Early, Wrong, or Immeasurable
The Cost of Divergence
Dutch people would call me a dwarsligger, in the literal sense: someone who lies sideways in the stream and likes to challenge the flow.
But it’s difficult to measure whether that pays off when modern culture uses a different system of accounting.
Take my refusal to return to an office job. The easy money of simply showing up on time and fulfilling requests has gone. You could argue I’ve made poor choices or am failing, because the evidence suggests my path is harder and less financially rewarding.
Like investing, at what point are you wrong rather than early?
Or take not having a family. I see the stress of friends grinding it out to afford their children’s education. I see the strain, the exhaustion, the narrowing of life. Yet who ever regretted having children? And am I happier simply because I’m not frayed by the responsibility, or am I avoiding something essential?
It seems evidence can stack up against my lifestyle without ever resolving into certainty. Timing matters. And the ledger I’m using is at odds with the standardised one.
I find myself wondering what everyone else is so certain about. There appears to be a confidence that arrives when life unfolds in the recognised sequence. A cohesion of milestones, paired with an acceptance of expected suffering, as people move in time with the script.
Their doubts are normalised, stabilised through shared recognition that everyone is paying similar costs. This becomes particularly difficult for the dwarsligger, who has no social reference point and is quietly questioned by peers. When will you return to normal life? As if deviation itself were an error waiting to be corrected.
What happens when my doubts have nowhere to land socially?
Did I fuck up?
That question carries more assumptions than it first appears to. It assumes there is a correct sequence, a measurable arrival, and a point at which deviation becomes failure. It treats life as an optimisation problem, as though there were a single yellow brick road and the only risk was stepping off it.
Struggle, though, is built into every path regardless of direction. Everyone pays a cost. Some costs are widely recognised and socially comparable. Others resist measurement entirely.
So I’m forced to re-evaluate my accounting system. My checks and balances are different now. If pain is the given, then the distinction that matters is not whether I suffer, but whether that suffering is corrosive or clarifying. Am I failing, or am I simply unsupported? Am I trying to measure my values, needs, and satisfactions against a culture I’ve already stepped outside?
Do my decisions numb me, or do they sharpen my perception?
This kind of questioning might be praised at twenty-five. By midlife, it’s often pathologised. Discovering I was autistic brought a great deal of grief with it. A set of illusions dissipated like fog in rising wind. What I lost wasn’t just certainty about the past, but faith in the timing I’d been measuring myself against.
Have I fallen behind? In comparison to what? You can see the culture shift its expectations within a single generation, from young mothers steered away from further education to IVF mothers at the height of demanding careers.
Certainly, in comparison to the majority of people I know, I am behind. But by other measures, I’m ahead. Few people can step off the treadmill for two years without alarm. Few have the freedom to examine their lives without immediate economic panic. Fewer still recover buried capacities once the bills and dependents have accumulated.
The uncomfortable truth is the absence of virtuous certainty. There’s no reassurance or applause. No comfortable knowing through commonality. It’s simply an undertaking that could end in disaster, much like any well-managed and rehearsed cruise.
If there is a mistake in all of this, it wouldn’t be in diverging, or even in misjudging the odds. It would be in refusing to pull on the ambiguous thread. In abandoning first-principles living simply to regain the comfort of alignment or the approval of peers.
It may seem both arrogant and ignorant to step outside the forms our ancestors relied on. But they could not have imagined navigating such rapidly shifting currents. Maybe I’m resting in an eddy, briefly held against the flow, or maybe I’m about to be swept downstream, gasping for breath.
Both are costs to carry.
