Before the Story Simplified

Recently I had several conversations with undergraduate and graduate students about their future plans. What struck me was how carefully many of them seemed to think through their options. Some already had plans mapped out from A to Z, with backup plans for their backups. Listening to them, I caught myself wondering something slightly absurd: perhaps something about being twenty has changed.

My first instinct was to attribute it to technology. Today it is possible to access an enormous amount of information—about graduate programs, industry careers, salaries, visa rules, long-term prospects. With so much information available, it seems natural that decisions would become more deliberate, but also perhaps more anxious.

For a while I assumed that the difference was structural: an information-rich environment producing more careful, more computational decision-making.

But after thinking about it longer, I began to suspect that what I was noticing might not be a change in how decisions are made, but in how they appear from the outside.

When I was around twenty, I was studying physics and, like many of my classmates, assumed that I would eventually go to graduate school. It felt less like a decision and more like a default trajectory. At some point during my third year, a taxi driver asked me what I studied. When I answered “physics,” he responded with a half-joking remark about how that probably meant I would go to graduate school and spend years “living off my parents’ money.” The comment was casual, but it stayed with me longer than I expected.

Around that time I went to Germany as an exchange student. I arrived with a certain romantic enthusiasm. Germany, after all, had produced many of the figures I associated with the history of physics, and the university I attended was a technical one. In my imagination, it felt like stepping into the center of the discipline.

So I enrolled in a theoretical course—analysis.

The enthusiasm lasted for about two or three lectures. After that it became painfully clear that I could not follow the class at all. The lectures were in German, but the real difficulty was not the language, and not even the mathematics. Analysis is not especially technical mathematics in the way physics students sometimes imagine. The problem was that I could not follow the logic.

In physics, when a calculation becomes difficult, it is always possible to blame the algebra or the notation. But here there were often no formulas at all—only arguments unfolding step by step. And when I lost the thread, there was nowhere to hide. I attended a few more sessions out of stubbornness, then quietly stopped going. The exams went about as badly as one might expect. I remember receiving a C-minus in at least one course, and a similar grade in another that I had actually tried to follow seriously.

Because the exchange program converted grades into a simple pass-or-fail record, everything technically counted as a pass. Instead of relief, the result gave me an odd sense of embarrassment. It felt like getting away with something I hadn’t earned.

During that period I also developed a routine that, in hindsight, had very little to do with physics. Germany’s gray winter made me complain about the lack of sunlight, which became a convenient excuse to travel south whenever possible. I took short trips to Spain, drank expensive coffee I could not really afford, and kept a refrigerator that often contained a box of Beck’s lemon beer. Occasionally I took taxis when public transport would have worked perfectly well.

I remember a persistent thought from that time: my productivity was close to zero, while my consumption seemed remarkably efficient.

Somewhere in the middle of that year I quietly concluded that graduate school might not be the right path for me. At the time the reasoning felt decisive and rational. Looking back now, it was probably a mixture of confusion, comparison with other people who seemed far more capable, and a certain impatience with my own lack of discipline.

What strikes me now is not the decision itself but the fact that I had somehow forgotten how much thinking and uncertainty surrounded it. Over time the memory had simplified itself into a cleaner narrative: exchange student year, change of plans, move on to industry. The hesitation, the awkward comparisons, the small moments of doubt had faded from view.

Which is why, when I listen to students today carefully discussing their plans—graduate school, industry, different countries, backup options—I sometimes catch myself reacting to the visibility of their thinking. From the outside, it can look like a great deal of calculation.

But that reaction itself may be misleading. It assumes that what has changed is the intensity of their thinking, when it may instead be the visibility of it.

I certainly did not have access to the same volume of information at the time, nor did I externalize my thinking in the same way. Many of the same questions were probably already there. They were simply answered more quietly, often in isolation, and sometimes with very little evidence.

So perhaps something about being twenty has not changed as much as it seems. It may be that time has simply smoothed the memory of my own uncertainty, leaving behind only the outline of the choices I eventually made.