A caterpillar doesn’t know it’s preparing to become a butterfly. It’s just living. eating leaves, crawling around, doing what caterpillars do. But something is happening beneath the surface. Something is gathering. Something is building. Your 20s and 30s are like this. You think you’re just living your life. making your mistakes, building your career, trying to figure out who you’re supposed to be. But really, you’re gathering evidence. You’re collecting experiences that will only make sense decades later. You’re learning lessons you cannot possibly understand until you’ve lived them thoroughly. When you’re young, everything feels urgent. That job rejection feels like the end of the world. That relationship ending feels like you’ll never recover. That mistake you made feels like a permanent mark on your character. Because when you’re young, you believe every moment is defining you—that every choice is setting your fate in stone, that every failure is a statement about your fundamental worth. But here’s what they don’t tell you in your 20s: all of that urgency is just noise. It’s the sound of your ego desperately trying to construct itself, trying to build an identity out of achievements and possessions and other people’s opinions. And the ego must be built. This is crucial. You cannot skip this step. You must first believe you are somebody before you can discover that you are nobody. Or rather, that you are everybody. That beneath the roles and the masks, you are the whole dance. - Alan Watts