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The Terrible Mistake Most Twenty-Somethings Make

‘Living a life that’s not the same as the life that wants to live in you.’

Serge Faldin
6 min readOct 30, 2020
Photo by Evan Dvorkin on Unsplash

In 1999, Parker J. Palmer wrote an autobiographical book filled with anecdotes from his own youth, in which he described the process of finding one’s passion.

Palmer himself went through the same struggle many twenty-somethings go through today.

As an aspiring “ad man” in the sixties, he experienced a “gap” between what he actually wanted to do and what he was spending his life on doing.

After chasing “the fast car and other large toys that seemed to be the accessories [of] selfhood,” Palmer found himself completely lost, he woke up one day to a chilling realization: the life he was living was not the same as the life that wanted to live in him.

If you want to draw a modern analogy, think of all the budding twenty-year-old entrepreneurs and startup founders who want to become the next GaryVee or Mark Zuckerberg, only to realize one day that entrepreneurship wasn’t really what they wanted to do all along. And that they were in it solely for the money.

Palmer's situation was aggravated by the fact that he didn’t really know what his vocation was. There was no clear alternative for him. In fact, he didn’t find that…

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Serge Faldin
Serge Faldin

Written by Serge Faldin

Honest thoughts. Unpopular opinions. Not necessarily true or smart. | Bylines: The Guardian, Truthout, Meduza, Prospect | Personal essays: sergeys.substack.com

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