All Roads Lead to Rome

All roads lead to Rome.

That phrase encapsulates my core philosophy. It’s not about history. Not about the Romans. Not about the grand idea of civilization or fate, at least not in the way people pretend to understand it. It’s about something simpler. The fact that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you fight or flail, you will end up exactly where you were meant to be. Not where you wanted or where you imagined. Where you were meant to be.

There is no need to ever make plans for your life. Or convince yourself that a different choice, a little more effort, some extra discipline would have altered everything. It won’t. That’s a lie. The outcome was always set. Not by an external force. Not by God. Not by your circumstances. Not by anything.

Your Rome was always waiting for you. It doesn’t matter what choices you made, good or bad, decisive or hesitant. Movement and stillness both led to the same place. What felt like chaos was just a script you didn’t realize you were following. If you think back, if you really think, you’ll see it clearly. You were always going to end up here. The only thing that will surprise you is how little impact everything you ever tried to do actually had.

The brain adjusts and sheds the unnecessary. The past gets trimmed down to something manageable. You forget things that don’t matter. You let go of people who were never going to stay. You think you’re growing, but really, you’re just evolving more into who you really are. What remains is what was inevitable. You are exactly where you deserve to be.

And not everyone is meant to be "successful." That word means nothing anyway. Look at the homeless man begging on the sidewalk. The one you step over and pretend not to see. He didn’t fall from the sky. He arrived, just like you. His Rome is different from yours, but it’s no less real. Every decision he made, every belief he held, every moment of weakness or defiance, it all led him here. He is not a product of his environment, his environment is a product of him. If you were to look at his life in totality, from the moment of birth, all the signs were there. Could it have gone another way? No, not at all. Agency is an illusion, and when you, yourself, look back on your own life, it will reveal the inevitability of where you've ended up.

You cannot reinvent yourself. There is no escaping yourself. You can run, but you will always be running in a circle. You can fight, but you are only resisting what was always coming.

But I say all that to say, there is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about. Go look in the mirror, because this is your Rome. This is you. You are better off finding peace in acceptance rather than resistance. All your emotional strife and inner turmoil stems from constantly fighting yourself, from fighting who you really are.

By your 30s, you start to understand. The 20s are for thrashing, for panicking, for trying to carve out a life that you think you should want. You make mistakes. You waste time. You force yourself to do things you don’t even want to do because you think, maybe, if you just keep at it, it will all click into place. But it never does. You only realize later that the only thing your 20s were good for was teaching you what you didn’t want. Everything else was static.

A shift happens as you continue to grow older. You stop fighting yourself. You stop waiting for the breakthrough, for the moment when everything finally makes sense. You see that it has already happened. That it was happening all along. You stop resenting where you’ve landed because you understand now that it could never have been any different. You learn to live inside it.

There is peace in that. A softening of the edges. You look at your life and, for the first time, stop trying to rewrite it. You stop measuring it against what you thought it should be. You just let it be what it is.

And so there is no point in worrying. No point in regretting. You are not lost. You never were. Every moment and decision was part of becoming yourself. You were always moving toward this. The only thing left is to accept it.

This is who you are.

For better or worse.

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