Be more interesting today.

A subway kid, a Cole Haan ad, and thirteen years of thinking about the difference.

Go tshwanetse tsotlhe ka nako ya tsone | Everything must happen in its own time.

I love a walkable environment. One of my favorite things about New York City was how easily I could hit my 20k daily steps while being completely entertained and stumbling upon inspiration. I walked everywhere, partly because I loved the city at street level and partly because I hated the MTA with my whole spirit.

The subway is basically a social experiment funded by the Department of Sensory Overload. Still, some important lessons of my life occurred underground between delayed stops, suspicious smells, weird liquids, and men announcing “SHOWTIME” on the car I always seemed to end up in. The lessons ranged from profound gratitude for my circumstances to a deeper appreciation of the economic value of quality earphones.

In 2013, during a ride, I noticed a Cole Haan ad that read, ‘Be more interesting tomorrow than you are today.’ Hmm, fine, I didn’t think about it further because I was frantically searching for my earphones to drown out the moment. While not listening to my iPod, a kid sat next to me and immediately launched into solo showtime mode, singing at the top of her lungs. She then stopped, stared at the Cole Haan ad, screamed to her mom, ‘Ma, shouldn’t it be, “be more interesting today than you are tomorrow?!” ’

Mind. Blown.

Jenny Holzer, “Protect Me From What I Want” in Times Square, 1986

2013 was… interesting. We were technically in recovery after the financial crisis, but still emotionally living inside the anxiety of it, with everyone trying to become someone. Better. Smarter. More cultured. More desirable. More booked and busy and emotionally evolved and professionally legible.

Everyone was waking up at 4 am to sweat out the demons while journaling, listening to those six specific podcasts, aggressively networking, reading The Happiness Project and Lean In. Tinder had just launched and suddenly everyone knew exactly how to describe themselves in six photos and a sentence. This was also early Instagram when people genuinely believed self-curation might lead to fulfillment, probably because underneath all of it sat a low-grade fear that if you stopped evolving, you might disappear entirely.

All of this was happening while we were physically crammed into overheated subway cars beside exhausted nurses, tourists who refused to move faster, finance bros sweating through Patagonia vests, children screaming, men selling churros, and someone inevitably yelling “IT’S SHOWTIME.”

We were trying to become elevated versions of ourselves inside absolute chaos.

More than ten years later, we’re exhausted by the performance of becoming and we talk about burnout: nervous systems, boundaries, logging off, touching grass, deleting apps, healing, slowing down and yet even that comes with its own aesthetic language, and we are still performing ourselves.

What feels different now is that the performance has become ambient. In 2013, there were still moments where life escaped documentation, and you had space to be interested enough to be interesting.

Bring back the 10,000-hour rule.

One of the strangest consequences of the last decade is that we have become more visible to one another, and still less knowable to ourselves.

I wonder how many people were sitting on that train believing their real life was waiting somewhere slightly ahead of them… one better version of themselves away. Meanwhile, a kid with absolutely no indoor voice looked up at a marketing poster and dismantled the entire premise.

She may have just been annoyed by bad copy, but what she understood instinctively, at whatever age she was, was that deferring your life is a strange thing to aspire to. The version of you worth being is not the one currently in production; waiting for yourself to become interesting enough is its own kind of disappearing act.

It is often easier to improve a life in theory than inhabit the one you’re already standing in.

I’ve spent time in both places. The version of me that was always arriving somewhere slightly better, and the version that learned to let the current moment be the one that mattered.

The train doors opened.

We all walked out, rushing toward tomorrow.

The kid remained exactly where she was.