For three years I made videos of myself kissing girls at festivals. Millions of views. More followers than I know what to do with. The high-rise in Miami, the girls, the car.
And somewhere in there, everything went gray.
A video would hit twenty million views and I'd feel nothing. A good night out, nothing. I'd wake up with a full calendar and no reason to get out of bed except that people were expecting me to. From the outside it looked like a guy who'd won. From the inside, I couldn't tell you one thing I actually wanted.
That's what a quarter-life crisis actually is. Not a breakdown. A flatness. You follow the script you were handed, you get the stuff at the end of it, and then you notice the stuff was never yours. You were running on other people's definition of a good life, and you ran it so well you lost track of where yours went.
I kept trying to fix the feeling the way most guys do. Make a bigger video. Buy something. Find a new girl. Go harder at the thing that used to work. None of it moved the needle, because the feeling wasn't telling me to do more. It was telling me I was living a life I didn't pick.
So I'm writing this from a car on the way to the airport. Lisbon first. After that I don't know where I'm going, and I don't know when I'll be back. No festivals, no kissing content, no plan to optimize. One question I'm carrying with me: what do I actually want? Not what gets views. Not what a 24-year-old is supposed to be doing. What do I want.
If you're reading this and nothing feels exciting anymore, I want you to hear one thing. You're not broken and you're not lazy. That gray feeling is a signal, and you can't outwork it or buy your way past it. The only thing that works is stepping back from the life that's making you feel it, far enough to hear yourself think, and asking yourself the same question I'm asking: what do I actually want? Not what should I want. Not what would everyone around me approve of. What do I actually want. Keep asking it until the answer that comes back is yours and nobody else's.
I don't know what to expect from this. I'm taking you with me either way.
— Noah Danenhower
P.S. When's the last time something actually excited you? Not impressed you. Excited you. One line. I'll read it when I land.