Hello friend,
When I was a kid, my father used to turn on the news.
I hated it.
Not because I had strong opinions about politics or world affairs.
I was a kid.
My strongest opinion was that Tom and Jerry should be on the television instead.
I could never understand what was so interesting about watching some serious man in a suit stare into the camera while only his mouth moved.
Every now and then the screen would cut to a building.
Then a crowd.
Then another serious person talking.
Then back to the first guy.
And I would sit there thinking,
Why on earth would anyone choose this when Tom is currently trying to drop an anvil on Jerry?
It made absolutely no sense to me.
Fast forward around fifteen years.
Same kind of television.
Same kind of serious man talking about the world.
Except this time...
I was the one watching.
Properly watching too.
Listening.
Trying to understand what had happened, why it mattered and what might happen next.
And then my little sister Imane would sit beside me, annoyed because I had taken the remote.
She wanted Tom and Jerry.
I wanted the news.
And one day I actually heard myself say,
“The news is important.”
I stopped for a second.
Oh no.
It happened.
I became my father.
What makes this funny to me is that Tom and Jerry did not suddenly become bad.
The news did not suddenly become entertaining.
Nothing dramatic happened.
I simply changed.
At one point, cartoons were genuinely important to me.
Not fake childhood-important.
Actually important.
A good episode could make the afternoon better.
Then slowly, without me noticing, other things started moving higher on the list.
School.
Work.
Money.
Family.
The future.
The world outside my little bubble.
All the things younger me would have considered painfully boring.
And that made me wonder,
How many things I care deeply about today will eventually become my new Tom and Jerry?
That is the strange part.
We live as if our current priorities are permanent.
The job feels incredibly important.
The relationship feels permanent.
The problem feels enormous.
The opinion feels obvious.
The goal feels like the only goal worth having.
And maybe it is.
Right now.
But right now is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Because the version of you reading this today is already different from the person you were ten years ago.
And ten years from now?
That person might look back at some of the things currently keeping you awake and think,
Really?
We were losing sleep over that?
Life has a strange habit of rearranging the list.
You can believe money is the most important thing in the world.
Then someone you love gets sick.
Suddenly the money only matters because of what it might be able to do for them.
You can think your career is everything.
Then something happens at home and work becomes the least interesting thing in the room.
You can spend years caring about what other people think about you.
Then one day, for whatever reason, their opinion loses half its weight.
Sometimes we change intentionally.
Other times life walks into the room, grabs our carefully organised priorities and says,
No.
This matters now.
And I think that is something worth remembering.
Changing your mind is not always weakness.
Outgrowing something does not mean it was meaningless.
A friendship can end and still have mattered.
A dream can change and still have been worth chasing.
An opinion can evolve without making your younger self stupid.
Eight-year-old me was completely correct to care more about Tom and Jerry than international politics.
What exactly was I supposed to do with economic policy?
Diversify my portfolio?
I had Pokémon cards.
My priorities made sense for the person I was.
The priorities I have now make sense for the person I am.
And hopefully the things I care about ten years from now will make sense for whoever I become next.
That is the point.
You are allowed to outgrow things.
Ideas.
Goals.
Interests.
Relationships.
Even versions of yourself.
Something does not need to last forever to have mattered.
Sometimes we become strangely loyal to our past selves.
We wanted something five years ago, so now we feel obligated to keep wanting it.
We said we would become a certain kind of person, so changing direction somehow feels like failure.
But your past self did not spend all those years learning just so you could remain exactly the same.
There is another strange thing about change.
Sometimes a lesson reaches you before you are ready for it.
You might read this today and think,
Alright.
You changed the TV channel.
Relax, Carl Jung.
Fair enough.
Maybe none of this means anything to you right now.
Then something happens.
A job.
A relationship.
A loss.
A responsibility.
A move.
A child.
Or just some completely ordinary Tuesday that somehow divides your life into before and after.
And suddenly something you dismissed years ago makes complete sense.
I think some lessons arrive before we have anywhere to put them.
So we ignore them.
Then life builds the shelf later.
That is why I have slowly become suspicious of the sentence,
“That’s just who I am.”
Sometimes it is true.
Sometimes it is just a convenient excuse not to change.
“I’m impatient. That’s just who I am.”
“I don’t trust people. That’s just who I am.”
“I could never do that. That’s just who I am.”
Maybe.
Or maybe that is just who you have been so far.
There is a difference.
And most change is not even dramatic.
We imagine growth as some huge moment.
A revelation.
A life-changing speech.
Beautiful music playing in the background.
Then suddenly,
New person.
But usually it is quieter than that.
You start enjoying something you used to hate.
You stop caring about something that once controlled your mood.
You react differently to a problem that would have ruined your entire week five years ago.
You become more patient.
You stop needing to prove something.
And then one random day you notice,
I would not have reacted like this before.
There it is.
You changed.
Quietly.
Without even noticing.
Maybe that is what growing up really is.
Not becoming some perfect final version of yourself.
Just slowly replacing old priorities with new ones and hoping the trade is worth it.
What I Learned
-
Perspectives Evolve Over Time: Something that feels incredibly important today may barely matter to you years from now, while things you currently ignore may become central to your life.
-
Changing Your Mind Is Not Always a Bad Thing: New experiences give you new information. Sometimes growth means admitting that the person you are today sees things differently from the person you used to be.
-
Priorities Can Change Very Quickly: Money, work, status and personal interests can suddenly feel tiny when life puts something genuinely important in front of you.
-
You Are Allowed to Outgrow Yourself: Old dreams, beliefs and identities do not need to follow you forever. They can matter deeply and still belong to an older version of you.
So maybe the goal is not to remain the same.
Maybe it is to stay open enough that life can still teach you something.
Do not hold every opinion like it has to be your last one.
Do not hold every identity so tightly that there is no room left to grow.
And do not be embarrassed when something you once ignored suddenly becomes important.
You are not supposed to remain the same person forever.
Just try to make sure the next version of you knows a little more than the last one.
And if one day I am fighting my own kids for the remote because I want to watch the news while they want Tom and Jerry...
Well.
I suppose my father gets the last laugh.
Much much Love,
Yassine X