mostly just been really hard and forced me learn a lot while sacrificing years of my life.

If it works out, I’m still going to look back and think “man, that was a lot of time spent alone inside working.”

And I’m not saying I plan on quitting, quite the opposite really (in fact there’s a big update coming), but I do want to make sure I enjoy it, because no matter what you’re doing right now, what rainbow you’re on as Steve Jobs says, you’re on it, so make sure you like it and you actually live it.

I’m reading the Arthashastra right now. It’s a 1500 year old guide book on being the ruler of India. There are a lot of roles in India. It’s very different than USA 2025. One thing I’ve learned is I would not want to be king. You exist, you fulfill your duty day in and day out, and then you die.

You might as well live in a box. You might have concubines and power and wealth and all the things a 14 year old boy thinks are f**kin sick, but at 31 no amount of caged decadence is alluring to me. I don’t know, maybe having a role gives the purpose so many of us are seeking, but it doesn’t feel like it when it’s not yours to choose. It doesn’t feel like living, no matter how much prestige is conferred upon the king.

You could argue the same thing about being a CEO. The least interesting things to me are power or wealth or status (I might be lying, I’m not sure). But the thing that’s nice about doing your own thing is you get to decide what you do every day. Even if I have 0 concubines, I have unbounded capacity to create things. I feel alive almost exclusively when I’m creating things. For me, creation is life.

And every day you don’t is a day you’ve forfeited.

Every day you spend doing something other than something you find important is a waste.

Every day you squabble over asinine garbage is a waste.

Every argument. Every swipe or scroll or “next episode” is time you are giving away that you will never get back.

Life is such a gift.

Think right now. Take a second. Acknowledge that you are a floating soul controlling a carbon meat puppet with electricity. Like what!?

And you get this window into the world via a set eyes with this magical thing called consciousness. You.

How special is that? Doesn’t it feel like magic? You are somehow magically alive. You exist. You’re in your room, or on the bus going somewhere, or wherever you are. But you “are”. It’s pure. You get to walk and move around and talk to people and experience things and eat good food.

When you see a baby. Even when someone is pregnant. That is magic because it’s alchemizing life. It’s watching the creation of life. And life is a miracle. And you have it right now.

What a gift.

And in 45 seconds when your forget that, you’re going to teleport days forward, with this maybe being the last thing you remember before then. That’s terrible.

We live on auto-pilot.

There isn’t a ton of time to do things in life. You don’t get to raincheck indefinitely. You only get so many chances to fall in love. You only get so many chances to say sorry, or see that friend, or really go for it.

You only get so many boys trips to Whistler before kids come along, and then maybe you run that back when you’re 50, but then you have back pain and less energy.

You only get to move in one direction. You will blink and it’ll be February, and then Summer, and then the holidays, and you’ll do it again and it’ll happen again.

Chapters come to a close.

Do not waste your time.

You’re never going to feel ready to do that thing. You’re never going to feel 100% certain about that person, or that job, or that decision. But you do not get infinite chances. You don’t get to optimize because optimizing takes time. You don’t even get a bunch of chances. You get like 5. And every 2-3 years that go by while you waffle and argue and explore you forfeit a chance.

The best artists have maybe a few hits. The best entrepreneurs might have 1-2 products. The best investors might have 3-4 unicorns. The best writers maybe 2-3 stories worth telling.

I don’t want my 30s to continue moving so fast. I’ve been busy every day since I turned 30.

Part of that is cool. I am very good at what I do, in rock n roll, work, and life. But part of that is scary, because even if at 40 I’m successful and have a few kids and a great family life, my parents will be older, my siblings will be more distant, and my remaining youth further spent.

But this isn’t all negative. You don’t get infinite chances. You don’t get a lot. But you still get some.

You have 5 great adventures in your life. Or at least you can, but you must embark.

There is no adventure in your bedroom. There is no adventure while you’re waiting around for those fun plans coming tonight or next weekend, and in most cases those plans are meaningless too. There is no adventure in chasing likes online. There is no adventure getting angry at social media propaganda. As the Chinese proverb goes, there is no adventure unless you take the first step.

Im lucky. I’m on an adventure right now, but even adventures can become monotonous. There’s a lot of walking! And not every day needs to be fireworks, but you can be sure that if none of them are you’re doing something wrong.

The world isn’t fair. There is injustice everywhere. We are all just over-evolved monkeys riding a pendulum between the building of prosperity and the decay of decadence. We don’t have a ton of free will: our environment dictates our possible outcomes and actions, but we still have a few degrees of freedom.

You can start the family, or the business, or chase that curiosity all the way down the rabbit hole. If you have something in your gut telling you to act, that is god’s compass pointing you toward life. You don’t do it because people will care, you do it because the opposite is the void. It’s death. Do you really want to die without living?

Time is not on your side. It’s your biggest enemy in fact. But you can end the game with an even score if you choose to embark.

I’m going to continue making things. I’m going to keep trying to be a good man. And I’m going to try to be a little more intentional about living now, because life isn’t the milestones, it’s right now and it’s everything in between. It’s what you make and what you make of it. It’s adventure.

What will you do?

Jack