{"id":13486,"date":"2019-05-20T01:34:03","date_gmt":"2019-05-19T17:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=13486"},"modified":"2021-03-21T20:49:10","modified_gmt":"2021-03-21T12:49:10","slug":"ages-17-to-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/ages-17-to-29\/","title":{"rendered":"\u23e9 ages 17 to 29"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Dear Visa-17,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Visa-29 here. So I recently got on a Singapore Airlines plane (I know, finally!) and flew across the planet to San Francisco, California. It was, in my opinion, the best two weeks of my life. I have so much to say about it that I don\u2019t know where to begin \u2013 until I remembered the advice that I give writers who are stuck, which is to think of the one person who you think would most want to hear from you, and to write directly to them. And so I\u2019m writing to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gosh, what would you wanna know? Some quick broad strokes about the next 12 years of your life:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>You know that girl you loved, and broke up with, and pined over? We&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/4-years-together\/\">married her<\/a>! And it\u2019s been fantastic. You\u2019re a very lucky kid, you don\u2019t even know it yet. (We&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1024529242892075008\">also got two cats<\/a>, can you imagine? They\u2019re cute, annoying zen masters.)<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/jibabom\/\">We started a business<\/a>! We\u2019ve sold thousands of t-shirts \u2013 I think over 10,000 at this point \u2013 and it\u2019s opened all sorts of interesting doors and opportunities for us. And it\u2019s just a lot of fun. Some of the t-shirts are particularly rude, you\u2019ll love them.<\/li><li>We were&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/sg\/meeting-pm-lee\/\">invited to meet the Prime Minister<\/a>! Because of our Facebook posts! Turns out he\u2019s quite a smart, thoughtful guy. This will help you realize, importantly, that you can pretty much talk to anybody about anything.<\/li><li>We&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/starting-work\/\">got a job<\/a>! Working on Internet things, with incredibly smart and kind people \u2013 so all that blogging and forum posting you\u2019ve been guiltily doing totally paid off. I am so, so thankful to you for that, you can\u2019t imagine.<\/li><li>We&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/buying-a-hdb-flat\/\">bought a flat<\/a>! Having a place of our own has been such a blessing \u2013 it\u2019s been a place to recover and heal and figure out who we are. One thing I do regret though, is that even now I haven\u2019t quite\u2026 made it a home. I\u2019m working on it.<\/li><li>We&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1021091196121243649\">got depressed again<\/a>! Yeah, I\u2019m pretty sure you\u2019re depressed right now. Surprise! And\u2026 after all of the life-changing, world-expanding things that happen, depression strikes again. And we work our way through it, as you\u2019ll do in the coming months and years. I think\u2026 a lot of it is a sort of grief, a sense of hopelessness at the realities of existence. We eventually work through it.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1080203630756605952\">Alan Watts helps<\/a>.<\/li><li>We&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1012504508012744705\">left the job<\/a>! We spent a good 5.5 years there and it was easily the best environment we\u2019d ever been in. Working there was a challenging, enriching experience and we levelled up tremendously on all fronts while we were at it. But eventually we\u2019d feel a longing to do something different, and you shouldn\u2019t leave your longings unattended.<\/li><li>We have&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\">over 10,000 Twitter followers<\/a>&nbsp;now! (You don\u2019t even get a Twitter account until you\u2019re 18\u2026) We\u2019d spend a bunch of time on Quora (receiving \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/profile\/Visakan-Veerasamy\">You\u2019re a Quora Top Writer!<\/a>\u201d in the mail will be something that moves you deeply), on Reddit, on Facebook\u2026 but it\u2019ll be on Twitter that you finally find a medium that\u2019s well-suited to the way your brain works.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Each one of those things has been life-changing. And none of that is what I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk to you very specifically about <a href=\"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/blog\/sf\">my trip to San Francisco<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Visa-17, Visa-29 here. So I recently got on a Singapore Airlines plane (I know, finally!) and flew across the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1171],"tags":[606],"class_list":["post-13486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs","tag-memoirs-2"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u23e9 ages 17 to 29 - @visakanv&#039;s blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/ages-17-to-29\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u23e9 ages 17 to 29 - @visakanv&#039;s blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dear Visa-17, Visa-29 here. 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