We Removed the Instructions

Nobody warned us freedom would feel like this.

You can build a company in your bedroom. You can DM your heroes. You can learn anything from anyone. You can start over in any direction you want, on any day you want, with almost no permission from anyone.

We are celebrating this shift. And we should.

The world is becoming permissionless. DIY by default. Almost everything that used to require a gatekeeper, a credential, or someone else’s approval can now be done alone.

"You Can Just Do Things" as Jay Yang would say. He’s right. The floor of what one person can build has gone up in a way that would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago.

But there’s something about this that doesn’t get said out loud.

Compare this DIY economy to IKEA.

When you walk out of IKEA, you carry a flat box. Inside is pre cut wood, a baggie of screws, a cheap hex key, and a paper booklet with cartoon instructions.

The whole thing is designed for you to succeed at it. You might mess it up. You might lose a screw. You might curse at step 14. But the path is laid out. Someone designed the chair. Someone cut the parts. Someone wrote the instructions. Your only job is to follow along.

This is the version of DIY that everyone mentally pictures.

The DIY economy is not that.

The DIY economy doesn't come with a laid out plan. It doesn't come with cut parts or a booklet or a hex key. It comes with the idea that you can build whatever you want, and then it walks away.

Many of the people cheering loudest about how you can "Do it yourself" tend to be naturally good at figuring stuff out without help. They have an internal compass. They are the kind of people who walk into a Home Depot, look at lumber, and start sketching. So when they tell other people just go build, they think they're handing over freedom. And they are. But they are also handing over a problem they personally never had.

When you tell most people they can build whatever they want, they don't feel entirely free.

They freeze.

Not because they're innately lazy. Not because they're scared of work. They freeze because what they actually need isn't permission to build. Its some sense of what to build, and why, and where to start. And the world used to give them that for free.

Think about what the old world used to hand you, almost without asking.

You graduated from school and there was a path. You got a job that came with a title, a ladder, and a clear sense of what success looked like at each rung. You knew when to get married, when to have kids, when to retire, because everyone around you was doing the same thing at roughly the same time. Your community came pre assembled. Your routine came pre assembled. Even your idea of what a good life looks like came pre assembled.

None of this was perfect. A lot of it was actually pretty constraining and bad in ways we have rightly moved past, and I'm definitely not trying to argue we should go back to any of it.

But the old world did one thing well.

It answered a lot of the hard questions before you had to ask them. What should I do with my life. Who should I spend it with. What does it mean to be successful. What does it mean to be a good person. The old world didn't let you pick all the answers, but it also didn't make you generate them from scratch. The questions came pre answered, even when the answers were sometimes wrong for you.

We have stripped most of those defaults away. Good. But the answer we have collectively agreed on for what to do instead is some version of figure it out yourself. Build your own career. Build your own community. Build your own routine. Build your own meaning. And when you cant figure it out, the response is usually some flavor of well, you can just do things, why aren't you doing them.

This is where the trap is.

What nobody really mentions is that figuring out what you want is often a much harder problem than figuring out how to get it.

The old world had hard problems. They were just hard problems on the outside.

These were external problems. You could see them. You could throw yourself at them. The friction was visible and most of life was about pushing through it.

But the new world has hard problems too. Except the hard problems are on the inside.

The friction moved from the outside to the inside.

And most of us were not really prepared for that. The old kind of hard, you could grind through with effort. The new kind of hard, you cant grind through. You have to sit in it. You have to tolerate not knowing. You have to choose one thing and let the other thousand things go. That is a fundamentally different muscle, and almost nobody is teaching us how to build it.

I think this is the real reason so many people in their 20s feel stuck even though, on paper, they have more freedom than any generation in history. Its not the freedom thats the problem. Its that nobody warned them the friction was going to be internal, and they keep trying to attack it the old way. They take more courses. They follow more accounts. They consume more advice. They are throwing external effort at an internal problem, and it doesn't work.

I hit this wall pretty early.

I had every advantage of the new world. I could build things. I could DM strangers. I could learn whatever I wanted from the internet. For a while I confused that with knowing what I was doing.

And when I sat down and asked myself what I actually wanted my life to look like.

I didn't have an answer.

I had a thousand half answers, all of them shaped by whatever I had scrolled past that week. One day I wanted to be a founder. The next day I wanted to write. The next day I wanted to move to SF. The next day I wanted to live in a mountain town in the middle of nowhere. None of these wants were really mine. They were borrowed from people I had been watching that morning, and as soon as I scrolled to the next person, the want changed.

Having the You Can Just Do Things mindset is empowering when you know what you want. When you don't, its like staring into a dark forest.

Its like being told you can go anywhere, while standing at the edge of a dark forest with a flashlight. The flashlight is great. But it doesn't tell you where to walk.

I stood at that edge for longer than I'd like to admit. I was a deer in headlights. I would scroll and watch other people doing cool things and assume they had something I didn't. Some clarity. Some plan. Some advantage I was missing. They didn't. Most of them were just already moving.

The way out of the dark forest isn't a map. Its motion.

You can't think your way to clarity. You can't always read your way to it. And you definitely can't scroll your way to it.

Every small thing you do is a data point about what you actually want. And the only way to collect that data is to start doing things, even when you have no idea if any of them are going to matter.

The mistake most people make is waiting to know what they want before they start. The people who look like they figured it out didn't do that. They started a thousand small experiments. Most of them went nowhere. A few of them taught them something. And the few that did teach them something compounded into a direction that felt obvious in retrospect, even though it wasn't obvious in the moment.

I wasted a lot of time waiting for clarity. The thing that finally moved me was just building.

Not big things. Small things. A cold dm site nobody asked for. A tool for my brother. A meal prep app. Most of these were attempts at things I thought I wanted, and most of them taught me that I didn't. I couldn't have figured this out by sitting in my room thinking about it. I had to make the things and watch what happened.

So if you're stuck, the move is not to commit to a path. The move is to take whatever vague thing you're curious about and try it for two weeks. Build the smallest version. Ship the worst draft. Send the embarrassing DM. You aren't committing your life. You're just running an experiment. The point isn’t to be right. The point is to generate data.

I don't have a solution to all of this. This new world without instructions is scary, and you can absolutely go back to the old one. A lot of people do. They take the safer job. The clearer ladder. The path their parents would recognize. They opt back into the defaults because the defaults are easier to live inside than this void that we are in.

But the freedom on the other side of this is addicting.

The people who live and breathe in the DIY world have built lives that weren't possible a generation ago. They picked their own work. Their own communities. Their own meaning. They are the trailblazers of this version of the world. Thats something I want too. And I think a lot of you reading this do too.

The old world handed you a path and asked you to walk it. The new one drops you at the edge of a forest and asks you to build something worth finding.

Both are hard. Only one of them is yours.