A proving ground with consequences

Youth really does let you try out several versions of yourself.

You can change hobbies, friends, style, educational route and your idea of a future profession. A mistake at seventeen usually costs less than the same mistake after a mortgage, three employees and a joint account with a partner.

A proving ground, though, is not a place without consequences. It is a place where the consequences are limited in advance.

Some experiments are reversible: try a new sport, spend a month off social media, sign up for a course, speak in public, live on your own, do a small project.

Others can leave a long trail: dangerous driving, serious addiction, irreversible changes to your body, a crime, a pregnancy, a contract with large obligations.

Treating life as a game is useful, as long as you remember that a game has rules, other players and no save point before every level.

The job of youth is not to try literally everything. It is to use cheap experiments to find out:

• what interests you;
• what you are good at;
• which people suit you;
• how much risk you can take;
• what price you don’t want to pay.

Freedom to experiment is worth most where a person can stop without wrecking what he has already built.

Experiments sort neatly by one feature: the cost of the exit. You can quit a course halfway and lose the money for the remaining classes. A rented room can be vacated with a month’s notice. Guaranteeing someone else’s loan has no exit at all: the signature takes ten seconds, the obligation lives five years and doesn’t depend on whether you are still in touch with the person you guaranteed. The difference between these three decisions is not courage, it is the presence of a door.

Hence the working rule: try a lot, but before signing check not “is this interesting” but “how do I get out of here and what will it cost”. An experience you can’t exit stops being an experience and becomes a circumstance.