Making the most of your 20's

21. Go to/host theme parties. Once people age out of their 20s, no one’s trying to wear pajamas or Saran Wrap out of the house. The only theme parties that exist after your 20s are ‘Wedding,’ ‘Baby Shower,’ and ‘Funeral.’

Thought Catalog with 21 ways you should take advantage of your 20's.​

My general advice for your 20's would be to leverage​ assets generally unique to that time of life: your remaining physical prime, higher adaptability and tolerance for new environments and ideas, and the freedom that comes from not having a family yet. It's a time to cultivate and enjoy option value, and also to maximize your exposure to as broad a set of people, places, and ideas as possible, if for nothing else than to know what the world has to offer before option value starts to lessen in value in your life, and you start to trade it for certainty.

I had a 30 before 30 list, and while I didn't check everything off the list, it was useful to have one. Of items on the list, I'd highly recommend:​

  • Travel to all 7 continents. I missed Antarctica, but the goal forced me to travel on a regular schedule. The easiest way to expand your worldview and reduce your tendency to reductivist "us vs. them" mentality is to become a citizen of the world. When speaking with people in that country, your first resort should be their native language.
  • Live in New York City.​ No more efficient place in the U.S. to meet as many people as quickly, and as such, the ideal place to develop your socialization skills (making friends, dating, everything in between). As an expensive place to live, it teaches you to both hustle and live with less (space, money, material possessions) quickly. The wealth of options and opportunity eventually force you to find your own compass to avoid being overwhelmed or lost.
  • Don't live in New York City. ​Learning to find your equilibrium in a new place teaches you how much of your own happiness is intrinsic rather than environmental.
  • Run a marathon​. Or something physically so challenging you have to train for months on end to even have a chance of finishing, like climbing a mountain, or biking 200 miles in a day. Finding your physical limits is useful hardening of the soul. It teaches you to structure your efforts over extended period of time, and the time required often forces you to be more disciplined in scheduling the rest of your life. Making it something you need to train a long period just to finish keeps you from cheating, one advantage of physical challenges.
  • Pick up one new skill a year​. Playing the piano. Scuba diving. Learning to cook. Getting your pilot's license. Photography. Learning Photoshop. Something new every year. It's important to maintain the educational pace from your college days, just to turn it into habit. With the advent of so many online courses, now, it's easier than ever.

If you believe the adage that the paths not taken are the ones you regret later in life, then the best way to mitigate that early in life is to take as many different paths as possible. Fear and discomfort seemed to be more useful guides as to what to seek out in my 20's. As you age, you fear less and tend to avoid discomfort.

Slavoj Zizek's Greatest Films Poll ballot

Via Fimoculous, here's the critics poll ballot from Slavoj Zizek ​in Sight and Sound's 2012 Greatest Films Poll. It's no surprise that Zizek's is the only vote for 2007's Hitman, starring Timothy Olyphant, in the entire critic's poll. And I haven't seen it myself, so my surprise could be a bit of snobbish presumption. Still...

Browsing the entire list of films that received at least one vote is a fun exercise. The list has a reputation for skewing towards movies with narrow appeal, so what seemed to me to be more recent populist entries leapt out at me:​

  • Anchorman
  • The Artist​
  • Avatar​
  • Back to the Future​
  • Bambi​
  • Borat​
  • The Breakfast Club​
  • The Departed​
  • Girl with the Dragon Tattoo​
  • Gran Torino​
  • Inglorious Bastards​
  • Kill Bill​
  • The King's Speech​
  • Minority Report​
  • Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End​
  • Precious​
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes​
  • The Social Network​
  • Sweeney Todd​
  • Up​
  • Wall-E​
  • Zodiac​

To take this poll to the next level, the BFI could tweak their website so you could look at any movie and see how often it ranked in the top 10, 20, 50 movies among only those critics who had actually seen it. As the years go by, and despite increased average life expectancies and the number of classics that stream online, it becomes harder and harder for critics to have seen as large a percentage of the the entire film canon.

AT&T text messaging rates

My iPhone is on the AT&T network. For a while, I had been paying $5 a month for 200 text messages a month. Then last year, AT&T eliminated the $5 plan, so I had to pay $10 a month for 1000 text messages a month, even though I didn't need them. I still had enough text messages a month that it was cheaper than a la carte pricing.

When Apple launched iMessages, my text message volume dropped a lot, and I suspect AT&T saw a corresponding drop in the number of people paying them for text messages. So they eliminated the $10 plan, and the only options left in place were a $20 a month plan for unlimited text messaging or a la carte pricing charged at the absurd price of $.20 a text message, whether inbound or outbound.​ AT&T justified this by saying customers preferred unlimited plans.

Since the FCC clearly won't protect consumers from this type of price gouging, we're largely on our own. Given how many of my heavy texting friends are on iPhones and iMessages, I looked at a few phone bills and decided to try paying a la carte for two months.​

The results are in, and it looks like I'm saving about $15 a month​ by doing so. Not enough to change my life, but the emotional satisfaction of taking $15 a month out of AT&T's pockets makes it feel like $100.

What ​I'd love to see is my iPhone have the ability to take incoming text messages and reroute them to one of my free text messaging apps, or Twitter DM, and save me paying any fee for those random texts from non iMessage users, but of course by that point AT&T would have charged me already.

I have faith that someday we'll be free of this absurd rent-seeking toll, and AT&T as a whole, and in the meantime, I keep picturing Anne Hathaway dancing with an AT&T executive at a masquerade ball, whispering in his ear, "There's a storm coming. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could charge so much for text messaging and provide so little for the rest of us."