Some People Were Never Meant for a Normal Life

John Steinbeck in his classic book East of Eden writes:

On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other—cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He’s suffering over the choosing right now. It’s a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn’t that strange? A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be.

Warmth and companionship on one side, cold lonely greatness on the other.

Two paths, and a father watching his son agonize over the choice, secretly hoping the kid chooses the cold one.

I think the reality is different, the choice is real but it’s more complicated than a fork in the road.

The warmth doesn’t necessarily stay warm, the cold doesn’t have to stay cold, and for some of us there was never a real choice to begin with.

I know what this life feels like because I lived in it for years.

The regular normal life. A 9 to 5, a job you don’t really care about, but atleast the colleagues are funny and it pays you to do stuff. The same loop of going out every week-end, having to deal with problems stacking in the background, and some vacations/travel sparsed in a few times a year to have something to look forward to constantly.

You know what next month looks like because it looks exactly like this month.

There’s a real sweetness to that life. You’re known. People love you for who you are, not for what you’ve done. You can show up and be a mess and nobody’s evaluating you. Friday night is easy. Saturday is easy. The path is already laid out: school, job, marriage, house, kids, dog, retirement. You don’t have to figure anything out. You don’t have to wonder if you’re wasting your life because everyone around you is doing the same thing, so it feels normal. It IS normal.

That’s the hardest part about writing this honestly. The warmth feels good, it’s pleasurable, it’s certain, it’s safe, it’s comfortable. I felt it. I liked it. Leaving it was one of the harder things I’ve done.

But it doesn’t hold.

You feel it slipping before you can name it. That Sunday evening feeling where the weekend’s ending and you can’t point to anything you did wrong, but you know something’s missing. You tell yourself you’ll start the thing tomorrow, or next month, or after the holidays. You’ve been telling yourself that for three years.

Your friend group scatters. People get married, have kids, move away, get busy. The crew that hung out every weekend slowly becomes a group that meets up twice a year and sends memes in a group chat. Nobody planned it that way, it just happened because life pulled everyone in different directions.

The job you took because it was stable and paid well starts to hollow you out. You spend 8 hours a day doing something you don’t care about, you come home tired, you scroll, you watch something, you go to bed. Weekends become recovery time or pure hedonism, getting drunk because you need to feel something after a week of feeling nothing. You tell yourself this is balance.

I’m not judging anyone who lives this way, everyone is free to live however they like. But I think a lot of people end up here without choosing it. They ended up living the warmth, the safety, the certainty. But the warmth faded and all they kept was the certainty, the certainty that this is all there is. The happy stable friend group that does everything together past 30 is a fantasy for the overwhelming majority of people. It exists, but it’s rare, and banking your twenties on it is a gamble nobody realizes they’re taking.

If you’re reading this and you feel something, if you have that pull toward the cold path, if you’ve been wrestling with whether to leave the comfortable life and go chase something that scares you, I don’t think you’re making a choice. I think the choice is already made. You just haven’t acted on it yet.

The fire is that thing you can’t stop thinking about. The thing you know you could be doing. I throw around the “ambitious but lazy” thing freely becaus everyone calls it that, but it’s not ambition exactly, ambition is a plan, the fire is before the plan.

It’s really the awareness that you have something in you that your current life isn’t using, and the longer you ignore it the louder it gets. You know what it is for you. I don’t need to name it.

The reason you haven’t acted on it is rarely cowardice. The people around you hold a version of you in place without even meaning to. Your friends know the 22-year-old you, and every time you see them, every interaction reinforces that guy. You can’t become someone new while surrounded by people who only know who you were.

You go home for a weekend and within an hour you’re the same person you were at 19. Same jokes, same role in the group, same expectations. You’ve spent months building something new in yourself and it evaporates the second you walk through the door. That’s how strong the gravity is.

They love you, but their love is for a version of you that has to die if you’re going to grow into the next one. Your friends aren’t bad people. Staying close to them just makes it almost impossible to change, and that’s what makes the whole thing tragic.

The warm path is only available, like truly available, to people who never felt the pull in the first place. If you’ve felt it and you try to stay warm, the fire doesn’t go out. It just sits in you.

Ten years from now you’re the person at a dinner telling someone about the thing you almost did, the move you almost made, the business you almost started, the life you almost lived. That person will nod politely and you’ll both know what that story means.

There’s a quote from Marc Andreessen (I heard Elon Musk say it in an interview, attributing it to Andreessen): “Most people are willing to endure any amount of chronic pain to avoid acute pain.”

That’s the whole thing right there.

The cold path is acute pain. You leave and it hurts, you’re alone, you’re uncertain, you might fail, and the failure is visible and concrete. Everyone back home will see it. That’s terrifying, and I get why people avoid it.

The warm path, for someone who has the fire, is chronic pain. The regret that never peaks but never quite leaves. Manageable on any given day. You push it down, distract yourself, tell yourself you’ll get to it next year. But it’s always there, this low-grade awareness that you’re not doing what you know you should be doing. You traded a wound that would heal for one that won’t.

It’s two kinds of pain either way. One has a ceiling and the other one doesn’t.

I’m on it right now, so I can tell you what it looks like in practice.

Nothing dramatic. There’s no movie scene where you slam a door and walk into the sunset. It’s a slow accumulation of distance. You stop being available on Saturdays. You move cities, countries.

Your old friends stop reaching out because they don’t understand what you’re doing and you can’t explain it without sounding either crazy or pretentious. Your family worries about you. You spend a lot of time alone. I’ve had stretches of weeks where the only people I talked to were cashiers and my girlfriend on a phone screen.

Nietzsche was all about this, he lived that life.

In Zarathustra there’s this figure he calls the last man. The last man is the person who has optimized everything for comfort. He blinks and says “we have invented happiness.” He has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night, and he thinks he’s won at life.

Nietzsche despised this person because the last man gave up on becoming anything and built his whole identity around calling that decision wisdom. That’s the limbo. That’s the person three years deep into telling themselves they’re happy when they’re just comfortable, and the distance between those two things is enormous.

The whole warmth path, when it goes wrong, produces last men. People who stopped reaching for anything and got really good at justifying why.

But Zarathustra comes back down the mountain. He spends ten years up there alone, ten years, and then he descends. Why? Because he has something to give. He has something to share and he needs to find people who can receive it.

Nietzsche isn’t arguing for permanent isolation. The mountain is where you go to become someone. The descent is where you use what you became. The cold path has a direction to it, it’s supposed to go somewhere, and that somewhere involves other people eventually.

The motivational content on the internet takes all of this and strips the philosophy out. They show you the highlight reel, the guy who left everything, worked in silence, came back victorious.

They don’t show you the years of nothing, the doubt, the long stretches where you wonder if you made the biggest mistake of your life. They don’t tell you what Nietzsche understood, that neither path is safe, that the warm path can produce last men and the cold path can destroy you, and you have to choose anyway.

In Jack London’s Martin Eden, Martin is a working-class sailor, he choses the cold path to become a writer and win over an educated girl, becomes everything he wanted to become, and it destroys him. People say this book is autobiographical, and Jack London is said to have killed himself not long after it was published.

This tragedy was partly a tragedy of timing. Martin, or Jack for that matter couldn’t find the people going through the same thing. A writer alone in San Francisco in 1908 had no way to reach his equivalent in Paris or Moscow or Buenos Aires. He made it to the top of the mountain and there was nobody there.

Zarathustra had the same problem. He came down the mountain overflowing with ideas and tried to teach in marketplaces full of people who had no idea what he was talking about. A philosopher in backward villages and a writer alone in 1908, same issue. Their people existed somewhere in the world, they just had no way to find each other.

That’s the central issue in the two way forkroad that I mentionned at the start: warmth and companionship versus cold lonely greatness.

Because that’s different today. You write about your cold path on Substack or X and someone in Brazil or Germany or Japan reads it and thinks “this guy gets it.” You put your thinking out there and the people on the same mountain find you.

I’ve experienced this. Writing on the internet put me in contact with people who think the way I think, who are building the way I’m building, who are on their own cold paths and glad to know someone else is too. The internet lets you find the people Zarathustra was looking for without coming all the way back down.

The isolation is a passage. For Martin Eden it was a dead end because the world hadn’t built the tools yet. For us it doesn’t have to be. I can’t promise you’ll find your people up there, but the odds are better now than they’ve ever been.

Chronic pain or acute pain. That’s the real choice if you have that fire burning inside of you.

This is me extending my hand to you, from the cold mountains.

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