Dear Lana,

Today, I am reminded of how little I matter to the world.

I guess this is a part of being young, but there is so much I want to do in the next couple of years, at least before I settle down and raise kids in my suburban home on Long Island.

There are people around me who have done so much, yet I have not done much at all. When I ask myself, what do I have to say to that, I cannot come up with an answer.

This is probably the least appropriate time for me to be feeling what I am feeling, but I am sensing that my time to have the freedom to do what I want to do is coming to an end. There is a tradeoff between how I want to live my life now and how I want to live my life in the future. There is the life I want for myself in the future, but getting there amounts to sacrificing the life I have now.

So much of life, I feel, is calibrating our own system of risk and security. If I have learned anything from the first twenty years of my life, it’s that wanting security always leads to more longing. Yet, I still don’t find risk to be a compelling alternative to security. Is there a method of living life that maximizes our interal tolerance for risk in a manner that leads to the secure life that we have always wanted?

I often wonder what my life would be if I was thrown into a chaotic system that forced me to confront risk when security no longer exists. It would take away my freedom to choose, which is something I have always wanted, but I’m not sure if that’s story would have a happy ending when it comes to it. When my life ends in however many years, would I value living a life with risk or a life with security more?

I don’t know, Lana. What do you think? How did you navigate this tradeoff, if you had the choice at all? There is so much about life that did not end up how I wanted it to be, and I’m just trying to live the life I could’ve had. It’s never too late to change, but the universe doesn’t always change with you, unless you were living in romantic subjectivism.

I like quarentining right now because it buys me time to figure out what I want for myself. But, as soon as it ends, I am forced to once again confront this choice between risk and security. I hate that continuous choice that we have to make.