On Being 17

Kinda like being an adult, but not really?

Written on my balcony, at 7:23 pm when the sun is perfectly angled so that it isn’t in my face.

As I approach 18 (in 27 days at the time of writing!), I’ve been reflecting on the past years of turmoil, happiness, and angst.

Looking back with my newfound wisdom as a 17.93-year-old, I’ve seen close friends implode with stress, try to be someone who they weren’t, and give up on their dreams.

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At the same time, I’ve seen friends grow to new heights, chase greatness, and become unstoppable.

There’s so much about the experience of being an ambitious GenZ teenager that isn’t talked about from the perspective of one.

At 16 I was still riding my bike for 30 minutes to get to my friend’s house which was a 5-minute drive away.

To me, “going out,” meant getting a super shawarma from Osmows with extra garlic.

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University was an abstract concept that I had to worry about but didn’t feel real yet.

For ambitious young people, this is when they must decide their life path if they haven’t already. Obviously, it’s hard to have much foresight at this point, so your chosen “life path,” is usually just what you study at university.

Tests. Grades. Admissions. Scholarships. Extra-Curriculars.

Being a “successful” 16-year-old in 2023 means that you never leave Kansas

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unless it’s to chase after an MIT acceptance letter.

In most ways, you’re still a child.

But when I was practically a child, I lived a double life as a founder and a high schooler.

At the time, I was building a web3/neurotech startup called NeuraDAO. We were trying to build a holistic network where you could fund, contribute to, and purchase/spin-out neurotech research.

There were weeks when both of these lives would collide and I had to desperately hold myself together as my responsibilities would spread me thin.

Once I was flown out to ETHAmsterdam (thanks Erik!) to pitch NeuraDAO and talk about the future of DeSci where I felt the passion in the air and my thoughts actually mattered. In Amsterdam it felt like we were moving towards an exciting future, and that I was going to be a part of it!

Then I flew back to Toronto where I was with 5 missing assignments, teachers reaming me for speaking up in class, and a new child to take care of.

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High school culture would ostracize me for pursuing my passion as it’s so foreign to work on something that isn’t school. On the other hand, other founders would praise me for building something while being so young, as if sometimes that was my only redeeming quality.

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What I’ve realized now, is that during my time with NeuraDAO, I enjoyed building something that I believed in. I had no problem staying home, enduring long meetings, putting out fires, whatever. However, my dedication led to a lack of any sort of social life or social skills. I still cringe when I think of my previous interactions with my friends (or strangers that could’ve been friends) where I was just plain awkward if we weren’t talking about tech.

I felt like even though I was doing interesting things with my time, I was wasting my youth couped up in my bedroom when I could easily pursue these projects later.

By the time I felt that way, I was already 17!

At 17 you can drive to your friend’s house, but you’d rather not since gas is expensive.

VCs would take a call with me, but wouldn’t consider investing as the teen founder appeal is starting to wear off; leading me to buy a copy of Industrial Society and Its Future (True story).

Despite the fact that it doesn’t make sense to build a startup as a teen anyways, it still sucks when it all goes to shit.

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When I was 17, I sunset the startup that I’d been hard at work with for the past year. I wasn’t living a double life anymore, I was just a high schooler.

17 is a weird transition year where you aren’t a child, but not really an adult.

You’re in grade 12, and an MBA kid is preaching some bullshit about dropshipping, but you’re not listening since the next year of your life looms over your present day.

The consequences of your habits and social circles really start to bite you in the butt around this point. For the first time in most people’s lives, your choices are for performance, not simply practice…

Because I wasn’t building NeuraDAO anymore, I felt so much freedom with my time as I could do basically anything that I wanted to do now. At first, I wanted to start a new company in another space instantly. Thanks to Charlie Feng, I saw that I was rushing into the next project and instead should wait and reflect on previous learnings.

I spent the next 6 months focusing on school and just being a kid again.

I became annoyed that I wasn’t doing anything special, and believed that I was falling behind. It felt like I was ahead of the curve yet behind it at the same time. On both ends of the founder-highschooler spectrum, I had friends being incredibly successful.

My high school friends were getting full rides to top universities, while my founder friends got into the Thiel fellowship or raised 7-figure seed rounds (congrats everyone btw!)

While I was kinda in the middle not particularly successful in either direction, I learned a lot about myself in those 6 months after sunsetting NeuraDAO.

I learned that I’m not anti-social. Apparently, I’m just awkward when there are women around.

I learned how you can binge-watch Game of Thrones, House of Dragons, Never Have I Ever, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Breaking Bad, Mindhunter, and Death Note back-to-back.

I learned how quickly time passes and the days merge into each other when all you talk about are grades, girls, and gossip.

But most importantly, I learned that I have no idea what I want to do with my life (shocker!) and I sort of default to whatever mimetic environment I’m in (also shocker!)

Realistically, the main responsibilities that I had were getting good grades, and staying out of trouble.

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Other than that, I’m basically a kid with a beard that can drive.

Figuring out my life path is not one of those responsibilities for at least another 4 years.

Optimally, I should be preparing for adulthood, but there’s something about this time in my life, where I just want to experiment.

While being 16 was about being extremely telic, in that everything you do is for the specific progression of some sort of goal, I believe that being 17 should be about being atelic—instead of running every day to train for a marathon, I would be running every day because I simply enjoy running.

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With the next year being university, it didn’t make sense to start any long-term projects, but at the same time, another 4-week sprint felt pointless. Being in this weird in-between allowed me to experiment and figure out what I actually liked spending my time on.

At 17, I had a lot of fun just doing what I wanted to do simply because I enjoyed doing it. Right now, instead of writing to grow my online presence, I’m writing just because it’s fun getting my thoughts down on paper.

I feel like too much of my time has been spent on doing things not for their own sake, but for somebody else’s. Whether that’s checking someone else’s boxes like an admission officer or building projects to get the coolest SF internship.

Becoming more atelic allowed me to genuinely explore different curiosities that I normally wouldn’t give time to, like political science, philosophy, and calligraphy.

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Whereas if I was super successful as a student or a founder, I’d likely be a slave to my grades or my KPIs, respectively.

Thankfully, being in the middle of the founder-highschooler spectrum gave me the freedom to be atelic which every 17-year-old should have. Because next year, I can somewhat imagine what it’ll be like.

At 18 (in Canada), you can sign a lease, get a credit card, and become a stripper (with the necessary licensing).

I’m not 18 yet (only 10 more days at the time of writing!) but I can speculate on what my experience might be like.

At university, either you double down and become the best in the rat race, or constantly try to find an out and be atelic. Either way, I think that I would probably have trouble finding my tribe of people who align with my way of thinking at Queen’s University.

Obviously, you’re given more responsibilities at 18, I would be living by myself for example. However, I’m not really sure what to expect other than maintaining my discipline and putting out random fires as they occur (metaphorically, not from bad cooking lol).

As you can probably tell, I’m not sure what my next year will look like and I’m somewhat nervous. I have faith that I’ll be fine and I’ll get through it, but I’m not sure if getting through it is enough to figure out my path in life after my exploration this year.

Till next year!

— AK

1. I pulled this number out of my ass but apparently, it’s really close to my actual age.

2. Not to paint the picture that all 16-year-olds are incredibly innocent and don’t party. I just wasn’t invited to any, especially during the pandemic in a new town.

3. This is a reference to The Wizard of Oz! I’ve never watched it but it goes hard.

4. This is a joke. I am not a father.

5. Not to dismiss anyone who’s said this to me. I appreciate the words, this thought nags me from time to time.

6. I wrote about this opinion more deeply in this post.

7. Thankfully, I didn’t have to help around the house with bills and other things like that. Some people had to grow up a bit faster than I did.

8. This article was a lovely read.

9. Admittedly, calligraphy was to improve my terrible handwriting, which didn’t really work.