So This is 30
What burning through my twenties taught me about gratitude, chaos, and love.
I woke up today in a tent with gratitude and a game of chess with Dakota. Gratitude for thirty years of skin and bone still intact. Gratitude for nights survived, chasing sunrises, for the chaos that didn’t kill me but almost did. Gratitude for the fact that I’m here, scarred but breathing, older and still restless.
I never had a plan. No carefully charted path, no brand deck, no neat strategy to explain myself to the world. All I had were sparks… things that pulled at me, haunted me, begged me to chase them. I said yes more than I said no, even when yes meant risk, even when yes meant collapse. I didn’t walk carefully through my twenties, I burned them. And when one of our OG’s at companion, Chris, asked me the other day what the single best experience of that decade was, I couldn’t give him one. Because the truth is, I lived all of it. Every wrong turn. Every bad idea that turned into a story. Every risk that left me bloodied, broke, laughing, humbled.
And the best part of waking up in a tent at 30 years old today: I still don’t know a damn thing. I’ve lived alone in foreign cities, I’ve launched myself down Himalayan roads in rickshaws that had no business being there. I’ve gambled everything on a horned whale spelled wrong, on a restaurant born from scratch, on words I’m still learning how to write. Yet still the world only expands in front of me, taunting me with how little I’ll ever know. Experience doesn’t bring mastery. It brings humility. The only wisdom I can claim at thirty is how small I really am.
But what I do know, what I believe with marrow-deep certainty, is that none of it matters without the people. The ones who walked beside me when I did not deserve company. The ones who believed when belief looked foolish. Dakota, who saw me before I could see myself. My parents, who kept fueling every reckless idea. My friends, who held up a mirror and let me be both mess and dreamer.
The only thing worth clinging to is people. Everything else—the savings, the strategies, the brand-building—it all turns to ash. What endures are the voices at your table, the hands that steady you when you are falling, the laughter that refuses to let the darkness win.
If I have one wish for the next thirty years, it is not success or certainty. It is more nights at the table with the people I love. More chances to say yes to the unknown. More opportunities to throw myself against the edge of the world and return bloodied but breathing.
So if you are not here yet, if you are staring down your twenties like they will last forever, burn them. Say yes more than you say no. Do not wait for the plan to appear because it likely never will.
And if you are already past thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, I think I am beginning to understand. I don’t think the point is certainty, it’s not mastery. It is smaller than that, and somehow larger too. I think it’s the table, the people. It is the scars and the laughter and the quiet knowing that none of us ever really figure it out.
In the end, life is nothing more than this: a string of yeses, a map of wrong turns, a handful of people who make the weight bearable, and the desperate hope it mattered when the curtain inevitably falls.
Cheers,
Nick