This is more of a self-reflection letter to myself to assuage my fears about turning a year older. But since any attempt to assuage that will only make an ass of u and age, please keep your expectations low. I’ve thrown in a bunch of memes to keep you company.

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I’ll be turning 32 this week. I’m writing this essay a few days in advance so I can flush it out of my system and get jiggy with it when the actual day comes. By the time it’s my actual birthday, I should hopefully be on a little staycation in North Goa with a few gin and tonics in my system.

32.

It sounds fake even saying it out loud. I thought I’d have more time before the numbers started sounding like serious business. Normally, I like to downplay my birthday. Quiet dinner, minimal fuss, maximum denial. Anything resembling a birthday week is an act of war.

But 32 landed with a thud. Thudy-two. It isn’t like 24 or 26. Those were ambiguous numbers that I easily brushed off. Like maybe I’m a person or maybe I’m still a rumor, who knows.

Somehow in your thirties, you feel like you’ve crossed into territory with rules you’re supposed to inherently know by now. And that’s precisely why I don’t like birthdays. They feel like forced reckonings with myself, check-ins I didn’t ask for.

If I could go back in time to last year and sit down with thirty-one-year-old Sonia, I wouldn’t offer empty reassurances. I’d deliver the truth: things don’t always turn out okay. You won’t be okay either. Okayness is largely a group hallucination we hold onto because the other option is public crying (which personally I’m fine with.)

If I could go back a decade to 21-year-old Sonia though, I wouldn’t say a word. I’d step away slowly. I’d let her be. You don’t interrupt a tornado in progress.

In general, I’m scared of talking to people in their twenties. They’re going through too much already. The amount of meaning we shove onto our twenties is criminal. After twenty-five, every choice feels impossibly high stakes. The job, the postgrad degree, the relationship, the city you live in, it all feels make-or-break.

And each decision is exaggerated by an internal voice that tells you these choices will define your whole existence. It’s such a farce though. Nobody tells you your twenties are mostly about frantic damage control. You’re just throwing duct tape on leaky pipes and slapping band-aids on wounds you won’t even understand until YEARS later.

You think that mistakes in your twenties are serious, but then your thirties show up, and suddenly you feel less afraid.

It’s not that you stop making mistakes or that your mistakes are less serious. I think they just stop feeling like personal affronts to your destiny. You shrug, you sigh, and you patch things up. It’s the circle of life.

And YET, every birthday sneaks up like a collection agent holding out their hand. Demanding you account for yourself. Tally up your wins and losses. List every place you fell short. And pay up.

Yayyy! You won a stupid game!!! Come collect your stupid prize.

There’s this thing called Goodhart’s Law. It’s named after a guy called Charles Goodhart, a British economist who basically said: “When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.”

Translation for the rest of us: the second you start chasing the number, the number gets dumber. Or even simpler: obsessively chasing the score ruins the game.

Goodhart’s Law is easy to spot once you know what to look for.

You want to improve education, so you introduce standardized tests to track student progress. At first, it helps. Scores go up, schools seem more accountable. But keep pushing, and teachers start teaching only what’s on the test. Students stop learning how to think and start memorizing the right answers.

You wanted better education. You got better test-taking robots.

Or you want healthier people. You make food more accessible and affordable, thinking more food = less hunger. It works for a while. But soon, the easiest foods to access are the cheapest, most processed ones. Obesity rises, diabetes skyrockets. You solved hunger and created a health crisis.

Or you want to make the economy look stronger. So you focus on GDP growth at all costs. You get bigger numbers, sure. But also massive inequality, burnout, and environmental collapse. 

It’s the same pattern, every time.

You pick something easy to count like a test score or a calorie count, and once you start optimizing for it, the real thing you cared about slowly dies behind the scenes.

And you don’t even notice at first because the numbers are still going up.

There’s a parallel in machine learning too. It’s called overfitting. (Disclaimer: I’m not a data scientist, but I have watched enough YouTube explainers to speak on this with misplaced confidence.)

Overfitting happens when a model stops learning real patterns and starts memorizing random quirks in the training data that don’t actually matter, but seem to matter because they’re there.

Let’s say you’re training a model to tell cats apart from dogs. You show it thousands of photos: cats stretching, dogs drooling, cats loafing, dogs barking at clouds.

At first, it learns good, generalizable features: pointy ears vs floppy ones etc. Things that actually mean something.

But if you keep training it too hard on the same limited set of photos, it starts picking up weird shortcuts. It notices that “cats” are often photographed indoors, maybe on beige carpets. “Dogs” are more likely to be outside, sitting on grass.

This happens because the model has latched onto proxies — superficial patterns that stand in for the real thing without actually being the real thing.

Proxies are useful. They give us shortcuts in complicated situations where real answers are hard to see. Instead of painstakingly studying every single cat, we just look for beige floors and call it a day.

But the longer you lean on a proxy, the more it starts to betray you. Because proxies aren’t the real thing. They’re rough guesses, stitched together from patterns that only kinda work. Push them too hard, optimize for them too blindly, and they stop telling the truth.

Now there are safeguards to account for overfitting, like:

• cross-validation (where you keep secretly swapping out parts of the dataset to catch the model if it starts memorizing where the beige carpets are instead of recognizing the cat)
  
• fresh test data (feeding it brand-new pet photos it’s never seen before in different angles, lighting, backgrounds and seeing if it still knows what a dog is vs cat)
  
• regularization (basically giving the model a gentle *slap on the wrist* every time it tries to get lazy or pull a fast one on you by using random background details instead of real features)

These safeguards exist because machine learning engineers know to look for overfitting. They build around it. They know that models are dumb and lazy by default. Totally unlike us

Except that’s obviously a lie.

We walk straight into the same trap face-first (machine learning engineers included.) We lose track of what we were trying to do and start optimizing for whatever’s easiest to measure instead.

Congratulations on your stupid prize.

Goodharting our way through life

I think Goodhart’s Law applies just as much (maybe even more) to our personal lives. We want to live well. We want our lives to be full and rich and wholesome. So we choose milestones like marriage by a certain time frame, an enviable set of friends, a career in a particular field, homeownership, parenthood, a packed travel calendar, and assume hitting these markers will confirm we’re living correctly.

And at first, the milestones really do mean something. You fall in love because being around that person makes you feel more alive. You pick a job because you want to contribute to something meaningful and feel valued. You want kids because some deep, ancient part of you is wired for it.

But somewhere along the way, the milestones stop being reflections of an authentic life and start becoming proxies for success. Trophies you have to defend to show that you’re not wasting your existence.

It doesn’t happen because you’re fake, or shallow, or broken. It happens because the moment you name something as a goal, the stakes change. Once you tell yourself “this matters,” it becomes vulnerable. You have to guard it. You have to chase it. You have to contort yourself to protect it.

And we’re so desperate to be good at life. To be good at love, good at family, good at art, good at friendship, good at existence itself. So we reach for things we can point to that say look, look, look — I’m doing it right.

I see it in myself all the time. By every conventional measure, I’ve done everything exactly how you’re supposed to. Relationship in my early twenties. Married at twenty-six. Baby at twenty-nine, apartment by thirty. Career leap into full-time writing. The checklist is aggressively, obnoxiously complete.

And to be clear — these were my goals. My milestones. I know plenty of people wouldn’t want to be married as young as I was, or have kids by thirty, or even want kids at all. Honestly, many people I admire didn’t follow this timeline. But for better or worse, it’s the one I internalized, so that’s the one I ended up measuring myself against.

And yet, when I look at this supposedly finished product – my neatly packaged adulthood – I’m left feeling unsettled. Like I built a structure that technically stands, but when the wind picks up, you can hear it rattle.

What I have in front of me doesn’t match the feeling of accomplishment I always imagined. It doesn’t even feel like it fully belongs to me. It’s not that marriage, parenthood, or work were wrong choices. They’re some of the best and most joyful things I’ve ever stumbled into.

But I think somewhere along the way, I started using these milestones as proof. Not of my happiness, but of my seriousness. As if the only way to legitimize my existence was to show my work.

And to anyone who doesn’t have these things, I get how all of this might sound. Like I’m standing in front of a full and wholesome plate, complaining about my appetite. I’m worried about sounding ungrateful. I know these are huge privileges.

There’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-indulgence, and I’m definitely toeing it 🦶🏻

But I’ve also realized that having what you once hoped for doesn’t always come with the feeling you thought it would. Gratitude and confusion can sit side by side.

I used to think meaning would just happen if I took good care of the life I built. Love, work, parenthood. All of it would eventually sprout purpose if I watered it enough.

At least, not consistently. Eventually, I had to face the fact that I needed something sturdier. That’s how faith became real to me. Not because it gave me certainty or control, but because it reminded me that I’m not the one holding everything together.

My relationship with God has given me a kind of steadiness I couldn’t fake on my own. It doesn’t mean I never feel lost or that I have all the answers. But it means I don’t have to keep reinventing myself to feel worthy. I don’t have to extract significance from every win or failure.

Ordinary things could stay ordinary, and that was fine. I could trust, even on days I felt nothing special, that my life still had value.

Yet even with faith as my backdrop, I still found myself trying to reverse-engineer my life toward outcomes I thought I was supposed to achieve. Outcomes that used to feel like natural results of love and curiosity, now turned into objectives: Have a second child after two years. Make a bunch of mom friends. Level up your career. Get back in shape. Teach your child to become more independent so you can be more independent too. Travel more. (FYI I didn’t accomplish most of these).

In your twenties, it’s easy to believe that milestones will save you. Marriage will stabilize you. A career will give you value. Parenthood will transform you. Travel will inspire you.

By your thirties, you start seeing it:
People who have hit every marker and still feel hollow and confused. People who got everything they asked for and are wondering why it doesn’t feel the way they thought it would.

Can we stop Goodharting ourselves?

Maybe not. Or at least, not completely. That’s the first uncomfortable thing I have to say.

We constantly get tricked into chasing things for the wrong reasons, and part of growing up is noticing it a little sooner each time. Pulling the thread before the whole thing tightens around our necks.

It’s okay to want those things and to celebrate them. The trick is never letting them become the purpose themselves. You don’t have to be a data scientist to know what it feels like to optimize for the wrong things. You just have to have survived your twenties.

It sucks that anything you care about enough eventually gets tangled up with proof. You want to learn for the joy of learning, but you end up having to care about grades, degrees, and credentials. You want to write because it feels like fulfilling, and suddenly you’re caught up in performance metrics.

And there’s something rotten under the surface of that performance.

It’s something Logan Roy saw all too clearly in the TV show Succession, when he looked across the table at his own children. His kids were heirs to a billion-dollar empire, armed with elite educations, public achievements, and polished resumes. And Daddy Logan dismissed them with one brutal line:
“You are not serious people.”

His kids weren’t unserious because they lacked achievements. They were unserious because they mistook achievement for character. They could posture, negotiate, scheme, make moves, but when it came time to carry true weight, they collapsed.

On being serious people

An essay from one of my favorite writers called ‘Surely you can be serious’ touches on exactly this confusion. The writer points out three lies that keep us from truly understanding seriousness, and they’ve profoundly resonated with me as I’ve thought about the strange gap between accomplishment and fulfillment.

Side note: His third point was different from the one I’ve written, I preferred this one so I swapped it out. But in general, everything he writes is phenomenal. So read his essay only after you finish mine.

Lie #1: Seriousness is all or nothing.

If you’re not wholly committed or all in, you’re not serious at all. If you’re not making dramatic, high-stakes moves and posting cryptic Instagram stories about it, then clearly you’re just dabbling.

When I thought about making a career switch to writing, I held off on it for a bit because I thought that becoming a real writer meant quitting everything and jumping into it headfirst. Since that was too scary, I did it gradually.

I took a writing-adjacent role at the pharma company I was already working at. Then I moved to a communications-heavy position. Then I took on more writing. And more. Step by step. And despite the lack of fireworks, I was serious about it the entire time.

Now you can do that with a career, but you can’t with a decision like having a baby. That’s relatively all or nothing, which brings me to the next lie, and it kind of builds off of the first.

Lie #2: To be serious, you must be serious about everything all at once.

Are you serious about getting your life together. Is it time to lock in? Cool. Let’s go.

You’ll need the house, the relationship, the career, the gym routine, the creative outlet, the mindfulness practice, the skincare regimen, the inner child healing work, the reading list, the group chat, the side project, the activism, and ideally, abs.

You must do ALL of these. Otherwise u suck.

Of course, nobody can function like this. We know that. Which is why the impossibility of it becomes the excuse. Now we never need to fully commit to anything because why bother!! Better to seem casually detached than admit you’re drowning.

My former manager gave me a piece of advice in a conversation that has helped me feel okay about being half-serious. She said that at any given time, you can be properly on top of only one or two things. And it’s not some Important vs. Urgent quadrant nonsense.

Sometimes you need to pick the thing that’s most available to you, like eating healthy when you don’t have time to exercise. Or spending time with friends to find fulfillment when your career is taking a bit of an L. Or throwing yourself into work because that’s the only place where cause and effect still make sense.

If you’re trying to be serious, you get maybe one or two working pieces at a time, if you’re lucky. Everything else has to either limp along in low-level chaos or get sacrificed completely. You have to get good at choosing which disappointments you can live with.

Lie #3: Seriousness must be permanent.

If you cared once, you have to care forever. If you change your mind, it means you were never really serious. If something stops fitting, it means you failed.

*thumbs down w/ fart sound*

It’s not true. This lie is very popular among people who mistake consistency for character.

There’s an interesting parallel to forest fires that I’ll share with you. I normally don’t like nature-parallels because it feels like something you’d do in an essay writing competition but chal lets do it.

In 1988, a year before Taylor Swift was born, Yellowstone National Park in the US went up in flames.

The backstory:
For decades, the forest fire policy was simple: No fires. Ever. If you see one, kill it. Fire = bad. Trees = good. No exceptions.

They were trying to protect the park, save the trees, save the animals, and preserve the beauty. And on the surface, it worked. The forests stayed green. The trees stood tall. Everything looked A-okay.

But underneath, something was going wrong. Without small, natural fires clearing things out, deadwood started piling up on the forest floor. Fallen branches, dry leaves, stuff like that. The trees grew closer together and were fighting each other for sunlight and affection from the gods.

The system got more crowded, more fragile, more ready to collapse. And nobody really noticed, because everything still looked healthy. Until 1988. Yellowstone caught fire. Like a really big fire, nearly a third of the park burned.

It ripped through everything: the deadwood, the sick parts, the healthy trees, the soil itself. All because they hadn’t let the small burns happen when they were supposed to. Because they mistook maintenance for damage.

Parallel over.

Sometimes you build your whole life around something, and for a long time, it holds you up. It gives you shade (the good kind) and it looks green and healthy from the outside. But if you refuse to let anything burn, it can set you up for a bigger collapse later.

The hard part is that you won’t always see it coming. You’ll think you’re protecting yourself. You’ll tell yourself that serious people don’t quit. But real seriousness won’t always involve preserving everything you once loved. It’s about noticing when it’s time to clear space even when it feels like cutting off a part of yourself. Especially then.

If Goodhart’s Law has a personal version, I think it’s this: The second you try to turn your life into proof, you lose the parts that were ever worth proving.

On the plus side, everyone I know over the age of 35 seems to agree that seriousness is mostly for idiots. They don’t say it directly, they just live like it. Getting some cats. Embracing adulthood. Switching careers. Moving countries. Picking up weird hobbies. Staying at home. Shrinking their friend circle. Logging off.

They’re not less serious about life. They’re just less serious about pretending. That’s what I’m aiming for.

Okay that’s all, this is the end. Happy birthday to me.

Here’s to one more year of making an ass of u and age. And one more year of getting away with it.