There is a story about Grian Chatten, the lead singer of Fontaines D.C., that I think about often. Before choosing music, he was considering studying computer science.
That might sound ordinary now, but it carries a very specific cultural weight. For a lot of people growing up in the late 2000s and 2010s, computer science was presented as the sensible path. The future. The safe option. The thing you did if you wanted security, employability, and proof that you were making a smart decision.
Then his grandmother said something simple: "You can do what you want, but that doesn’t feel like you."
I think about that sentence because she wasn’t trying to control him. She wasn’t giving him some grand motivational speech. She wasn’t saying, “You’re destined to be famous.” She was simply recognising a mismatch. She was saying: I know you, and this choice does not resemble you.
That is what alignment often looks like. It does not always arrive as a dramatic revelation. Sometimes it arrives through someone who knows you quietly reflecting you back to yourself.
So he chose music. And that decision changed the rooms he entered. Because alignment does not only change what you do; it changes where you spend your time. It changes who you meet. It changes the conversations you become available for.
At music school, Grian met the people who would eventually become Fontaines D.C. Connor Deegan was eager to form a band. Carlos O’Connell had come from Spain. Other members arrived with their own histories, influences, instincts, and reasons for being there.
That is the part I find beautiful. A band like that can look inevitable once it exists. But it was not inevitable. Carlos could have stayed in Spain. Grian could have chosen computer science. Connor could have formed a different band with different people. Any one of them could have made a slightly different decision and the entire thing might never have happened.
That is not magic. That is alignment meeting environment.
People often say someone “got lucky” when something works out. Sometimes that is true. But luck usually still needs a person to enter the right room. Alignment helps you find those rooms.
Fontaines D.C. are not interesting to me simply because they became successful. They are interesting because before the success, there was a moment of choice. A moment where someone could have chosen the sensible thing, the expected thing, the thing that looked safest from the outside. Instead, he chose something closer to himself.
That does not mean everyone should quit their degree and start a band. That would be ridiculous. It means we should pay attention to the moments where something inside us says: this path might be impressive, but it is not me.
I have seen this outside famous musicians, too.
A close friend of mine was the kind of person people assumed had everything figured out: a straight-A student, good-looking, athletic, confident. The kind of person you would look at and think: what could possibly be wrong?
Then university hit him, and he became deeply unhappy.
From the outside, it did not make sense. He was intelligent enough to be there, capable enough, social enough, and put together enough. But internally, something was not settling. The life he had entered looked right from the outside, but it did not feel coherent from within.
That is what misalignment can do. It can make someone who appears to have everything feel completely misplaced.
Eventually, he left university. At the time, that could have looked like failure. Everyone else seemed to be staying on track; everyone else seemed to know where they were going.
He picked up a bass guitar. Started learning. Started playing. Started sending riffs. Joined a band. Later, he found another way to make money through financial advising, something that suited him far better than the route he had left behind.
Years later, he still plays music. He works, he earns, he lives. Not perfectly, not magically, and not without difficulty. But more coherently.
And that is the point. Alignment does not guarantee fame. It does not guarantee money. It does not guarantee that life becomes easy. It simply asks whether the life you are building actually resembles you.
Sometimes the aligned choice looks irrational at first. Sometimes it looks like leaving. Sometimes it looks like disappointing people. Sometimes it looks like choosing the room where your real life might begin.
I do not write this to tell anyone what to do. Grian could have studied computer science and still found music later. My friend could have stayed at university and eventually settled into it. None of us can know every version of a life.
But I am interested in the pattern. The moment a person stops asking, “What should I become?” and starts asking, “What already feels true?”
That question matters because the world is very good at handing us scripts. Be practical. Be employable. Be impressive. Be optimised. Be safe. Be more like this person. Be less like yourself.
But sometimes someone sees you clearly enough to say: "That does not feel like you."
And if you are lucky, you listen.