Chapter 8: Sights, Sounds, and Seeds

The City, the Stampede, and When the Urge to Excel Fights the Yearn to Escape

Foundations

In Chapter 7, Restlessness, Revolution, Roots, I wrote about three themes that kept showing up in my life. Restlessness was that underlying sense that the standard career path… even at Nielsen, which felt like a breakthrough at the time… wasn’t the final destination. Revolution was partly literal, in the sense of my involvement with the Sons of the Revolution in NYC, but also symbolic because it reminded me that my pull toward independence and non-conformity had been there all along. And Roots were the grounding… family, heritage, and values that would always shape my decisions, even when the professional story wasn’t yet fully written.

So the lessons here are practical:

• Restlessness can be an early signal, not always something to “fix.”

• Symbols and affiliations (like Sons of the Revolution) can reveal where your instincts are headed, even before big life decisions are made. Or my years as an EMT managing intense and chaotic scenarios. An underlying need for independence, yes, but also a craving for adrenaline, for meaning, or simply to help other people directly. Your younger self is actually quite wise and revealing. Perhaps it’s actually the systems and related social pressures you’re wading deeper into as you age, rather than you “maturing” per se, which pulls you away from these early activities or interests… to your detriment.

• Roots matter. They provide some contextual anchoring and continuity while everything else evolves around you. History is far more interesting when you can pinpoint exactly how you connect to it versus an impersonal abstract understanding from a textbook. And it can be incredibly motivating as you build a narrative around yourself (see: You Actually Are the Main Character), as if you’re carrying a torch lit by others or force bending your default life arc to a new trajectory.

And again, a reminder of what this Anti-Course series is about. It’s part personal reflection so my boys can someday understand not just what I did, but what I was thinking along the way. It’s part memory dump pulling up old notes, emails, and photos that help me connect dots I’d otherwise forget. And it’s part public memoir so that others might see parallels in their own restlessness or worldviews, and take something from it.

With that framing, we move into Chapter 8. I originally planned for this chapter to be about a big family trip to Ireland and how it seeded thoughts that would eventually blossom into our life today. But the intro context I wrote is deserving of its own chapter… the imagery of what I was seeing and how that imagery was also shifting my perspective on life and work. Ireland will have to wait for Chapter 9.