Movies and books show life as one big story, one coherent narrative that unfolds logically, linearly, with a cause-and-effect relationship, where the main character influences the world around them.
Reality is different, of course. Our story is not one big story—but many little stories. And they keep coming.
I once saw a meme on social media about entrepreneurs. “Every time I launch a new venture, I think to myself,” the meme said, “THIS IS IT! Two years later, I close the business down and think, Ah, nah, more experience.”
Swap starting a new business for education, choosing a profession, having a partner, a friend, a good body, and pretty much anything you want, and you get the point: life moves in cyclical waves. We build towards something until we don’t. In my experience, each cycle is roughly 3-5 years.
So many times I’ve lost weight only to gain it all back again. So many times I’ve started a project and thought to myself, this is going to change everything. And so many times I’ve begun a relationship, thinking, “Alright, this is the person I will spend my life with,” only to be disillusioned some years later, when something would stop working in that relationship.
With each new time, you think as if this is the last time—THIS IS IT!—but with yet another cycle, when life throws you off, you have to find a new balance, build your life anew.
It’s tiring to even think about—that life isn’t one big project. It’s exhausting if life instead is a series of little projects and attempts, most of them futile, and then—death. Like one of my teachers once mused, “Life is a bitch, and then you die.”
But maybe that’s not so bad.
Sure, building long-term relationships and professions still makes sense. I look at folks in the US, especially on the East Coast, the trust fund nepo babies who were born into immense wealth passed on from their great-grandfathers down to them, and I see: there is a lot of value in legacy. Where I come from, where a new country is built every few decades, things don’t accumulate—they get destroyed, transferred, stolen. So, people in Russia are used to living in the short-term, living as if there is no tomorrow, chasing quick wins and hoping nobody would take it from them. Every generation has to start from scratch, as if there wasn’t anything before them. This shapes a certain mentality.
But how do you maintain a legacy in a world that changes fast, accelerates constantly, that is random and controlled by forces we can’t understand—let alone have an effect on? How do you go about “making it” when the entire concept of “making it” will change in a few years? How do you build careers when AI will make most of today’s jobs obsolete and climate change will fundamentally shift the geopolitical landscape in the coming decades?
All we can do is keep iterating: cycle after cycle, attempt after attempt.
On a smaller scale, in our micro worlds, this idea of having to go through cycles in various aspects of life allows us to live many lives—not just one.
Think about it. When I speak to my great grandmother, her life was surprisingly simple. She was born in a village somewhere in Siberia, got married at 20, and was a housewife all her life. Fin. That’s it. Really!
Now she is almost 95, still alive and going strong. (Though I recently learned that her first name isn’t what she told everyone it was and her date of birth—Feb 29, 1929—in her passport is wrong; there were only 28 days in February that year. Old ‘ma keeps surprising!)
On the contrary, when I look at people my age, my sister, myself, I see that we have tried already SO MUCH. I have lived so many lives, in several different places, with different people—and I am just 25. Fate permitting, up ahead lie many more decades of iterations and attempts—at building genuine relationships, a better health and body, finding what matters to me, and how I can be useful to this world. In fact, I think that the whole idea of “build a life for yourself—and live it,” is flawed.
Just take a look at successful people who get bored with themselves to a point of writing books and making podcasts. They are bored not because they are “done with life”—life is not a homework assignment, after all—but because they assumed they had to pick one persona and be that; when it’s really the opposite.
Life is about building lives after lives after lives. It’s about exploring different versions of you and in as many ways as possible. As one book says, “Anything and everything is possible within a five-year crusade.”
Most things, though, take even less than that; you can change your whole life in several months. (This year, I went from an overweight drinking smoker to running two marathons and completing a triathlon in just 7 months. This is not to brag but to show that quick transformations are also possible, especially when you’re young). But it also means that nothing, even the good things that you enjoy now, will last forever. And they will come to an end in the most unexpected and least convenient time and place. Which is all to say: being grateful is important, but if you have to start over, that’s okay too. That’s part of life.
When I look back and draw a diagram in areas I care about, I see a wave-like shape. I was a fat teenager turning into a skinny anorexic and back many times over. The same roller coaster can be seen in my relationships, work, money, virtually anything I did. I would begin something, I enjoy it, and then things would come to an end, as they do. I lost and made money, reinvented myself many times over. And sure, maybe like any other arrogant twentysomething, I judge the world by myself, the constant shifts teach a valuable lesson: whatever happens, you’ll be OK.
When the bad states change to good ones, it’s exhilarating. When the opposite happens and things stop working, it often feels like the floor is being ripped off from under your feet. It takes time to find balance. And then you lose it again. But that’s fine.
The more you lose everything and rise back again, Phoenix-like, the more you train your psyche not to worry. Yes, you can lose all your money, but the ability to earn is still there, with you. You can get a divorce, and it will leave you devastated, but the experience can make you a better person, open for a more true, honest relationship in the future.
The thing with cycles is that even though they tend to come and go, nothing is lost. It’s like running on a track: some people run their first track, others their fifth, even though visually they might be running side by side. The more data you have, the more confident you get. Pain is unpleasant, but nobody ever died from it. It just makes you stronger.
And maybe—please remember that I am writing these things merely as rants to myself, not as an attempt to preach or sound smarter than I am—that’s the beauty of life. These never-ending cycles and iterations allow us to become different people and discover parts we never thought were there. Life pulls things out of you. As Matt Haig wrote in his deeply personal account of depression, “The reason to stay alive when you have nobody to stay alive for is for those other, future versions of you.” Life would be boring if we all lived it just once.
If you enjoy reading me, you can buy me a coffee and ask a question here. I will answer your questions in the upcoming posts.
Cheers.
— S
P.S. Listening to:
Prettying amazing observations for a 25 year old