“Fake it till you make it” was the life philosophy that my friend and I, jokingly or not, subscribed to in high school. At that time, it was about getting into college: faking being good at math even though it frustrates me to hell and back, faking liking ROTC even though I could not stand the domineering, misogynistic instructors, faking being a natural leader even though leading scares the living crap out of me, faking having genuine interest in founding clubs even though they are either useless or useless. Getting into college would be the end of faking, I thought. By then I will have made it, I thought. I was naive then.

The feeling came rolling back when I started job-hunting in college. Getting a good internship became the new “making it.” I knew leet coding reminds me of the cardiac-arrest cases in the gyms of Chinese tech giants. I knew networking makes me repulsed. (Luckily I didn’t end up doing much of that because LinkedIn apparently has a search limit, otherwise I surely wouldn’t be able to claim to be who I am today, so thank you, LinkedIn.) But what choice was there besides faking it to make it? So I toiled over practicing case interviews, looking up finance formulas, and crash-coursing algorithms.

Why did I care so much about getting an internship somewhere substantial? Well, it probably wasn’t for padding my resume because I hardly knew what I wanted to do in life. I figured it was because I feared, above all, to spend a summer doing nothing. And why was that? Fear of not constantly having new experiences? Fear of being left behind? Seeing how my peers were always enriching themselves, learning new skills, building side projects subconsciously push me to think that I should be doing those too. Or maybe, it’s because I distinctly remember the time when a senior recounted his summer experiences to the freshman-year me, and I thought “damn, he wasted that summer.” It was faulty reasoning, I have since realized. But I still don’t want to become someone that my past self would be disappointed in.

Now that, through very fortuitous events, I landed an internship for this summer, I once again feel compelled to compare myself against my friends joining or founding start-ups, raking in cash through Tesla options, or flaunting their multiple offers on WeChat. I need to get rich, fast, goes the thought. Or else I will be behind, and eventually will actually need the one dollar per month pittance that my high school math teacher promised when we inadvertently end up in the streets. The same math class where my friend and I established our “fake it till you make it” philosophy.

There is no end to this, is there? To making it? One second it’s getting into college, next it’s getting an internship, then it’s getting rich. One step after another, leading us into the cycle of endless “faking,” bottomless wants, and eventual dissatisfaction. When will I ever truly make it, if there even is such a thing?

On the other hand, I tell myself, life is not a race, right? It’s not about who gets to the end first? The common "it" path of college-career-wealth is well-documented by societal standards. But perhaps “making it” doesn’t have to be quantifiable in materialistic, temporal, objective terms, it could also be subjective, or a product of a mentality. Eventually, we will all get somewhere, maybe to the end, maybe beyond the end. At that point, when all karma will have caught up to us, it shouldn’t matter if we made “it.” It shouldn’t matter if we have lived “that” life, as long as we lived a good life.

What kind of life is a good life? Most generally, a good life can be quantified in terms of salary, assets, marriage, kids, status, etc. When defined within a social unit, a good life can be one that is comparatively and convincingly better than one’s peers. For one individual, a good life might simply be a happy life. The “it” life might be a deemed good life, but in the confines of societal norms many do not attain happiness. Being propelled by peer pressure and comparison often leaves one drained. I’m scared that if I switch on autopilot, and allow external pressures to push me to do things, I will lose myself after witnessing the individual’s powerlessness against a cruel world. Which, to some extent, I can already feel.

I think I should redefine what a good life means to me. A good life should be one where at any point or during any sub-segment of the entire lifespan, the aggregate amount of content, up to that point or through that sub-segment, dominates over the amount of discontent. Probabilistically speaking, at the end of our lives, we will likely be normal people who have done common things. We are probably not the ones for the history books, sorry to break it to myself. If society won’t remember us after our departure, then why should we conform to it? By not conforming, we can solve the “making it” problem by eliminating the consensual “it” to make.

It’s like when Car Seat Headrest sings “I’m coming up short in a life worth nothing.” This life is not necessarily worth anything. “I think you knew what loving to run towards something can do to a man.” It’s the pursuit that is unhealthy, the stubborn pursuit for worth, approval, meaning, success. We shouldn’t feel like we are coming up short in life, because to make joy out of nothing is already worth celebrating.

Then, the least we can do is ensure that we live a happy and fulfilled life in which every moment is worth it. A life with which we are content. A life through which we are confident that everything happened for the best. If we can convince ourselves of that, then maybe we have already made it.