Then two of my most creative friends commented:

I’ve taken up a lot of creative hobbies while being unemployed for the last year. I’ve been an analytical tech bro for my entire life, but recently realized I love writing, and spend all my time on a blog where I follow someone around for a week and talk about what makes them special.

For the past two months, I had “writer’s block”. I just couldn’t write anything good, no matter how hard I tried.

Except, I didn’t really try that hard. I convinced myself that anything I wrote would be shit, so I stopped writing entirely because I thought the output would be the same as not trying.

I was taking way less shots on goal, so there were way less chances to make something good. But even by the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters theory, if I tried hard enough and wrote a hundred drafts, surely one of them would be good?

No! I was blocked GODDAMMIT.

The way I got over it was exactly what Farza and Riley said. I started a new draft and planned to never publish it because it was so bad. It took me 3 days to finish that draft when normally it might take a couple hours. I wanted to delete every line I wrote as I wrote it because I knew it’d never make it to the final version. Yet I wrote those lines regardless, following some advice my friend Adam gave me while I was learning guitar:

“Struggle through the entire song, even if you miss the chords or they sound buzzy, because you need to practice the whole song. If you give up every time you’re not perfect, you’ll only ever get practice on the beginning.”

I thought, “If no one’s gonna see it anyway, then it doesn’t matter how bad it is. It’s just practice.” After the first draft, I thought I was done with it, but the ideas in the draft took over my shower thoughts. I kept scribbling notes on my waterproof notepad. I’d think about it in the 20 minutes before falling asleep. I had to reread it, just to see what I wrote, and ended up deleting and rewriting about 60% of it. But I finally felt like I had something.

The drafts that came after weren’t easier to write, but after a certain point I realized I was going to publish it, and all the effort after that wasn’t as effortful because I knew I was going to do it. There was no more if or try. Easy or hard, it was a compulsion.

Once an idea is in the real world, it’s like clay you can move and shape rather than just vapour in your head. This was a run-on paragraph from my first draft:

I can’t even read that right now. I don’t know why anyone else would. My eyes just glaze over because it feels like babble. But that paragraph influenced these three in the final draft:

And I used the JARVIS part later in the piece:

I see this pattern in literally everything I do, going from shit to shine. I started making an online store to sell physical prints of my magazine. I used AI to whip up something shitty:

I forgot about it for a day. I just needed something to sell my stuff. It was fine. Then one day, staring at my bookshelf with all my spare inventory on it, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I 3D scanned my bookshelf?” Turns out it’s really hard to get clear 3D scans of all the little trinkets on my shelf, so after some cleanup, I got this (shop.sfalexandria.com):

Still a work in progress. I have more ideas for it, like making the buttons and titles from my own handwriting and drawings, but this is how the seed of an idea grows.

Every reason to not work on making something bad is an elaborate rationalization. Smart people are bigger victims of this because they’re smart enough to convince themselves of anything. I have lots of friends who ask me how to get into writing, or write better, and I’ll say, “don’t use the backspace button and send me a draft.” Everyone laughs, and no one ever sends me anything.

Good writers aren’t necessarily clever the same way NBA players aren’t necessarily tall. It helps, but Jalen Brunson at 6’2” is arguably the best player in the NBA, and he puts in an ungodly amount of work. The best writers write an ungodly amount of words.

When you’re in your head, there’s a million forces against you. What will people think? What if I’m not actually as good as I think I am? What if my crush sees this and thinks I’m an idiot and I die alone? The whole point of making something bad is to get to the point where momentum and compulsion take over, which can only happen in motion.

Take all the pressure off by expecting it to be bad, expecting it to not turn into anything, expecting it to stay unpublished and unfinished, but as long as you keep making it, the law of conservation of momentum will keep you going.

My ultimate inspiration is San Francisco’s Treasure Island. It started out as a landfill, and now people spend $4k/month for a 1 bedroom apartment there. If I make enough trash, eventually I can bundle it up and call it a treasure.

When I first started lifting, I learned from a fitness guru that if I felt sore during the first week, the best thing to do was to keep lifting.

My parents were really worried that I was hurting myself, and TBH so was I, but the guide mentioned that people who don’t lift get muscle soreness at the start because they’re not to moving that way under all that duress. Stopping would never give my muscles the chance to acclimate and I’d be stiff all over again, while continuing would increase blood flow to those areas and reduce soreness as long as I was using proper technique. Within a week, my soreness was gone.

The only time lifting really hurts is when I don’t use proper technique or come back after sitting around for a long time. The same is true whenever I’m doing something creative. Writing every week, even if it’s just a journal I never publish, makes it easier to write full pieces when I want to. If I don’t write for a few months, I start feeling really bad and never want to write again to avoid confronting the inevitable shitty first drafts.

I love “Antifragility”, the idea that the more you stress a system, the better it performs. If you use a cast iron pan a lot, it gets seasoned and actually performs better versus leaving one alone makes it gather rust. The human brain is like that too.

I think all my friends in San Francisco understand this, and so everyone’s constantly in some kind of motion here. Growing up in Canada, I thought Americans were fat and lazy, but everyone I meet here is a distance runner, concert musician and running a $10 million startup all at once. Just like Ava, “any one of my friends could cold email the statue of someone who died in 1578 and get a response in 30 minutes.”

I get worried about them sometimes, because they seem so terrified of stopping that they’ll show signs of tear from overuse. I have friends who are afraid to lie on the couch, fearful they might become lazy from how soft and comfy they feel. Who would spend 10 years building a space elevator before realizing they didn’t care about going to space at all and would actually rather work on clean energy.

But working hard is so invigorating that it’s easy to become blind to what you actually want. A year ago, I joined a 996 startup, figuring I’d taken it easy for too long and it would teach me how to work hard again. I wanted to be like my friends who cared so much about what they do that they throw themselves at it every hour they’re awake.

It quit after less than a full quarter. More motion was great and all, and I’d definitely learned a lot, but I left feeling like my motion after 5 pm was unnecessary. I was walking in circles rather than lifting heavy like I’d wanted.

I didn’t notice I was overtraining at the time, but looking back, my body knew. My jaw hurt almost all the time, and I was clenching my teeth during most of the workday and probably at night too. My back pain was worse even though I was lifting regularly which usually fixes it. After I quit, I fell into an “unemployment coma”, sleeping 10 hours a day for a week to recover.

My friends run an awesome company called SLAM, which stands for Sprint Like A Marathon, a mantra I now try to live by. When I played rugby in high school, we’d run “suicides” i.e. sprinting drills and I hated it. Made me want to puke. But for the cooldown, we’d always “walk it off”. Imagine sprinting and then standing still as you’re doing a marathon. Of course you’re still walking it off between sprints. Of course you’re still in motion as you rest.

And so there seems to be this great fear that if you take a break from working really really hard, that means lying on the couch scrolling Tiktok, like that’s restful. And there’s this other fear from my friends back home in Toronto, that all their dreams are so far out of reach they’ll never achieve them if they start now because they’re already too far behind.

My career so far has looked nothing like I expected it too. I thought I’d be an engineer for life, hopping companies whenever I had an opportunity to make more money, and starting my own company after saving up.

But I’ve held so many job titles beyond engineering at this point that I never even knew I’d enjoy without taking career breaks to figure out what I really wanted.

I never could’ve become a sales person without being a YouTuber on my sabbatical, because before that I was an engineer staring and my computer screen for 12 hours a day. I could never have done growth and marketing without starting my ecommerce business in high school. I could never write biographical profiles for SF Alexandria without writing blogs bitching about my problems on Substack for the past 4 years, and understanding how to easily communicate technical info by writing Medium posts explaining AI for the 4 years before that.

I texted this to a friend yesterday:

I’m feeling tired again, even after sleeping 9 hours a night, which is why I know it’s probably time to sprint again soon. I went to a therapist 4 years ago and mentioned I felt depressed all of a sudden after feeling so good for so long. He asked me what I’d been doing, I mentioned I just mostly stayed in bed, did the bare minimum for work and feeding myself. To paraphrase his reaction: “Yeah no shit you’re depressed, you haven’t really moved in a week. You haven’t given your body a reason to remember it’s alive.”

I’ve been feeling scared and nervous and all around some weirdness about writing an SF Alexandria profile again. I’m not exactly sure why, because I’ve never felt more fulfilled by any other project I’ve worked on, but it’s kind of scary being in a funk when it comes to creating something I and so many other people love. I keep joking that I’ll do anything but write a profile, and have been pursuing lots of other creative stuff recently like making my own camera and figure drawing, but I know it’s all elaborate procrastination.

I expect to shake it up soon, because for a while I thought I was just burnt out and decided to take it easy by lying on my couch, but now I’m remembering I prefer to take it easy by going to the gym and working on my backlog of project ideas. It’s hard to know if the issue is with how I feel about my work or how I feel about myself, since there’s very little difference when I’m self employed. But the beauty of having no boss is I can just take a month off and no one would care. For now, I’m just focused on getting my swagger back.

It’s been eight months since I quit my job with absolutely no plan. I’ve flirted with the idea of being my own boss for years but usually end up being like, “oh I’m still young and money is sort of important I guess and I should try lots of different things and jobs are good for meeting people and learning from them” and then ending up at another job that I hate.

I was a teenager who was probably plugged in a bit too early. I was the only one of my friends with a summer job in grade 9 and 10, and in grade 11 I had an internship at a tech company. That same summer I started a dropshipping business that actually worked and skipped school to go to hackathons and tech networking events. Most kids skipped class to smoke weed in the bathroom but I as a man of culture was in the library writing Medium articles on AI.

It was no surprise to any of my longtime friends when I dropped out of college. School was never really my thing even though I really loved learning. I always thought it was stupid I was learning things I’d never use in the real world, and so I interned at Shopify throughout college while studying to learn how to code “for real”. I worked on a startup for a year after dropping out, and after getting laid off when I was 20, I realized it was the first time I’d ever have complete control of my time. No job, no school, just me and the hamster in my brain.

Three years later I’m kinda back at the same place. And it’s fucking terrifying.

Did you know that when you have no one else telling you what to do, no rubrics or KPIs, that you have to come up with it yourself?? And that when people at San Francisco parties ask you what you’re working on, if you say something like “not much just trying to take it easy” or “just chilling how about you” they’ll walk away and stop talking to you??

I know we’re in an all time hard-as-fuck job market for everyone and all, but that’s not why I’m terrified. I’m lucky enough to have enough money in the bank and all to weather the storm, but I’m fairly mid-career enough to know I could get a job if I really wanted. I’m just scared that so much of our world is set up on the idea that you do something you kinda maybe like only a little bit (if you’re lucky) and the big bad man pays you a little bit for it and we do that until we’re dead. Squidward told us about this years ago but it’s finally sinking in.

It blows my mind how much I felt a loss of my entire identity every time I quit a job and tried to figure out what to do with my life. Sometimes it ended up being another job - I went from software engineer to sales engineer to growth engineer to account executive to growth engineer again. That’s mostly chill.

But when I was making YouTube videos, I hated saying I was a YouTuber, because I felt like I wasn’t. I never made any money from it, never got more than 10,000 views, and there was no way to claim any identity without feeling like I didn’t deserve it. I had a TikTok get one million views - but I barely put any effort in that. Is there a certain view count that makes me a TikToker? I was writing Substack posts sometimes maybe three or four times a year - was I a writer?

There’s no easy identity to claim when you’re unemployed, other than being a bum. But it’s so easy when you’re employed, you don’t even have to think about it, it’s there on an official-looking piece of paper! I’m an engineer!

Say we get to a place where money is meaningless and all work is automated. Entirely possible future with the way AI is going. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like when everyone has to look themselves in the mirror and think about what they are outside of what they do for work. Sure, we’re also our bonds with people, but also there was a point in time where our names were literally our jobs (Smith, etc.) To look yourself in the mirror every day and figure out what you want to do even if it’s not economically productive is a future we’re not ready for. It’s shaking.

That’s kind of what I’m experiencing right now. I’ve spent most of my time writing SF Alexandria these eight months, and while I’d like to make money off it someday, I’m not actually that pressed about survival right now. I’m more worried about finding something I actually want to do, and I’m confident that if I believe in myself, the money will follow.

I wish that confidence was unfaltering but I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve wanted to give up at this point. It’s almost easier to give up on doing your own thing, because giving up actually means starting something, in this case a job. Which is what everyone else does anyway, and that’s why there’s so much resistance towards quitting a job. I see a million smart and capable people rationalize circles around themselves into staying somewhere they’re not entirely happy, because they’re right! It’s so easy to be unemployed and bum around playing video games all day. God knows how many months I’ve spent doing that. At least if you’re putting in the bare minimum at your job and bumming after hours, you can still say you’re being a productive member of society and have a script for social events.

Starting a new job? Good, you’re starting. Doesn’t really matter what you do there, you did it! It’s on a resume, you’re co-signed for future big bucks. Quitting a job?? You’re quitting? You’re a little quitter, aren’t you? That’s what it feels like in my head whenever I feel that all too familiar feeling in my chest that my latest career pivot actually wasn’t the dream I dreamt of as a boy in my room. In that room my ideas felt infinite and here I was, putting myself in another place trying to confine them in an office lined with free pseudo-healthy snacks and $1000 chairs that still hurt my back.

I keep asking myself why I do it, and part of the reason is probably because I enjoy the pain. Alysa Liu was onto something when she said, “I love struggling. It makes me feel alive.” But the other part of it is that, even through all the pain of feeling aimless and stupid and broke, all those shitty feels are new feelings. I hate that sinking feeling in my chest that arrives three, six, or twelve months into a new job, and having to put up with it until I feel the courage to take off my own golden handcuffs.

With a job, I know what to expect. Each one is different but there’s a certain space they exist in, and how I expect myself to be, and how others will be because this is a workplace where we work and these are my work friends. But I have no idea how good or how shit things can be when I’m truly in charge of everything. The search space becomes so much wider, to the point where I may be all over the place but at least the canvas is more filled out even if the picture isn’t as pretty.

More ideas:

1. I feel like active exploration is the way to go when you don’t know what to work on, and when you do just full on sprint and get into a routine where you leave as much time to work on it as possible. My best days are when I set one goal and try to hit it, then treat the rest of the day as gravy. My friend Farza does active exploration incredibly well.

Throughout his early years, he just built things inspired by what he liked. He liked gaming, so he made a bunch more gaming projects. That led to him working for TSM, a major esports team, doing data analysis, and later Visor GG, making an AI Overwatch coach. He never applied for a job. People just found him after he posted about projects he made for fun.

“When I was doing Buildspace, pretty much every time we came up with something, it’d just start with ‘wouldn’t it be cool if...?’ Before Nights and Weekends, we made courses teaching people about AI and crypto. But we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if people who started with a course could keep working on their ideas after the course is done?’ After seeing everyone in Nights and Weekends make stuff on Discord, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if they came to San Francisco and met each other?’ For the school, it was like, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if they worked on their ideas full time?’”

He recently posted a demo on Twitter for a little AI friend called Clicky. It follows your mouse cursor around, points at stuff and you can ask it to help you with whatever’s on screen. People loved it, it went viral, then he shipped another demo the same week for a site that stores all of his information in a way that makes it easy for AI to use called Farzapedia. People loved that one too and paid him thousands of dollars to try it, yet he’s shelved it for now because it’s not interesting enough.

Creativity often feels like an abstract art. I hear people complain about not feeling inspired whenever they try to make something good. Like they’re waiting for lightning to strike but it’s just not hitting them. Farza’s somehow been able to come up with products and ideas that millions of people love, and watching him work, it feels anything but random. He’ll reference the moment in the Beatles documentary where Paul McCartney composes ‘Get Back’ in four minutes while waiting for John Lennon to come to the studio.

“People will look at that and say he had a sudden stroke of inspiration. But they won’t see the previous three months of him coming to the studio every day and coming up with nothing.”

—You can make something good, SF Alexandria

So does my friend Riley:

One of Riley’s biggest inspirations is this guy who makes $200k/year writing music that you’ve probably never heard of: Matt Farley. Matt’s been making about 50 songs a day for the past 12 years, but most of those songs barely get any streams. He’s written a book, produced short films, all of which have been seen by maybe a few hundred people total. But when you add up the impressions of his entire 20,000-song body of work, it starts to make sense why he makes that much money.

When asked about how he makes so much stuff, he said:

“If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop. You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.”

One of his most elaborate pranks was Mehran’s Steak House. It initially started as a joke when his old roommate Danielle listed their group house as a steakhouse on Google Maps. The joke grew, getting over 100 detailed 5-star reviews from other friends pretending they’d eaten there. Being the only perfect 5-star steakhouse in NYC gave them a lot of attention, and after shooing away visitors from a restaurant that didn’t exist for two years, they thought “Wouldn’t it be funny if it actually did?”

That’s how a lot of Riley’s ideas start. “Wouldn’t it be funny to piss off the Qatari government? Or make a Gmail clone called Jmail with all the Epstein emails in it? Or Find My Friends but it tracks parking cops?”

—Training the idea muscle, SF Alexandria

2. I’m kind of a beacon for people quitting their jobs at this point. I’ve done it so often, and I know it’s scary to quit and go without income or purpose for a while, but it’s more scary for me to have the ideas I have bottled up in my head instead of out in the world. What I try to remind myself and other people is that you’re always choosing your hard.

   As in, it’s hard to exercise, but it’s also hard being fat and lazy. At my past jobs, I could slowly feel my creative energy fading, and that slow drain hurt, so I just decided to stab myself and feel the sharp pain of quitting rather than letting the drain take me away. Also, after quitting, you can usually go back! From my post You’ll make worse decisions by thinking about them:

   I’ve quit more jobs than my parents combined at 23, because I know that if I don’t like what I’m doing I’m living my worst-case scenario on purpose. As in, if I quit then try something new and it doesn’t work, worst-case my previous employer would probably take me back since I wasn’t fired for performance issues.

3. I can’t really argue that chasing your dreams is easier when you have a good amount of money saved up. But also, greater men than you and I have done incredibly difficult work for much less money than today’s white-collar jobs and lived for their dreams:

   The American composer Philip Glass funded his music by starting various companies where he could work intensely for two weeks, then take two weeks off to write—a moving company, a plumbing business. After his international breakthrough, the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), the 39-year-old Glass spent two years working as a cab driver in New York to pay off the debts from the tour. That is as good a way as any to do it.

   Herzog, after founding his company at 17, spent the final two years of high school working the night shift at a steel factory to save up money for productions.

   —On Agency, Henrik Karlsson

   I’m not sure if I’m as passionate as them, but I do think we need a lot less money to live a fun and fulfilling life than the nuclear family with a house and car and 2.2 kids American dream propaganda advertises. In my worst case, even before moving in with my parents, I’ll take my last $10,000 and live like a king in Shenzhen for a year. If I can’t make something work then, I deserve to go back to a job for a bit.

   

My friend’s basketball coach said something I think about all the time:

“Move quick, but not in a hurry.”

I can trace all the good stuff in my life back to moving when my heart felt strongly about something without waiting for my brain to confirm it. I moved to San Francisco with no plan 3 years ago and sorted out the visa and career stuff later, just because I had a fun summer there. A month after losing my job, I went on a spiritual journey through China because I always liked their culture, then flew back on a flight I booked the same day from Taiwan for a job interview I ended up getting. I then left that job in a couple weeks because it didn’t feel right, but had nothing lined up after. I felt like I had to do something, anything, so I asked a friend if I could visit his office and see what he does all day. That was the start of SF Alexandria, my publication where I write biographical profiles about Silicon Valley’s cracked young people.

My parents hear all this and think, “but couldn’t you have gotten the job before moving? Couldn’t you have figured out you wouldn’t like the job and just have gotten a different one? Why do you live your life on the edge so much?”

Everything may look rushed on the outside, but the reality is I couldn’t have known anything about what my next step was without taking some gamble on the step before it. For my first job in San Francisco, it was the guy subletting to me who ended up being my boss. That job would’ve literally been impossible to get from my hometown!

In Taiwan, my eventual employers wanted to do a short work trial, but doing it remote with a 12-hour time difference probably wouldn’t have gone as well, so I decided that same day to fly back to do it for real. Everything about that company and people seemed awesome during the interviews and trial, but only after working there for a bit did I realize I couldn’t get myself motivated about the product they were working on, even though it seemed cool to me before working there.

I don’t think decision quality goes up linearly with time spent on it. It looks more like this:

I never really spend more than an hour on most decisions nowadays. I usually arrive at the same conclusion I came to initially even after sleeping on it for a few days, and if I spend too long on it I’m overthinking and going in circles. I’ll sleep on it if it’s a decision of real consequence, but as a 23 year old kid, most aren’t!

I think taking lots of time to make decisions is major cope. By saying you’re taking the time to think through things carefully, you can pacify the part of yourself that fears the consequences of your decision, and be comfortable with inaction because it’s not like you’re not going to act, you’re just thinking! And thinking is good!

NO. THINKING IS POISON. PEOPLE WHO THINK TOO MUCH ARE SAD.

I often remind myself that not making a decision is a decision in itself. This should terrify anyone who considers themselves indecisive, because they’re actually avoiding a decision, they’re choosing to be undecided every second they wait on deciding. All the time spent thinking is all the time not learning from dealing with the consequences of your actions. And decisions often produce more decisions, so by deciding to do nothing, you’ll get less decision-making practice, and stay unskilled.

If I decide to rent an apartment, I have to decide how to furnish it, where to work to pay for it, whether or not to have roommates, who those roommates should be, and 100 other things I can easily avoid by deliberating it forever while staying at my parents’ house letting my brain go smooth.

I remember hearing a very simple exercise on a podcast when I was 16. The guest said that to train decision making, he’d order within 10 seconds of getting the menu every time he went to a restaurant. I tried this and ordered a lot of bad shit, but the exercise removed my fear of making a bad decision in the most low-stakes way possible. No matter how badly I ordered, my life still continued on with pretty much no harm. It’s the same with booking last-minute flights. I’m lucky enough that $500-1000 a few times a year won’t bankrupt me, and every spontaneous trip taught me way more than reading some book could.

By making a decision, you get entirely new information to move from rather than staying exactly where you are churning over the same points. If a decision is reversible, which most are, by making it you’re always better off than not, because your worst case is exactly what you were doing before. I’ve quit more jobs than my parents combined at 23, because I know that if I don’t like what I’m doing I’m living my worst-case scenario on purpose. As in, if I quit then try something new and it doesn’t work, worst-case my previous employer would probably take me back since I wasn’t fired for performance issues.

The caveat to all of this is to never be in a hurry. Don’t make decisions because you’re bored, or feeling self-destructive, or when they’ll leave a lasting impact on your life. Burning a bridge with someone is almost never worth it, neither is trading options with unlimited downside. For important decisions, I won’t execute before talking to a trusted friend or two, family, and getting at least one good night of sleep. Anything longer and I’ll get stuck in my own head.

But a coffee order isn’t worth spending more than 10 seconds over.

Related:

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.

from Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems by James Somers

Decisionmaking is hard. When it takes >5 minutes and doesn’t matter that much (costs less than ~$500 or ~1/2 a day of time), I will flip a coin. Sometimes good to inject a little bit of randomness to the simulators trying to predict what you are doing.

For a medium-sized decision, I tend to lean on two heuristics:

(1) Do Thing

(2) Do One Thing

1. Should I go to this social event, even though I’m feeling tired? (1) says yes. I don’t trust my tiredness — I’m wary it is a low set point of sadness that my mind is overcorrecting towards — so I overrule it by biasing towards action.

from Do thing, Do one thing by Jason Hausenloy

“If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” — Jeff Bezos

from Do it. Most things are reversible anyway by Farhan Thawar

17) If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it. Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didn’t do than things they did do. When in doubt, kiss the boy/girl.

from The days are long but the decades are short by Sam Altman

I.

At a retreat, someone asks me:

“Do you treat your life as a game or are you just doing your own thing?”

“Definitely my own thing”, I answer.

I’m watching the sunset over a ranch that’s nice enough to host a celebrity wedding, eating steak and exotic honey paid for by the LPs, in a room with 100 brilliant young people using their talents to get people more addicted to their phones, and all I can think about is how I’m just a kid from Scarborough, Ontario.

How the hell did I make it here?

I’ve spent most of my 20s in San Francisco. To even be able to live here is an accomplishment to my parents’ friends. Almost every single person I meet here was the best in their town at coding/tech/startups, and just wanted to move to place where people get it. That’s how it starts, the dream itself is living here.

Once you’re here for a few years, you forget that you used to pray for days like this. Perfect weather, jobs that grow on trees, friends within a 15 minute walk and events every weekend. It’s more impressive to have a girlfriend than it is to raise 5 million dollars here.

The thing about everyone having money is that most people who have it, grew up having it. Quitting your job to do a startup is a lot easier when your dad was a VP at Apple. We’re all jumping out of planes but only some of us have parachutes. We’re all in the same room, but some of us were born in a ballroom, and some of us (me) don’t know why there’s 3 forks around our plates.

II.

“What are you optimizing for?” the same person asks me.

“I dunno. I just like what I do.”

I thought it was money at first. I started a dropshipping business in high school and quickly made enough to pay for (Canadian) college. If I really was money-maxxing, I would have ran it for more than 4 months. I shut it down after I got bored. I didn’t feel like I was learning anything watching this business chug along. The money wasn’t really hitting.

A lot of my family’s problems settled after we got more money. But at 19, I was in the 99th percentile of annual income in Canada for 30-40 year olds, and I was still riddled with insecurities and loneliness. I had a feeling that probably wasn’t the way, but I didn’t really know what was, and money seemed important. So while I didn’t see the point in having so much money, I still made pretty fiscally sound moves.

At a certain point I thought I just wanted to learn everything. Read every book, become a CTO level engineer, become really interesting to everyone I met. Knowledge-maxxing — I loved feeling smart and being right. I kinda fell into the Good Will Hunting trap where there wasn’t much I could tell anyone they couldn’t read in some fucking book. I cared more about being right than I did about learning. I couldn’t handle looking dumb which put a cap to how much I could learn. I wasn’t okay with the fact that you can only learn something by being wrong or clueless about it initially.

Maybe being a brainiac just wasn’t my game. Maybe I needed to friend-maxx. Lean into my social proclivities and become a super networker. But not like the other networkers, more genuine. But also so I can sell them GPUs and use my friendliness productively somehow. I had to cash in on these connections somehow, or else what was the point? Dammit, I wish I’d become friends with more AI founders. Don’t be transactional, but also don’t spend too much time with other people. Your laptop will miss you if you spend too many weekends away.

III.

“Why are you here?” I wonder as I stare at all the people in the foyer. I wonder the same about myself. I tell myself it’s for the visa, but they already signed my letter. I could’ve just said no if I knew it’d sap my time and energy.

I think I’ve been at odds about my own ambition for a while. I pride myself on my honesty yet I can’t honestly answer simple questions like “why do you do what you do?” I still can’t. There’s no root cause analysis, just the feeling that it’s the most right thing I’ve ever done.

When I quit my last job, I was trying to explain to my CTO why I was leaving. I gave a bunch of reasons, he rightfully pushed back, and in the end I admitted it’s just a feeling and I have to do it. “I don’t know what I want to do, but it’s not this,” I remember thinking. After realizing that, I accepted that any more time I spent there was a waste. It’s like realizing you don’t want to marry someone yet continuing to date them. There’s the sharp pain of ending something, and the slow throbbing pain of choosing to stick with something you know isn’t for you. There’s pain on both sides, pick one.

I’ve recently become okay with introducing myself as a writer. There’s no formal qualification for it, but I think I’ve come up with one that works for any identity. I’ve realized that if I don’t write for too many days in a row, it starts to hurt. Like a sinus infection or constipation, there’s too much in my brain that needs to be taken out.

There’s no point where I’ll be done with writing. There’s no single point in the future where I’ll have accomplished everything I’ll have wanted to, then I’m just fine for the rest of my life, because no matter how much I poop, I’ll have to poop again someday. I give up every single sentence I have to the world, knowing that it’ll help me come up with more sentences, and it’ll only stop if one day I bear the pain of constipation. It hurts to write, to go through 6 drafts and only then feel like it’s beautiful enough to share, but it hurts more to keep it all inside.

I came here because I wanted to meet other people who knows what that’s like. I wanted to validate my own identity as someone who makes things by cross-checking with other people. Do you feel the same way when you can see the piece in your head and you can’t rip yourself away from the screen til your creation matches your vision? Do you also feel like you could create for weeks and feel like you’ve made no progress til it all comes together? Do you also feel your 16 year old self trapped inside you crying and laughing and being scared and bored, and do you also do it all for him?

I don’t care how much he raised or what her total comp is. I don’t care about this brand deal or that launch video. Ironically my favourite question is “What would you do if AGI solved everything, scarcity included?” But no one can see past escaping the permanent underclass. What would you do if it couldn’t be a business? What would young-you be happy seeing you do? Are you living the dreams you set out for yourself years ago, and if so, does it feel like it? Are you looking for an answer, and what’ll you do when you find it? I ask myself these questions constantly, and often I have no answers because it’s scary to feel dumb and not know things.

So I tell myself, in rooms full of talented people where I’m a little nervous and very excited and maybe a bit insecure:

• be curious, not judgemental

• you can’t know something if you haven’t been taught

• everybody poops

Then I try my best to listen as much as possible, and remember that no one thinks too much about the random 10 minute conversations we have, and we will all die one day. Better to just try and do what you want before you can’t anymore.

During my high school rugby games, our coach would yell “WHAT’S THE SCORE?!” from the sidelines, and we always had to respond, “ZERO-ZERO!”

The whole point was that there’s never any good reason to think about the score, and we should always play like it’s tied. If we’re up, we could get cocky and give up easy points. If we’re down, we could get demoralized and give up even though a comeback is always possible.

My favourite place to be is toiling away in silence at my desk, releasing my creations into the nether, not expecting anyone do read it. This blog is called A ship in the middle of Nowhere for a reason. I’m the captain, just sailing around, no destination or guide in sight. My mind always feels lost at sea, which, when I started this blog, was a scary place to be. But overtime, I realized it’s exactly where I want to be.

A weird thing started happening around 2023. I didn’t feel like I was in the middle of Nowhere anymore. I had 100 subscribers, and every post was read by at least a few hundred people. People would tell me how much they related to my work, that it put into words what they’ve been thinking but couldn’t say. Cool!

Anytime I met someone in person who’d read my writing, I’d be a little shocked. “I don’t know why, I just never expected anyone to read my writing, so it’s crazy to have someone tell me they did,” I’d tell them. “What are you talking about, you’re kinda famous dude!” they’d often tell me1.

Kinda famous. Huh. …cool?

No. Not cool. What the fuck.

I think it was around this time I first started to feel perceived. I used to make fun of people with this fear, because we live in a time where people are more lonely than ever yet scared to be seen by others? Make up your mind.

But I get it now. I kinda stopped making things the way I wanted in 2024. I used to love tweeting every random thing that came into my head, and writing Substacks about my life, and making funny youtube videos. But in 2024, somehow, I felt like I had something to lose. I felt like I was in the lead somehow, and putting out something “bad” would squander it, causing everyone to get mad at me and never read anything I wrote ever again. So whenever I made something, it’d never be good enough to publish, and I’d beat myself up for making bad stuff. Then, because I never published anything, I stopped making stuff entirely, and beat myself up for not being creative anymore.

My friend Sharif described this fear well in his post, Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work:

“Before the Nobel Prize, nobody really cares who you are. But after the Nobel Prize, you're a Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are supposed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every paper, every talk at a conference is now being evaluated against the standard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is asking, “is this worthy of a Nobel laureate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.”

Ironically, in the same post, he referenced my thinking as the antidote to this:

“A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked! We all said a bunch of terrible ideas, and eventually we landed on a good one – a pretty clever pun based on our friend’s longtime email address.”

[…]

“It feels like there's something like a conservation law at work here: the amount of stupidity you're willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you'll eventually produce. I'll call this Aadil’s Law.”

I read that and think, “Damn. Who is that guy? Couldn’t be me, must be another Aadil, I’m analysis-paralysis perfectionist Aadil.” BUT NO, IT IS ME!!!

It’s especially true now that I’m jobless. I have no succinct answer to the age old San Francisco greeting “What are you building?” And it hurts. It hurts to admit to people that I have no plan, that I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, that I spend all my days reading and jotting down notes and staring out of windows and fiddling with my Chinese walnuts.

Somewhere along all that I ended up producing some writing that people seem to really love, more than anything else I’ve written in my 8 years publishing online. I love it too. Some examples from my wall of love2:

Somehow my writing can make people cry. Like that’s awesome, and I’m glad, but also I’m really terrified, because what do you mean I have that much power??

So I’m in this really weird state where, to the world, it looks like I’m doing really well. People seem to love my stuff, they offer to pay for it, they find my preview links before I publish and share it in group chats, all the while, I’m terrified after publishing each article that I’ll never write anything as good as the last one ever again.

How the fuck do you get over this???

I have a few ideas.

1. Stop

I’ve currently decided to take a 1 week break. As my dad says, “A break from what?” (in reference to me already being unemployed.) But it’s a break from expecting anything from myself.

I think the root of feeling perceived is a fear of what someone might find if they look closely enough. There was a time where I very much didn’t feel whole, so I berated myself and tried to achieve all I could so that some day, someone (ideally everyone) would acknowledge me. Look at all my great work, because I made that great work, so I must be great, right? I wished I could say that

Now, it almost feels like I have that. Again, people like my stuff. I think I’ve made some of the best work of my life. Yet it’s kind of obvious to me, after seeing many men driven to madness and unicorn startups by a fear of not being enough, that there’s no way the world can make you whole without your own participation.

All this wondering about meaning and purpose and pondering is just exhausting and tiring. I kind want to just stop, and see if my fears that I’ll become lazy, ugly and irrelevant actually manufacture. And, if they do, whether they’ll actually bother me or not.

So this week, my only objectives are to:

• be in bed by 1 am

• cook 2/3 meals per day at home

• go to the gym 4 times

• go to the pottery studio twice

Everything else is gravy.

2. Make anything

Some of the best advice I ever got was from my friend Darshil at 16, where he said:

Just start a lot of stuff. Don’t worry about finishing any of it.

Every single post I’ve written has left at least a few Apple notes, shower notepad scribbles and half-baked drafts in its wake. I look back at some of my earlier work and think about how I used to just be able to write a full post in a day that was actually pretty good, and curse myself for not being able to do that now.

I almost feel like I can’t anymore. Back then, I really didn’t care if they were good or not, just if I said what I wanted to say. If I thought at least 1 other person might like to read it, I’d publish. Some days it feels like if something comes easily, it’s not good enough.

I think the idea of suffering being baked into the creative process is so common but so stupid. It’s painful to not be able to get what’s in your head out into the world, sure, but to see that as a prerequisite rather than a symptom is arbitrary.

What you’ve chosen to do, on your own terms, should be fun. If it’s not, there’s a million other things to do, go choose something else. Money and status get in the way for smart people, but again, these are arbitrary and also a solvable problem in any field.

When I was worried that being a writer in Silicon Valley was low status, my friend Jasmine, who’s been writing since she was 10 and is now a famous capital J journalist, told me:

Doing what you really want is high-status.

It’s only low status if everyone can see you don’t really want to do it, or you falter at the easiest steps. In a similar vein, I truly think you can make enough money doing anything. In the back of my mind, I know if nothing works out, I can save up $10,000 and live a first-world life in Shenzhen for a year, or like a king in some village for ten.

We live in a world where people buy houses off selling bathwater. I’m sure with that much time, I can create something of enough value to support myself, and if not, it wasn’t mean to be anyway.

3. Leave

I live in an environment where no one has kids or pets, and the dominant mode of hanging out is doing laptop work beside each other. I scroll a feed split equally between AI agents and talking about how there’s only 7 girls in my city. Maybe I’m in a bit of a bubble.

It feels like literal life or death if your social group is dependant on how hard you work, like it often does in San Francisco. My friend Farza commented on this:

“When I moved to SF, one thing I hated was how much people would judge you for what you were working on. They’d be your friends one day, then if you stopped working on your idea or your company was struggling, suddenly you weren’t cool enough to hang out with. Like, that’s so ridiculous.

But the rest of the world isn’t like that. Even just visiting a California suburb I realize how much better life is when people look up and smile at you on the sidewalk. I’ll go to China and it feels like everything can be solved with some street meat and a cigarette.

What really did it for me was holding my friends baby. If you’re worried about life and meaning right now I promise you the answer will become very clear after holding a chubby ball of happiness for 30 minutes. Even when they cry, you still know that you’ll do anything for them, and having that makes everything so much more doable.

I’ve talked to a few mothers in the past year, and they all talk about how bad pregnancy was, and the early years of raising a kid, but you just somehow… forget. (And then you want to have another they’ll tell me.) I think that’s just true of almost anything painful. After a while of not being in it, you just forget how bad it was, and if you have a deep seated desire to do it, you will.

The key here is not expecting a fix. It’s to actually forget. You can’t take a trip hoping to fix yourself or forget about something bad or find what you’re looking for. It’s like if someone tells you, “Don’t picture an elephant right now!” You can’t help but see it.

But putting myself in a situation where I realize there’s more to the world than just making stuff for an audience generally helps me get out of a funk.

I don’t really know how to end this. This post was for me and also my friends who might gain something from it, particularly Anna. A sort of return to form. I didn’t talk about nearly as much as I wanted to, nor do I think this post flowed that well or had the best prose or anecdotes or anything. I do hope you got something from it, but if you read all this way and are kind of unsatisfied, remember I’m just some unemployed dude who’s at least as dumb as you and probably dumber, writing this without thinking much from a coffee shop on a random Tuesday without even buying a drink.

If you like this weirdness tho, consider subscribing! #smooth

Subscribe now

Eight years ago, I did an after-school program for teenagers interested in tech and The Cognition Academy, aka TCA.

Seemingly no one knows about TCA. People will tell you they went to Stanford within seconds of meeting you. Getting into Y Combinator or the Thiel Fellowships warrants an announcement post on Twitter and LinkedIn. Yet all my friends from TCA rarely mention they were part of it until you really get to know them.

The program still runs today, and most kids in it will rep it proudly. But anyone who did it in the early days has a more complicated relationship with TCA. If anyone asks me how it was, I’ll shrug and say “net-positive” in a way that implies a lot of baggage.

Everything good I have today was downstream of TCA. I’ve had an incredible career in tech for a 23 year old, amazing friends I feel soul-bonded with, and I get to live in San Francisco surrounded by the future.

It also gave me hella anxiety. Some days if I’m not productive enough I feel a burning in my stomach. I had to spend years unlearning that new people aren’t threats or competition but potential homies and collaborators. All of this was probably innate on some level, but TCA definitely amplified it.

I found out about TCA through my cousin, who went to school with the founders: Jason and Jerome. I grew up without much money and, deep-down, was always looking for a way out of my hometown where I felt misunderstood. TCA cost $5000 at the time, but my cousin talked me into it.

He told me, “It’s like private school but one-sixth the cost. The world is run by people who all know each other. If you’re smart and talented but alone, someone who went to the same school as a person who’s hiring will give the job to their friend because they already know them. But if you can meet other smart kids right now, you can call them up later in life when you want something.”

Made sense to me. I applied.

I didn’t even want to do the program that badly until they called me in for an interview. That was the first time I met Jerome.

My TCA interview was the hardest conversation I’d ever had. He asked me a question I’d read in Zero to One but never came up with an answer to: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?1”

I don’t remember any of the other questions, just the fact that I got absolutely grilled. I was very not used to being asked questions I didn’t know the answer to at that point. If I didn’t know the answer already in school it’s because I didn’t care enough to learn it. But here was a Shaman asking me questions I’d never asked myself, that I wish I had good answers to. What does he know that I don’t? I remember exiting the interview and lying down in the cement stairwell for ten minutes, thinking about how desperately I wanted to learn from him.

That was the first thing I remember wanting so badly that even if they rejected me, I promised myself I’d show up at their office and do whatever it took to make it in. Fortunately it didn’t come to that, and after arguing with my dad to pay for the program, I was in.

Year One: Initiate

My parents don’t know how to swim. But they brought us to the neighbourhood pool every summer hoping we’d figure it out. At some point, my brother taught himself to swim by watching everyone else and then later taught me. I remember starting out in the shallow end, learning to kick and then move my arms, then slowly working up to the deep end when I felt ready.

My parents were pretty gentle and hands off. They trusted that my brother and I would figure it out and gravitate towards what we wanted to do. They had certain expectations and dreams for us of course, but always listened to what we wanted.

We argued a lot, but my brother and I could always get them to relent over time. When I dropped out of college, they were shook of course, but still went along with my plans. I always felt like I pushed myself harder than my parents pushed me. Maybe some part of it was to make them proud, but most of it was to relieve my own boredom and satisfy my curiosity.

Nothing about that way of growing up could’ve prepared me for my first TCA session.

Jason and Jerome always called TCA a human accelerator. Their marketing spiel was roughly this:

Y Combinator takes in startups and pops out better startups, TCA takes in young humans and makes them better. A potential olympic-level swimmer knows what to do. Swim a lot, get a coach, train hard, the path is set. But what if you wanted to be an olympic level innovator? A person who changes the world and impacts a billion people? There’s no plan for that, and that’s where TCA comes in. An olympic level training program for ambitious 13-17 year olds.

The plan for an olympic level founder seemed to start with being thrown into the deep end. Our first session, they told us to form groups and research a technology that was going to be “the next big thing” for two hours, then do a three minute presentation on it.

All was calm until the end of the first presentation. When it was over, the room felt like a firing squad had executed the kids who’d just presented. The founders ripped into them with feedback on delivering a quality presentation.

After that bomb went off, no one even listened to the other presentations. We were all too busy changing our slides and praying we weren’t called on next. I don’t remember learning a single thing about the next big technology, but I carry those lessons about presenting to this day.

All of this may sound anxiety-inducing, and it was, but I was hooked.

I was a chronically bored kid always looking to be intellectually challenged, and this was it. Like eating spicy food, harsh direct feedback burned so good. The best part of my week for many months was the Sunday TCA session.

A lot of kids in TCA were just trying to pad their college applications, but there were a couple other crazy ones like me. We were obsessed, and had no idea how far it could take us, but lots of us wanted to get as far away from our current situation as possible. We all disagreed with our parents, had big egos, and felt like nobody understood us. TCA treated us not only like adults but made us feel special, and that was all we wanted.

Trust the process

The way TCA was structured was partially to teach you about tech, partially to teach you about yourself and how the world works. Everything revolved around having a Focus i.e. learning about a technology in your spare time by following The Process™.

First you’d Explore. Go through a list of articles and videos about Artificial Intelligence and why it matters. If you like AI, make it your focus. Once you’ve committed to a Focus, do 2 Replicates. Read through a tutorial on how to code something and try to implement it yourself, do that twice. Each time, write a Medium article and make a YouTube video about what you learned. Then a Create. You’ve learned enough, now try to make something of your own.

Throughout the process, we were encouraged to do Focus presentations. “Share what you learned with the class at the beginning of each session. But make it legit. It should feel as though Steve Jobs has been resurrected into the TCA office to teach us about Generative Adversarial Networks.” That was the vibe. There were usually one or two each session, and after a while, some of them were better than presentations at the tech conferences TCA encouraged us to go to.

I remember my first tech conference was Advanced Tech Fest. Everything outside of the Sunday sessions had to be earned. TCA had a bunch of tickets for students, so to earn one, you had to send a 2 minute Loom video about why you felt you deserved to go. Basically everyone got to go, but it still made you feel like hot shit to be “accepted” and make up a reason to skip school for 3 days.

Jason told us, “A conference isn’t about the talks. You can learn anything you want on the internet. Watch those talks on YouTube later. A conference is for networking.”

In a convention hall filled with tech people wearing lanyards and suits, trying to raise money for their startup or hire or invest or make a name for themselves, TCA let loose 100 teenagers who looked like a bunch of chipmunks in trench coats.

TCA had a second year program filled with kids who’d already done The Process and come out better for it. A bunch of them were speaking at this conference and people would mob them afterwards, bewildered that a 14 year old could know anything about augmented reality.

But I was a nobody, and the only adults I talked to were my teachers and parents. So me and all the other new TCA kids just hung out with each other, trying to avoid the scary well-dressed adults.

Then Jason came in to throw us into the deep end again. He’d come into our circle, break it up, tap each of us on the shoulder, point at someone and say “Go.”

The 10 second walk over to a random stranger had my stomach doing backflips. But once I said “Hi I’m Aadil, nice to meet you”, the jitters were mostly off. I did that again and again over the course of 3 days. It never got any less scary, but I didn’t die and people were fairly interested in talking to me, probably on account of me being 16 years old in an environment no 16 year old should be in. But Jason’s shove was effective. I felt better off after the exposure therapy, and learned lots about tech, myself, and the world that week.

A few months later, I threw myself off the deep end willingly.

Dive deeper

“You should only join Velocity if you’re willing to make TCA your number one priority”, Jason told us.

Velocity was like the inner ring of TCA. After 4 months, many of us realized it wasn’t so much of a tech and science after-school program as it was an “everything you thought you knew about the world is wrong” program. Some of us even joked that it was a cult.

Joining Velocity meant getting assigned a set of special tasks to further your development and showing up for sessions an hour early to discuss your progress with everyone in Velocity. Those special tasks were:

• studying the “Person of the Week”, anyone from Chamath Palihapitiya to Paul Graham to Socrates

• embodying the “Mindset of the Week” like “high standards”, “boss mentality”, or “seeking discomfort”

• having a meeting every week i.e. cold messaging or emailing an adult you’d find on LinkedIn and doing a coffee chat with them

At the time, I thought none of it was too difficult. But even today, most of my friends aren’t reaching out to at least one new person each week. Jason said he’d kick people out of Velocity if they didn’t do the tasks2, and he’d call on people randomly to see if they did the requirements. I’ve never been very religious but I prayed to every God that he wouldn’t call on me if I didn’t do the meeting.

A bunch of people quit Velocity, saying they wanted to focus on school or their Focus. But maybe it’s because they couldn’t take the pressure or realized how ridiculous it was.

I wasn’t one of them. I went from the honor roll at school to having the principal’s office call my parents every other day. Not to smoke weed in the bathroom like the other truants, but to write, code, and nap in the library.

I quit the Rugby team, the robotics team, and the school newspaper. I obnoxiously lectured anyone at school willing to talk to me on how they were on the wrong path and there’s so much more to the world than school and playing League of Legends, which I was previously addicted to but had no time for because of how much I was GRINDING on TCA work. It literally became my number 1 priority, and for the most part, I was grateful.

If Velocity was the inner circle, securing an opportunity was the upper Echelon. Anyone could be in Velocity, but you had to be chosen by the founders for an “opportunity”.

So when I got a message from Jerome 5 months in asking if I wanted to go to San Francisco for an AI conference, I literally ran up to him and started nodding furiously. Senpai finally noticed me!

I’d never been on a plane without my parents before. And to San Francisco! The place I read about in the books! It felt like a dream. A couple of 2nd year TCA kids were speaking at this conference, but 3 of us first years got to tag along. Before the conference, we toured the LinkedIn, Twitter, Kitty Hawk and Udacity offices via Jason and Jerome’s friends who worked there.

I’d also never felt imposter syndrome until that trip. In the Uber, before going to the offices, Jerome asked us, ”What’s your one-liner?” I didn’t even know what that was. “What’s your quick introduction that makes you worth talking to?”

I struggled to come up with one. After all, why would someone care to talk to me? I’m 16. I barely know how to wipe my own ass. No Silicon Valley professional can reasonably seek to learn or gain anything from me right now. I wondered why they even brought me on this trip, or why anyone was even friends with me.

I wrote a Medium article after that trip. The first time I can ever remember writing for myself. No one told me to write it. I just had so much inside me I wanted to get out.

TCA was the start of me writing online3. I wrote daily updates to my close friends in TCA about what I was working on and thinking about. I wrote a monthly newsletter for basically only my mom and nine other people, but sent them to anyone else who subscribed on Mailchimp.

“You know a company has failed if you stop getting their investor updates. You know a person has failed if you stop getting their monthly updates.” Jason told us at a session once.

Looking back, my early work wasn’t bad, and had a stronger voice than much of the stuff I see today. But it also has a certain tightness to it. I didn’t feel like what I was writing about was worth reading, so I eventually stopped publishing for a while outside of what was prescribed by TCA.

Cracked is a double entendre

After the first year of TCA, I got a summer internship. TCA had relationships with a bunch of companies in Toronto, so they brought a bunch of us to a company’s office one day for a “meet and greet”. We sat in a circle and gave our one liners to the company’s general manager, walked around for a bit, some people asked some questions, and we were all out within the hour. A couple days later I got an email that the company chose me and one other student as their interns.

It was complete luck, but I felt like I’d “earned it”. I followed The Process™ after all. I was in Velocity. Surely the people of culture at this company recognized that. I deserved that $14/hour.

The internship lasted 2 months, and they kind of just left us alone to work on a side project. We made an augmented reality app where you could play with a pet robot that was meant to increase customer loyalty, but no one really cared about. I spent the second month learning how to dropship on Shopify

.The company stopped existing 2 weeks after our internship was over. The most useful thing I remember learning was how most people (don’t) work.

“A 9-5 is maybe 3 hours of work for most people. 9-10 people settle in. 10-11 is work. 11-12 is looking forward to lunch. 12-1 is lunch. 1-2 is maybe some meetings. 2-4 is work. 4-5 is looking forward to going home. 5 they’re out.” Jason told us this before we started our internships, but I really internalized it on the job. He also mentioned to schedule meetings to meet everyone within the first 2 weeks, and to write them thank you cards when you leave4.

That summer was also the first time I felt a sense of belonging. Everyday after our internships were over, all my friends would hang out at the TCA office downtown. I’d never quite fit in anywhere for the previous 16 years, but TCA was where I found my people.

Those are the only friends from my high school days I’m still in touch with, though now they feel more like brothers and sisters. I’d never been to a party before Jessica threw one. I’d never been to a cottage in the summer before Ethan’s. I’d never worked on a project where I felt like an owner and an equal before Ray. I’d never scammed Uber Eats before Brad goaded me into it. I felt my world expand during that summer, and I was finally living. 16 was the first age I felt conscious, in no small part due to the incredible friends I made at TCA.

The more I got into TCA, the more everyone else in my life found me insufferable. I met with the principal once to let me test out of Grade 12 math and have 2 spare periods. He basically laughed in my face and pointed out I had Ds in all my courses. I thought I was too smart for school and there he was, looking at a paper that told him I was an idiot.

I felt alienated because I was putting in work, but no one cared to see it. I grew a dropshipping business to the point of being able to pay college tuition5 and was teaching myself how to code because I knew tech would be so important in the future that anything else was a waste of time.

My ego was so fragile that I’d write off anyone who disagreed with me. I told my Dad I wouldn’t need to get a driver’s license because in five years, all cars would be autonomous. I thought talking to my mom was a waste of time because she wasn’t “intentional” enough. Arrogance was my defence, and it all fell apart after a fight with my brother.

The first time I met my brother’s girlfriend was the summer after TCA. They’ve been together 8 years now, and I still regret that first interaction years later. I was just an absolute asshole to her. Zero social awareness. I grilled her on what she’s passionate about, then called her lazy when she didn’t give me an answer I was satisfied with. Looking back, I realize no answer would’ve satisfied me, because I wasn’t actually trying to get to know her. I just wanted to prove I was smarter than her.

My brother pointed all this out to me, and I just broke. I didn’t want to be that way. I didn’t want to be angry, or arrogant, or alienated, nor did I even realize I was all those things. I actually really liked his girlfriend and thought the meeting went well. I raved about her to my parents afterwards, and nowhere did I see how much I’d hurt her and my brother. The way I talked to them felt normal, because that’s how everyone in TCA talked to each other.

So after that summer, I took a long hard look in the mirror, and decided to chill the f*ck out. People started talking to me at school again slowly. My grades improved since I realized it was probably best to get into a good college even if I ended up deciding against going. I talked to my teachers with respect again, and actually became good friends with some of them.

But I was still in TCA, this time in the second year program. That next year both built me up and tore me down in ways I’d deal with for years after the program ended.

Year Two: Actuate

The founders are brothers, Jason and Jerome Jalali. Jason started a couple startups after college, one got acquired by Square, then he became a VC for a bit before starting TCA. Jerome was a BCG consultant for a couple years. They both went to a great business school in Canada, and their lives were changed in 3rd year when they interned for a microfinance organization in Sri Lanka off of a cold email. They saw how much good there was to do in the world and how few people there were to do it, hence TCA to instill the skills and values in young people to do good for the world.

Like me, Jason and Jerome grew up practicing Ismailism, which is a small sect of Islam of about 30 million people. It’s differentiated by the fact that its leader is still alive just like the Pope. Leadership is passed down through its family, and the leader is called the Imam, or the Aga Khan, who Ismailis treat like God.

Other people couldn’t realize it but I noticed Ismailism was key to the formation of TCA, since many of their slogans and teachings were reminiscent of my time in the religion.

So while all their marketing material talks about tech and startups and science, anyone in the program would tell you that they were obsessed with trying to make everyone into a Unicorn Person™. Like how a unicorn company has a valuation of 1 billion dollars, a Unicorn Person is someone who is capable of impacting 1 billion people. The Aga Khan, with his many charitable organizations, is someone they’d likely consider to be a Unicorn Person (after a while the definition faded and the term was used for anyone who was “legit”).

Year One of TCA was called “Initiate”. It was designed to expose kids to what’s possible with technology. Year Two was “Actuate”, meant to help kids use what they’ve learned about to solve real problems in the world. It was much more focused on impact. Less learning about technology, more learning about how the world works. How economies and governments move and what their incentives are. What life is like for people less privileged than us.

The process in year two was centered around PIEs i.e. Problems Incentivized by Economics. We’d spend three months at a time learning about an industry, finding a problem in it, and pitching a solution that we thought people in that industry would buy. When we focused on the legal industry, I ran a cold email drip campaign to set up calls with lawyers asking about what they did all day and what their biggest pain points were. At the end, we presented our ideas to real lawyers in the legal offices they filmed Suits in.

I really hated this process at the time. Why would I ever randomly need to contact a stranger off LinkedIn just to talk about their job? In hindsight, putting in the cold emailing reps might’ve been one of the highest ROI skills I developed through TCA.

As a college dropout, I’ve made all my friends and gotten all my jobs off of the internet. The bread and butter of an early stage founder is talking to people and finding pain points they’re willing to pay money to have solved. I got so ahead as a 21 year old in the startup scene from these 2 skills alone. Jason’s advice while we were doing PIEs was “just listen to their problems, don’t pitch solutions.” When I moved into tech sales with no experience, those 8 words were more helpful than any of the sales books I read, helping me close 200% of quota with no prior experience.

I’m outta here

I’d chilled out by year two, to the point where I knew there was more to life than becoming a unicorn founder, and that all the propaganda wasn’t worth listening to. I was ready to just take what I liked from the program, and discard what I didn’t.

I slowly wound down my dropshipping business since it wasn’t exciting anymore. I read a lot of philosophy and listened to tech podcasts at 2x, habits I picked up during the first year of TCA. I spent lots of time writing university applications and making YouTube videos.

I had improved. I was smarter, faster at processing, better at speaking in front of a crowd, less afraid. None of it would’ve been possible without TCA. Though I still had this gnawing feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, amplified by seeing all the great things everyone else at TCA was doing.

It was fine. I was protecting my peace. Improving my relationship with my family, and at the end of the program, I gave a presentation to the lawyers that Jason specifically called out as being “authentic” in our group debrief after the experience. He said, “even though he was wrong, he was wrong for the right reasons” when referring to my presentation. I’ll take the compliment, sir. I thought I was past needing the validation at the time, but it still meant so much that I remember it to this day.

Then Covid happened in 2020. TCA took a pause then resumed online. Everything from this time was a blur. TCA Zoom sessions, like virtual high school classes, weren’t nearly as fun. They put us in groups to basically start startups6 and after a while, I just didn’t want to work with my group anymore, so I left. At that point I was done with TCA, ready for the next chapter. So long, and thanks for all the friends.

I was on Twitter now, writing and reading and making side projects and meeting people on the internet who’d become my best friends 4 years later. I had also gotten a full scholarship to study CS and work part time at Shopify. Life was… good?

At a certain point when Covid got a little better, I started meeting up with TCA friends. One of them had networked with a billionaire, and brought up an opportunity for some TCA kids to visit his mansion and help him with some business stuff. She thought I should be part of the squad that went on that trip, especially because I’d helped her scrounge together a website in 10 minutes for the project she pitched him.

Jerome said no. “He hasn’t impressed me enough,” I was told he’d said. My friend insisted that even though the opportunity was off the table, I should let him know what I’ve been up to. I sent him a long text update of my past year, and he basically hit me with the “I ain’t reading all that” meme and said “let’s call.”

We called, and for the first maybe two minutes it was me talking about what I was up to, then the rest of the 28 minutes was him berating me for not doing anything in my second year of TCA. I basically fully dissociated but can vividly recount at some point in the middle he was like “for most of second year, I thought you were a serial masturbator addicted to anime”. I kept that line in my mind because of how ludicrous (and funny years later) it was for a 28 year old man to say that to a 17 year old boy.

I always had the sinking feeling I wasn’t making the most of TCA. I wasn’t working hard enough to become a unicorn person. History would forget me. That call confirmed it in my head, and for months I felt like I was never going to amount to anything. It was also Covid, so I retreated back into my league addiction after being sober for two years, and just… chilled. I had a job and school online but nothing really mattered to me. I’d just talk to my friends, play league, eat and sleep at 5 am. Dark times.

In a weird way, I’m really glad that happened. It broke the spell TCA had cast on me, and since I was so isolated because of Covid, I finally had to think for myself. The boy that emerged from those dark days was still driven by insecurity and arrogance, but at least he didn’t have the pressure of trying to impress his inherited father figures. He could start making his own mistakes.

Epilogue

I’m 23 now, and I still maintain that TCA was a net-positive on my life. I dropped out of college to start a startup with another TCA alum. After leaving that startup, I moved to San Francisco to live in a hacker house with a friend from TCA, who ended up hiring me three months later. My first serious crush was on a girl from TCA. I love my life now, and there’s no way I would’ve gotten here without TCA.

My experience in TCA feels spiritually similar to Alysa Liu’s figure skating journey. Her tiger dad pushed her to the point where she quit because it wasn’t fun anymore. Then she came back on her own, made it fun, and loves it now.

So do you give credit to Alysa’s tiger dad for where she’s at now? You could say his way made her want to quit, but it also set her up for success. Could she have gotten to where she is today and loved figure skating as much as she does without him setting her up since she was three? I don’t think so. Both things had to happen: she had to be pushed, and she had to quit then do it her own way.

In many ways, TCA really lived up to its claim of being a human accelerator. I think my path without TCA would look similar to the one I’d take if it never existed. I was reading Zero to One in the ninth grade and heard of TCA in the 10th. I was already enamoured by the tech world, but TCA had me visit Silicon Valley when I was 16. I wanted to study software engineering and work at Google, but it’s unlikely I would’ve found satisfaction there. I didn’t during my 2 years at Shopify.

I probably would’ve felt lonely in college like I did in high school before TCA. It’s likely I’d have sought out a community that felt more aligned on my own. Knowing my heart now, I find it impossible to think I could’ve been satisfied with the traditional path, even before Jason and Jerome repeated their mantra, “to achieve unconventional success, you have to take an unconventional path.”

Even now, I feel resistance towards calling TCA a cult. I feel compelled to defend it, because it was so formative for my younger self, it’s like I’m defending him. To denounce it publicly would be like scolding my inner child for not being smarter and better earlier, and absolving his role in making me who I am today. I feel like I can’t have regrets about what I did in the past because I like who I am today.

If I admit it was just suffering with no benefit, it’d feel like all those years were wasted. So I focus on the fact that I was in the driver’s seat the whole time. That a human accelerator that must accelerate both the good and bad parts of someone equally. That I’m just looking for a scapegoat for everything wrong with me when I look for the flaws in the TCA process.

It’s so twisted that when a friend asked me if I’d send my kids to TCA, I instantly replied, “HELL NO.” But when he asked if I’d let them do it if they wanted to, I said I would.

Like Alysa Liu, me and my future kids can push ourselves when we want to. We can take breaks if we want to. We can pick our own coaches, and if they choose the directors at TCA, I won’t get involved. The most important thing is that they’re having fun.

In the years after TCA, I realized I don’t need anyone to push me. I’d rather feel drawn towards something rather than pushed. It’s easier to cope with the struggle if I chose it rather than if it was thrust onto me.

I don’t want to be a swimmer. I want to skate at my own pace and make things only I can make, rather than having a blueprint for the kind of person someone else thinks I should be.

Every day in my life is a gift. And I have no desire to skip over its precious moments by accelerating.

Thank you for reading this long ass lore drop. All the names and some pictures are altered for anonymity, I made them up. This one’s for all the dogs I came up with. I couldn’t have made it here without you. Hopefully I did you some justice by putting words to our twisted experience.

Closing deals is awesome but lots of people find it stressful. There’s often an air of winning and losing around it, but it’s more like a supermarket in my head. If a deal is agreed to, everyone gets what they need at a price they’re fine with. While you might not be overjoyed paying three dollars for avocados at Whole Foods, you do it because implicitly, you’ve calculated your life as better off with the avocados than with the $3 in your bank account. There’s no anxiety at the supermarket.

I definitely had more anxiety negotiating when I started out as a software engineer, but since then I’ve done a bunch of hiring at startups, and spent six months in tech sales. All that taught me some principles to get paid more, and even sometimes have the other side thank you for it.

Figure out what you’re really worth

In tech, at some point during the process, a recruiter will always ask:

“What are you looking for in terms of compensation for this role?”

Sometimes people start off with, “well at my last company I was making…”

Or they’ve done their research, looked at levels.fyi, and talked to some friends in similar roles, and say a more balanced range.

There’s nothing obviously wrong with either approach. You’ll likely get paid fairly this way. But if you want to get paid unfairly in the upward direction, stop trying to assess your own worth.

Instead, assess what you’re worth to who you’re trying to make a deal with.

Most people view themselves more negatively than the world does. You see 100% of yourself all the time, all your strengths and flaws, while seeing everyone as they present themselves. No one tries to present themselves badly, so you’re most often only going to see the good parts of everyone else.

Which means you, seeing both your good and bad and only everyone else’s good, think you’re worse than everyone else. You’re innately biased to the negative.

A better model is thinking about what the position you’re filling is worth to the company. If they hire you, how much money are they going to make? If they don’t, how much more are they going to spend to recruit someone else?

This works best after you already have an offer since you have more leverage. As in, the company has already put in significant recruiting resources into you, and thinks they’ll make more money off your contributions than they have to pay you. They’ve decided they’d rather have you than the money in their bank account.

The person in front of you is not thinking about any of this consciously, but they are really hoping you’ll say yes. It’s a drag trying to get someone else. They have every incentive to get you to accept, so even if you ask for a sum of money you think is egregious, 95% of the time they’re just going to present a counteroffer rather than stripping away the entire deal. This is the fundamental fear that drives people to ask for too little money. I’ve never seen it happen.

You can usually find out what you’re worth to the company in a few ways.

1. Look at revenue per employee. Six years ago, Google was said to make about $2.5 million per employee and that’s including the janitors. Tech companies are normally looking for a 5-10x multiple on their employees. But even if you ask for a million, and they make at least 2.5 mil off you, it’s not crazy for you to actually get that! Hiring you nets them 1.5 million dollars! You’re doing them a favour by joining.

2. Ask around. Friends at similar companies doing similar jobs with similar years of experience in similar locations are good comparisons, but remember most people are afraid of negotiating so their salaries might still be low. Usually no one balks if you ask for 1.5-1.7x an amount they’ve done before. 2x can be a little dicey because people can do that math quickly in their heads, and think “Why am I paying double?!” unless you clearly differentiate yourself.

3. Think about recruiter costs. Tech recruiters make about 140k/year + bonuses for hiring someone. People often do 3-7 rounds of interviews, often with people higher up at the company. Think about all the time that takes away from their job. Not just meeting with you, but talking about you, and the switching costs for hopping on a call. Now repeat that for every candidate they interview, and how long a recruiting cycle can take.

   I often see roles open for 3-6 months at a time. When I was trying to hire, extending an offer to someone felt like a huge relief and we prayed they took it, cause recruiting is such a pain, and having extra help on the team is amazing. Think about how badly people want the process to end and how much it costs to recruit. No one’s gonna mind you asking for an extra $50k-$100k.

4. Bonus: If the position’s been open for a long time, they’re desperate. If they created it for you, same thing. Lever accordingly.

Take on this lens of valuing yourself based on how an employer judges your value and you’ll quickly see why job hopping is the best way to get paid more.

If you’re a happy employee with no complaints, you are worth what you’re paid. Why would anyone give you a raise to do exactly what you’ve been doing?

If you want to leave, suddenly you’re worth what your absence would cost the company, about 5-10x what you’re paid multiplied by the percent chance you actually leave.

If you have a competing offer, you’re worth at least that offer, but also the value of your absence * 100% because you’ve made it clear you’re not afraid to leave1.

Ask for more than what you want

A good white-collar negotiation feels like a win-win. Both sides get what they came for. It might feel odd to propose better terms for yourself, but again, this doesn’t detract from the other person. They’re allowed to say no! Therefore if they say yes, they must be satisfied with what they’re getting in return.

In tech, the recruiter is usually allocated a certain range, and is able to go to the top of the range at their discretion. They don’t lose any money for giving you more. They just have to be able to report that you asked for it.

If they ask why, feel free to give a reason. If they don’t, don’t. No need. Common valid reasons are relocation, family situations, or “looking for a step up”. They don’t care too much, often they just need to check a box.

Same thing when you’re buying something. I’ve had friends negotiate cheap leases for offices. They’ll mention the landlord said they don’t normally do this but they’re willing to make the exception just this once.

More likely than not, the landlord doesn’t have any alternatives, but wants to save face in front of the buyer. The only reason someone will give you a certain price is because they have convinced themselves the price is acceptable. No amount of smooth talking or sob stories can convince anyone of anything. They can only convince themselves. If someone says they’re making a special exception, they’re probably not, just that you’re still negotiating within their range.

The best way to know the price you’re getting is fair is to get rejected.

There’s no worse feeling in a negotiation than having your first offer accepted. That means you’ll never know what the actual best price was. Even when my friends get way more money than they could’ve imagined, they’re still upset if their first counter gets accepted.

Often people are suspicious when something’s too cheap that it’s not high quality. Confidently asking for a lot of money signals that you’re high quality. If you weren’t good, why would you ask for so much? Therefore you must be good.

Even if a price is within someone’s bounds, remember they also want the best price! Make their desire to end the negotiation stronger than their desire to eke out a few more dollars. This is why it’s best to negotiate with people whose own money isn’t on the line, or rich people. They value their time much more.

Glossary: Anchoring, Leverage and BATNA

Anchoring is when the first number tossed out sets the tone for the rest of the negotiation. AKA anchoring bias, because no one really knows how much stuff should cost and the entire monetary system is made up, the first number holds a lot of weight.

Sometimes, you’ll hear that you shouldn’t say a number first, or whoever speaks first in a negotiation loses. I think this is kind of dumb.

With anchoring bias in mind, I try to do 2 things:

1. Remember, it’s a bias. I do my own price estimation and center the conversation around that. The first number isn’t necessarily more relevant to the final price than any other terms proposed. I make my own bounds for what I consider an acceptable price point independently, before the first number is out there.

2. Throw out a number first to anchor high. Most people forget about cognitive biases even if they know they exist, so anchoring to something higher isn’t a bad strategy. The only possible downside is someone thinking it’s so ridiculous they walk away from the table, which rarely happens.

I’ve only ever done this at the electronics market in Shenzhen where they try to scam foreigners. After asking a bunch of vendors about the tech I’m trying to buy, I know who’s willing to play ball or not. Anyone who anchors too high is not. But I only do this because it’s a competitive marketplace and I have a good BATNA.

BATNA stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. As in, what you do if the current deal falls through. If every single stall is selling the same electronics, my best alternative is to go to any of the 20 others. Having a job offer from another company is a good BATNA for salary negotiation. Unemployment isn’t. Leverage comes from having a good BATNA.

Leverage is just how much sway you have over the other side. Multiple close competitors often means the sell side has leverage, as long as those sellers are accessible to the buyer.

There can be a million tech companies but not all of them are offering jobs to the labourer. If you’re the best in the world at something, or at least the best designer/coder that the person you’re negotiating with knows, you have much more leverage since you have no close substitutes. The reverse is also true: the employer has leverage if the economy is rough and no one’s hiring.

To get the best price you always want leverage, or try to conjure it up if you don’t have any right now. The best way to get VC funding is to have other VCs interested in you. Or make VCs think you don’t need their money. Your alternative is to just keep chugging along happily with the resources you have, so why would you need to take their money unless they offer you favourable terms? They want to invest in successful companies, but successful companies don’t need their money.

Years ago, when we were raising for my first startup, one VC was interested early so my CEO stopped taking meetings. That VC dilly-dallied to the point where we panicked, and realized we needed to take meetings again. We got a Tier 3 VC interested, which made another Tier 1 interested, who offered us a term sheet.

The next morning, the initially interested VC magically stopped dilly-dallying and offered us a term sheet2.

Also, to get those meetings in the first place, my CEO would always take meetings with VCs “just to chat”. When they asked if we were raising soon, he’d tell everyone we’re “fully heads down in building mode”.

Genuinely not needing something is the best way to get it at favourable terms. Always act from a place where you’re willing and able to walk away, and negotiations will go a lot more smoothly.

Useful tidbits

• Don’t try to negotiate face-to-face. Or commit to numbers on a call. Whenever someone tries to get numbers out of you, mention you want to consult your partner/friend/brother/parents to plan a bit before responding, and that you’ll get back to them by a certain date. Face-to-face interactions are easy to fumble and forget all good negotiation practice, because certain people are just better at manipulation than others. The barrier of a screen takes away that advantage.

• Respond quickly! Speed wins deals, and it’s contagious. If you reply slowly, the person on the other end will be tempted to do the same, and anything that feels sluggish makes our ADHD generation not want to do it.

  When I did sales, I trained myself to have an instant response rate to everyone (even friends on iMessage). I’d respond to everything at most in 24 hours and it just gives you a reputation as a person who does things. It does not make you look desperate and needy, as long as you’re not saying desperate and needy things. If you’re really worried about looking desperate, making assertions rather than asking questions helps. “I’d be comfortable at a million dollars” vs. “Does a million dollars work?”

• If someone tosses out a number initially that seems fair, there’s actually no need to negotiate. Negotiations are a way to get what’s fair, so don’t try to over-negotiate. Generally try to think that if you’re negotiating with someone once, you’ll likely negotiate with them again at some point in life, so it’s best to maintain that relationship if you’ve already got what you wanted.

• There’s lots of little ways to make sure someone feels like they got a good deal. Saying “I usually never do this”, or throwing in a free extra, or showing comparisons to deals you’ve done before if this deal compares favourably. My rule is if you can do this truthfully, go for it, but don’t make it up if it’s not there.

Some good guides by others:

• Paul Graham on raising venture funding

• Patio11 on negotiating software engineer salaries

Now go forth and make more money!

People seemed to really resonate with this article, more than anything I’ve put out before. The writing was good, but it also helped that the subject matter was Riley, an absolute legend.

Lots of good things happened afterwards. I got to meet the co-founder of Notion, praise flooded my inbox, and some important people I’ve looked up to for years finally followed me back on Twitter. Riley also got a lot of fun inbound including an incredible potential job opportunity and props from a not-so-niche not-so-micro internet celebrity.

People really liked the title, to the point where it’s now the first search result for “training the idea muscle”. I have no idea how I came up with it. I thought it just came to me in a dream.

Turns out, I’d actually come up with it last May. I write a secret substack for myself and close friends where I just braindump and give weekly updates. It’s a really low pressure way to practice writing and build the habit without feeling pressured to “target an audience”. I’m 40 weeks in at this point, and every week I give the piece a funny nonsensical title. Scrolling through the archive recently, I found this:

Even further back, there’s a video in the piece from 2024 where Riley and our friends are dancing on stage at the finale of our SF wide scavenger hunt. No one else could really have that footage from that angle unless they were one of the 30 or so scavenger hunt helpers.

Even further back, Riley ran a fake steakhouse in NYC in 2023. I was supposed to help cook steaks there but my cousin was getting married so I skipped out, but because I was around Riley a little while he was planning it, I had stories that the public couldn’t.

Even to start off the profile, I pulled out receipts from 2020 to make a joke about b2b SaaS.

I say I spent a week with Riley to write the piece. And that’s true, except I’ll also joke that the piece was 5 years in the making, ever since we met in 2020.

Sometimes when I’m having an especially unproductive day, I’ll think about how the Beatles were able to write a song in 2 hours. They can write music that reaches millions of people in 2 hours! And it takes me 2 days to write a substack for 200 people. But then I think about how many days they have like that, and it’s probably few and far between.

Most of their days probably yielded no output at all. How many empty days did they have before getting one where everything they’d soaked up ambiently coalesced into something coherent?

I used to think of myself as idle. Now I think of myself as pre-banger. Many of my favourite people in any profession didn’t set out to make that profession their career. It just happened as a byproduct of stumbling through life.

JK Rowling took 5 years to write the first book of Harry Potter after writing 2 novels of ‘rubbish’ before the idea randomly came to her on a train to London.

Mark Carney is my favourite Canadian PM and heralded as the only world leader that ‘gets it’ nowadays, yet he’s not a career politician. Just a goated banker who saw an opportunity to make the country better.

Steve Jobs was a hippie interested in design and drugs. He had a million unrelated experiences in Ashrams in India and calligraphy classes that culminated in him being perfectly suited to bring personal computing to the masses.

He also dropped one of my favourite quotes ever:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

I could’ve never known that by writing articles on Medium at 16, the then-CEO of Medium would read one and mention it when we met. I could’ve never known that would be the start of seven years of writing online, admittedly to not very many readers, but one of those readers would end up becoming one of my best friends and emergency contact.

That one of my Twitter mutuals would ask me to come visit him in SF, and I’d become stubbornly obsessed with moving here one day after sleeping on his couch for 2 weeks.

That one of his mutual friends would convince me to live in SF for a summer and make YouTube videos, and those videos would be watched by the CEO who gave me my first sales job with no prior experience because he thought I was funny.

Not just individual work products, but any level of success is premeditated by a million little dots that make no sense until 1 day a line is drawn through them.

If I had to give some advice to anyone who’s having a few too many days where the dots don’t feel like they’re connecting, it’d be to think less about the connection and think more about how many dots you’re producing.

This is what people mean when they say luck is a skill. So-called lucky people have put out a million feelers into the world through interactions and creations.

A dot can be as simple as any form of connection between you and another person. The internet makes it easier now because you can use social media to instantly reach at least 10 people. That’s 10 people, 10 dots, that could one day conspire in your favour. If you get good, you can create millions.

Working on yourself doesn’t directly create dots but can help you produce dots in the future.

Toiling away in your room never showing your work to anyone will get you absolutely nowhere, because most people’s idea of success requires getting something from other people; money, recognition, or influence.

Refining your craft will let you leave a stronger impression on whoever sees your work someday. Getting feedback will also help you improve in ways you couldn’t have come up with yourself. Better dot placement and size makes them easier to connect later.

For me, most good ideas have come through some sort of collaboration, even if I didn’t directly seek it out. Yet the kinds of collabs I can do are way more productive when I’ve done a lot of work myself.

Anyone I know who makes good stuff also consumes what they create. Good writers read a lot, good musicians have hundreds of playlists, and good coders try a lot of software.

Too much is dangerous because it’s easy get stuck in read-only mode. So is consuming with the intent to create because of the risk of copying, so I usually find that it’s best to pay attention to frequency over recency. If I keep coming back to an idea, I’ll make something of it, rather than if I’ve just learned about it and it seems exciting.

Dot production is the major part of making stuff. The connecting is all about trust. Everything will connect somehow once I have enough dots. I often talk about how I can “see the piece in my head” after a while. I felt the same way when I was making YouTube videos, and other creative friends also seem to have magical moments when it all just clicks.

What sucks is when you have to make creativity into a career and force a line where there isn’t one, or else you can’t eat. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to make stuff as side projects, because dot connection is tougher under pressure. Once you’ve pulled out all the natural threads, there’s only so much life you can live in such a short time when we’re all given the same 24 hours.

I’ve never seen anyone who’s been able to put out a high volume of creative work all imbued with equal amounts of soul. The exciting part is that sometimes, putting out the work itself makes a dot that one day will be connected to something better. If every song on an album tried to be a banger, none of them would be. They’d all be strangled by trying too hard.

People create dots all the time without noticing. They get easier to collect when you decide to focus your attention to them. I always thought I was decently funny and had friends tell me to do a standup set. I finally set my mind to it last year.

Everytime I naturally told a joke that made someone laugh, I’d write it down. Intending to do a set at some point, my friend just happened to host a comedy night that summer and forced me to perform.

I didn’t come up with those jokes that week. I already had a bunch collected throughout the year and just had to string them together. I also didn’t sign up for a comedy event, but the comedy event came to me. But I’d already primed myself to pay attention to whenever I made a joke, trusting I’d have an opportunity to connect them some day.

So much has to go right for so long for anyone to look like an overnight success or effortless. I love thinking about that, because it reminds me that even on my off days, I’ve probably made some dots I just havent realized will connect some day.

What a beautiful way to go about life.

Going to College

I probably wouldn’t go to college. I dropped out after two years, and was 50/50 on going in the first place. I just don’t think the cost:benefit ratio is there anymore. The promise used to be: go to college > get educated > get a job > happy life > american dream. That promise has become less true over time and we’re seeing it with [rising levels of new-grad unemployment](https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market).

I can’t say for sure it’s any different for people who don’t go to college. But if you’re somewhat smart and, more importantly, motivated to make something of yourself, college likely isn’t the best place for you to learn useful skills.

What it is good for is the social environment and having a sandbox to mess around in. Friendships and happy marriages are good for the soul, and you’re pretty likely to start them there compared to the rest of your life. College is also a great place to f*ck around and find out, to try things and meet people you normally wouldn’t. Most people fondly mention going on exchange, as well as certain clubs and the people they met through them. Barely anyone I know talks about what they learned.

For me, I also couldn’t justify the cost, so unless I got a scholarship or into a great school outside of my typical bubble like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, or maybe out of province Canadian schools like UBC and McGill, I wouldn’t go. Instead, I’d use the 4 years to recreate the experience in the aggregate.

Getting a job with no skills

I’d think of work like college. Which means thinking about where I could learn the most and meet the most interesting people. If I didn’t have a strong idea of what I wanted to learn, I’d try to maximize learning overall by joining companies based on what industries I think would grow like crazy or what companies my smartest friends are working at and talking about. I’d likely work at startups over big companies, since being 1-25% of the company means you have more demanded of you, whereas it’s easy to get lost in the machine of a BigCo and do very little work.

At 18, I already had a bit of coding experience, but definitely not enough to be useful to a company at this point. The learning happens on the job. Landing a job with no skills seems like where young people get tripped up a lot, but it’s probably not as hard as you think. People love mentoring young people as long as they feel like they actually made an impact, so it’s your job to convince them the experience won’t be lost on you.

In any industry, all people are looking for is someone who can do the job. As in, someone who makes the company more money than they receive in salary. At 18, this is basically impossible. But companies make R&D investments all the time, which is what you will be if a company hires you at this stage. Handing in a resume with nothing on it will not be very convincing. The way to prove you can do the job is by _actually doing the job_ as your way of applying for it.

No matter how polished a company looks on the surface, there’s always a dumpster fire under it. To apply for a job, look for a problem and offer a solution. Make sure it’s as well thought out as possible, think about potential obstacles and how to solve them, and put together some sort of visual demo of your solution. Make it as real as possible. If you’re looking for a coding job, your solution should be an interactive demo like a website, not a Github repo. That’s fake. If you’re going for a writing position, write something they’d like to publish. If you’re looking for a design role, do an annotated critique in Figma, or a redesign of the company’s assets.

Act like you already have the job, put effort into really trying to identify a problem and figuring out a solution to it. Be really useful, or at least fully aim to, then find the email of whoever’s hiring for the job. If it’s a startup, email the CEO and cc anyone relevant directly. If you can’t find the hiring manager’s email, email the CEO. Busy people respond the fastest. Follow up 1-4 times on an exponential decay time curve. If you can’t find these emails, you don’t deserve the job.

In the email tell them, briefly, why you’re interested and show them the initiative you took to find and solve a real problem for them. The bar is so incredibly low that a little bit of motivation to do a good job and a decent cold email goes far. No more than 5 lines, clear ask, use line breaks, attach a link I can view instantly (no requesting permissions), and you’re ahead of 90% of people. When I was hiring, I would’ve instantly given an interview to anyone who did this to me, and would’ve never even considered asking for their age or resume.

Doing what you really want to do

People often say youth is wasted on the young. I think they say this because old people are haters. They’ll say it’s because time and experience comes with age and by the time you know how to use your vitality, you’ve lost it.

Which is fair, but another reason is that young people are poor. A lot of what I want to do costs money, and so the great part of starting work early is having money saved up to do what you want. Of course your early career should mainly be about the learning, but money is a nice byproduct.

Money buys time and freedom, which is what youth implies anyway, but more so. It’s important to live as cheaply as possible for as long as possible, so I wouldn’t recommend buying luxury goods even if it’s what you think you really want. That money’s really best spent on stuff that’ll make you see the world a different way. Think plane tickets, camera gear or a guitar if you’re into that, a nice laptop, anything that contains a world inside it. You want the things you buy to have the potential for infinite use. I definitely recommend moving out of your parents’ house ASAP, your growth is capped there.

You have to keep doing stuff you like. It’s not about what you own but what you do with it, getting gear just helps with that. Maybe the best thing right now to buy for a motivated young person is a $200/month ChatGPT subscription. The entire internet is locked away in there, ready to teach you anything without getting tired of answering your questions. So is a billion dollars if you press the right keys in the right order.

Try to do everything you want to do in a public way somehow. I’m not saying don’t keep moments to yourself, but a little bit of public documentation or externalizing your thoughts goes a long way.

A lot of good things can happen when you’re known but not necessarily famous. It’s just a tool for opening more doors and making more friends, especially if you skip out on college. I made all my friends on the internet so when I moved to San Francisco, it was a no-brainer because I already had a huge community there from spending so much time on Twitter.

Having friends with the same interests rather than just who you randomly spawned in with in your hometown can completely change how you think about yourself and the world.

Beyond that, you’ll likely make better stuff if it’s public. Being forced to fully bake your creations for the world will push you further than you could’ve taken yourself. Creating in obscurity is nice because no one can tell you your work isn’t a masterpiece, but having haters builds character. Having your work impact people touches you in a way just making it can’t. Opportunities might come your way that you didn’t even know existed. I got my last job because the company’s CTO found me on Twitter.

Today everyone’s an influencer and everything’s content, which can become draining on our actual lived experiences. Yet I still think it’s quite positive as long as we:

1) remember to create more than we consume

2) create as a byproduct of our experiences rather than experience things to show them to someone else

The benefits far outweigh the costs, and the costs are mitigable. We can’t be too afraid of what’s three miles down the road that we don’t even take the first step. No great artist is obscure, because if they were really that great, they’d be known. Worst case, you have a log of memories to look back on when you’re old.

Beyond that, try to do new things often. Happiness is pretty easy once you make it beyond your bedroom door and off your phone. Travel a lot. Stay up late talking to people. Try things even if they’re not halal. Say yes more than you say no, and really scrutinize why you’re saying no, since you’re probably overestimating the downside. Be nice to everyone, you have no idea what people are going through. Get your heart broken. Host stuff. Everyone loves the host, no one likes organizing. Play a team sport. Practice an art form. Experience what it’s like to eat clean, get really strong, and sleep perfectly. Then throw it all away and have fun. Ideally both, but I’d rather have life in my years over years in my life. Make dad (or mom) lore.

Spending time with people

Ideally you spend time with people you like, and away from people you don’t like. This will likely not come to you instantly, but worth looking for. Don’t trust anyone that tells you to network. Find and replace “networking and building connections” with “making friends”. Everything good in my life career-wise has come from my friends. Make your own nepotism.

Finding my people felt like meeting people who congratulated me when I said I got laid off rather than asking if I was okay. People who start brainstorming when presented with a crazy idea rather than claiming it won’t work. People who cared if I didn’t show up to a group hang. I have friends like this in Canada as well, but so many more in San Francisco. Having these people in your life, who make you insntantly feel cool and comfortable, can do wonders to build up your confidence. Knowing what a good friendship feels like helps you ignore anyone who makes you feel less than. They’re not worth the energy.

Life is filled with pain and suffering but friends make life worth it. It’s not about the journey or the destination, but about the company. To find them takes a fairly simple but slow optimization process of meeting people and paying attention to how you feel around them. Are you contracting or opening up your chest around them? Do you feel light or heavy? Do the hours pass like minutes? Do you like looking at their face or do they look kind of slappable?

I’ve had a couple friendship breakups. I truly believe you can be friends with anyone, but sometimes you’ve gotta move towards ease rather than tension. You only have a finite amount of time and most of the time you know who you like and who you don’t if you’re honest with yourself.

You could probably make a list right now of who you care about then spend all your time with them. They’ll likely also lead you to their other friends who you’re more likely to get along with than the average stranger. I’ve only ever made a handful of friends randomly, the rest were mutual friends I befriended. You should spend more time with people you’re close to, not less. Yet young people especially try to make as many friends as possible and spread their time and energy so thin they don’t have any left for the people that matter. The older I get, the less friends I have, and the happier I am.

It also helps to be yourself when you meet someone, so the people that are looking for you can find you. Forget trying to be a camouflaged version of yourself tailor made to fit into a social situation. Be unapologetic about your personality while being receptive to feedback from those close to you. Often they can see things you’re blind to and help you in ways you can’t. Repay the favour by trying to do the same for them, without forcing your opinion onto them too much.

Maybe not for everyone but also, call your mom. Ideally every day, but definitely on some cadence. 10 minutes doomscrolling will mean nothing to you but a 10 minute call will make her day. She should know when she’s going to talk to or see you next, even if it’s in a long time. Tell her, “I’ll visit in six months” or “I’ll call you in two weeks” and keep your word. Or update her if you can’t. Just make sure she has something to look forward to. Do this for yourself, not her, because it’ll make you feel good in the soul.

Keep showing up

A successful entrepreneur I know mentioned he had a group of friends that all started doing startup stuff in their early 20s. Some people quit a few years in, but everyone who stuck at it for 8-12 years had some outsized outcome.

You can do anything you want but it’ll always take longer than you expect. Take breaks as needed, that’s totally fine, but also you can recover much faster than you think. Every time I think I need half a year off, I’m usually bored after 2 weeks. Just make sure you keep coming back. If you aren’t excited about what you’re working on, switch! Chances are, you can always go back to whatever you were doing before, so the downside is really low.

Show up on the days even when you don’t feel like doing anything. A lot can happen in three months if you show up every day. 12 weeks. 84 days. I’ve seen [people turn their entire lives around](https://buildspace.so/sf1) in that time. Get a friend to help you out. Call them when you’re stuck in bed feeling lazy. Send out weekly updates with whatever you’re thinking to some close friends. Find a WeWork that’s empty on the weekends and [get your friends together to work on projects](https://luma.com/wosp-to) you’ve been procrastinating together.

Every day, there’s one thing you can do to make it a win. On your lowest of days, even getting a 10 minute walk in is progress, or writing one paragraph, or one line of code. Momentum is everything, and every little bit of work you put in now will pay dividends as you take on bigger more ambitious and harder projects later in life.

Work really hard now and learn to love it, because another one of life’s great joys is having work that feels like play. Bonus points for getting to work with your friends on stuff. Again, you can probably make a list of stuff that feels like play to you. Do it as much as you can every day, even if it doesn’t make money, and do it in public so opportunities and friends can find you.

Some more (mainly career focused) guides I think are good

• What I would do if I was 18 now - Levels.io

• Guide to Career Planning - Marc Andreessen

• Career Decisions - Elad Gil

Hope this helps someone!

If you’re seeing this twice, forgive me. I originally posted on my site aadillpickle.com but x-posted here because the content is more life-y so thought folks here might like it. Also it follows an unofficial series I seem to have started of giving advice to my younger self. Earlier posts here and here.

Usually, I feel like every year of my life has been better than the last.

I often look back at myself and cringe, which is great because that means I’m learning and growing so much. But in the moments, I feel like I’m doing the best I can.

This year was not that. This year, I was doing shit and I knew it. December 2024 was God testing my strength and was the worst I’d felt in conscious memory (since I was about 16). The 4 main things in my life are always work, family, friends and romantic relationships, and each had some crazy shift that month.

At the start of the year, I felt like I was going to enter my villain arc. Everyone hates me anyway so might as well. I’m gonna get super rich and jacked and “who cares about other peoples feelings? I gotta look out for number 1” was kind of what was going through my head for a bit.

That, coupled with feelings of self-hatred, led me to kind of just… disappear for a few months. Not physically, I still went outside and stuff, but I was just not present the way I normally am. I simultaneously felt like everyone would be better off without me, but also so desperately didn’t want to be lonely.

By about April, it became clear to me that I was actually going through a redemption arc. I had committed some serious emotional crimes and, after much wallowing and self-pity, realized that I wanted to make up for them with community service rather than jail time.

It might sound like I’m setting this up for a surprise twist. Like, “And that’s how I realized that 2025 actually WAS the best year, even though I didn’t know it at the time.” No. It really f*cking sucked. Changing is so hard! Even when I want to! And I’m never really sure if I’ve changed at all in the moment, or if I just removed the stimulus that made me act out. Change is a constant in life, but also at a given point in time, I can never grasp it if I tried to.

Only in this past month I started to see it was kind of a blessing being so down, because hitting the wall made me open to so many new things my stubborn ass never would’ve tried before. I was way too up on borrowed confidence before, thinking I was too good to make a fool of myself, when everything really good and memorable in my life has started out by doing something “cringe”. Like:

• making youtube videos again

• doing a 5 min standup comedy set in front of 40 people

• going to China and trying to communicate and get around and haggle in Chinese (they stared, laughed, and took pictures with me)

• quitting a job I didn’t care for right after getting my visa

• saying “I love you” to my parents

• writing A LOT

Most of those things I’d wanted to do for years, and part of feeling socially isolated for a bit was I dropped the bit where I felt like I needed to impress anyone. I mean, if no one’s around anyway, no one’s there to see me screw up, so might as well try. Nothing needs to have rhyme and reason because I don’t need to explain it to anyone else anyway. No one’s asking.

Then a funny thing happened. People started paying attention. To the things that I didn’t even care or want people to pay attention to.

Anything I made that I wanted people to look at would get… *crickets*. Like I started making YouTube videos again, put in weeks of filming and editing, and came back to 100 views. Then a blog I wrote in an hour went Hacker News viral. I wrote a blog about selling to engineers, hoping to get noticed by some startup that’d hire me as a tech sales person, posted it on Hacker News and again… *crickets*. Then I hung out with my friend for a week and wrote about what I think makes him special and all of a sudden all the famous Twitter people are in my DMs. I didn’t even think it was that good! Like it was good, but everyone else thought it was GREAT, and I’m thinking “guys I have better pieces out… go read those too…”

It was to the point where I felt like anything I held too tightly had the life squeezed out of it, and that was palpable to everyone watching. I’ve long said my preferred state is toiling away in obscurity. When people are watching, I get nervous and can’t translate my brain into the world without distortion anymore. But if no one's watching, it’s all for me, and I can just make what I think is good.

I’ve made stuff that’s gotten attention before and always stopped it for that reason, even though I didn’t know it at the time. A watched pot never boils and a watched aadillpickle never toils.

I have a feeling this time is different though. Even though a good number of people are watching. Because:

a) Earlier last year in April, as a way to inject some structure into my life after some late night frustration, I started writing weekly logs about what I’m up to and thinking about. I sent it to some friends mostly to keep me accountable and a little bit to stay connected. We’re 38 logs deep now with only one missed week, and it’s something I look forward to almost every week. No matter what happens, I’m going to keep writing that log. Not want or need or have to, I just will. I never know what I’ll write about til I do, I never know my thoughts until they're on the page, and I realized making stuff with that intention is what I want to keep doing. I want to see what I pull out of myself because I have a jungle up here filled with lost treasure. “Got presents in my mind but couldn’t open up my own vault.” It really isn’t for anyone else anymore, and I’ve proven that to myself 38 weeks in a row , because I was writing it even when no one was liking or commenting.

b) I used to say “I have to” a lot. Like if I commit to something publicly, I have to do it. Now, I don’t care. I’m already naked. There is no more shame left if I commit to something and don’t do it. Even saying this now, even saying this time is different, I still don’t care if somehow I stop writing and creating, because I know it’s all part of the path. That ability, that feeling in my hands that everything is on the path, and not holding myself tightly to anything is actually what lets me loosen up rather than holding things so tightly I crush them. Letting my mind flow through my hands in everything I do, and if one day my mind and hands truly choose to do something else, that’s fine. I trust them.

Everyone always asks how my parents react to all the things I do that are the opposite of a good Asian son, like dropping out of college, changing jobs so frequently, or moving to San Francisco with no plan, money or visa.

I told my mom I quit 6 weeks ago then asked her how she felt about it. Her response then sums it up best:

“Me? I’m fine. You always find something. You have given us so many shocks in the the past few years. Now we are shock-proof.”

It took a few years to here, but her thinking finally somewhat lines up with mine now. I’m shock-proof. Might as well play with some electrical sockets.

A big change this year is I started believing in the universe. Before, I was fully a man of science and prided myself on cynicism, but now I know it’s much more fun to believe. In that spirit, here’s some stuff I’m putting out into the world for the new year:

• I will be allowed to live in San Francisco legally as a non-immigrant alien

• I will make an income enough to pay my living expenses in San Francisco without a W-2 job

• I will publish 100 pieces of work publicly on the internet next year, be it writing or video or whatever, in addition to the private daily logs

• I will get a Twitter payout

• A Fortune 100 CEO will somehow engage with SF Alexandria

• I will hit a devious lat spread

• I will make 100 pieces of pottery, and sell at least 1 piece to a stranger

• My wonderful friends and I are going to create epic dad lore

I know a lot can happen in a year, but I’ll admit: even writing these down right now, I don’t full believe they’ll happen. But if you read out the story of my life to 16 year old me, he wouldn’t believe it either.

The biggest part he wouldn’t believe is all the friends that feel like family I have around. How I get to spend each week hanging out with them, making memories we’ll talk about on rocking chairs 30 years from now. Looking back on my year, I can’t believe so much joy took place among all the chaos. Every single scary thing I did, I had someone in my corner with a towel and water bottle pushing me to get back out there and tending to me when I was KO’d. Every single goal I put up there is directly tied to a friend who pushed me to dream it up in the first place1.

This year I want to do more for and with my friends, because that’s the best part of every year. I want to be the friend that ropes people in, and do for them what they’ve done for me, without holding on so tightly. I want to be the catalyst that makes people realize they can do more than they previously thought possible, by doing what I want so unapologetically that everyone is freed up to be themselves. “And as [I] let [my] own light shine, [I] unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.” I want to care so deeply that caring becomes cool again à la Timothee Chalamet.

I look back and think about how sad a lot of my writing was, how confused and scared I was, and how many people reached out saying how much they resonated. I felt great about that, being able to give people catharsis by following along with my journey. To give off the vibe that, “yeah honestly I don’t know what I’m doing, and nobody else does either, so here’s me figuring it out in real time, so you can too.” I hope to carry a similar vibe forward except with a 2 small alterations.

We’re still figuring it out, but we’re:

a) unburdened by what has been

b) confident it will all work out, because it always does, or else we wouldn’t be here right now

Anyway, from the depths of my soul, to everyone who’s reading this right now:

THANK YOU.

When I started writing on the internet 7 years ago I never thought more than me, my mom and my friends would read it, let alone tens of thousands of internet strangers. I have started keeping a wall of love with all the nice messages people send me to look at in times of despair and remember that what I do matters, and that the world is pulling for me to keep pouring my soul into it. Imma keep it up. Hopefully you do too, in whatever it is you choose to care about. Just make sure you care about something. Cue Japanese hot dog man:

Ganbate!!!

—Aadil

There’s this 441 page slideshow that went viral recently. It talked about social media signals - what’s in, what’s out, what’s coming in, what has the opportunity to be in, how people feel about all of that, and generally what the vibes are on the internet nowadays.

I thought it was the best thing I’ve read all year. I spent hours pouring over this because I’m a huge geek when it comes to understanding how humans think and relate to each other, and social media is probably the main way everyone my age does that now. I ended up saving about 30 slides in particular that made me stop and think for a bit.

1) Main character syndrome is taking over

I never heard about main character energy before 2 years ago, and now it’s everywhere. It was kind of empowering at first but now it just seems like a nicer way to say “selfish”. I get the point - appreciate your life more and have the faith that everything will work out. But no one can ever touch the main character, and everyone else is less important than them, which is a pretty shit way to live when most of my best times haven’t happened alone. Putting yourself above everyone else is a great way to never feel like you have any equals, which is super isolating.

2) The process behind the art matters as much as the art

BTS videos do orders of magnitude better than the actual video sometimes. People want to know the why before they know the what. Taylor Swift’s new album launched with a “movie” that had her talk about the process of each song and the music video before they were played. This is likely in response to most of the world being afraid of AI, and to know the artist’s intentions makes media much more enjoyable than knowing it came from the black box slop factory.

BTW, Charli XCX’s substack is actually pretty good. Even she talks about how important it is to make the audience feel involved now as an artist.

3) We’re all tired of brainrot

Everyone knows social media is bad for them, but like cigarettes, you can’t quit so easily. To the point where there’s whole movements to reset your brain and regain your childlike sense of wonder. Dopamine fasts were around years ago too, but now it’s hit mainstream, and it’s not just about sitting still and doing nothing but actually enjoying what you consume.

Social media used to be fun and weird and being chronically online felt like being part of a cool secret club. But now that the smartest people in the world are working their hardest to get you hooked so you can swallow their ads with no chaser, no one’s having fun anymore.

Speaking of cigs…

4) Cigarettes are in.

Legitimately how did we get back here. I’ve never smoked in my life but even I keep seeing short form content that makes me want to try it. Friends are legitimately addicted. Maybe it’s that vaping was in and people wanted something stronger, but I think it’s more that cigarettes are legitimately cool now. They make you look cool, having wine and a cigarette is cool, Europe and Asia are cool and they smoke, skinny cigs are cool, taking smoke breaks is cool because going outside is cool (since everyone’s so online). So it’s a lot of little compounding factors that spilled over into cigarettes entering mainstream culture again. If I wasn’t so against supporting things I don’t want to see in the world, buying tobacco stocks would probably be a pretty lucrative move right now.

5) Anytime there’s culture, there exists an opportunity for counter-culture.

Culture is cyclical, and everything that’s old becomes new again, which is why we’ll see mom jeans and dad shoes trending til the end of time. Once you internalize this concept you see it everywhere. Being online was in on the early internet, now everyone does it, so going outside and dopamine fasting (doing nothing) is in. Fast paced jump cut content was in because of Tiktok, but now people are deliberately slowing down their content and making it longer to combat overstimulation.

Walking is in. Run clubs are in. So my friend Danielle decided to make a “Sit Club” that 1000 people showed up to in San Francisco. It was hilarious and got a ton of press and social media attention, because running and walking were already in the zeitgeist so everyone’s primed to understand the joke.

You can also take what’s in but put it in a place people don’t expect. Like bathhouses are entering culture as a third space beyond bars and restaurants to hang out at, but hosting a corporate event at one is incredibly counterintuitive, which is exactly why people will talk about it.

6) Being weird is so in.

Speaking of counter-culture, when a pattern is too established, people start to hate it no matter how good it is. Like a song being overplayed, everyone intuitively knows the pattern of every single form of content they doom scroll to a tee. So when something disrupts that, and it’s somewhat interesting, funny, or causes you to mentally say “WTF”, it feels like a breath of fresh air. This works especially well for brands because people have more solid preconceived expectations around them.

I don’t give half a shit about Ramp, On or Birkin but these promos are genuinely pretty cool, and I’ll remember them for breaking the mold. The reason ads that look like ads don’t work is because they’re forgettable. The best ads make you remember something you previously didn’t care about at all, so that when it’s time to make a buying decision you’re already primed.

7) Create what you live in

Every lifestyle vlog feels a little off to me because I wonder if they actually live like that or they’ve started living a life that looks good to a vlog. I personally don’t call myself a writer even though I write every week, because I’m just a guy who lives and happens to write when I feel like thinking through something a bit more.

The best art comes from drawing on personal experiences. Write what you know and all that. I love Timothee Chalamet’s promo for Marty Supreme. I don’t even think of it as promo. I’m super excited for this movie, and I’m not even a Chalamet fan, but he promotes that movie like he promotes himself because he’s all about the pursuit of greatness just like the main character of the movie.

I often get sidetracked when making stuff thinking about what’s trending and what’ll grab attention. But my stuff that circulates the most and resonates the most with people is when I talk about my feelings, or if I myself am laughing while making the thing. Like Charli XCX says, “If it doesn’t come from a truthful or meaningful place for the artist […] the work is totally fucking DOA.”

8) It’s easy to stand out if you care a lot

Even though there’s so much content out there, it’s easier than ever to be noticed. The algorithms are so good that you get hand delivered to your ideal audience. All the content in the world is a mountain of hay, but the algorithms are incredibly powerful magnets looking for needles 24/7.

Getting a few views but having people really love your stuff isn’t actually a bad thing at all. The algos pick out lots of slop because human desire isn’t actually as pure as we’d like. We’re easily enraged and amused by stuff our higher minds might disapprove of. The thing it, we’re realizing it now, and everyone’s preferences are slowly changing. We love cake even though it’s bad for us, but we’re all realizing that too much cake is hurting us, so now we’re switching up our taste and diet.

People are now more aware of attention as currency, and are giving it to more deserving media each day. Our taste is getting more refined, and the algos cater to taste perfectly, which makes it the best time to make a masterpiece and have it seen by people who’ll care about it.

9) Remind people you exist

With the switch to algorithmic feeds, even if you put something out, you likely gotta put it out a couple times in a couple different ways for people to actually see it, even your followers. Social media rewards the courageous over the intelligent. It might feel a little shameful, but if you truly think what you made is good, why deprive people the chance to see your thing? Surely they’ll prefer what you make over their 95th slop video of the day in the middle of their doomscroll, right?

If you’re struggling to come up with what to post, post freaking anything. Start with what you live in, and the feeds are so smart nowadays that it’ll find it’s way to who it’s meant for. People love feeling like they’ve found a diamond in the rough, and are craving real life so much that they’re actually more intrigued by something that looks unpolished but interesting rather than “content”.

Bonus: 10) inspo/laughs/ponderings

Inspo

Colin and Samir are awesome. I didn’t know it took so long for them to get the attention they deserved. Similarly, for one of my favourite writers, it took him 15 years of writing before anyone wanted to talk to him about his work.

I’m a raptors fan and these posters are fire. Also really cool that people can just post their art on Twitter and get paid for it per impression now. Never a better time to make cool stuff and share it online.

I never consciously thought of these errors as ways to hook someone, I feel like the fish being caught, but cool to know you can use “faults” this way.

Similarly, I’ve seen these types of videos before everywhere, but never thought of them as a “format” where the first frame is meant to invoke a specific emotion.

Laughs

Banger. Funny to think about big brands spending millions to replicate a 16 year old with a Tiktok addiction and no filter.

1. Banger motto for anyone afraid of not being original with what they make.

2. Even the national parks service has a social media specialist now. I bet he’s pretty good.

No way they actually did this. Reminds me of Amazon Boy.

Ponderings

Yes these things are on the up and the brands are going to use them to sell us things. But also further proves the slop uprising, which means there will also be a counter slop uprising. I predict next year anti-brainrot/brain-recover content will be a thing.

I wonder how much of everything I see online is a subtle attempt to sell me something. Even the people who say they’re not selling you anything when they’re small or act authentic change their ways as they grow and need money. You can’t even show your phone anymore without it turning into a marketing opportunity.

There’s this $5 app called Dumbify I’ve been using for the past year. Highly recommend. I try to make my phone as un-addicting as possible which involves:

• hiding all the addicting apps with face id so they don’t show in app library, search or history by default

• muting everyone I don’t care about on Instagram

• muting everyone that remotely annoys me or is hateful on Twitter

• disabling double tap to wake

• black and white mode (though I rarely keep this up because I watch netflix on my phone and forget to turn it back on)

• disabling animations/motion

• disabling notifications from almost every app

• always being on do not disturb, allowlisting only family and close friends

That’s all the slides I saved. Hope you learned something! Email me if you have any thoughts on this or read it yourself, I’d love to chat about it: aadillpickle@gmail.com

Anyway, sometimes when people age, they think they know more now that they’re older. I have realized, as I’ve aged, that I know nothing at all. I had myself and the world figured out at 16 and it’s been downhill ever since.

So instead of the usual “23 things I’ve learned at 23”, here’s some things I’ve been thinking about recently that my past self would likely be better off knowing.

Literally no one knows what’s best for you

You think you know what’s best for you. You’re pretty sure mom and dad don’t but you still wish they did. You hope that your brother and cousin know what’s best for you, but the truth is it’s impossible to know because there’s no objective criteria to measure against.

This is terrifying and freeing. Terrifying because no decision you ever make is going to be correct in an objective sense. Freeing because no matter what decision you make, you can’t be wrong! People are going to get really upset with you for not listening to them, and you should probably listen to them more, because more input data is never a bad thing. But lots of times there’s going to be no decision that makes everyone happy, so you’ll have to learn to live with that. Democratic discussions, autocratic decisions.

In the end, you’re the one who has to live your life, and has to make most of your decisions. The more decisions you make, the better you get at making them, and it’s much easier to live with a decision you make than one that’s made for you.

Do what’s obvious

You’re going to spend years thinking there’s some silver bullet, some secrets in the universe you can unlock just by thinking hard enough, or searching for it by talking to the right people and just asking the right questions. There’s not.

The most obvious approach is usually correct. If you want to be better at something, work hard on it. If you want to figure out what you’re meant to do, try a bunch of things and do what you like. If you want to be happy, notice when you’re happy and do the things that got you there.

What makes this hard is that obvious doesn’t always mean easy. You’re going to have some really hard conversations along the way, and hurt some people you never meant to hurt. You’re going to feel stuck, lost, and alone. That’s inevitable, and it will suck so much. But the pain of inaction hurts more than the pain on action. The few regrets you have will be related to things you didn’t do, not what you do do. When in doubt, ask her out.

Damn dude give yourself some grace

You’re going to push yourself a lot, then try to relax, then get angry at yourself for not pushing yourself enough. You’re going to try lots of new things and get mad that you’re not as naturally talented at them as everyone else who’s spent 10 years practicing. You’re going to think you’re lazy. A lot, you’re going to think that a lot actually. It’s pretty much going to be your constant fear anytime you take some time off that you’ll slip into being lazy, poor, and disheveled.

Relax. Maybe one of the most important things along the way is learning to breathe. Wim Hof method, circular breathing, 30 seconds to take away all the pain, to center yourself. The ideal version of you in your head isn’t smacking himself with a baseball bat every day because he’s not enough, and if you want to become him, neither should you.

You’re going to think giving yourself grace is going to make you lazy. I promise you, your ambition is core. It doesn’t come from being mean to yourself, it comes from the pure goodness in your soul. Your heart is clear and you genuinely care so much about the people around you and the world, and want to improve yourself so that you can do more good. Plus, every time you do truly relax after becoming sick of everything, you get bored after a while, and realize it’s more fun to try doing and making things than not. Even when you think you need like 3 months, you’re usually back at it within 2 weeks tops.

Friends make life worth it

You’re going to go back and forth between desperately wanting to feel belonging with other people and thinking you don’t need anyone else around because you’re better off alone. You couldn’t be more wrong about the latter. And for the former, you’ll find belonging but only after you achieve a certain amount of self-acceptance. It’ll be offered to you a couple times, but you won’t be able to accept it at first, and you’ll push away lots of people that are just trying to be nice to you. It’s all good — see above section about giving yourself some grace.

You might have moments where you lose yourself trying to care for other people, and you’ll notice that, and withdraw thinking everyone’s better off without you. They’re not, and neither are you. A break is good, spending time alone is good, but reclusion sucks, you’re just not built like that, and you’re actively hurting your friends too because they’ll miss you like you miss them. You can’t find yourself in other people, but it’s almost necessary to find yourself with other people. A father is just a man without his daughter, a President is just a person without a population, a CEO without employees is just someone with a desk. People are nothing significant if not in relation to others.

You might think it’s unproductive to spend time with your friends. You’ll think you need to “work on yourself” to fix all your problems. Most of the progress I’ve made has come from phases when I interacted with the world more. There is no nobility in self-isolation, only stagnation. You’ll learn that solo travel is a cool idea, and that you’re pretty chill by yourself, but travelling with friends is 10x more fun, so it’s usually better trying to convince someone to come with you.

Take every moment to stay up until sunrise talking to someone. Show up early to help set up. Take the flight, rent the car, share a way too tiny scooter together. Give gifts that’ll become remind people of you everyday. Create lore that you’ll talk about in rocking chairs one day. Have people unrelated to you that your kids will call Uncle and Aunty one day.

Comfort is the enemy of learning

Remember how I said you’re going to fear getting lazy? It’s a really valid fear. There’s going to be lots of times where you’re going to be doing above average by most observable metrics, and you’ll envision this life where you’re settled down with a wife, dog, 2.2 kids, car, house, everything. And you’ll be on the path to getting it, everything should be right, and then suddenly you’ll be struck with this painful feeling in your chest. LISTEN TO THAT FEELING. DO SOMETHING ELSE.

You’re not built for traditional comfort. You feel most free in navigating ambiguity, and can handle chaos better than most people. That’s not an excuse to leave your room messy, in fact probably a reason to clean it because there still is an upper limit to your chaos so you might want to minimize all easily reducible chaos. For some reason, you believe you’re capable of a lot, and by the Thielian proverb “whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right”, you are capable of a lot.

There’s a reason you read Zero to One when you were 14 — you’re a little insane. Lean into it. Do not confuse your comfort for what most other people think is comfortable. You love learning, and whenever you’re not, you get so uncomfortable. Spend your weeks being a different person at the end than you were at the start. An ideal life for you likely will include an atomic family, but if you conflate that with lounging around all day watching Netflix, you’re likely in for some uncomfy chest feelings. Because the truth is, that feeling comes from not living up to your own values. And whenever you try to shy away from working hard or trying new things, it’s lying to yourself about the type of person you are. And you hate lying.

Appearances matter

Okay, you are not going to care about your appearance for a long time. Nor should you care about it too too much, but it will definitely make your life better being 10% hotter rather than 10% smarter. Anecdotally, good looking people seem to matter more in this world.

It’s not just physical appearance. Design matters. You love well designed software, not just functional but beautiful. You feel noticeably better with soft lighting and floor to ceiling windows than you do in a fluorescent white box. Your appetite fades when the food doesn’t ‘look good’. Make things look good, and things that look good.

Please spend more money on clothes. The free tech swag and sweatpants look is a phase that’ll pass as you engage more with the world outside your bedroom. Don’t listen to other tech dudes they’re all just as clueless. Lululemon and Ultraboosts aren’t the peak of fashion and you’ll feel way more confident when you stop dressing like you’re ready for an 8 hour flight all the time.

Do stuff for no reason

Some of the best stuff in your life will come from writing about every random thought you have on the internet. People will want to be your friends, give you jobs, and even ask you out because of this thing you started doing because you were bored during the pandemic.

I’m not saying don’t have goals or be intentional about stuff. It is cool to try and try hard. But don’t tie yourself to desiring a certain outcome from it. Try with no expectation.

Start things often. No need to finish all of them, but be the type of person who gets struck with ideas and tries to make them happen. If you let ideas pass through your brain often without trying to bring them into the real world, one day they might stop coming. Don’t question the ideas, just be glad they came, and pay respect to the idea by acting on it as often as possible. You have no idea how or if the dots will connect, but having more dots makes prettier pictures possible.

Be curious not judgemental

Again, you’re going to think for the longest time that you have the world figured out. That everything is analyzable and people are like puzzles waiting to be solved, to be “gotten”. The world is complicated and it’s easier to put people and situations into boxes based on your first judgement because to dive deeper would take effort and it’s just easier not too.

Fight that urge. Don’t ask questions and listen with the intention to arrive at an answer, or even assume there is one. You can only ever really know 20% about a person, max. Humans are so complicated that you could spend 8 years with someone and not even remotely understand what goes on in their head, because you’ll never be in their head. You’ll only see them from your perspective, never knowing their intentions or feeling their brain chemicals, in maybe 1% of their overall interactions in the world.

Truly feeling this is incredibly exciting. You’ll write it in permanent marker on your desk just so you can try to internalize it everyday. If you have the energy to dive in, no one is boring anymore. The people around you will feel like you think they’re special and one of a kind. Because you do. Because how could they not be?

Act your age

You are going to be the youngest person in many rooms from here on out. You’re going to keep the beard to make yourself look older, and beam with pride whenever anyone guesses your age as mid-to-late 20s. You’re the youngest, so you’re going to spend all your time wanting to be older, to prove you can take care of yourself and be independent and be taken seriously.

Take yourself less seriously. If people wanted another adult in the room, they would’ve invited one. People like youthful energy, it’s a breath of fresh air. It’ll be hard because you’ll care more about your career and less about school than other people your age. But don’t let that mean you have to care less about enjoying yourself. Use the allowance of being young to make mistakes, to f**k around and find out. No need to put so much pressure on yourself to be perfect all the time. Even as an adult, everyone is winging it. You’re going to become good friends with someone 15 years older than you, who you’ll admire a lot, and even he’ll tell you about how as he’s gotten older, he’s realized he knows nothing at all.

Please do something reckless on purpose. I promise you’ll have enough money for retirement even if you don’t save 70% of your money each paycheque just go on that spontaneous boys trip to Fuji. I know you’re scared, but you’re young, which means you’re basically immortal.

The lack of responsibility and how easy it is to make friends are some of the great parts of being young. It all gets way more complicated later. Use it to try as much stuff as possible so that you may “find yourself”, because if you don’t do it now you will have to do it later. No one ever skips stages of development without having to revisit them at a later date, or having something ugly happen. Take advantage of the neuroplasticity and go learn how to make robots or anything else you’re interested in but scared you might not be good at or be able to turn into a career.

Also, it sucks being independent. It’s good to trust people and to rely on them, rather than just letting everyone rely on you and putting all that pressure on yourself. Realize that the same joy you get from giving to others, others get from giving to you.

TBH I hope my 16 year old self doesn’t just think about these lessons but actually tries to go do something differently. I also know that I wouldn’t’ve listened to me back then so maybe this helps someone else.

Anyway if you liked this one, you’ll like the one I did before, this is kind of a part 2.

And if you’re new here, pls email me at aadillpickle@gmail.com on how you found this. It’s been growing a little bit beyond my mom and 3 friends that read this so it’s kinda scary feeling like my little corner of the internet is a bit bigger now. Don’t be a stranger and help me make it a little smaller pls.

I was addicted to that game for 4 years. I played at least a couple hours a day, and watched all the pro players and YouTube guides on how to get better. Obsession. Eventually I found other interests, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever reached the same amount of obsession for anything other than that game.

I’m often jealous of people who found their passion early. People who’ve been dancing since they were 3, who’ve been training for the olympics since they could walk, who have a special connection with music because of their grandma, who started taking apart computers and their parents handed them a Java textbook one day thinking their kid could be ‘good at computers’.

People often say that to find your passion, you should think back to what you did as a kid when you were blindly following your curiosity, unaffected by the world. I honestly can’t remember doing anything other than school and watching TV. I read a lot of books and ate a lot of food. Does that mean my destiny is to become a writer or a chef? Those things kind of just happened— I didn’t choose them. Nor did I put an inordinate amount of effort into either to the point of becoming top 10% in the world.

The second thing I remember devoting a lot of effort to was coding. I started 10 years ago, taught myself Python, learned about AI before it was cool, then worked as a software engineer for a few years before realizing that I probably have a lower skill ceiling than most other software engineers since I’m pretty reluctant to stare at a screen all day. I like talking to people and going outside, but programming inherently rewards those who are more introverted than me.

With that realization, I tried some other stuff. I watched a lot of YouTube so I tried making videos for a while. It was fun but super hard, and after a while, I gave it up because I missed living in San Francisco and having money. Then, backed by the experience of running an e-commerce business in high school, I landed a job at a GPU cloud startup as a growth engineer. After about a year of doing that, I had to opportunity to switch to tech sales. After 2 quarters of doing well at that by most metrics, I got laid off.

From everything I’ve done, professionally and for fun, nothing has screamed out at me as “the thing”. The elusive “thing” that I’m supposed to do with my life. My god-given purpose on this earth.

I have no idea what it is.

I’ve been thinking about the Japanese concept ‘Ikigai’ recently:

It describes so much of what I’m looking for. My last job felt like what I was good at, and what I could be paid for. But my Ikigai will likely come as a marriage of the skills I have and the values instilled in me early in life. I grew up religious, and doing good for the world was a huge part of my upbringing. I feel like I’ve ignored that in my career so far since it felt like the smartest people to learn from or the companies paying the most money are working on cutting edge tech for mostly capitalistic incentives. Even today, I have friends that say what problem you work on doesn’t really matter early in your career. Just optimize for optionality, learning, and money.

I also find it hard to care about large scale problems. Of course I know climate change is terrible, yet I just don’t feel it emotionally. I find it hard to work on something so massive I can’t hold it in my brain. I love working with people where I can directly see their day get better after they interact with me or something I’ve made. Especially if it ties to a broader goal that’s good for the world. Earlier in my career, mission wasn’t as important because I could just convince myself that whatever I was working on was important for the world in some way. Now I just can’t force myself to believe in distributed database software making the world a better place.

I’m not sure about my relationship with art. I really like making things, and believe I’m a creative person, but I’ve never really been amazing at making things look or sound good. I really love being around other creative people but I likely wouldn’t fit in with a group of people who call themselves artists. I’m more like a maker of things, doer of shenanigans, committer to bits. Making a career out of that was what I attempted when I made funny Youtube videos for a summer, and that desire is still in me. To do stuff that barely anyone does and document it so anyone watching feels like they can do more than they thought they could.

That’s one of my favourite feelings in general— to make someone feel like they can do more than they think they can. It’s something I’ve been lucky enough to have from multiple friends and mentor figures in the past, and I want to instil it in others. Which is why I think part of what I do next needs to have me in a role with a lot of ownership, and the eventual ability to teach others. I’d love to lead a team and think I’d be good at it, after getting over the initial learning curve of coordinating people. I just know much more is possible with others than alone. So learning to be a force multiplier on a group of people is really important to me.

I also think the most effective leaders are those who, if it came down to it, could do any of their team’s individual roles better than them. It’s near impossible to command respect as a general if people feel like you’re just a figurehead rather than an expert soldier. Which is why the best engineering managers are former engineers, yet not all top engineers are good managers. So whatever I do next, it’ll involve me spending lots of time in the trenches doing work that actually drives output to develop tangible skills. And therefore needs to have a high baseline difficulty so I can add some nice grooves to my brain. I want to actually do stuff, not just live vicariously through “enabling” the people doing the stuff.

Now that I’m unemployed, the most common question I get is “What are you going to do next?” For a week, the answer was: “Nothing.” I wanted so badly to jump into solving all the problems that came up when my job ended, but I promised myself I’d defer any decisions to at least next week. I spent that week trying to get my head right, taking long walks and spending lots of time in saunas and hot tubs.

The conclusion I came to was that I love America. I feel like there’s something here for me, and so I should get a job ASAP so I can have a work visa that lets me stay here long term. I interviewed with 20 or so companies, did a 2-week unofficial trial with one I really liked, and kept a bunch of promising options on the back-burner in case the trial didn’t work out.

Everything was going well until 1 week into the trial I had a full day where I just froze. I couldn’t get any work done, and I was also so mentally stuck that I didn’t give my boss a heads up. We talked about it after and 2 days later I told him I couldn’t do it. I really liked the job, my coworkers were awesome, and the mission was something I’d always wanted to work on. The timing just wasn’t right. I put a lot of mental and emotional effort into my work, and at the time, I wasn’t in the place to put 100% of my energy into something. My entire body was telling me that this wasn’t it, even though my brain said it was.

I shoehorned it into Ikigai, thinking that it fit all 4 criteria, but the feeling in my bones said otherwise. Considering the alternative, that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I want, was too terrifying. I wanted the answer so badly that I convinced myself and everyone around me that this was “the thing”. It had to be.

Maybe the other part unmentioned part of Ikigai is timing. Something could be put in front of me that fits all 4 criteria, but if I’m not ready to receive, it’ll never feel like a fit.

Thinking back to League of Legends, whenever I felt stuck in the game, I started “smurfing” — I made a new account on the side where I could play against easier competition and not take the game too seriously.

I ended up getting a higher rank on my smurf than my main.

I have this habit of getting into something far past the point of being a beginner, but then getting way too in my head when I start feeling legitimately challenged.

I spent 2 years writing on Substack to an audience of pretty much no one. Now that I’ve gotten recognized a couple times for my writing, it feels like no piece I write is good enough to publish. I have more drafts than posts at this point, and so to get out of my own head, I made a private blog where I write about whatever comes to mind to a few close friends every week. My private now has more posts than my main (and I think they’re pretty good too!)

I tweet less now that I have an audience. I said I’d make videos but get self-conscious when people tell me they watched them, even though the feedback is always positive. Some part of me is just more comfortable hidden away in the quiet of my childhood bedroom tinkering away at my desk in obscurity than being observed by anyone. Yet at the same time, making things and telling people on the internet about them has given me more than I ever dreamt of. It’s something I will happily continue doing, I just need to get out of my own head.

I need to start smurfing again.

So like Steve Jobs, it seems like every cool person in western history did 2 things:

1. Die young

2. Go on a journey to find themself in Asia

Who am I to argue with the greats? That’s why I booked a one-way flight to Shenzhen yesterday. I leave in 2 weeks, and have no idea when or how I’m coming back to San Francisco. I’m just going to be away for as long as I want, going wherever I want, until I’m ready to come back, or until I run out of money.

The plan is to see what I naturally end up doing when I have none of my existing influences pushing me in any direction. I love SF to death, but it’s a terrible place to be if you don’t know what you’re doing. The culture I’m a part of here seems to march in 1 direction only and promises to carry those who indulge it to power, wealth and influence I’m 90% sure I’ll find my way back here since some part of me wants those things, but more so because I love the friends I have here.

So if I’m meant to be a lazy bum for some time, or to write sappy love letters and blog posts all day, or to start importing Japanese shoes and Chinese electronics to the West, I’d like the find out. I’m not going away to look for something. I’m going away to open up the possibility of something finding me, and this trip is just widening my search space. I’m ready for active exploration — the point is to do something each day, but I have no preconceived ideas about what each day should look like. I’m not going to explicitly work or play or relax or anything — I’m just going to try out a new way of being and see if it’s for me.

In the back of my mind, I’m thinking about making videos again talking about whatever I want, unburdened by what I’ve put out before and my existing audience, just to get into the rhythm of making stuff and telling people about it again. But again, this is a soft plan. Not sure if I’ll follow through.

It may seem like I’m doing this to run away from my problems. It may seem like I’m searching for something. The truth is, it’s probably a little bit of both but also I’m really also just doing this because I genuinely don’t know what to do.

I feel like a reason for being is something you almost can’t search for. Borrowing from ideas in Daoism, it’s something you know when you have it but have no idea what it looks or feels like until you do. And I think what’s meant for me is coming for me no matter where I go, I can’t outrun it. Borrowing from Steve Jobs, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

I’m just praying this all connects at some point.

I’m a big fan of the phrase “do it scared”. And I am pretty terrified here, even though I know rationally there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m scared all get lazy, become broke and unattractive, or all my friends will forget me while I’m gone. I’m scared of getting irrationally arrested in China, or dying in a Tsunami in Japan. I’m scared of being unemployable, or never being able to come back.

But more than all of that, I’m scared of what’ll happen if I stay. I can feel my mind slowly slipping, slowly atrophying as I spend more time in the same place without leaning into the potential inflection point granted to me. I’m afraid if I don’t chase something right now, I’ll lose the ability to. If I settle into another job that’s not quite right for me, into one city for the rest of my 20s without really experiencing any other culture, into a domestic lifestyle without really wanting it because that’s what all my friends are doing — I’ll never really know what I want.

The way I see it, there’s pain on both sides. Might as well get hurt trying something new.

Thank you to Kasra, Grace, Jacky and Brinlee for reviewing this. And to all my aforementioned wonderful friends who’ve listened to me talk about all the crazy shit in my head through this transition period. Hope you know that I’m probably going to keep going through ups and downs like this, and that I appreciate you a lot for bearing with me.

I’m at a weird place with this Substack where I started out writing on it for an audience of my mom and a couple of friends, and now there’s hundreds of you reading this that I don’t even know. It’s been part journal, part newsletter, part blog and part captain’s log.

I want to get even more personal on here, and write more than I ever have before. I don’t want to give advice, just talk about what I’m doing and going through in the hopes that someone out there might benefit from it. I want to be known well by

But I want everyone reading this to feel less like an audience. I kind of hate that term for stuff like this — I want to write the same way I do for my mom and a couple friends as I do for you all reading this that I don’t know, the friends I haven’t met yet. So if you made it all the way here, I need 2 favours from you.

1. Introduce yourself! Say hi to me either here over email: aadillpickle@gmail.com or twitter @aadillpickle. Bonus if you tell me what I should write more about.

2. Send this to 1 friend you think could learn from what I’m talking about here, or someone going through something similar to make them feel less alone. No pressure, but I write for people like me, and I know there’s gotta be a lot out there, so I’d like to meet them, even if its just virtually and parasocially. Better than being just another of the 8 billion strangers out there.

Thank you so much for reading. 🫵🙏✌️

That’s the earliest I can remember trying to consciously change the way I was acting.

Around 17, after my brother gave me a wakeup call for being an arrogant asshole, was the first time I started trying to work on changing the way I was feeling. How I went about the world and the energy I presented, which, for me, felt way more esoteric and confusing than just simply choosing different actions.

Some days I think about how I still have so long to go, how I still keep f*cking up and give so much of a f*ck about so many things even though I read that book 10 whole years ago! I keep feeling like I should have it down by now.

But then I remember how much I used to beat myself up in my head, how I’d self-isolate for months at a time, how rattled by indecision and self-doubt I was, and decide to take the advice I often give my friends and “give myself some grace”.

I have a long way to go, yet I feel that I’ve come a long way still, so I think all the work I’ve put in is worth it when I think about how I used to be.

Some of the things I’ve tried over the years are probably really obvious, some may feel overly childish and prescriptive, and I’m not saying I’ve mastered all these methods and am 100% flawless now. It’s literally just some stuff I’ve tried to go from loving myself 10% most days to about 70% consistently now.

Trying to appease my 2 inner wolves

I tried therapy a few years ago. During which, I felt reluctant to admit that sometimes I feel like there’s 2 versions of me in my head out of fear of being diagnosed as bipolar or with some other condition. So it was pretty surprising when my therapist replied, “Yeah, basically everyone has that.” I later learned that managing the relationships between these 2 versions is sometimes called inner child work, but I refer to this concept as my ‘higher and lower selves’.

My higher self knows what I should do. My lower self knows what I want to do. Doing too much of what I want to do might have me acting on impulse too often, and sometimes leads to selfish, short-term thinking. But doing too much of what I think I should do means I’m not actually myself, and what I think I should do is arbitrarily based off what I’ve recently been exposed to. It leaves me feeling inauthentic, and it’s so mentally draining to be anything other that myself.

I try to have my higher-self in control of the decision-making as often as possible, but use my lower self as an advisor and make both feel part of the decision-making process. If I don’t, I just feel fake, and that clash leads to mental pain.

And higher doesn’t mean necessarily mean better. He just sees more from a taller vantage point, and takes all the factors of a scenario into account. Whereas my lower self has eyes on the ground, and represents the voice of the people — what they’re thinking but are too afraid to say. In this case, the people is me and my heart. Analysis and intuition, thinking and feeling.

Negotiating between these 2 sometimes feels automatic, especially in situations I’m comfortable in. Like figuring out what to eat or what to wear, both selves pretty much always agree. For me, creating a habit involves aligning these 2.

But when I’m trying to actively enact changes in my life and improve, it takes some very manual talking to myself in my head. When I wanted to get my ears pierced, lower-me was like '“FUCK IT LETS GO”. But higher me was thinking about what my parents would say, the possibility of an infection, how much it’d cost, and how much time it’d take to clean everyday.

There’s 2 major unlocks here. a) Accepting that I may have multiple versions of yourself in your head, and that’s okay. I don’t need to hide or think more or less of each version — they all have valid things to contribute and their own objectives when it comes to making my life the best it can be, even though it may feel annoying in my brain to have them conflicting.

That brings us to b) I can actually resolve a lot of inner conflict by separating my different selves and having them talk to each other to achieve consensus. And consensus is pretty much always achievable, since it’s just me in my head and what I say, goes. And if all the MEs agree on something but I still feel tension, I usually need to communicate to myself more. I journal whatever’s in my stream of consciousness without judgement and once it’s out on paper, all the perspectives sometimes feel more malleable.

Just like in the physical world, most disagreements between 2 reasonable people can be solved with communication. If you’re a reasonable person, the same can be said for the dissonance in your own head.

Feeling physically good

I’ve always been more brains over brawn, mind over matter. I was a “big-boned” child til I was a teenager. Had back pain since 17. Got sick all the time as a kid.

But wow. Feeling good in my body has changed my entire life.

I’ve realized feeling good physically and mentally are so connected that nowadays, immediately when I feel stressed or anxious, I try to think of making some physical change to sort it out.

Some quick fixes:

• When I’m nervous, I try making myself as big as possible. Arms and chest out, gorilla mode.

• When I’m anxious, I try to breathe as deeply as possible. In with my mouth, all the way through my esophagus, down to my stomach, really feeling it all. Then I force all the air out when I exhale and repeat a couple times.

• Whenever I have mental tension, I stretch out my back and hips with a few yoga poses. Frog, downward dog, and cobra are all great.

But for longer term fixes, I’ve experimented with a bunch of different activities, and tried to stick with what makes me feel good in my body. Overall, everything contributes to feeling strong, loose, and smooth.

Feeling strong is kind of obvious — some form of resistance training. Currently lifting weights, but for a while it came from rock climbing a lot and resistance training sometimes.

Loose is still mentally tough for me because I’ve spent so much time trying to ignore body tension and just brute forcing through. But stretching in the mornings and doing physiotherapy has helped a ton. Just lying on a lacrosse ball with the muscles along my upper and lower spine for 10 minutes a day helps so much to treat all the damage I’ve done sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day.

Smooth is just feeling fluid. Moving a lot in general, trying to play sports, making sure I use all of my body. Basketball, walking a lot, and dancing all fall into this bucket.

I used to feel like a brain piloting an exoskeleton. Now I just feel like a human.

Negative visualization

At some point I learned that the brunt of what causes anxiety is just not knowing.

As in, anxiety triggers when you have some vaguely scary scenario that your brain and body try to prepare for by tensing up so you’re ready to fight or run away.

And this was useful millions of years ago when our problems were genuinely uncertain and required us to summon superhuman abilities all at once to beat them.

But now, most of our imagined danger scenarios don’t actually imply anything close to death.

For me, I’ve had social anxiety for years and didn’t know why.

But once I started thinking about what my anxiety might be trying to tell me and how it’s actually working to keep me alive, I realize it stems from rejection. Which makes perfect logical sense. Humans are more likely to survive attacks from predators when travelling in tribes, and more likely to carry out the core evolutionary objective of spreading their genes if they’re better socialized.

So my anxiety is signalling me of the danger of rejection and trying to keep me alive. As in, not getting rejected means you could potentially be allies in the future, whereas rejection now = death. Avoid rejection at all costs to stay alive now. Then later, feel anxious about being lonely, because being lonely also = death. Perfectly logical.

I’ve found that if I play the scenario forward, and visualize all the possible things that could go wrong in the social scenario I’m scared of and how I feel in them, I actually feel better about it. Maybe it’s the logical part of my brain realizing that my scenarios just aren’t realistically very dangerous. Then the anxiety goes away once it realizes that in all the danger scenarios I’m still alive, so there’s nothing it needs to signal me to stay alert for.

My cue whenever I feel social anxiety now is to ask myself “Where are the tigers?”

An extension of this is visualizing a scary scenario, and thinking about what Aadil 2.0 might do there. Here I try to focus more on how I’d move and feel in my body rather than what exactly I’d say. Then thinking again about 4-5 ways that scenario could go wrong and playing those in my head like a movie. Then, thinking about how Aadil 3.0 would want to feel in even those crappy scenarios. Maybe someone throws a drink in my face after hitting on them. I’d probably want to feel happy that I had the courage to try and that I have a funny story to tell my friends later. Importantly, really trying to feel that happiness in my chest and arms, no matter how ridiculously terrible that scenario sounds.

This is hard as hell to remember to do in practice, but has gotten me to approach strangers in public way more over the years after having it running as a background process for a while. Just another tool in the toolkit.

Unfolding (as opposed to goal setting)

When I was 21, I realized that I’d accomplished so much of what I’d set out to do as a teenager, and still wasn’t very happy most of the time.

The unofficial promise was “I’ll sacrifice feeling good now, work hard to get somewhere else, and once I’m there, then I’ll feel good.”

Imagine my surprise when I was still sad. Like what was all the suffering for?

I eventually decided that I’d start from feeling happy first, then figure it out from there. So I moved to San Francisco with no plan since that’s the place that good things always just happen for me, and figured I’d sort it out from there. The 2 years since that move have been the best in my life so far.

I later learned that some famous substacker had written about this phenomenon already.

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.¹ Put simply:

  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

  —Henrik Karlsson, Escaping Flatland

I never planned to move to SF. It just happened that all of my friends ended up there. I never planned to even make those friends, they all just came from Twitter, where I started posting everything that came to my head during the pandemic. I just DM’d who I thought was interesting, I wasn’t trying to build a network or brand.

I started writing on the internet because I kept giving the same advice over and over to my friends. I continued because if I didn’t write and offload my thoughts to a page, my head would explode. Who knew one of my best friends now would come from us reading each others blogs for the past 5 years.

When I dropped out of college, my parents were worried about how I didn’t have a plan. I couldn’t justify it in terms that made sense to them, but it was just something I had to do. I felt a scrunching in my chest every day at my part-time corporate job. Frustration that what I was learning in school was antiquated and useless since the world was changing so fast. What had a 0.1% acceptance rate and looked great on a resume to the world felt like a prison to me.

It made way more financial sense to stay in Toronto. It made no sense to drop so much time, money and effort into acquiring a US work visa to live with people I’d only known virtually. But I didn’t actually feel like I was losing that much, because while my friends and family in Toronto are wonderful, it felt like my time there had come to an end, and I had something waiting for me in San Francisco.

The past 2 years have led to a lot of firsts, and I remember it all so much more vividly than when my life was dictated by what I’d plan to do in the future rather than pursue day-to-day. Some months I could barely get out of bed, other months it felt like I could bend metal if I tried. Sometimes my life feels like a movie, other times it feels like the intermission.

It’s exactly what Henrik said. My life is nothing like I imagined it to be.

But it truly is mine.

Thank you for reading! Sometimes I feel a little weird writing posts like this, since again, I’m by no means perfect at all this, and also the people who are the most mentally healthy probably don’t think about any of this or write Substacks about it, so it feels a bit vulnerable to admit a weakness like this publicly.

Thank you to all the people who tell me they like reading my writing, you keep me going. I do it for the 1 person that might need to hear something in this post. And if you enjoyed this one, please tell me I have no idea how I’m doing otherwise.

Special shoutouts to Heather for recently reading all my stuff + talking about it with me (sometimes a bit too much), and Jacky + Grace for always being sounding boards for me.

A lot of my life has been spent in “analysis paralysis”. As someone who thinks a lot, I can often convince myself I’m thinking rationally even when I’m not. Whereas most often it’s the feeling that comes first and the rationale after, I can pretty reliably fool myself into thinking it’s the other way around.

In my brain it looks like this:

“Oh yeah it makes perfect sense to move to San Francisco. The weather’s good, my friends are there and it’s great for my career.”

I really just did that on a whim ‘cause it felt right.

“Oh yeah, it’s actually ideal that I got fired. I was thinking about quitting and this way I get severance and avoid an awkward conversation and it’s the push I needed to get started on my dreams.”

That really was just a decision made for me before I was ready. I felt crushed by it at the time.

On one hand, I can convince myself into thinking any decision is good, which is great for mental clarity since I avoid the pain of indecisiveness. On the other hand, the decision to not do anything differently is also a decision. I rationalize this by saying:

“Well, you’ve been through a lot for your age so far. You deserve some time to rest and be comfortable. Life is long and you’re already ahead of most people in a career sense. Everyone feels like this at your age. You need to take care of your health and avoid stress and and and and…”

It goes on like that.

This has been a recurring theme in my life, since I think about and plan for the future a lot, often to my benefit. But that also ends up having me think about the far future a bit, and can sometimes take a nihilistic turn. Whether I do or don’t, it’s all the same, so why try1? It’s also tough in the sense that my most enjoyable periods in life weren’t preplanned but rather made off an intuitive decision to pursue what felt good at the time. By planning, I’m often actively planning against myself. I’m implicitly giving my current self more decision making power than my future self who’s older and likely wiser.

I’ve recently been reminded of why I feel better actively trying. Why caring about things is cool, why having dreams and hope is better than not. Not caring about life outlooks or trajectories, but just doing cool stuff with great people. I spent the last 3 days in the middle of nowhere Canada with some of the best friends and strangers I’ve ever met, and came out with a renewed sense of “Damn I wanna make things again”.

I rented an Airbnb with some friends and spent 3 days in Waterloo. Day 1 was coming in to watch and help with running a massive 3000 attendee demo day for cool projects people we’re working on for the year. I got there early to help out and all was mostly calm. Then around T-2 hours ‘til showtime, a bit of urgency sets in as we realize we have to check in and seat 3000 people. My job was firefighter - fix whatever goes wrong, make it work. I don’t even go to this school yet they trusted me to run the main registration and lead a team of 10.

I was super impressed at how everyone was so willing and excited to make this thing go well even though no one was being paid or “getting something” out of it. A team of 100 volunteers went out of their way to help each other and make the event successful, with almost an entirely flat org structure. No egos— just straight “doing good work is its own reward”.

I got handed a walkie talkie at some point and decided to head backstage and even though registration was technically over. I helped out last year with the same job, and just anticipated an extra pair of hands and a cool head might be helpful there. It was easier to do that as an outsider because sometimes when tensions are high and you’ve been working on something so hard the entire year, little mistakes can create a lot of stress, and it’s hard to have great judgement when stressed out.

Backstage was insane. An AV team made of some professionals flown out from the US, side-by-side with some brilliant Waterloo students, crowded by a million monitors and boxes with knobs. Controlled chaos when swapping off mics after getting on and off stage. Wrangling demoers and hyping them up before speaking to thousands about their passions. Things went wrong and you could feel tension in the air as everyone came up with fixes on the fly.

While backstage, I honestly thought the show was going terribly. It was a little surprising hearing everyone raving about it after seeing all the mistakes made behind the scenes. A good reminder that van Gogh looks at his paintings and sees everything he could do better — but the world just sees Starry Night.

The average caliber of the people demoing and running the show was probably equivalent to some of the smartest people I know in SF, but their egos were 10x smaller. No one there made me feel any less than them for not doing the incredible things they were. They made me feel like I could do it too. They just love the game — how anyone else feels about what they’re up to is secondary.

That became super obvious to me watching the whole operation supported by countless people that Twitter will never see, but the show couldn’t have run without. Alex and Pav on AV, Donald behind the camera, Wenhao setting up the stage/AV equipment, Zhi Ling checking people in, Rachel and Aava running the volunteer team, Eesha managing socials, and many others putting in work. Everyone stayed til midnight to clean up and weeks after the event my friends are still combing through invoices. No one makes documentaries about janitors or accountants, but that’s what it takes to run something this impactful and grand. No one complained once — just an air of “I can make it happen”.

Doing things for the love of the game was made even more apparent watching a high school robotics competition the last day I was there. It was about as fun as watching a basketball game for me — ESPN should pick this up soon it’s insane. They have $10000 robots driven by Valorant players in gold shooting dodgeballs, climbing chains and sorting tubes, all color commentated and refereed. Talking to the kids building these robots and seeing how much they cared reminded me of myself. It reignited a feeling I’d maybe lost for a bit in the past year staying so stable and comfy. And my friend said that the average kid in this competition probably knew as much about robotics as someone in 3rd year Mechatronics. In high school.

What I’ll miss the most about that week was the fact that every night I was there, somehow people ended up at our house til 2 am. That rarely happens in my life anymore for a few reasons. When it does it’s often the highlight of my week. People in SF sleep early, have lives and jobs, their own friends and relationships, and don’t really rally around some central cause outside of work.

It makes sense that we have higher reported rates of loneliness in the world now — the intimacy of college relationships fades as we settle into routines. It feels like there’s just not enough time in a day as an adult — 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, 1 hour of commute, 1 hour for exercise, 1 hour for cooking, 10 hours for rotting to recover from all that, a million other misc. chores and you find yourself with barely any time for the homies while trying to achieve “balance”. Routines set up a solid base, but life happens at the fringes.

I think there’s a world in which taking care of my mind and body go hand in hand with making things with cool people prolifically. I don’t think that’s crazy to say even though I don’t see it very often in the world, and haven’t been able to do it myself yet either2. I’m not talking about maniacal obsession, but trying to make progress on something everyday that I care about and seeing where I end up in a year.

For a while, I thought feeling content with what I have meant never wanting more. After all, wanting more inherently implies not being fully satisfied with what you have. I now realize that life is a book that’s constantly being written, and you can like the chapters you’ve written while still wanting to make the chapters that come after it better. You can still want the book to be great in the end instead of just good with the chapters you’ve had.

Without a setup, the climax just isn’t as good. Without world-building, the main character won’t seem as interesting. Not all of the book has to be a climax, but all of it can be interesting. But no good book was ever written about staying at home typing all day.

Some days when I feel nice and comfy, I get a little panicked that everything’s going too well. In my head, I rationalize this by thinking:

Surely something must be wrong? Nothing’s ever gone this well before. You probably have some problems you’re not realizing. And if you have problems, you should solve them. Problems bad, solutions good. Go look for some problems and solve them.

This comes from the same part of my brain that gets analysis paralysis. By planning for the future, I stop taking action in the now. By obsessing about problems, I forget to build towards things I actually want. Months ago, I made a long list of all my problems at the time. Once that was out, I felt much better, and thought about how to solve them. After that day I actually forgot I made that list and yet, while rereading my notes 3 months later, I realized most of them were solved as a byproduct of living my life. And the rest didn’t feel that problematic.

It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes focusing on your problems makes them feel bigger. And diverts you from addressing the root causes by focusing on symptoms. I could feel sad, and the root cause of that could be loneliness. I could try fixing that by doing things that make me happy: eating ice cream, playing guitar, exercising. But even though that’d make me feel better for a bit, I’d miss the lifelong satisfaction of finding people I belong with and enjoying my own company.

I feel like my ideal self is someone who looks for early signs of joy rather than problems to solve. The quick hit of satisfaction from solving a problem is a high like no other. But the sustained joy from creating something sparks more of a warm glow inside.

I’m now on the hunt for that glow. After seeing it in so many others, and being reminded of what it feels like in myself through them, I know I can get it again.

It’ll be painful along the way. But the quick hot burn of being bad at something hurts much less than the slow burn of realizing your brain is atrophying since you haven’t challenged it in a while.

I’ve been hibernating in the cold too long. I’m ready to be burned again.

I spent many years asking myself what is my purpose, what was I put on this earth to do, who am I and who am I meant to be. Everything I could use to define that was made up by people like me, fitting answers to a puzzle they literally cannot solve but try to regardless. No one will ever have a mathematical proof of how the universe was created and why we were put here.

Engineer is a label conferred onto me by this world of answer-seekers who are just as foolish as I am. Language was constructed similarly to label what must be felt to those who can never feel the exact same way as us.

It seems foolish to do all this - to search for meaning and try to give it to ourselves even thought the answers are asymptotic.

But if it all ends up the same in the end, isn't it just more fun to try?

All the time wasted on labels and definitions is time spent not trying.

All the time justifying your being to yourself and then on to others is time spent not being. And time spent observing yourself, or thinking about how others observe you, is time spent not interacting with your head rather than experiencing the infinity of the world.

And isn't it more enjoyable to experience the infinity of the world rather the infinity of your head going around in circles?

I bet that's what they meant in math class when they said not all infinities are equal.

It's almost a fallacy to think about what I do as good or bad, those labels are just as arbitrary as human language — invented and contrived all the same.

What I do or where Im at in life, how it looks compared to others, the actions I do and how I judge them based on the value system placed on me is much less important than how I feel about it.

End of the day I only have to live with me and myself. Not every decision has to be reasoned through, not every choice justified, not every minute of my time accounted for as part of some grander goal.

Not everything needs an answer. Not everything needs a master plan.

Try things, see how they make you feel, do more of what feels net good, less of what feels net bad, and don't take the "net" part of that phrase lightly.

Others can be seen as inspiration for what's possible, companions to make you feel net better, especially when it comes to love.

I've never regretted a single second of love I've felt even if the love:pain ratio was infinitesimal.

Anything I've done out of hate — I don't regret and wouldn't undo either. It got me to do as I do now.

If I'd never experienced hate or indifference, how could I know how good love could feel?

I'm thankful for all I've gotten to feel. I want to feel all that I can in this life. And since there's infinite feelings and I'll never get to even know if I've experienced them all, it doesn't matter if I'm ahead or behind 'cause I'm still in the same place. n/∞ always reduces to ~0.

I'm just happy I get to know what happy feels like.

And I'm just happy for the chance to try.

I moved to a sublet in San Francisco on nothing more than good vibes and a tourist visa 15 days prior. 15 days in SF felt like 3 months in Toronto. The summer I spent in SF felt like a year. The past year in SF has had a greater impact on my life than the previous 3 years combined. There’s something special about this city

My past was over, my future was just starting, and it had to start by leaving my old self behind on a different coast in a different country.

Yearning

My entire life it feels like I’ve been looking for something. I’m a consistent pacer, can’t sit still, and my greatest fear is being bored. I actually can focus quite easily when I care about the subject, and can settle in to comfort when I like where I’m at. But most of my life has been denoted by looking for new opportunities and trying to improve my circumstances.

I felt the most amount of stability this year. Which was fairly quickly shaken up by the universe sending a typhoon of events to shake me into awareness again. Almost as if it was saying “You can’t rest yet, this isn’t your time.” I grew up religious but never really believed in God or the Universe until this year. Superstition generally doesn’t appeal to me — I like to think everything is malleable, and admitting things are out of my control is just an excuse for laziness. Trying really hard has gotten me to where I am today — why would I ever leave anything up to anyone but myself?

I think that’s what I’ve been yearning for for so long — the ability to just live and let God. Or rather, to trust that something or someone other than myself would be there to take care of me. That’s what underlined this entire year. I remember early in the year talking to my brother and mentioning, “Everything is so great here. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like it can’t always stay this good, right? Something terrible must be coming, so I can’t just give up and relax, I’m too anxious.”

And he said it so simply yet somehow it stuck.

“Yeah, problems will always come up. But you’re very well equipped to solve those problems. Growing up isn’t trying to make everything feel good all the time, it’s believing that when things go bad, you have the ability to make them good again.”

This is the first year I’ve believed in myself to have that ability. I moved to SF with no plan on how I’d stay, but I just did. I got a skilled worker visa without a university degree, even though I normally would need one. The place I loved most in the world, where I made my best friends, what I moved to SF for, closed down this year — I didn’t know how I’d go on. There was multiple times this year I felt so anxious, so tired, so beaten up, I didn’t know how I’d go on. And each time, I was picked back up and compelled to keep on moving. Call it God but I prefer to call it my friends and family being the greatest ever. Surrendering to the fact that, no matter what, I will figure out a way to go on and that I don’t have to do it alone doesn’t make me superstitious but it does make me a little stitious.

I think this innate belief that somehow my life will work itself out has been an idea I’ve avoided for so many years that even now it feels hard to reconcile with. As in, if I believe my life will work itself out, why do I need to work?

Reality is a little different. By believing that I’m able to get myself out of whatever complicated, sticky situation I’m in, I’m not saying that my life is complete and I’ll never again yearn for more. It’s saying that I have a certain amount of belief in myself to make good of almost any situation that nothing can shake my core, and everything is now built from that strong foundation. It’s not that I’m comfortable and therefore not striving, or that I have no wants anymore. It’s that I’m no longer doing things to fill in a pit but rather building a sandcastle on top the earth. I am already enough, and everything I do is because I want to, not to fill some sort of hole in my heart.

When I look at it, getting that base is actually quite simple, but not quick. For me, it involves taking care of 3 things:

• a sense of belonging

• a sense of purpose

• a sense of fitness

For me, those are fulfilled by work, side projects, my close friends, meeting friends of friends (and occasionally some epic internet strangers that turn into close friends), climbing, lifting and playing basketball — all of which I engaged with plentifully in 2024, and why I felt so stable this year for the most part.

Ego

I feel like the second I feel like I’m doing well in life, like I have some stuff figured out, like I’m finally getting my footing, the universe decides to humble me. I think that’s a good thing — it’s pretty easy for me to get a big head. Growing up, whenever I’d start bragging about myself, my mom always said “You’re floating towards the sky. I’m here to bring you back down to earth.” But always felt like I had to celebrate myself otherwise no one would. That there were tons of people around to beat me back down to earth, but not many people around to actually lift me up and make me feel good about myself.

This insecurity of mine, of not feeling like anyone was proud of me so I needed to have excessive pride in myself and express that over people, manifested itself this year. When I’m feeling down on myself, it’s easy for me to try to help others for the wrong reasons, to feel good about myself rather than actually wanting the best for others. I think helping others is a core, good character trait of mine, but making people feel like they owe me something, that I’m better than them, isn’t. That just comes up when I really need the ego boost, and there were some times this year where my intentions were mostly good but got clouded by needing people to know how good I am. I learned this year that a good deed’s reward is the fuzzy feeling you get from doing it, not someone patting you on the back for it, or standing on someone else’s shoulders and calling yourself tall.

This year I felt like I had a lot of successes, life and work wise, and I’d usually keep most of them to myself, but this time I just tried sharing, seeing as I felt more belonging this year than ever before. Overtime I just learned that people don’t really want to hear about what I’m up to or what I’m happy about, they just want to talk about themselves. Asking “how are you” is just a formality, right?. And that’s not anyones fault, or even a bad thing even though it’s largely seen as such, it’s just how life is. You spend most of your time thinking about yourself because you spend 100% of your time with yourself — being self-centered is an innate byproduct of being human. It’s why the easiest time I’ve had connecting with people is when I’m innately curious about their inner world, because everyone, including myself and introverts, is looking to share it. We spend all our time thinking about it—it’s just easy to talk about.

It wasn’t until this year that I actually felt like I had people that I’m not related to who are truly excited to see me do well. Friends who ask how I’m doing and genuinely want to know. Friends who send text messages out of nowhere to thank me for helping them, or that they noticed my energy was different this year. Close companions who, when I mentioned I didn’t want to tell them about my day when they were feeling down even though it was good, responded saying that that’s especially when they want to hear about my day so they can feel happy through me. My brother told me he was proud of me, and I saw that he truly meant it, and I just broke down into tears. I didn’t know how badly I needed to hear that. Of course bragging all the time is quite unbecoming and I’m still trying to find the balance, but some part of me is healing a bit knowing I have people who are happy for my happiness.

Last year I learned it’s cool to care. This year I learned that I don’t need to be strong, silent and nonchalant. It’s actually cool to be fun, happy and loving.

Love

I’ve never considered myself much of a loving person. Or rather, I’ve tried to hide that part of myself for a long time. Never care, never get hurt, right?

Loving someone is really giving them the ability to hurt you and trusting them not to. I’d never fully understood why love and vulnerability are often mentioned together until this year. Being alone is safe. Letting someone really know you is like giving someone a map of your entire being, all your doubts, fears, hopes, and insecurities, a delicate web that you’ve spun for as long as you’ve been alive. Love is handing them some scissors and praying they don’t decide one day to cut through all of it.

The line between platonic and romantic love is much thinner than I’d previously thought. And it makes sense — we let our close friends know us incredibly intimately, and tons of emotions that come with having a partner you like also come with having friends you really like. Safety, trust, joy, and shared struggle are all common within most of my close friendships. The difference comes down to 3 things I think:

1. Chemistry — is there some level of unspoken tension and release between us? Do we just fit and feel good together?

2. Repetition — could I see myself us doing nearly everything together and having a good time? If we amplify our personalities 100x, would we get sick of each other?

3. Communication — Are we good at fighting with each other? Can we say the quiet part out loud?

If I think about attachment, a concept really commonly applied to romantic relationships, I started learning how to be more securely attached through my friends. I was definitely avoidant until I learned over a few years that the people around me are reliable, they’re not going to hurt me (intentionally), and they actually do want me around.

I’m now less scared of things going wrong, and more scared of never giving anything enough of a chance to go right. Assume the best, prepare for the worst.

I now lean a little anxious. I’ve always been socially anxious in general. Unlearning that has also happened through friends. Knowing that I can show up just as I am and be appreciated for it, rather than changing myself to be more likeable and fit the mould of whatever the people around me are doing, has made all the difference. The biggest change for my attachment this year was feeling like what made me weird in Toronto makes me cool in San Francisco, and having friends that can sense when I’m being inauthentic, or “off”, and know how to bring me home even if I myself don’t.

You can really only love someone as much as you love yourself. I learned what love really looked like when it was shoved down my throat by all the amazing people I met in Summer 2023, and that theme stayed in 2024. My friends who check up on me if they haven’t seen me for a bit, who welcome me in when I stop by their houses, who ask if I’ve eaten (for those who know, in immigrant households, “have you eaten?” translates to “I love you”). The more love I feel the more I’m able to express it, and even though I was very loved as a child, experiencing love as an adult by interacting with people that don’t have to yet choose to love me, has made it all the more palpable. To the point where after not saying it for 21 whole years, my parents and I now say “I love you” and “I’m proud of you” to each other. In that way, love is teachable.

You only fight with people you love. Before this year, no one had seen me cry except for my brother, mom, and dad. I usually average 1 cry a year, and my first cry of the year was held in the entire day and let out secretly at night on a bench overlooking the water in the SF marina. Since then, I’ve let it out in front of a few trusted friends who keep with them a part of my soul, and each of those friends feel like people from my own household to me. You can love someone as a partner, a friend, as family, at the end of the day it’s all mostly the same love. I think of them all as people I’m willing to let see me at my worst, who’s worst I want to be there for, who I want to fight with to show how much I care, and who I care for so much that I want the best for them even if it hurts me1. It’s the people that really love you back that’ll see past the words you say and stare directly into your soul to check that your intentions are pure.

You never really fall out of love with someone. I guess that’s why they call it getting over someone, not getting rid of someone. I can’t rip out the piece of soul I have of them — I just grow around it. Eventually it takes up relatively less space. I still think about people I loved years ago, thinking about how I denied how much I loved them, but they’re a part of me and I them. I deny it to feel less pain, but sometimes I want to feel the pain. To know that I cared so much and my experience with them was so deep that their loss feels so heavy. It weirdly brings a smile on my face sometimes.

It’s bittersweet to know that it's possible to appreciate how someone’s helped weave the tapestry that is my personality, and thank them for their contributions but also know that their services are no longer required. It’s easier to hate, but I’ve always somehow had to take the hard path. And it hurts to love but I think it’s better in the long run to keep loving and feeling the pain of losing it than to hate, alienate and never feel the warmth that comes with really, truly falling.

I used to default to hate to ease the pain of loving. Now that my world is more open, I realize: How could I ever hate someone I loved so much?

Loss

I’ve lost a lot of stuff this year. Jobs, family, homes, friends, my airpods, you get it. This year, my friends have been through a combined 11 breakups. I left the city I spent 95% of my life in. My last grandparent moved on. The place I loved most in the world shut down. Some of the people I once considered my best friends I no longer speak to.

There’s a few things all loss has in common.

1. Your brain already knows but your heart keeps searching.

I lost all my IDs and credit cards sometime this year. And still months after losing them, I still sometimes remember and search the whole house thinking, “Okay I just didn’t look hard enough last time, it’s gotta be in the house. Where else could it be?”

I’ll walk the same streets we used to walk together and wonder where they are. I’ll reference them in a story and it’s like they’re still here. I’ll look at the couch and realize they’re not sitting there. It’s like I forget they’re gone until my brain reminds me.

2. Mourning the loss also means mourning the future you could’ve had together.

“Oh but we never even got to…”

“We were supposed to go to a concert in March, I bought tickets in advance.”

“I wrote you a letter you’ll never get to read. I bought you a jacket you’ll never get to wear.”

Knowing that every tough situation you’ll have to face, you’ll have to face it without them, is a thought that makes you want to curl up into bed and never face the world ever again2. Knowing that everything you want to show and tell them you just have to journal about, or tell someone else, but it won’t be the same.

3. You think “What could I have done differently?”

Nothing, probably. Some things just aren’t about you, but like I said, humans have default self-centered views. Sometimes it’s just out of your control — the universe has a plan for everyone, and not every plan involves you. Again, your brain knows this but your heart disagrees.

In the face of loss, I’ve been given a great opportunity to reflect on what I have. When my grandfather passed, I looked inward to find that I care a lot about my family yet find it difficult to show them. I always forget to call my mom, feel guilty, and avoid calling for even longer to avoid that guilt. So I told her to call me everyday no matter what, even if we have nothing to talk about, and that’s made all the difference for our relationship. Just to see each others faces.

Selfishly, after all the breakups, it’s been really nice to spend more time with my friends. We missed each other a lot, and after spending time with them, I realize there’s no lack of love in my life. #kissyourhomiesgoodnight

I hold a great deal of love for Toronto. Thank you for raising me. And thank you to the border patrol officer who gave me my visa so I could leave the life I’d built there behind in order to forge one that fits my current form. San Francisco is where my heart is at, and hopefully where it’ll stay for the next 3-5 years. I’m just better here.

New

A lot of new things happened this year: I moved to a new city, picked up an instrument, made new friends, new foes (kidding! hopefully…), lived in new apartments, got a new job, fixed an old car, worked with hardware, developed new music taste, visited London for the first time, did my first road trips with friends, and lots of other new experiences for those who know.

One of the new things I’ve been thinking about is how, given enough time and proximity, conflict is inevitable. And so now when thinking of relationships I want to last for a long time, I now place less importance on how much fun we have together and more on how well we deal with conflict. Having fun is easy, and comes naturally, but being able to disagree and show each other our worst sides yet still reconcile is hard and takes courage. You can only be friends with people who want to be friends with you, and a big sign that someone wants to be friends with you is if they’re willing to tell you things you need to hear even if it hurts in the short term. If they see you as long term enough that they’ll bring up conflict to nip resentment in the bud rather than letting it fester and grow.

Of course fun is important and there’s no lack of it in my life, but in the long run, I strive to be someone that can balance both. I’ve had 10x more problems come up from not talking than talking, and there’s also certain people in my life now that I never feel worse after talking to (and many others who do make me feel worse). I’m a firm believer that if you talk about it, it gets better. And if you don’t feel like talking, write about it — it’s like talking to yourself. Much better than ruminating and letting it all fester in your head.

I’ve learned that approaching a discussion seeking to prove that I’m right often leads talking with someone to go poorly. Sometimes I want to prove I’m right so badly, we both stop trying to get on the same page and considering all the possibilities but rather trying to prove my point right or wrong. The whole point of talking is to seek understanding. It’s no coincidence that my favourite people to talk to are also the most curious, and it’s that ability to just constantly seek truth rather than prove superiority that makes me like them. This doesn’t mean I’m going to speak less confidently, but rather just give my take when asked for it, and then listen and learn about how the people around me think— that just sounds way more fun.

I used to think I needed to hide the bad parts of myself around people and always be up. I now realize that to be known and noticed is to be loved, and I myself can easily tell when someone is being fake and would rather they be themselves than try to hype themselves up into being on all the time. In the long run, it’s just too exhausting to be anyone but yourself. For you and for everyone around you. That’s not an excuse to never try to be better than you are, but to ask yourself, “Am I acting this way because I really want to and it’s core to me, or for some other external reason related to my past or my surroundings?” And if you truly do act in a way that doesn’t leave any cognitive dissonance3, you’ll feel so much better and be a magnet to the types of people you want to and are meant to be with.

Next?

Here’s a few things I want to keep in mind during 2025:

• Look at the world through a lens of curiosity, not judgement. Every moment is an opportunity to learn, and assuming you know is the enemy of learning. Being right means you don’t get to learn — don’t tie your worth to being right.

• You spend 100% of your time with yourself. You like hanging out with yourself. Instead of beating yourself up, push yet provide comfort and safety for yourself like you would your friends.

• You know nothing. Don’t make anyone feel less than you. Respect is viewing everyone as an equal. The world is a mirror — give it and receive it.

• You’re a good person. No one can say anything to make you not believe that. The only true evil is the good that never examines itself. Keep trying, and keep reflecting.

• You can be funny without being mean. If it hurts someone, it’s not funny.

Here’s a few things I want to focus on in 2025:

• making people feel at home around me, safe and comfy

• trying hard at work, pushing myself to learn through discomfort

• being more open to experiences, saying yes much more often

• taking care of my body

And here’s some tangible things I want to do more of:

• cooking at home

• playing guitar and singing

• hosting friends at my place

• getting my license and going on road trips

• making videos

This year more than any other I have the least idea of what to expect. Everything I could’ve planned for in life turned out massively different than I anticipated, yet 16-year-old Aadil would be hyped to meet me today anyway. The tapestry is richer and more detailed than ever, and the tapestry is still being woven.

Thank you so much if you made it this far. I want to continue writing — thank you to anyone who’s ever encouraged me in any way. Even if you just drop a like on here, I read every single notification. Even if you’re just a silent 5 star reader, I notice. If you liked any of the music in this post, I made a playlist of my 2024 by each month, go listen.

Special shoutouts to Jacky and Grace for reading early drafts of this. To Sharif for telling me I’m a good writer. Thank you Amit for getting me out of bed — don’t know if I’d have finished this piece without you. To Aileen for going away that one time to let me focus. To Farzain, for being my first ever subscriber, my writing inspiration, and the origin of maybe 80% of the good things that’ve happened in my life.

I got really good at making friends. When you change schools once a year on average for 8 years, you realize it’s probably more enjoyable when you have friends, and you’d rather have them around sooner than later.

Whenever I first got to a new school, it felt like I had to wait and observe for a while. To see what people talked about, to see what they liked — so I too could talk about and like those things, and in return they would like me. I’d paint over myself, to fit whatever color was most popular at the time, what color it seemed like everyone else was.

This went on, but there would always be a point where I’d feel comfortable enough to talk about and do things other than what everyone liked, and whenever I did, I could feel the people around me like me less.

For the first 2 years of high school, I decided that I would just talk to everyone possible, and be friends with everyone. This was supposed to my social awakening. It’s just that I was still using the friend-making lessons of changing myself to fit with most people. I constantly felt lonely even though I was always surrounded by people. Except all those friends were Red — most people are. Even though I was trying so hard to mix, so hard to make myself look Redder, something about me just felt like I’d rather be alone than alongside colors that just don’t fit with me.

I didn’t even notice how lonely I was with the Red folks until I finally met some people who were Purple. It was just so… quick. Not effortless, but we just got along so quick. It’s almost like each of us was subconsciously drawn to the other, after a lifetime of knowing what Purple looks like, and knowing that most people aren’t Purple makes it easier to spot someone who is.

Yet even if I got the feeling someone was Purple, it was still so hard to tell. Because they too had a lifetime of painting over themselves to get along with most people. They too realized that life was usually better with friends, and they’d rather not spend all their time alone, even though that was where they felt most themselves.

It was only when I became more conscious in my late teens that I started questioning that belief — was it better to feel lonely than to be alone? I spent a lot of time alone after realizing that, and in my solitude I realized… both sucked. What I wanted was really just more people who understood what it was like to be like me, and for us to stick alongside each other. I didn’t care if they were Purple or not, or what labels they went by, I just knew what it felt like to be around someone that got me, that could share the same brain-space as me, and I wanted more of it.

I realized that most people were not for me, and I wasn’t for most people. I am hard to love for most but incredibly easy for some. I am a needle in a haystack. Incredibly hard to find for most but trivially found by someone with a magnet. And even though it was hard to find Purple people since they were painted over, I realized that more layers I peeled back and showed more of my Purple side, the easier it was to notice others who felt the same. The world is a mirror. You can only know someone as deeply as you know yourself.

Last summer I found the highest concentration of Purple in one place I’d ever seen before. Not only that, this place was filled with complementary colors and shades, and suddenly being Purple was cool, even though it never felt that way growing up in Toronto. When I went back to Toronto, it became obvious that there was just too much Red everywhere. I missed the Yellows, Oranges, and Purples of San Francisco. It just felt like a place where all the colors I thought were uncommon belonged.

After I moved back, it just felt like good things were waiting to happen for me. I started an incredible new job I felt extremely unqualified for, got to hang out everyday with the closest friends I’d ever had, and met some of the most wonderful new people every other week.

One day, one of these new friends asked me, “You’re Purple, right?”

And I was like “What? No. Are you?”

And she was like “Yeah I am. I thought you knew you were.”

And I was like “Why would you think I am?”

And she was like “Well, you do a lot of things like many Purple people do. If you want you can do your own reading on it.”

And so I did. And after reflecting on my entire life, I think I always knew I was Purple. I just painted over it so much that I’d almost forgotten all the things I did that felt right to me but made me feel dissonance from everyone else. And when I’d accepted myself and showed more of my true colors and was accepted for it, I thought, “Maybe I’m not Purple after all.”

Because now it seemed like most people were easy to get along with. And I thought being Purple should innately mean not getting along with most people.

Accepting that I’m Purple doesn’t mean that I now actively try to not hang out with anyone that isn’t Purple or a complimentary shade. It just means giving myself some grace when I don’t easily get along with people rather than beating myself up or changing myself to be likeable.

It isn’t an excuse to be terrible to people, or to stop trying to improve myself, even though I’ve subconsciously treated it like that in the past. It’s just knowing that if I’m doing something that I feel good about but someone else looks down upon me for it, I’m not the problem. I don’t want to brute force a relationship with someone I don’t innately sit on a similar wavelength to when there’s so many other people out there I could be giving more love and time to.

That’s not to say I can’t be friends with anyone I don’t immediately gel with. Most of my close friends now I did get along with super quickly, but some of them I didn’t. Some took multiple years for us to grow closer, and now I can’t imagine my life without them. I’d just like to always keep in mind that the energy I feel from people is real and I shouldn’t doubt that like I have in the past because everyone else seems to like them, or they’re attractive or rich or whatever. Similarly true for someone with typically negative qualities, I’ll never feel ashamed for getting along with.

Because at a certain point that was me, and still can be. And I’m so grateful for the people in my life that didn’t see me as unworthy of love. They just see me for who I am.

Here’s some good stuff I’ve been reading recently:

Reboot

⚡️ all the better to see you with

Our last preview of Kernel Issue 2 is a gorgeous short story by Adora Svitak, about an AI tool and how it shapes interpersonal relationships. As Emily writes in her editor’s note, Kernel is a project in world-making. Fiction, poetry, and art are just as important to us as essays and reported work in making a more beautiful world; we hope you agree…

Read more

4 years ago · 15 likes

“I’m impressed you remembered I said anything about brilliance. It was a long time ago.”

“I remember so much about you.”

He paused and I thought again that if I waited to say anything, if I bit my worrying tongue just this once and didn’t jump to fill the silence, that maybe he would say more. I listened to him breathe in and out. Then he said, “I remember in sophomore year of college you got six cupcakes from the place across the street from the dorm for my birthday, even though we’d only known each other a couple weeks by then. You were anxious because you’d meant to get one for every single person on the library student advisory council but you forgot one. To make sure everyone got one you didn’t eat one yourself. I told you to take some of mine and you took the tiniest possible smidge you could slice off with a spork.”

“I didn’t know you would notice that.”

This short story was such a banger. Seriously worth your time to read it. Talks about AI relationships in a way that I haven’t seen before, how so easily someone could slip into one out of a pure-hearted desire to just make things better, but why exactly it could be problematic.

As for the quote, I just think its so uniquely intimate to remember and be remembered for the small, seemingly insignificant things that we do. To be loved is to be remembered constantly, to be noticed constantly, to be admired for things we ourselves don’t find admirable, and to appreciate fully what others may overlook.

writing of wenyi xue

you look like a memory

In my head, you’re already gone. I am in a movie theater watching a movie I already know the ending of. The characters are you and me, the scene is our living room, we are laughi…

Read more

2 years ago · 810 likes · 84 comments · wenyi xue

Gratitude becomes the color with which I paint your memory; this is intentional. Change is hard for me becomes change is a human inevitability, but I can see how your presence has guided the trajectory.

I think of how I am a patchwork quilt of all the people I have loved and of all the people who have loved me.

When I drink coffee, I feel the warmth of the girl who first introduced me to it. When I see a sunset, I feel the laughter of the friends who used to watch with me. When you are gone, you will still hold space in my heart. There are words I say in your voice.

She’s actually spitting facts when it comes to dealing with loss that you know is inevitable. (I guess all loss is inevitable because death but I mean the feeling that sinks in when you realize something is over.) There’s so many people that’ve shaped me that’ll never know how deep their impact was, and some of them I don’t even speak to anymore. I tried to capture how I feel about them with this project. Each person on there is someone who I gave a part of my soul to — they’re kind of a Horcrux, and they each have a significant portion of myself inside them, whether they know it or not.

The quote is just a banger. Change is incredibly hard for me. I’m super stubborn, but also I’ve been going through extreme amount of change since I was a kid, but it never gets easier and almost makes me crave the stability even more.

Escaping Flatland

Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

Giacometti’s studio…

Read more

2 years ago · 1064 likes · 72 comments · Henrik Karlsson

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.¹ Put simply:

  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say,

“I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”

—you start from the context.

When I was in high school I did a program that had us make 3-3-3 plans. You had to write out what you wanted to accomplish in 3 years then work backwards to set 3 month and then 3 week goals. I did that as an exercise but eventually realized that I never ended up completing those goals yet always seemed to get a lot of good stuff done. “Good stuff” is of course arbitrary, and I’d rather set some goals than none at all, since that’s an excuse for laziness, but overall my life did just get much better after I spent more time around what I like and less time around what I don’t, and paid attention to context clues that hint to me that I might like something.

This process is generally something I’ve been doing for a few years now, and is how I made decisions that seem difficult externally very easily. Some examples include moving to SF with no plan for a Visa, dropping out of college, leaving Shopify to join a startup, and quitting my job with no plan for how to stay in the country.

It’s been a crazy year. Probably the longest of my entire life. A end of year reflection piece is probably coming soon, but I’m not sure when or what form it’ll take. This is just what’s been in my head recently, and I thought I’d try to get it out. If any of this makes sense to you, or is also in your head, I’d really appreciate you telling me.

I’ve been writing online for 6 years now and a lot of good in my life has come of it, but often I still wonder “Is anyone actually reading this? Is it any good? Should I procrastinate my job even more to write more frequently?”. So dropping a sub + comment + DMing me if you like/hate this would be a huge help.

Anyway, appreciate you reading this. There’s a lot of Substacks on the internet and I’m glad you found and decided to read through mine. You now have a little slice of my soul in you, whether you like it or not. To me, that means more than you know.

Thank you to my friend Brit who I met once yet she mentioned I should write about this whole Purple thing I keep talking about, so I did.

Thank you to Subby and Grace for reading early drafts of this and making me feel good about it. And thank you to Fateen for being my body double while I worked on this on Christmas Eve.

Thank you to everyone on this page who’s become a Horcrux for me. Couldn’t be me without you. And to everyone who has 5 star reader activity on my Substack.

All that is kind of bullshit though when applied to the max. I think much of it is valid— having close friends does make me incredibly happy, reading the same influential material does help reinforce what I think is important. But sometimes I feel like I’m conflating having strong beliefs with stubbornness. The goal is to have strong beliefs, loosely held. To both explore the world and exploit what I like in a constant loop.

But I’m not sure if there’s a point where I’ll be able to stop the loop — when will I be settled enough to not want to explore anything again? When will I have acquired enough “Good Things™️” that I won’t want to look for any more? I’m not sure if stopping the loop is even the goal, because it’s exhausting yet rewarding. Is the pain worth the pleasure?

My current hypothesis is it’s really not that deep — maybe someone with better epistemic thinking than me can reason otherwise, but now I just go based off of how I feel. I’ll have periods of expansion in my life where I’m incredibly prone to trying new experiences and meeting new people. Then periods of contraction where I like to stay close to what I like, prioritize existing friendships over developing new ones, and reinforce my roots by engaging more with stuff that “felt right” during my expansion period.

The enemy of learning is thinking that you know something. All the smartest people I know really understand what they’re good at and what they’re lacking in, and are the first to say “I don’t know” when they don’t.

But what about when you don’t know what you’re lacking in? Like you feel like everything is pretty much going right and there’s no problems to work on? I obviously have problems, but overall in life I feel like this is the most stable period I’ve ever been in and I’m not used to it at all. Before this, my life felt like 20 years of mistakes, and I was always trying to fix my problems.

But after achieving a certain level of Okayness, and confidence that I could make good from mostly any situation, I am now in really unfamiliar territory.

For the first time in my life, nothing’s really wrong.

My brain keeps trying to convince me something is. I’ll have a small anxiety pang every now and then, and there’s still a million things I haven’t done, I do often get a sinking feeling that something could go wrong in the future and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and all that. But whenever I’m slept, showered, fed and watered, looking at my life objectively, I feel better than I ever have.

It’s going to sound crazy but there’s almost a soft of comfort in having big problems. You know exactly what to work towards. It’s like being given a list of tasks as an employee at work — no need to think about what’s important to do and why, it’s just your job to execute. But now I feel like I’m a manager, where I really have to think about my broader goals and plan what to do accordingly, and that’s way tougher cause a) it’s much more abstract and there’s no real right answer and b) I’m not used to this sort of big picture planning since everything was so task oriented before.

My life used to look like:

Problem #1: You don’t have any money and you need money to live.

Solution: Work on making money and save up so you can do what you want.

Problem #2: Canada sucks, there’s some cool people here but for a couple reasons it’s not the best place for you to live forever.

Solution: Get out of Canada. Get a visa and move to SF.

Problem #3: You’re lonely and have no good friends.

Solution: Do things you like around people, meet more people, work on being yourself around them, and stay close to people you feel good around.

But now, it’s more like:

Problem: ???? Nothing is obviously wrong but it’s always possible to be better and life is long so you should probably do stuff so you gotta figure out what you want to do.

Solution: 🤷‍♂️

The periods of my life where I’ve felt like this, I figured out what to do just by doing some random stuff and seeing how I felt about it. But it’s almost like the more I’ve done, the more I expect myself to do, and so before when I could just try things with nothing to lose, now I expect myself to really commit to the next thing I choose. It has to be THE thing — otherwise I’m just wasting time doing stuff that doesn’t matter right?

Sometimes all these thoughts feel overwhelming but I anticipate that this, too, shall pass. One day I’ll just start doing things again without thinking about it, and this natural period of ease and stability is needed in my ongoing sprint → rest lifecycle.

I’ve been describing to some friends recently how I feel like I’ve changed immensely over the past 2 years. That I feel like a completely different person — not someone else, but who I always was, and these past 2 years have just uncovered more of him underneath the masks I developed in my youth.

I’ll say something like:

It’s like there’s a new CEO in my brain who’s been in charge for the past 2 years. But the former CEO is still around and got demoted to a VP and he’s grumpy about it. And the former CEO was around for 20 years so the new guy sometimes listens to him cause he brought the company this far and feels pressured cause the old guy is so stubborn. But the new CEO is here for a reason, because the same guy who built a company isn’t necessarily the same person fit to grow it.

In most ways I’m not actually that different at my core internally. I do feel like I’ve always been this way but I realize the outer didn’t always match the inner. I always thought I looked good in my head, but these past 2 years my physical health improved a lot and I finally match that inner expectation. I bought new clothes to bring the inner outside. I moved to SF since that’s a place I always felt like even though I was making the same jokes, people laughed harder. I told the same stories but people listened more intently. Everything that made me weird in high school made me cool in SF.

And in some ways that’s frightening, since I still sometimes censor myself expecting some sort of rejection to happen if I say or do what I really want, but it doesn’t. And that’s unexpected. And unexpected is scary. And so in some ways, it feels like everything I’ve known has been for nothing. Instead of learning and moving forward, it feels like all I’m doing is unlearning to stay where I am. I know I am still moving forward, and that unlearning itself is progress, but it’s almost like I have a debt to pay off, to unlearn everything holding me back, before I can move forward at the pace I want to. And that staying still is the “stability”.

I’ve been thinking about how the 20 years of mistakes I made are what led me to this point of feeling so good. I love being right so innately I always had a fear of making mistakes. But my life got way better when, irrespective of the outcome, I just started trying stuff. I think my fear now is moreso that 'I’ll make the same mistakes, that I haven’t actually learned from them and am still as dumb as my 16 year old self.

When I’m at my best, I actively try to make new mistakes. I’ll run little experiments on myself like “oh, sleeping at 5 am makes me feel like trash, what if I just don’t sleep at all and then reset my schedule going forward?”1 And I’ve done that before — it was a bad idea. But I realized what I was currently doing wasn’t working, and so even if I tried something else and it didn’t work, it couldn’t really get much worse than where I was currently at.

I spent 20 years in Toronto and just didn’t feel great — after my last job ended, I didn’t know what to do. With no income source I spent 4 months in SF, just cause I felt good while I was there. Left for 2 months, came back, ended up moving there permanently. I didn’t know I’d find a job I love and friends that feel like family along the way. I just knew that something I was doing wasn’t working and that I wanted to be in San Francisco — worst case I’m back in Toronto living with my parents where I started. If moving to SF was a mistake, so was living in Toronto. At least it was a new mistake.

If I think about my motivation over the years, a lot of it was based on dark energy. Proving to people in high school that I would “make it”. Proving to my mentors that they were wrong about me being lazy. Proving to the girls that rejected me that I actually could be attractive and successful. Proving to my parents I didn’t need a college degree to be successful and stable. A lot of it was vengeance based, and driven by my inferred expectations of other people.

That dark energy is still within me, and I worry about it from time to time, but many of my major moves in the past year have been driven by light, love, and hope. Life became a little lighter after I spent less time alone guessing the thoughts of the people around me and instead spending more time with them trying to learn about their inner worlds. I started thinking less of them in relation to me and more about them as people with their own lives, doubts, fears, hopes, and dreams. Which has led me to think about myself from my POV rather than how others may see me.

Since doing that, I feel like my drive has actually lessened. I feel like I’m coming to a point where I don’t do nearly as much as I did, and yet I feel more satisfied, stable and happy than I’ve ever been by an order of magnitude.

Unlike I learned as a kid, life is not just about doing things and looking back on the list of things you’ve done and feeling happy or sad based on how little or how much you’ve done. I have friends who accomplish incredible things yet are still down on themselves and don’t even appreciate the things they’ve done nearly as much as I do or the world does, so that really can’t be it.

At my best moments this year (about 60% of the time) I find myself in a good, happy state — and whatever I do whether the world sees it as big or small, important or useless, good or bad — I take into account my judgement the most, which was almost never true before this year. I’m still fighting the war in myself of trying to get better everyday just for my own pleasure vs. showing my growth to prove to the world I have value, but this year I’ve finally been winning more just by looking inwards and asking myself if I’m pleased.

I still love doing stuff — there’s no drug like learning. But this year I learned a bunch of stuff that my 16 year old self would call useless yet be secretly really happy about and interested in if he met me today. Guitar, Chinese, mechanical engineering, writing, making videos — all this stuff I’m an incredible novice at but it brings me so much joy having tried it. I’m so proud I made the world a bit bigger for myself rather than sticking to my silo of being a really rich computer person, which is all I thought I was meant from from 16-20.

Now I have no idea what I’m meant for. I don’t feel the need to find out.

I just want to bathe in the possibilities

Thank you to 柯凯琳 without whom I wouldn’t write anywhere close to as much as I do now. And for making me feel good about the stuff I think isn’t good enough (like this blog post initially).