On Aging

I distinctly remember getting in a fight with my high school boyfriend in the science lab about economics.

He was the grade above, entering his senior year, where he had the dream to study economics and pursue a career in finance. My radical environmentalist 17-year-old self, standing there in a thrifted sweater and Tevas, told him how disgusting it was to live by his capitalistic corporate greed. That to study economics made him a “pig.”

I really had a way with words, vast maturity, and a perspective on the world at the time. Needless to say, our relationship didn’t continue, he graduated, and I pursued my dream of environmental science on the East Coast, with one thing standing in my way of saving the world from capitalistic economic greed: an intro microeconomics class.

I decided to take it first semester my freshman year of college. “Rip off the Band-Aid” so I could spend my later years taking classes I desired.

Four weeks into college, I called my father on the phone. I told him, “I want to be an Econ major.” Supportive but perplexed, he told me to wait until at least after the first exam. Four years later, I graduated top of my class with my favorite book* by my bedside.

*This is still in my top 5 favorite books of all time. It is an amazing read, and sometimes it brings me to tears with the beauty in how it makes the brain think.

I went on to work in finance, becoming everything I believed I had hated five years prior. I spent my 20s as a slave to corporate. I believed that my love for math meant that my only path in life was to be exploited in exchange for the golden handcuffs.

And then I crashed. Literally. I fell off my bicycle, got a concussion, got dumped, and lost a 15-year best friendship all within a month.

I looked inside my cabinet, and in a bid for reconnection and stability, decided to take my love of beans to the internet, under a pseudonym of Bean Supporter, in hopes that my colleagues would not be able to find this endeavor.

What started as me eating only beans for 30 days turned into a community of well over a hundred thousand bean supporters, community meet-ups, news articles, and a new way of life.

Growing up, I have distinct memories of my parents saying, “Does anyone even work?” whenever we would go into a store or hit traffic during standard working hours in the Los Angeles area. It was ingrained in me from a young age that to be “creative” was to have a fake job, and that my value to society came from my ability to automate, solve, and analyze in the mathematical sense.

So when, 5 months ago, I left my corporate job, I realized the beans had saved me from far more than my early college health scares. Beans had taught me my gifts, my value, my joy. None of that was tied to a line on a P&L, a KPI, a title, or a dollar, rather, in feeling at ease with what I create.

Today, I enter my final year of my twenties. I can’t wait to enter it with all of you and see where the beans will take us next.

I love you all.

Xoxo,
Bean Supporter