Accept It: You're Not Normal

I have met many people who are unhappy with their jobs. When I ask what they would do instead, about 75% of them say something like: "Hmm, I don't know. I'd like to open a little coffee shop!" If I am in a good mood that day, I ask a follow-up: "So where would you source your coffee beans?"

If they cannot answer, I keep going:

• Which coffee cups are the best?
• How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
• Would you bake your own pastries or buy them from a supplier?
• What POS system would you use at the register?
• How would you schedule your employees?
• What will you do when a staff member calls you at 6 AM to say they cannot come in due to severe diarrhea?

The point of the "Coffee Beans" method is this: if you cannot answer these questions — or if they do not even interest you — then you should not open your little coffee shop, because that is exactly what you will be doing every single day as the owner of that coffee shop.

You will not be sitting in a soft armchair sipping a latte and greeting regulars while flipping through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small hot-caffeinated-water business every morning at 6 AM.

The Coffee Beans method is what psychologists call unpacking. Our imagination is naturally limited — it cannot hold all details simultaneously. (If it could, we would face the Borges map problem: a map containing every detail of the territory would have to be the same size as the territory itself.)

Unpacking is the process of restoring all the small details our brain has "compressed" in order to form a quick mental image of our future. It is like turning a napkin sketch into a full, final blueprint.

When people struggle to figure out what to do with their lives, it often simply means they have not done any unpacking. In graduate school, for example, I frequently encountered students who were convinced they wanted to become professors. I would send them to my PhD student Dan, and he would unpack them in seconds. "I do this," Dan would say, miming typing on a keyboard. "And then I do this," he would add, pointing from himself to the student. "I write research papers and talk to students. Would you want to do this every single day?"

Most students reacted immediately: "Oh, no — I don't want to do that." It had never occurred to them what a professor's life actually consists of. If you could peek inside their heads, you would likely see a cartoon where they stride across campus in a tweed jacket humming, "I'm a professor, here I am!" — and everyone waves cheerfully. Or more likely there is no image at all, just a thought looping endlessly: "Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I don't know. Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I don't know."

Why is unpacking so hard? You know how it is when you move to a new place and boxes sit around for weeks. After a while the boxes stop being boxes and become part of the furniture. The same happens in our minds — the nuances and details get taped shut inside boxes and pushed aside. And that is actually correct: if we kept everything "unpacked" at all times, answering a question like "Do I want to be a professor?" would feel like dumping everything in a giant pile and searching for a single sock.

The Beast and the Wolf

When you fully unpack any profession, one thing becomes clear: only a complete lunatic should be doing it.

• Want to be a surgeon? = Are you ready to perform the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?
• Want to be an actor? = Are you ready for your career to depend on the shape of your cheekbones?
• Want to be a wedding photographer? = Are you ready to be the only sober person in a banquet hall every Saturday night?

If you think no one in their right mind would answer "yes" to these questions, you have missed the point: almost no one will answer yes — but precisely those few who do should become surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.

Prestigious careers are the hardest to unpack because the advantages are obvious and the disadvantages are hidden. After finishing university I was sure that uploading a few cool videos to YouTube would bring instant fame. I dropped the idea almost immediately. I simply lacked the particular madness required to post something every week, let alone every day. It would never occur to me to fill an entire house with slime, drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetics for two thousand people. Read through the leaked production guide written by MrBeast — the world's most successful YouTuber — and you instantly understand the scale of his particular obsession:

I am willing to count to one hundred thousand out loud, bury myself alive, or run a marathon in the world's largest shoes if I have to. I just want to make content that brings joy to me and my viewers. This channel is like a child to me — I have sacrificed my entire life for it. I am so attached to it that it is almost sad — lol.

(And those are not hypothetical examples: MrBeast has actually done all of these things.)

Surveys suggest that 57% of Gen Z aspire to become social media stars — and almost certainly most of them have not unpacked what success actually requires. How many of them have the kind of madness MrBeast has? How many are willing to become a slave to the algorithm, structuring their entire life around whatever content it demands today? One in a million?

Here is another example. Countless people dream of becoming writers, but when you unpack what that actually involves, it becomes clear that nobody — in principle — should be a novelist. Take Tracy Wolff, the author of the "Crave" romantic fantasy series, one of the most successful writers of our time. A New Yorker profile mentioned in passing that between 2007 and 2018 Wolff published "more than sixty" books. That is 5.5 novels per year, every year, for eleven years — before she became famous. And she is still writing. Her website now has its own search bar. Categories include: "Contemporary Romance (Rock Stars and Bad Boys)," "Contemporary Erotica about Billionaires," and even "Contemporary YA Romance (with Snowboarders!)."

Tracy Wolff and MrBeast may look like lunatics, but what is actually unusual is only the volume of work, not the hours they sit at their craft. Here is the obvious-but-often-ignored conclusion that unpacking reveals: successful people spend enormous amounts of time on their work. Hours. Every day. It is Tuesday at 2 PM — you are working. You glance at the clock: 3:47 PM — and you are still doing the same thing. No amount of willpower will carry you through a whole life full of Tuesday afternoons like that. Whatever you are doing in those hours had better be something you actually want to be doing.

For some reason, this never seems to occur to people. As a child I was the tallest kid in the class, and grown men would slap me on the shoulder and say: "One day you'll be a great basketball player!" When I pushed back they would ask: "Don't you dream of making the team? Don't you want to represent the school? Don't you want to wear the jersey and go to regional championships?" But those were the wrong questions. The right questions — the unpacking questions — would have been: "Do you want to spend three hours every day at basketball practice? Do you want to endlessly drill dribbling and shooting? Do you want to sit on the bench while your more talented friends play, secretly hoping Brent twists his ankle so you get a chance?" And honestly? No. I did not want any of that. I would rather have stayed home playing video games.

Viewed from altitude, every future looks beautiful and simple. But once you unpack the details — imagine life not as an idealized picture but as an endless string of Tuesdays with all the small things you will live through day after day without exception — you realize that most such life scenarios only make sense for a very specific type of person. The madman type.

Fortunately, I have good news: you are that madman.

You Are Not Normal!

I do not mean "not normal" in a clinical sense — though perhaps. I mean it in the sense that you are noticeably outside the norm in at least one area, and quite possibly in many.

Some of you get up at five in the morning to bake almond croissants. Some of you watch golf on television. Some of you are willing to drive a forty-ton truck loaded with fidget spinners across the entire country. There are people who enjoy the squeak of styrofoam, people who watch 94 YouTube episodes about the Byzantine Empire back to back, and people who can spend an entire long-haul flight staring at a single point. Do you not realize that to me — and to almost everyone else — you are all completely mad?

No, you probably do not realize it — just as none of us does. We tend to overestimate how common our own preferences are; psychologists call this the false consensus effect. It is likely because it is very, very hard to step into another person's perspective. So unless we are directly confronted with contradicting evidence, we assume our internal standards represent the universal norm. We might not even be aware of our own peculiarities. You can live your entire life seeing three moons and never suspect that everyone else sees only one:

The first time I put on glasses and looked at the night sky, I was astonished to realize you can actually see the Moon clearly. I had always assumed artists were just being fanciful when they drew it that way — I thought the human eye simply could not see the Moon without its two blurry "doubles."

In my experience: the moment you start unpacking a person, some wild peculiarity always surfaces. Sometimes you do not even need to dig deep — for example, when a friend mentions she loves finding "lost" photographs — forgotten snapshots from flea markets and garage sales — and casually adds that she has collected twenty thousand of them. Sometimes the quirk is buried deeper, often because the person does not consider it strange at all. For example, a friend I had known for years once admitted that she had ended every previous relationship because the men were insufficiently "mean."

Dr. Pimple Popper Is Waiting for You

This is why career choice so often leads people into a dead end. They do not understand what their own particular madness is, and they do not understand what madness their future job will require. The result: they spend their lives trying to fit into professions they were never meant for.

When I worked in a university environment, there was a remarkable breed of administrator who was constantly, visibly irritated by students. When sophomores, say, built a snowman with enormous features on the quad, these grumpy administrators would shake their heads: "I am so sick of these students." They apparently did not realize that their colleagues genuinely enjoyed being around eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds, and that episodes like the snowman sculpture only added humor to the routine. It probably never crossed the grumpy administrators' minds that anyone could actually like that sort of thing.

Another example: as an acne-ridden teenager I had a dermatologist who appeared constantly irritated by the very fact of seeing patients — as if we had somehow dared to trouble His Majesty by requesting services he was obligated to provide anyway. Meanwhile, the YouTube channel Dr. Pimple Popper — whose name speaks entirely for itself — has accumulated nearly 9 million subscribers. Clearly, there are people who are genuinely fascinated by pimples and acne. Dermatology is, incidentally, one of the most competitive fields in medicine. Yet through stubbornness, lack of self-reflection, and a refusal to do any unpacking, it is entirely possible to earn the right to spend your life doing work you simply hate.

On the other hand, when people find the right outlet for their particular madness, they become a truly formidable force. A university acquaintance recently reminded me of a guy — let us call him Danny. He was mad in a specific way: he was incapable of feeling shame, which is a very useful trait in politics. When Danny arrived as a freshman, he announced his intention to become student body president by printing roughly a thousand copies of his résumé — including his SAT scores — and plastering them all over campus. He was, of course, mocked everywhere. But the following year he won the election. As it turned out, people tend to vote for a familiar name — and it does not matter at all how they came to know it. When Danny ran for a second term, he won by a wide margin. Danny was no longer that ridiculous freshman who had stuck his face on every lamppost. Now he was president.

Cops for Teenagers

Unpacking is easy and simple — yet almost nobody does it, because it is unfamiliar. It is uncomfortable to admit that your "deep understanding" is an illusion, that you actually know nothing, and that you need to keep asking seemingly stupid questions until everything becomes clear.

The situation is made worse by the fact that people love to talk about themselves and their work, but always in excessively abstract terms: "Well, I'm kind of an intermediary between the developers and the sales team." So when you unpack someone's job, you need to really press with questions like:

• What did you do this morning?
• What will you do after talking to me?
• Is this what you typically do?
• If you sit at a computer all day, what is on your screen?
• What software do you use?
• Honestly, does this genuinely appeal to you, or do you just tolerate it?

In the process of unpacking you can discover all sorts of unexpected things — for example, that firefighters mostly do not fight fires, or that Twitch streamers do not just "play video games" but play them for twelve hours a day. And in this process you are not only unpacking the work — you are unpacking yourself. Is there something in this job that resembles things you have already done and genuinely enjoyed? Not "would you enjoy being known as someone who does this?" but "if you were doing this right now, would you want to stop — or would you want to keep going?" These questions sound very stupid, which is exactly why no one asks them. But the answers, strangely enough, are often surprising.

At least they were for me. I never unpacked any of my jobs before starting them. I simply showed up on my first day and only then understood what I had gotten myself into — as if it were impossible to learn what the work would actually involve in advance. Classic "pass the bill, then see what's inside" thinking. For example, I spent the summer of 2014 as a counselor at a camp for seventeen-year-olds — even though I could easily have figured out in advance that this job would consist of activities I despise, like constant supervision of teenagers. Could I have known that my responsibilities would include things like "escort teenagers across the camp grounds because otherwise they will flee into the forest" and "try to determine whether anyone has smuggled alcohol into the dance by surreptitiously sniffing their breath"? No! But if I had done even minimal unpacking, I would have chosen a different way to spend that summer — perhaps selling alcohol to minors directly outside the disco.

It is no surprise that people find it so hard to figure out what to do with their lives: we simply have no cultural framework for this, because until recently there was no need for one. We did not evolve in an environment offering a wide range of professional choices. Then, with the invention of agriculture, nearly everyone was a farmer for the next ten thousand years. The question "What should I do with my life?" is actually a recent problem, emerging only in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the grand sweep of history, we simply have not had time to fully adapt to it.

I think the first step toward that adaptation is unpacking. By opening your boxes and examining all the components of your possible futures, I hope you will find the work that is mad in exactly the same way that you are mad. And then I hope you will go for it. Through hardship to the stars! And even if you miss, you will still land on one of the three moons.

Accept it: You are not normal.