Right around the time I started high school, we finally upgraded the family computer. It was a new, charcoal grey Dell. Much thinner than our old, boxy beige one. The real kicker? It could run Windows Vista. I was so excited.
What followed was a summer of exploration. Whereas my previous video editing experience was limited to animated work in the 1995 PC game The Adventures of Batman & Robin Cartoon Maker, I now had the means to learn tools like Sony Vegas and the Adobe Creative Suite. Part of the process was self-directed experimentation. An equally large part was countless hours spent watching online tutorials. The gentlemen at Creative Cow helped me understand Premiere Pro’s editing timeline; Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot taught me the joys of After Effects explosions.
Three summers later, I thought I was a decent video editor, at least for a teenager. And though I would occasionally shoot and edit something as part of a school project, my newfound passion had mostly been applied to a relatively niche creative outlet: fake movie trailers.
Remember the famous edit that made Mary Poppins look like a horror movie? Or the Green Lantern fan trailer that probably still makes Ryan Reynolds jealous? Maybe not, but these were a thing for a while. The art of splicing together clips from pre-existing material, creating new narratives via their juxtaposition, and developing promos for films that would never exist. For whatever reason, the concept really clicked with me.
My initial contributions to this world were messy Marvel and DC crossovers. Adolescent dream scenarios that put Smallville’s Clark Kent in the Spider-Man and X-Men universes. Operating under an anonymous username on superhero message boards, I’d share my YouTube uploads with a like-minded community… after I finished my homework, of course. We were faceless fans who spent our evenings chatting, just for the love of the game.
Then I saw Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and it planted an idea in my head (how appropriate) for what I believed could be my faux trailer masterpiece.
Now, it’s worth mentioning that this was an era where YouTube monetization already existed. In fact, while Inception released in July 2010, the YouTube Partner Program opened to Canadian applicants in December 2007. I even vaguely recall receiving offers to join the program after some of my comic book crossovers tallied a few thousand views. I gave the opportunity very little thought.
Back to my 18-year-old self’s idea of what constituted a masterpiece…
February 2011. I’m halfway through the first year of my Biomedical Science undergrad with tunnel vision for medical school. In between classes, I check if I’ve received any comments on my latest edit — a teaser trailer for a fictitious film called The Batman Complex, wherein the Dark Knight persona is a figment of Bruce Wayne’s imagination, and the characters from Inception enter his mind to erase the delusion.
To my surprise, the teaser is YouTube’s #11 most favourited video (an old metric that no longer exists) on the day it’s uploaded. More surprising is that my follow-up trailers for the project go viral, earning coverage on WIRED and discussion on Reddit. A classmate who knows I’m a Batman fan tells me I should check out these videos he discovered, unaware that I’m the creator.
Fifteen years later, I still think fondly of The Batman Complex, yet its fleeting, anonymous fame is more of a bonus than a focal point. The honest truth is that I often rewatch my own edits not to revel in the reception they received, but simply because I like them. I think they’re pretty cool. I’m proud of what I made.
So why is there a tiny voice in my head whispering “missed opportunity” every now and again?
As I reminisce about the good ol’ days, I find myself looking beyond the question of whether I could’ve capitalized on being early to the online creator economy and instead circling something that feels much heavier. When we’re inside a moment, how can we expect ourselves to know just how significant that moment might become?
This is, in essence, the trouble with attempting to outsmart time. There’s this weird, unconscious tug of war that comes with trying to master both foresight and hindsight, and rather than one side prevailing, we end up ping-ponging between competing impulses. Half your brain desires to yell “YOLO” at the top of your lungs, the other half is taunted by a regretful inner monologue: “I’m behind… I should have done this by now… I’m too old to start.”
If any of this feels familiar to you, if you’re someone who feels pressured to live a life that follows a pre-determined, universal schedule, you’re not alone. Social scientists call this phenomenon “the social clock,” and though it really is quite common, it doesn’t always align with reality.
According to a 2025 report by the Pew Research Center, among Americans who believed there’s an ideal age for buying a home, the average answer was about 29 years old (28.8 to be exact). But according to data from the National Association of Realtors, the median age of first-time homebuyers is 40.
The social clock said, “Quick! Do it before you’re 30!”
To which the reality clock replied, “Pump your brakes, kid. Give it another decade.”
Let’s take a look at another curious group of numbers:
Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the results of its long-running longitudinal study (the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth). The study found that the participant cohort held nearly 13 jobs between the ages of 18 and 58. That’s 10+ jobs over a span of 40 years.
To be fair, “job” is not synonymous with “career,” and my point certainly isn’t that everyone reinvents themselves a dozen times; no, the intriguing angle is that the data introduces a bit more nuance than the ideals reinforced by the social clock, painting a picture of working lives that contain starts, stops, and real stages of change.
Earlier, I wrote about that fateful February in 2011, when I faced a flash of viral success. At the same time, I was already a committed passenger on the medicine train. A future as a physician made total sense according to the social clock, so why ever open the door to anything that might derail a tried and true path? Ironically, neither the creative hobbyist nor the med school hopeful knew the sheer variety of what the next fifteen years would hold.
From where I stand today, I recognize that period as a legitimate fork in the road. Obviously there were never any guarantees of success, but I can’t deny that there was enough momentum to at least take a shot at evolving from an anonymous uploader to Corey Stanton, YouTuber — possibly even in place of Corey Stanton, MD. From where I stood then, however, there was no fork in the road at all… there was only the road.
That tug of war between foresight and hindsight doesn’t quite happen until you understand both sides, and at 18, there was nothing to look back on yet. Now that I’ve acquired the clarity of hindsight, well, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You can’t escape the struggle of demanding that every choice you make proves its future value, despite the fact that you don’t reliably know what will and won’t matter in the end.
I wonder, can we get better at making this distinction? After all, we live in an age with more access to information than ever before. And it does seem like interests have become much easier to measure while they’re still forming.
Take video editing, for example. A teenager learning Adobe Premiere in 2026 can immediately understand real-world use cases that weren’t so apparent two decades ago. Someone born in 2012 has only ever known a planet where building a channel, growing an audience, attracting sponsorships, and monetizing creation is a perfectly viable career to strive for.
Beyond the technical know-how, they’ve also seen a landscape where people can make money in non-traditional ways, earning compensation for passions that previously had no clear way of paying the bills. Frankly, I think that’s kind of amazing.
Also amazing? The YouTube Partner Program I barely considered joining in the late 2000s now includes three million channels. In 2025, YouTube reported a payout of $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the previous four years alone. That’s “billion” with a “b.”
When you consider how pervasive and readily available all of this information is, it’s only natural that the question one asks while developing a new interest no longer stops at “Will I enjoy this?” In the modern era, that question almost instantly expands to “Can I grow this? Can I monetize it? Should I be taking this more seriously? Is this worth my time?”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this mindset shift, but it does suggest that the more ways we have to measure an interest’s potential, the more tempting it becomes to assign worth before we’ve even explored what the interest actually is.
To those who study decision-making, this temptation shows up in the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Here, exploration means spending time on something with an uncertain value, while exploitation—not to be confused with more negative definitions of the word—refers to making a choice whose value you already understand.
We’ve all been there. The choice paralysis of considering Uber Eats-ing from a new Thai restaurant (“Could be great! Could be terrible!”) vs. effortlessly defaulting to an old reliable where we know how much we love their Tom Yum soup. The former is exploration, the latter is exploitation. One feels potentially wasteful since the outcome is unknown, while the other feels more efficient because the reward is unmistakable.
Of course, exploration only feels inefficient due to the TBD status of its payoff; I mean, if the payoff were knowable, it wouldn’t really be exploration, would it?
To take it one step further, maybe sometimes the payoff is that there is no payoff. I can tell you every main event of every WrestleMania since 1997. I can cite the absurd twists and turns of The Undertaker’s quasi-mystical role in a sport-adjacent soap opera. I could probably write a half-compelling essay about the cultural and historical significance of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s anti-corporate rebellion. But to what end? In this case, perhaps the return on 30 years of watching professional wrestling has been just that: I watched wrestling.
A lack of predictable return is all well and good when we’re talking about a hobby. Things get a smidge more existential when it’s an entire chapter of your life…
While I was both pursuing and completing med school, medicine was my future. After I left the white coat behind in favour of directing movies, medicine felt like a sunk cost detour. Nearly a decade after graduating, medicine is now something else entirely. It’s the admiration I have for hundreds of classmates who currently take care of our friends and families. It’s the stories of more than a thousand patients who trusted me during the most difficult and vulnerable moments of their lives. It’s the strategic DNA of how I approach every challenge, every conversation, every goal and aspiration. Medicine is no longer tied to any kind of chronology; its value exists in so many parts of me, far removed from the hands of time.
Poetry aside, shedding the hands of time isn’t easy. It’s also not always a good idea. Sure, the paradox of how I was early to being a creator / late to figuring it out is fun to look back on. As is the reverse, where I was late to filmmaking / early to a midlife crisis-level career change. Yet there are indeed situations where timing absolutely matters. Lately (no pun intended), I’ve been cursing just how behind I am when it comes to long-term investing, and the realities of how compound growth rewards the early bird are not lost on me. “Never too late” is a nice sentiment, though sometimes too late truly is too late.
So let’s amend the title of this thought:
Instead of claiming never, I’ll propose that being late to one thing is not the same as being late to your entire life. As for the always part, I maintain that there’s something to be said for being ahead of the curve, even if the eventual reward isn’t crystal clear.
All those years ago, I started an anonymous YouTube account under the name themanbatman. I had no expectations or extravagant plans for where it could lead.
All these years later, I’ve written over 2,000 words to justify revealing my secret identity. Does anyone care? I sincerely doubt it, but it still means something to me.
Life is short, life is long. Don’t waste it. Don’t rush it.