A few weeks ago, I handed an AI every note I've written since 2012, fourteen years of drafts, lists, half-thoughts and quotes I wanted to keep, and asked it to tell me what I'd actually been thinking about all this time.
It wrote back a report, and there's one line in it I keep coming back to:
He is unusually consistent. His labels are not.
My first reaction was that it had me backwards, because I've been a DJ, a producer and a creative director, and now I write about AI and train for endurance races. My interests have gotten hard to explain as a group.
I fear I may be developing range.
But then I looked at what it was pointing at. In 2012, I didn't have a name for it yet. All I knew was that I didn't identify with the scene I was standing in. In 2013, I found a phrase in a book, identity capital, and wore it like it was mine. By 2016, I was calling it multipotentialite, in 2024 it was "not confined to a static identity," and this summer I landed on a portfolio of serious curiosities.
That's four names for the same idea, without a single word in common among them. So the machine was right, and so was I. I haven't changed my mind in fourteen years, but I've changed my vocabulary roughly every four.
I've been turning over why that happens, and I think words wear out in two ways.
Sometimes I outgrew them. DJ, producer and creative director were all true once, and then the life under them moved on and the words stayed behind, like an old handle I never got around to changing.
The other way is sneakier, because the word stays accurate and quietly stops carrying anything. Same thing happens to a record you've run into the ground. It's still a good song, but nobody on the floor is hearing it anymore, and after a while, neither are you.
Back in 2013 I wrote a note about people who slide into career management mode and "completely stop saying anything new." I thought I was writing about other people, but reading it now, it sounds a lot like a note to myself.
The longest stretch without a new name runs from 2016 to 2024, a full eight years. Right in the middle of it is a note from June 2020, a few months into the pandemic, where I said I was struggling most with identity and that everything that gave me purpose and confidence had been damaged. I wasn't the only one. That year pulled the words out from under almost everybody at once, whether it was the job, the room, the routine or the sentence you'd been leaning on for years. My old words had stopped working, and the next ones took four more years to drop.
So why four, specifically?
In 2015, I tweeted that the rules get rewritten every three to five years, and eleven years later, my own notes came back with an average of four. But the average is lying a little. The actual gaps were three years, then eight, then two. My life clearly doesn't run on a schedule, and that's the whole reason I want my words to have one. The words never announce that they've expired, and they keep sounding fine to whoever's saying them.
And four already feels like a natural rhythm. High school is four years, college is four, and every four years we get a Summer Olympics and a presidential election. Nobody thinks those are the only times anything changes. They're the moments we look up and take stock, and I'd never thought to do that with my own words.
That's how I've started treating four years, as how often I want to check in. It's long enough for something real to shift, and short enough that I don't lose a decade before I notice.
That's the part that scares me: a job title changes when somebody promotes you, but nobody's ever promoted my vocabulary. Without anybody checking, ten, twelve, fifteen years of life can slide by while someone white-knuckles an identity that stopped fitting a couple of eras ago. The outside stops matching the inside, and the two never quite merge back.
I get why people hold on, because it's scary, and on the inside it's a tug of war. But the longer you hold on, the less those words work like a foundation and the more they work like an anchor.
Part of it, too, is that a new word feels like a confession, as if updating the language means admitting the old version was wrong. But the old words did their job and got me here. That doesn't mean they get to describe where I'm going.
Midlife crisis is a nasty way to describe discovering new interests. I wrote that down this summer. It's the same event in two vocabularies, and one turns it into a breakdown while the other turns it into a beginning.
If the pattern holds, I'm due for a new name around 2030, and I have no idea what it'll be. I thought I knew what kind of person I was. Very premature assessment.
Filed under Reinvention / Language / Identity. Part of the OWNWARD series on tools and systems for people rebuilding in public.