It had been a while since I talked to Tom. Tom, who I saw several times a week that first year I moved to New York, in 2024. Tom was someone who I looked up to. He seemed so smart, worldly, fast, and I hate to use the word agentic but I really, really mean it. Tom was someone who had done lots of different things and to very exceptional degrees. He was connected in politics, but also tech, and business, and perhaps most importantly, music. He might have been skilled and savvy, but like me, he was an artist at heart.

Imagine my devastation when he told me that “you know, we’re not as similar as I thought.” Of course I was devastated! I was insecure about lots of things back then, whereas Tom existed in the world with a perfect kind of calmness and self-assurance, unencumbered by mortal discomforts.

With his presence in my life, his fondness for me and his approval, I could momentarily believe that I too was like that.

It’s paralyzing to want people’s approval. Especially the approval of people who have what you don’t. But not only is it paralyzing, it’s annoying. Extremely so.

They might say, in good faith, “hey, you’re really smart, and you are so much more capable than you think. I think you just overthink too much, and you hold yourself back.” Then they say, once they realize I’m annoyed, “This is what people told me too before I got over it!” or “I’m only giving you tough love.” And it’s true, they are.

I suppose they do want to see me run at my full potential. I don’t really understand why. They get nothing out of it, it’s not like it helps their careers or anything.

But I imagine that it must be satisfying seeing something do what it’s supposed to do. For instance, there must be some sort of satisfaction in seeing a gazelle run really fast across some grass– something picturesque, extraordinary even, about seeing something in its complete and natural glory. But imagine you see a gazelle chained to a desk with a handsome 401K– feels different, cartoonish.

People are asking me why I don’t just do things. If you don’t like your job, why don’t you just quit? If you like him, why don’t you just date him? Stop, please. The reasons are so cosmically difficult and complex to comprehend that I, a mere mortal, could never grasp it, let alone articulate it to you. I assume they think it must be so simple, that life is like a box of chocolates and then you pick them and then you… eat them? I’m not sure what the metaphor is here but my point is they believe things are simple whereas I think things are not.

But what they say is true, that I am prone to overthinking.

I often dream that if I wanted something simple life would not be so complicated. Like if I wanted money. Boom, easy, finance job. Or if I wanted beauty. Boom, easy, pilates and plastic surgery. Or if I just wanted love. Boom, easy, dating the first man that seems stable. Something like that. But my desires are not so straightforward, and the result is that my methods must not be either.

But no. I want passion, and I want fulfillment. I want to make a difference in people’s lives, for it to be somehow better, for my presence in it. I want love, and romance, and grand adventure. I want culture, to be someone, to be an agent, not passive, or forgotten. I want independence, and to do interesting things with interesting people. I want stupid things and grand things and mundane things and lovely things. I do want money, but that barely scratches the surface.

Time is so finite, and yet it stretches across me like eons into the future. Who will I be, how many adventures will I have lived by the time that I am eighty? Or maybe one hundred? Possibilities fan outwards, lives that I will live, like a kaleidoscope shimmering in the eye of my imagination. They say you can’t have everything in life, but I think the slightly updated version (thank you) is that you can have everything in life, but just not all at once.

Is that greedy of me? I don’t think so. In fact, I think that’s fine, that’s so grand. There is so much I want from life, and by God I’m going to do it all.

I am someone with strong, strong desires. I also have many desires. Some people might call this ambition, ambition to an enormous degree, but this makes it sound hard and career-like. To me, they are desires, because they are like wishes.

I am someone who has many wishes for life, and I want all of them to be granted.

I desired to leave my small hometown and move to California. I desired to move to New York after college. I desired to work at a top-tier consulting firm as my first job. But I still have more desires - that are unfulfilled, that I watch with a keen sense of yearning.

For all my life, I have had very intense desires, and this has brought me equal parts satisfaction and distress.

Often, I feel overwhelmed by my desires. Desire is the root of all suffering, that’s Buddhism 101. So I try to repress them, but try as I might, they never went away. Then I realized repressing my desires was just a form of dishonesty about what would make me happy, and the only sane way to live was to chase them.

This is everything I know about desire.

I. Defining desire

The modern definition is simple: a strong feeling of wanting something.1

The etymology of desire is more interesting. Desire comes from the Latin desiderarse– “to long for.” And that is from de sidere – “from the stars.” To desire something then means to long for something that the stars will bring for you. Or, as I read it: it is desire itself that the stars brought to you. There is a fatedness to desire, and an intensity that feels almost celestial.

Desires are conceptual and unspecific. What we desire are ideas and feelings, and objects are just symbols of that. For example, one might desire wealth – to feel wealthy, or to be perceived as wealthy. And so they might want a Rolls-Royce or an eight-figure mansion. The object doesn’t really matter and is interchangeable.

Desires are not necessarily straightforward. On the surface, for example, it might be a desire for wealth. But actually, wealth is just a symbol for something deeper, and the actual core desire is success. Example: a friend from school comes from a prominent family fortune in Southeast Asia, but he once shared that he wanted a private jet, because that’s what his family could not comfortably afford. Obviously, then, the private jet isn’t about wealth, but specifically proof that he had accomplished something greater than his family.

Desires can be satisfied by many things, because it is not a specific object, but a feeling you are chasing.

II. You cannot control your desires

You do not choose your desires or how badly you desire them. It just is. Like ambition - people don’t choose to be ambitious, they simply are or aren’t. I did not choose to want to be creative, or choose to want to be conventionally successful. I just had this desire, and I followed it doggedly.

You cannot un-desire a thing. I have tried. Many times. I have thought to myself, wow, if I was simply less ambitious, simply aimed lower, wanted less, I would be a lot happier. Right? And a lot less stressed? This may be true, but it is a moot point, because you cannot change yourself in this way.

Repressing desire has a cost. I have had the desire to create relatable and entertaining content since I first perceived YouTube when I was twelve. This has never left me, and the desire has been partially abated by writing on Substack. When I stifled my desires, I wasted a lot of energy ignoring how I felt instead of acting on it.

Desiring things is neither good nor bad. There is no moral imperative or platonic ideal of one’s level of desire in life. There just simply is: the things you desire and how badly you desire them. It also doesn’t matter if they are convenient or inconvenient.

Are your desires really yours or mimetic? I say mimetic specifically because it is easy to tell when desires are from obvious external pressure (like your parents). But what about your true desires versus what you think you should want?

I would be remiss to write a piece about desire and not mention French philosopher René Girard, specifically, his theory on mimetic desire: we don’t want things on our own, but instead want what others want2. It is because of him that his student, Peter Thiel, was so bullish on Facebook that he became its first investor in 2004 (after all, Facebook is the OG social media for caring about what other people like). But I digress–

The important thing to get right is knowing whether or not your desires are true and exactly where they come from. Ask yourself: if there was no money, prestige, or any perceived value attached– would this still be fun or enjoyable?

III. Following your desires

Accepting your desires requires admitting that you lack what you desire. This is a deep strength and sureness– to be able to admit a lack and not feel a sort of desperation or pain. This is also the first step to getting what you desire - to accept it.

Things are ultimately won by those who have the strongest desires. The number one deterrent to achieving anything is bullshit: the tedious, gross, mundane, or painful part of accomplishing anything. Faced with it, most people give up. Strong desires can override the desire to quit.

What’s painful for everyone else might not be painful for the winner. The well-known Chambliss study in the 1980s set out to find what separates Olympic-level swimmers from mediocre ones. It’s not innate talent, or training time even. Rather, it’s their relationship to the actual training - what most swimmers found boring or mundane, the elite swimmers found “peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic.”

In fact: “It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”

In other words, the grind everyone else finds miserable, they find normal, or even pleasant. When you desire the game itself, you’re always there to play.3

Following true desires fulfills a sense of meaning. One interaction I think about a lot. A friend of mine used to be a serial monogamist. Then he founded a company, his first company, and he says he’s “having so much fun” he doesn’t feel the need to date anymore.

I feel like I’m reaching my potential, he told me the last time I was in San Francisco. I love what I’m building and the people I’m building it with. For the first time, I don’t feel this lack.

IV. Is desire the root of all suffering?

Another interaction I think about a lot. My younger cousin (fat, happy, simple, academically average, socially charming) is the most unbothered happy-go-lucky individual I have ever encountered. I once asked him: how are you so genuinely happy and relaxed all the time? He said:

It’s because I know the things I want in life, and I know I can get all of them, so nothing causes me great stress.

It made me realize that my unhappiness and my stress doesn’t come from my grandiose desires- it’s my lack of confidence in achieving them.

Jealousy is painful, but it is a strong guiding emotion. Envy and jealousy are great clues that point to what you truly desire. What about this person makes you jealous? Sparks envy? What is it about what they do, or have, or the way they express, that calls to you?

Once you figure out the exact root of your envy, you can let go of the jealousy and let it alchemize into admiration. Because jealousy carries the weight of lack. But admiration, with all its wanting, carries the hope you may be able to live that way, too.

Desire is not the root of all suffering, rather, denial of the self is. Chase your desires, all of them, and become the person who feels most like you.

Note: Events, details, and characters are all fictionalized. Enjoy.

I was nervous, but not in a bad way. This was ostensibly a business coffee chat, but was obviously a first date.

I’d met Alek a while ago, when I was interviewing for a startup he worked for. After that we never spoke again, until a couple days ago, when I received news that the startup was acquired by OpenAI. I fished an old email chain between the two of us, already aptly titled “coffee.” I congratulated him on the acquisition, then suggested we catch up. We didn’t really know each other so there wasn’t anything to catch up about. But he said yes.

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It was one of those friendship first-dates, the kind where you really hit it off when you first meet someone, so you decide to skip coffee altogether and arrange for a meal instead. At least, this is how I do things, in this city of infinitely interesting people. The weather is especially conducive to this - now that it’s almost summer, everyone has come out to play.

As I had predicted, a meal was the right call - at this point, we had been sitting in this Georgian restaurant for nearly three hours.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe making new friends?” I said.

This was the obvious answer. She was a new friend, I had written a whole essay on this, and over the course of our conversation we’d investigated all sorts of theories on interpersonal relations (“Do you think anyone has the capacity to understand anyone after just spending time?” to which I responded “No”). And for every answer, I’d elaborate on my thinking using metaphor. To which she said, “I think you’re actually quite good at metaphors.”

“Hmm,” I said.

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My heart! Oh, if all my feelings were a small mouse…

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It’s Wednesday. It was near empty when I left the office a little after 7pm. After that I changed clothes in my hotel and walked up Ossington Avenue. Both sides of the street were lined by small brickstone boutiques in different pastel colors. I sort of aimlessly meandered in shops I found interesting, noticing that most of them had already closed given how late it was.

Some coworkers recommended I visit Lunch Lady, an upscale Vietnamese restaurant, so I stopped by. The restaurant was bustling, dimly lit with a Wong Kar Wai-esque ambience. Table for one, I said. A spot just opened up by the chef’s counter, follow me.

Eating alone is something that I do very occasionally, but more often than the average person. This is more of a nod to the time I took a year off to solo travel. But back then it felt more coming of age, independent, exotic; a glass of white wine and a Jack Kerouac paperback in a cafe somewhere off the Catalonian coast.

I settled into the chef’s counter, stainless steel, and abruptly I was sucked into a memory. This was from years ago, the last time I sat at a steel-like chef’s counter. But that was in Japan, with someone I had once loved.

The waitress fills my water, then asks me if I’m waiting for anyone. Nope, just me. I feel awkward, so I add that I’m on a business trip. I know I don’t need to explain myself, but I do anyway. When I was a kid I used to think that people on business trips were always important and wore dapper suits. Now I know that sometimes they are unimportant and wear more casual clothing.

I take a sip of my drink, a pandan-infused negroni that the restaurant had lovingly dubbed Pandoni. It was more bitter than I expected. As I waited for my food to arrive, I opened The Stranger by Camus. I’m trying to read more, since I feel less well-read than my peers.

I was struck by the blase tone of the narrator in The Stranger and how bored yet incisive he seemed. I wondered if that’s how I felt too, in my day-to-day, in the liminal space that one experiences on business trips.

The food took longer than expected to arrive, even if I wasn’t very hungry. When it did, I took a bite immediately. It was softshell crab, lightly fried and rather tasty.

Several moments later, I realized that there was a patch on the roof of my mouth that was tender, burnt no doubt from my impatience earlier. I thought of my mother, who told me that if I continued my habit of diving in too quickly while things were too hot, I would eventually get esophageal cancer or something like that. This was later confirmed by my sister, a resident doctor, who said that yes, that is how you can get cancer, by constantly injuring yourself in the same way. I wondered if that same theory applies to the mind, if you constantly made yourself sad. By being mean to yourself, or falling in love with people you know won’t love you back.

Right then, a small commotion snapped me out of my reverie. A chorus of cheers, and a chocolate dessert with bright flames delivered swiftly to a young family next to me. They were celebrating a birthday, the mother’s. I thought it was cool that they were celebrating the mothers’ birthday, and felt relieved that maybe your life doesn’t actually end once motherhood begins. Then I saw a small red dot on their front-facing camera, and myself posted awkwardly in the background. I turned my head away. Though I would have liked to watch, I would rather not be in some random stranger’s home video.

Afterwards, I paid, then began my trek home. The sun had long set at this point, and I let yellow lampposts guide my way back.

Before I knew it, I arrived at the hotel. I am shocked at how quickly the time passes when I am returning home as compared with when it takes to get somewhere. It’s always like this, even on my commute to work. It’s excruciating slow on the way there, but time back flies past like a blink of an eye. It must be because I’m so lost in my thoughts when I’m on my way home.

I thought back to a conversation I was eavesdropping on my walk earlier. It was a duo of girlfriends just behind me, a blonde and an Asian girl. The blonde had a Russian accent, and said, Yes, he married his sugar baby.

When did he marry her? Three months ago. Three months ago! That’s fast. Yes, but they had been together for a long time now, so it made sense.

I didn’t know these people, but I was invested. He married his sugar baby, I thought to myself. He must have really loved her.

When I was 22, I took a gap year to solo travel the world. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - and everything extraordinary thing that happened started with talking to strangers.

I once wrote an essay about how to make friends with anyone, which chronicled my philosophy on connecting with people. But I kept getting the same follow-up question: okay, but how do you actually talk to people?

How do you even start the conversation?

I’ve been sitting on these comments for almost a year now because it’s kind of a hard question to answer. Just talk to people! is my honest response, but there’s a bit more nuance than that.

It’s more like, talk to strangers, yes but don’t expect anything. Talk to strangers, yes, but think of it as play. Talk to strangers, yes, and just see what happens1.

Let me explain.

Solo traveling and meeting strangers

When I was soloing, making friends came very easily, largely due to the fact that hostels are the most optimally designed place in the world to become friends with strangers.

Hostel-goers self-select as the kind of person who would stay in a random dorm with ten other people on a hot summer day to meet travelers from all over the world. Most are alone, and the best way to pass the time is asking people what their deal is and how they ended up here. Then you go out drinking and make plans to meet up for breakfast the next morning. Afterwards, hungover, you trek to the local tourist attraction together. It’s awesome.

Hostels make it easy, but the conditions of solo traveling itself is ideal for talking to strangers.

For one, everyone’s a stranger. The reality is that no one you speak to will be of any lasting social consequence. If you have a horribly awkward conversation, you can simply walk away.

Secondly, when you’re in a foreign country where you know no one, you shed your identity. You are no longer a sister, a flakey friend, or an overworked analyst from New York who sometimes cries in the bathroom.

Instead, you enter this temporary state of being no one. And stripped of all of these labels and expectations from your “real” life, you become the barest version of, well, you.

One of my absolute favorite quotes is:

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth

Oscar Wilde

Starting a conversation always has friction - someone has to go first. When you are solo traveling, it is easier to strike up conversations because you can literally say whatever you’re thinking out loud.

For me, it is usually the obvious thing that is also very simple, like “I like your jacket” or “Why did they put guacamole out in the canteen, do you know what’s going on?” After that conversations flow easily if the other person is open.

I was reminded of all of this on a recent solo trip to Montreal. On the evening of my flight, I looked through the window and saw a large red moon. I’d never seen a red moon before, and it was shining against the black night sky, holy and not unlike a celestial tangerine.

This is so cool, I have to share this experience. I turned to the person next to me, and feeling shy, I almost turned right back around. But I wanted to be the kind of person who was brave and talked to strangers, and besides, what’s the worst that could happen? So I took a breath, and said, hey, look at the moon!

And we were off! I learned why she was in Montreal, what she did for work, and more than I ever thought I’d know about the alcohol and beverage industry. All because I wanted to be silly and show someone the moon.

That’s what I mean by play.

Strangers and serendipity

Strangers also function as this magical door to unknown possibilities and extraordinary amounts of luck. This is how I found myself hitchhiking.

Mont Tremblant is this cute, Euro-esque ski village that is about 2 hours of driving away from Montreal. Transit is difficult without a car: first, you call a 20-minute taxi (there is no Uber) from the ski village to a random gas station, and then a bus takes you the remainder of the way back to Montreal. There are only two buses the whole day, so there’s little room for error.

The morning of my flight, my taxi didn’t come. I called what few other taxi companies were in the area, but to no avail. Resigned, I lugged my skis and bags back to the hotel lobby. The front desk manager told me she could call me a car straight to Montreal, but it would run me $400. What to do?

Asking to hitchhike is a lot like cold-calling sales: you walk up to strangers knowing it’s super weird and that most will say no. And they did. Families loading their skis into cars looked at me like I was insane. “Sorry, no space.” “We’re not going to Montreal.” Fair enough.

Then a young couple that looked nice started checking out at the hotel lobby. When they finished up, I opened with the very obvious and simple thing that was on my mind: “Are you guys going to Montreal?”

And just like that, I had my ride.

Harry and Megan turned out to be delightful.2 Over the two-hour drive we talked about their studies, Quebec’s language laws, and all sorts of other random things. We ate cheese crackers and sour cream and onion crisps - it felt like I was back in college on the drive home from a club retreat.

Sometimes, talking to strangers is simply delightful. Other times, it’s delightful, and it meaningfully changes where you end up.

Not everyone wants to play - and that’s okay

I will not pretend that striking up conversations with strangers isn’t scary. Rejection is scary, but what actually makes it hurt is judging yourself for trying.

One of the hardest things to do is looking like a fool. There’s a reason being cringe is so universally abhorred - it grates against the ego. Paradoxically, though, being a fool is one of the few ways to free the soul.

When you do the math of talking to strangers, it looks something like this:

• Benefit: Potentially have a really fun and unexpected conversation, maybe meet your soulmate

• Risk: Seem weird3

And in the hitchhiking case, it looks something like:

• Benefit: Save $400 and get a ride to Montreal Airport and avoid missing your flight

• Risk: Seem weird

Sometimes, I talk to strangers and they rebuff my invitation for play. At the Montreal Airport cafe, I spotted the most beautiful scones I’d ever seen. I turned to the lady in line next to me and said, those are really big scones!

She gave an awkward stare, then a polite chuckle. I’d love to say the miniature rejection rolled off me like water off a dolphin’s back - and honestly, it kind of did. Because that’s the point! Because conversations with strangers is really about play, and part of that is not knowing what you’re gonna get. Sometimes they’re down, sometimes they’re not. Either way, both are okay.

When you do the math like this, you realize the main variable is mostly about how self-conscious you are. Strangers, novelty, serendipity - they’re all multipliers to infinity. But if fear reduces you to zero, the outcome will always be zero.

Bringing it home

Strangers, by and large, are everywhere. So starting good conversations doesn’t need to be reserved for solo traveling; you can bring serendipity with you wherever you go.

My favorite chocolate shop in New York is a place called Chocolate Moderne. They sell artisanal, hand-crafted bonbons in innovative flavors (the passion fruit syrup is a favorite of mine). As I was sampling some chocolates, I asked the old gentleman at the counter about the history of this shop.

Apparently, his wife had spent 20 years in banking before she quit, moved to France to train as a chocolatier, and returned to New York to start this shop. Fascinating, I thought. I really am dazzled by how rich even the smallest corners of the world are, if only you ask for the story.

All of this - just because I stopped to say hello.

As psychic as I wish I was, the real expert in my life is my mom. She is psychic in the way that only immigrant mothers are: surgically perceptive, able to discern strikingly specific details about someone from just a photo. As a mother, she is of course principally concerned with whether the people in my life are good-natured— is this person kind, or are they someone who could hurt my daughter? But she can read other things too: sharpness, resilience under pressure, honesty.

Over the years, I’ve shown her photos of new friends I’m making, coworkers, and boys I’m considering seriously dating, and she’ll give me specific predictions on their character. Only now, as I’ve gotten older, I can see how many of these predictions have come true (especially about the ex-boyfriends, to my chagrin).

I’ve asked her countless times how she does it. I can’t explain it, she’ll say, it’s just a feeling I get. Or occasionally she’ll say something about the eyes, which is also vague.

This is my attempt to pass along everything I’ve learned from her.

Reading people 101

Before we dive into the how, I also want to talk about why this is important. Choosing your inner circle, your life partner and your closest confidants, is the most important choice you make in life. This is obvious. But too often, especially as young adults, we overindex on someone’s intelligence or ambition or ability to succeed. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that smarts are incredibly sexy, but I do think in the long-term intelligence matters less (past a critical threshold).

Instead, kindness and caring and loyalty matter much more in the long-run. You can rest easy for a lifetime knowing someone will do right by you, not only because they love you but because it is in their nature to do so.

So let’s talk reading people 101. Better know right off the bat if someone is shifty instead of learning your lesson the hard way. First, this chart:

You might recognize this from the memes. Specifically, let me draw your attention to the Good-Neutral-Evil axis. Here’s how I think of the definitions:

• Good: Actually wants to help you even if they don’t benefit. Will never wish ill on you, not really in their nature

• Neutral: Will help you if it’s convenient or mutually beneficial. Won’t go out of their way to screw you, but won’t protect you either

• Evil: May help you when interests align, but will actively screw you over if it benefits them

If you have any sort of sense of intuition (which you do), reading these definitions should have instinctively made you think of certain people in your life. Pay attention to that!

Goodness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It shows itself in the real world when people want different things:

This is the real test. What happens when your interests no longer align? How do they treat you when they no longer owe you something?

Now, how to read people

The thing about people is that they tell you who they are. How they think is infused in practically everything about them, from the questions they ask (or don’t) to their casual comments to their tone of voice. You don’t need to watch particularly closely for people to reveal themselves to you, but you do need to watch consciously.

The most obvious signs are how they treat the people around them. How do they talk about their friends? How much fondness or affection or care comes across? A great signal is how they talk about their ex-lovers, or frankly, anyone they’ve had prior conflict with. How willing are they to consider the other’s side when it conflicts with their own? To advocate for the needs of others in a morally ambiguous or zero-sum situation? Even if they aren’t chatty, you should be able to feel warmth when they speak.

Listen to how they talk about themselves, too. If someone mentions that they feel like they are not a good person, or struggle with being selfish, then it’s probably true. Again, people tell you who they are. Working on becoming a better person is not the same as being a good person. It just means they have a gap so wide that it’s become obvious. The effort to improve is commendable, but it’s not the same thing.

And lastly but just as important, the nonverbal signals! For example, their facial expressions: how guarded are they? How big is their smile, how open is their laughter? And their eyes– is there light in their eyes?

Most importantly, do you feel that they have good intentions? Or do they have little regard for you? Even if you just met, do you sense that they wish you well?

Do not use your brain! Your brain is good for rational thinking. Trust your gut on this, your body, your soma. Your body has evolved now for hundreds of thousands of years to be able to figure out if people are good or not, honest or not, as this was instrumental to our survival as a social species. So yeah, all that wisdom lives somewhere very archaic in your body, which makes it all the more accurate. Use it.

Intuition as a practicable skill

When I was a kid, I was impressed with how my dad seemed to know exactly how many seconds to stick leftovers in the microwave. This seemed like witchcraft. How do you do that? I asked. You practice, he said sagely. You just guess how many seconds something takes, and gradually you get better at guessing.

Guess and practice, indeed. Like any skill, intuiting someone’s goodness is a practice of refining one’s guesses. When you first meet someone, you should have a hypothesis. Are they selfish? Honest? Do they seem to care for the wellbeing of others, or is this an afterthought?

Building intuition via guessing is something you’ve done before, because likely you’ve done it with intelligence. Think about it. Guessing the intelligence of others based on first encounters is something a lot of us do and are quite good at, because we’ve had a lot of practice doing so. We do it at school, then we do it at work, and we get instant feedback from knowing other people’s grades or their place of work or other proxies.

You can do the same with moral character. And with time, as you get to know them and see how they treat others, you will have your answers. You might find that you were right, or that maybe they surprised you. And in every case, with every meeting, your intuition will only get sharper.

As for myself, I live in Manhattan and am blessed to encounter many kinds of people basically all the time. I’ve also lived in California, and before that the American South, and sometime in between all of this I solo-backpacked abroad for half a year.

This is all to say: meeting different kinds of strangers and making snap-second judgments is a skill well-practiced for me. But it’s also a skill well-practiced for you, too. Think of all the people you’ve encountered in life, from school to work to your commute to the person bagging your groceries. We are constantly in a flux of meeting strangers, some of whom we will be lucky enough to call our best friends and future spouses. So it’ll always be important to be able to see, in these strangers’ eyes, if they are someone who will be good to you, for now and for forever onwards.

Jackson Hole airport has to be one of the most beautiful airports I’ve ever seen. It’s quite small (only eleven gates), yet the interior feels like a newly furnished cabin: lacquered wood, fireplaces, caramel pleather seating, and floor-to-ceiling windows that frame snow-covered mountains. The income per capita in Teton County is unmistakably reflected in the airport itself.

I’ve been living out of a large suitcase and a backpack for over a month now. It’s a bit long for comfort, but I’m fondly reminded of my time backpacking and hostel-hopping over a gap year. With this final leg in Wyoming, I’m now headed back to New York, penning a reflection mid-flight.

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A peculiar thing happens as we get older. We leave our hometowns, attend different colleges, enter different industries, and date different people in different cities… and with every new experience, we become more ourselves. But while the process of becoming is beautiful, it also makes it harder to feel truly understood.

As our lives diverge, so too do the ways we see the world. We become more unique and less alike, with fewer shared reference points to anchor mutual understanding.

I could liken people to an onion, but that feels trite. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to say that people are miniature planets, each with our own orbit and gravitational pull. And like planets, we accumulate layers over time, experience settling into sediment, year after year, until a distinct terrain takes shape, with its own flora and fauna.

So I want to talk about what it actually means to be understood. Because without it, even a full life can feel lonely.

I am shocked at how small the number of people I feel truly understood by is. Moreover, I am shocked by how powerful and precious this feeling is whenever it emerges. Some are friends I’ve known for years. Others I’ve just met, yet with whom my philosophies and paths seem to align uncannily, as if we’ve been independently shaped by parallel forces.

I once tried to articulate this in a more extreme way:

In life, there are people who love you and there are people who understand you. Ideally, you find someone who does both– but they are rare, so rare that should you encounter them you should marry them. It’s hard to find a heart kind enough to love you, and arguably harder to encounter a mind attuned enough to understand yours.

Understanding, then, is not incidental. To understand someone is to know them without explanation—to be able to see what they see when they look at the world. It is to intuit how their particular injuries and ideals have shaped their ambitions, fears, dreams.

Put simply: it is to know what they think, how they feel, and why. What else is there?

Def. understanding

I don’t think understanding comes from sharing every experience, nor do I think it can be achieved through effort alone. Complete 100% overlap is impossible, and communication (no matter how earnest) has limits.

Instead, I’ve come to think that understanding is two-pronged. One part is inherent: a base compatibility shaped long before two people meet. The other is earned, built slowly through attention, effort, and care. Both are necessary. Together, they make possible the kind of understanding that precedes real love.

Part I: Base compatibility

Base compatibility is foundational. Like chemistry in romance, it’s either there or it isn’t. And when it is, understanding flows intuitively.

This intuition often emerges from shared background. For me, understanding clicks easily with people who grew up with STEM-minded immigrant parents. I can infer the values they were raised with, the pressures they navigated, their coming-of-age and their rebellion arc– because I went through the same thing. I feel a similar ease with people who went to public school in Middle America and now live coastal yuppie lives. I know what it’s like to grow up far from the things I value now, only to be ferried into an elite coastal institution at the age of 18 and learn a new set of cultural norms. I get it.

What counts as foundational in someone’s psyche will vary from person to person. And these formative experiences aren’t limited to culture or upbringing. They emerge wherever people have been shaped by similarly immersive environments—shared vocations, religions, or subcultures intense enough to leave a mark. For friends like L, it’s an obsession with skiing and all things snowsports. For A, it’s a shared way of processing emotion through making music.

Crucially, this form of understanding can’t be taught or reverse-engineered. No amount of effort can substitute for the experiences that created it.

You simply had to be there.

I want to clarify though: even without this base compatibility, you can still love and have a meaningful connection with someone. But it does mean that you must resign yourself to the reality that there are certain aspects of them that will always remain inaccessible to you, that you may never see eye to eye on.

One of my closes friends falls into this category. I love him dearly, but there are ways in which we will never fully understand each other. It shows up in small, almost trivial moments. Once, on a ski trip, I asked him to buy bread and cheese for lunch the next day. He came back with white Wonderbread and Kraft singles.

If he understood me, he would have known I meant an artisanal loaf and real cheese. And if I understood him better, I would have known that without explicit instruction, this is what he would choose.

You could argue that these things simply need to be communicated—and maybe that’s true. But with base compatibility, they don’t need to be. Preferences like this remain unspoken because they are intuitive. They don’t require explanation, because they’re obvious to someone shaped by similar tastes, backgrounds, and sensibilities.

It is the feeling of: you just get it.

Part II. Sustained effort

Then there is the second layer, the one that comes after base compatibility. Because compatibility alone isn’t enough. To truly understand someone, you still have to put in the time to learn their particularities.

This is understanding built through sustained effort. It is knowing someone because you have paid attention. Maybe you weren’t there when the manual was written, but you’ve cared enough to read it closely (for my friends who read my essays, this one is for you).

This kind of understanding is what makes some people excellent gift-givers. They know the kinds of T-shirts you wear, how you like your coffee (cream, no sugar), and that you spend all your money on expensive Japanese knives because you love to cook. They know that you always run cold, that you want dessert even though you say you don’t. They know that a souvenir sticker would be carefully tucked in a folder (never used), that they should send a postcard instead, because you love handwritten notes.

It is reading not between the lines, but beneath the lines. This is the kind of understanding that is built through watching someone patiently and attentively over a long, long time.

I experienced this kind of understanding recently. I was with a group of friends, cooking dinner in an Airbnb. I mentioned that I was kind of a germaphobe, and very offhandedly L says - Oh yeah, that’s obvious. That’s why she won’t get in the hottub.

I was stunned. I had not told anyone that. How did he know? But it was because we had been friends for so long now, that he had put in the time and effort to understand me.

Conclusion

Time and time again, from mentors I’ve collected from all my walks of life, from professors to investors I’ve encountered abroad in whiskey bars in Tokyo or coffee shops in London, I’ve heard the same piece of life advice: the most important choice you make, perhaps the singular most important one, is choosing the right life partner.

This is why it is so important to understand what it means to be understood. Because then, how do you find the person who will live and die with you? Who you will share a home, a dog, then children, and ultimately the rest of your life with? A life surrounded by people who do not understand you is a lonely one, no matter how hearty it looks from the outside.

In the end, the art of being seen (or of seeing) is incredibly complex. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we leave little clues everywhere about who we are and how we see the world. For those similar enough to us, they will notice the clues. For those who care enough, they will learn to read them.

I’m opening a new paid tier for more personal writing: narrative, diary-entry style pieces that are looser, episodic, and occasionally poetic.

It will also include longer-horizon reflections: yearly and quarterly recaps, and sometimes monthly ones, as I practice looking back with intention.

I hope you enjoy this corner of my work <3

It is always in California that I feel the most optimistic. How could you not? Today is Thursday.

I step out of this chic hole-in-the-wall lunch spot in FiDi after an hour and a half lunch with my former manager. Not even ten years into his career, he tells me he’s making over a million a year now, works a 9-to-5, even has the flexibility to take hour and a half lunches whenever he pleases.

I get it. I get the California dreaming.

Last weekend I was in Big Sur, driving down the PCH with my best friend from college. I watched the coastal sun dip into the water, blue ocean reflecting gooey orange before the sun fully disappeared. Then it was night, and the stars were unleashed as far as the eye could see. We were still not yet at our lodging, and stepped out on the highway shoulder to look up at the endless constellations. M pointed out the North Star. Then we debated if what we were looking at was the Little Dipper or the Big Dipper.

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It has recently come to my attention that I can be a bad friend. Not in small, forgivable ways, but in a structural one– so damning it can sometimes result in friendship breakups.

I’m writing this to you off the heels of a New Years ski trip in Utah.

Ski trips are precious. You see friends you haven’t seen in a year, ring in the New Year with them, drunk off wine and the excitement for tomorrow’s snow. Everyone’s exhilarated, riding down the mountain, and you’re clocking so much speed you feel like god. Snow gushes over you as you’re weaving through pine glazed in white, bobbing over powder so bountiful it buoys like butter. Then later, you’re slamming back plates of curry at the local Indian restaurant, starving after a full day of nonstop skiing. And in between bites, you think of your friends, how they waited for you patiently at the foot of the hill, even though you are much, much slower than them– and yet still they stayed.

But like any kind of group travel, ski trips also have a way of bringing out the worst in us: hours-long traffic up and down the mountain, broken equipment, injuries that have you choking down Advil and testing your last reserves of patience. Long lift lines with infinite delays. Messy houses, cramped spaces, inconsiderate people who don’t pick up after themselves and assume that their friends will do so for them…

Which brings me to, well, me.

This morning, B told me what I had feared for a long time: that I was the Demanding Friend. It especially stung because it confirmed an insecurity I already carried: that I asked too much, too often, and that even my most patient friends had begun to feel used.

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About a month ago, I texted X and wished him a happy birthday. After days of silence, it was official. Our entire text message screen was blue, a string of separate texts that had been piling up for months now.

With this irrefutable evidence, I finally had to admit to myself: I had been ghosted.

How does one even begin to talk about being friend-ghosted? Friend-dumped?

Without language to describe these situations, we lack any real framework for interpreting, grieving, or healing from the loss of a friendship.

With romance, there’s something concrete to mourn. You were in a relationship, now you’re not. There is a standard protocol to follow. You unshare Find My Friends. You unfollow each other on Instagram, or at the very least block their stories. You let all your mutuals know, so they know not to bring up your ex or to only do so gingerly.

Similar to the way you vacate your apartment when your lease ends, you can follow an established protocol. You decide you want to move out, and so you tell your landlord, fold your clothes, and pack your bags; you can even leave a thank you note as you drop off your keys if you so desire. Such is the dignity formal structure affords.

But with the slow decay of a friendship, more often than not things remain an unhealed wound, suspended in time. Like leaving your apartment in a rush to catch a plane, you leave your belongings strewn everywhere, clothes spilled across the bed, mugs in the sink… clearly, there was intent to return. But when you return, you find yourself locked out. You can peer through the window and see everything exactly as you left it, yet your keys no longer fit. You are unable to even, at the very least, retrieve your belongings. This is the lack of closure that comes with being ghosted.

With friendship, the rules are more ambiguous. There are friends I haven’t talked to in over a year because we live in different cities, lead different lives.

This is what makes friend-ghosting so much more insidious. Because there’s a slow, uncertain death that comes with not knowing. Are you busy, or is something actually wrong? What if you text me back? And how long is too long? If you ghost me for a month but come back and explain, that seems forgivable. Two months, maybe. But six? A year?

What is the statute of limitations on hope? And when does absence become an answer?

In life, there are people who love you and there are people who understand you. Ideally, you find someone who does both– but they are rare, so rare that should you encounter them you should marry them. It’s hard to find a heart kind enough to love you, and arguably harder to encounter a mind attuned enough to understand yours.

X was one of the few people who understood me. Our conversations spanned the entire gamut of life: work, philosophy, dating, the absurdities of social life. I have friends I love deeply, friends whom I am loyal to; but they might not understand my worldview, my emotional logic. X did.

All the more jarring, then, was the ghost. Especially given I thought I understood him– apparently, I did not.

I would open Find My Friends and see X jaunting through Manhattan. His icon stared at me mockingly, as if saying: we can pretend to still be friends because you have my location, but you’ll never know why we stopped talking. A wave of sadness would wash over me. Then I would close the app and pretend I didn’t see it.

I began to harbor a specific kind of shame. In the absence of knowing, I internalized the loss of our friendship as my fault. Why else would I have been ghosted? The last time we spoke, I’d been upset with him, what I’d considered a minor tiff. But maybe I had misread it. Maybe it had been the final straw. And maybe I was actually just a deeply flawed person who finally crossed a line.

Our mutuals still talked about us as if we were close. Because, to them, we were. I asked A for his advice on something. You should really talk to X, A tells me, he knows a lot about this stuff. I just nodded and agreed because yes, X would definitely be helpful on this, and then deftly changed the subject.

Because how else are you supposed to say that you were deeply ashamed that it was your fault you got friend-dumped, but you actually weren’t sure about anything?

Every once in a while, I visit a coworking space and I’ll bump into X. It’s only happened a handful of times, but it always goes down the same way: I wave at him, he waves back, and we exchange awkward, miserable smiles to each other.

This is what happened a couple days ago, except this time, X comes to find me. Listen, I want to clear the air. He tells me why he’s ghosted me. He tells me that it’s not my fault, gives me some bullshit excuse about some external circumstances. He tells me he’s sorry.

A myriad of emotions coursed through me. It wasn’t my fault, so I was relieved. But I also felt angry. I had spent months interrogating myself over something that, it turned out, had never been in my control.

It was then that I realized how unnecessary my shame had been. In the absence of explanation, I had assumed the worst about myself, that when something went wrong, it must have been my fault.

I was also reminded of something else: being understood is not the same as being chosen. And in waiting to be chosen by X, I had failed to choose myself.

When I returned to this friendship months later, the door had been shut. But I was not trapped. All along, I could have chosen to walk away, and find someplace else that would have welcomed me warmly.

The first time I watched The Menu was 2023 when I was backpacking Asia. I was sitting in bed eating Japanese Domino’s pizza somewhere in Tokyo. I was younger, poorer, and much, much happier. Back then, almost all the cultural references of The Menu were lost on me. But I didn’t know or care. I was just out of college, travelling the world, and in love with life.

A couple of days ago, I rewatched The Menu and realized how many more of the cultural references I now understood. Since then, I’d Interrailed across Europe for a post-grad summer, moved to Manhattan, and worked in consulting for two years. I’d dated and dumped a Wall Street trader and a YC startup bro. I’d gone from “What is omakase?” to tasting menus at Masa.

In other words, I received a nepo education.

What is a nepo education? It’s knowing the catalogue of boarding schools (both domestically and internationally) whose tuition costs as much as a down payment for a Midwest home. It’s knowing that Harvard-Westlake isn’t in Cambridge. It’s knowing that if you went to a place like this, at least one classmate’s name is on a building somewhere.

I can rattle off the east coast boarding schools (Exeter, Andover, Choate; though I can never remember how to pronounce Choate correctly). I know Dalton, Trinity, and the other Manhattan prep schools that inspired Gossip Girl. I can tick through the Asian international schools, too— SAS, ISB, HKIS— because enough of my friends went there that this alphabet soup starts to represent someone’s teenage years.

These schools are small. If you went to one, I can probably name someone you know. It’s a fun party trick, isn’t it?

M and I talk about this frequently, with the fascination that only outsiders peering through the window could possess. He told me he was grateful he wound up in consulting— not just for the work itself, but for the social education.

But didn’t you learn this at Harvard? I asked. Apparently not. Us STEM kids were nerdy, locked-in, and children of immigrants. We lacked the social finesse (read: generational wealth) that our peers had.

M admitted he wished his older sister had gone to Harvard too, so she could’ve shown him the ropes. This surprised me— she’d gone to a prestigious school in Chicago. Weren’t they similar enough? But I already knew the answer. Even within elite spaces, there are tiers. Each one has its own codes, its own references, its own social language you have to learn. And the layers to exclusivity are never-ending…

As for me, I grew up in a state that consistently ranks bottom 5 for education and top 5 for teen pregnancy. Public school until college, scholarship kid after that. Looking back, compared to my freshman year peers, I was very sheltered, unfashionable, and just plain weird.

But I was also much happier then. There’s a certain innocence in not knowing what’s out there, a certain peace when your world is small and the things you want are finite and achievable. I wonder when that changed…

Ignorance is bliss, they say.

“Like mine, his life is pressure. Pressure to put out the best food in the world. Pressure to please…

And even when all goes right… there is no way to avoid The Mess. The Mess you make of your life, of your body, of your sanity, by giving everything you have to pleasing people you will never know”

Now, back to The Menu. What I love about this movie (beyond its hilariousness) is how poignantly they club you over the head with this concept: that striving to be elite through exclusivity destroys the capacity for genuine enjoyment. Two characters nail this perfectly: Chef and the Tech Bros.

At first, Chef started cooking because he loved it. Somewhere along the way, things changed. Now, he’s financially owned by his investor Doug Verrick, creatively owned by food critics, and spiritually owned by his own reputation.

And for what? To cook for people who either don’t appreciate it at all– like the billionaire couple who can’t remember a single dish, or most everyone else who just treats it like a status symbol to prove they’ve “made it.”

Which brings me to my personal favorites: the Tech Bros1.

Yes, they were obnoxious, entitled, and completely undeserving. But they were also deeply insecure. None of them were white, and I’d bet none of them came from money. They represented the children of the immigrants, the “I must work insanely hard because my parents were poor and so I must prove something” class.

“To money and to work,” they toast. “What else is there?”

The food floods their senses— savory, decadent, designed to induce bliss. But even if they’d finished the meal and walked out alive, they still would have left unsatisfied. They have no love or appreciation for the experience itself. It’s just another box to check, another proof point that they’ve arrived. They are trapped on their hedonic treadmill, as nothing can truly assuage their insatiable insecurity.

The Tech Bros aren’t unique. They’re just living out the promise we’ve all been sold: make enough money, achieve enough status, and one day you’ll finally feel like you’re enough.

“And I’ve been fooled into trying to satisfy people who could never be satisfied... But that’s our culture, isn’t it?”

Perhaps the most insidious thing about the desire to be elite? It’s E for Everyone.

Modern philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it the Achievement Society, the idea that you can be anything if you just work hard enough— successful, rich beyond belief, and with abs as a cherry on top. The flip side is brutal: if you’re not optimizing every moment, you’re falling behind. Hobbies become “side hustles.” Rest becomes “unproductive.” There are no simple pleasures anymore, just opportunities you’re either capitalizing on or wasting.2

America the beautiful, America the meritocracy. We are meritocratic in the sense that class is defined by money, and technically, anyone can make money. In older European societies, your class is your upbringing, your lineage, the deftness with which you navigated napkins and continental style dining. Things you were born into, things you couldn’t control.

Here, it’s all on you. So if you’re not rich, it’s your fault. So of course, you may find yourself doom-scrolling through self-help content and Becca Bloom Hermes hauls and some 19-year-old explaining their dropshipping empire. Monetize, monetize, optimize. Duck, duck, goose.

“You cook with obsession, not love.”

At the end of the movie, Margot asks for a traditional cheeseburger. This is significant — the only time we see Chef genuinely happy was in a photo from decades prior back when he was flipping burgers.

Back then, he was making food for normal people who wanted to eat his food because it was good and they were hungry. Back then, he found joy and satisfaction in his work. Back then, things were simple.

But after years of toil and sacrifice and striving, he finally made it to the summit. And found himself alone, and very, very cold. Under the constant scrutiny and pressure for perfection, he had lost his sense of purpose and joy.

I haven’t wanted to cook for someone in a long time, Chef says. Margot gave him a gift: one last chance to cook something out of love instead of obligation. And watching him make that cheeseburger, with such care and joy and love, I realized that’s the only way to stay free.

To do things out of love. Not from fear of failure or imperfection. Not to collect experiences that prove you’ve “made it,” not to impress. To do things because they feel right, because you genuinely appreciate the aesthetics of the craft. This is what, I think, it means to be free.

Small talk. Let’s begin. We both come hungry, for good food and good conversation. I’m ready to have my favorite kind of conversation in the whole wide world, the kind that makes you tilt your head and go, wait a moment I’ve never thought of it like that before.1

On a Saturday somewhere between summer and autumn, N and I catch up. And as all good catchups go, we talk life and we talk shop. He tells me about his adventures skydiving, I tell him about my waning interest in working corporate. But there are good perks, I have to admit: a couple weeks ago I went to see the Cincinnati Open on company dime, and so we start chatting tennis.

Ah, Alcaraz v. Sinner. What a famous rivalry. Their matches feel like epics, almost Odyssean– Alcaraz winning the Roland Garros after Sinner’s triple match point, setting a record for the longest playtime for a final match. But for me, it’s the look on their faces when playing with each other, the way they smile so wide even after losing a point. It’s the thrill they feel, the unwavering respect they have for each other. The sheer love of the game.

Which one is your favorite? says N.

Sinner is consistent, powerful, with speedy groundstrokes that always land at just the right place, destabilizing the opponent. Sinner wins at being exceptional at the core basics. Alcaraz is much more unpredictable, running after balls so far they are off camera, playing trick shots that defy reason, dazzle the audience. He’s less consistent, makes more mistakes, but far more interesting.

I tell him I crave doing interesting work. He asks me to define interesting. I think about Alcaraz, and the way he plays. Interesting means your actions can produce a wider range of outcomes: more novelty, more serendipity.

I am someone who craves this feeling. I find such a gripping, inordinate thrill for novelty. I don’t know exactly where it comes from. I can hypothesize that it might come from my upbringing, growing up in a state so flat and so square that I couldn’t help but crave to see what more the world could offer. It might be that. I don’t know. But it’s important to me that I lead an interesting life and do interesting things and meet interesting people.

So, for my sake, I want to define what it means to lead an interesting life. Because I’m quite bored now, and that doesn’t make any sense.

I. The struggle

Inevitably, there’s another side to this: the struggle. And I don’t mean in a bro-y, no pain no gain kind of way. I think a foundational part of a task or quest or goal being interesting is that it must have some pain to a certain extent– either the actual task must have some optimal level of struggle (Flow Theory), or you are at some sort of risk of to avoid an outcome that is painful (Yerkes-Dodson Law on arousal).

But the theory I like most right now is Schopenhauer’s pendulum.

Schopenhauer’s pendulum is the idea that life swings endlessly between the pain of lacking and the boredom that follows satisfaction.

“Behind every striving is a painful lack of something, Schopenhauer claims, yet obtaining this thing rarely makes us happy. For, even if we do manage to satisfy one desire, there are always several more unsatisfied ones ready to take its place. Or else we become bored, aware that a life with nothing to desire is dull and empty. If we are lucky enough to satisfy our basic needs, such as hunger and thirst, then in order to escape boredom we develop new needs for luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco or fashionable clothing. At no point, Schopenhauer says, do we arrive at final and lasting satisfaction. Hence one of his well-known lines: “life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom.”

David Bather Woods, “The semi-satisfied life”

So let’s linger on the “pain” side of the pendulum. Schopenhauer claims that striving is born from pain, but I think the very act of suffering is what makes striving worthwhile. Pushing against resistance feels meaningful, even satisfying, because it means you’re moving towards something that didn’t exist for you before. And so you reach the reward, and it’s novel and it’s different, and just for a moment it’s magic.

Isn’t there something so fun about that, so thrilling? I’ve come to believe that pain is inevitable; but instead of resisting it, I’ve accepted it as essential– a foundational ingredient in doing anything interesting at all.

Take writing for example. Is fun? Sometimes. Pleasurable? Occasionally. Really hard, even painful? Almost always. And yet, it’s probably one of the most intellectually and creatively satisfying things I do. For my work, I spend roughly 12 hours a day in front of a screen to move boxes around and fill in spreadsheet cells with numbers. Writing, despite its pain, is so goddamn satisfying that I will willingly elect more of my time to type in front of a screen. There’s something so special about that.

II. Boredom

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy”

Albert Camus

Every week (sometimes every other week), I do laundry. To this day, it is a constant battle to convince myself to do it. I have no idea why. It is an inevitability of life. I will wear clothing, and it will get dirty. Then I will wash it.

But it’s tedious, mundane, repetitive. It’s not particularly hard. It’s just so boring.

There is one trick that I do, without fail, that always gets me excited to do laundry. I imagine a life where I did not have a laundry machine. Where I was born in a decade or in a place that did not have access to technology and I had to wash my clothes using a… washboard? I literally don’t know what I would do.

And suddenly, doing laundry to me feels like a deeply meaningful task. A real privilege. I get to do laundry, walk through some hallway in some building (that I live in!) to use an in-building unit. Somehow, being able to hold a life-like alternative reality in my head where I did not have access to this privilege makes me realize how truly lucky I am.

Isn’t it so strange how meaning is so subjective. Things are meaningful if you choose to assign meaning or let yourself find it. Isn’t that so empowering, does’t that stoke some sense of deeply held optimism? Meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

In the end, I think the approach of defining what “interesting” is and chasing that isn’t the right move. Because what you find interesting is about something that is tapped from within— your ability to listen to your intuition, use your body as a honing a beacon. From there, it’s making the conscious choice to pursue this— really, to look at fear in the face and say, I could do something in spite of you. I won’t back off because of you.

I wonder if that’s what bravery is. I think of Free Solo, a documentary film that follows Alex Honnold as he climbs sheer rock faces without ropes or harnesses, suspended 3,000 feet in the air. He’s climbing the face of El Capitan, summiting to the top with no support, and one misstep and he could literally die. It’s a terrifying and fascinating film to watch.

On the surface, it looks like fearlessness. In fact, neurologists found his amygdala barely lights up– his brain literally does not have fear in the way we do2. But to me, the point isn’t about being superhuman; it’s about showing what becomes possible when fear doesn’t dictate your limits.

Interesting is flashy, compelling, but let’s peel away the glamor to see what’s underneath. The crux of the matter is that I don’t want to live an interesting life that is spruced up with random novelties, but rather I want to live a life that I am aligned to, one where I can pursue my hunches and intuitions and curiosities fully.

These are the things that compel me, the threads I keep coming back to, time and time again. The greatest privilege in life is the ability to simply do what one wants to do, what one is called to do. That’s why corporate is so easy, in some ways. No one asks you what you want, just do what you’re told and you’ll do just fine. You might be unhappy at the very end, but at least you’ll have eaten expensive meals and worn expensive clothes in the meantime.

So I ask you, what are the things that compel you, over and over again? And why are you not pursuing it? What are your hesitations and your fears? It might be hard, but you were made to do hard things. You tolerate pain for a job that bores you (perhaps the ultimate pain), the least you could do is tolerate pain for your own pursuits.

Maybe it’s time to bet on yourself.

A couple weeks ago, I caught up with a friend who quit a prestigious job in consulting to join an early-stage startup. When I asked him about his thinking, he said something to the tune of:

“I truly believe that if I am world-class at anything, it would be clarity. As in, if this startup crashed and burned tomorrow, I would have absolutely no regrets in making this decision.”

I was stunned. What a thing to declare, that one is world-class at something. But also, truly, what a thing to declare. I was stunned to the point of captivation.

This feeling, this sureness of self and of mind. Was it real, was it possible? And if so, I wanted it for myself, this crystal clarity that felt like alchemist’s gold. What does it really mean to have no regrets? I wanted answers.

What ensued was a long conversation that eventually inspired this post. Below is an abridged version of our talk, edited for clarity (pun intended).

I: What is clarity?

Never before in history have humans had so much abundance: of options, access, information, choice. True boredom, the kind that once sparked imagination, has been drowned out by infinite scrolling; and stillness has now become a luxury.

Human brains weren’t designed for this. A famous 2000 study asked grocery shoppers to sample gourmet jams. When offered 24 flavors, people were more likely to sample, but walk away with nothing. When offered just six, they were ten times more likely to make a purchase. Even more interesting, those who successfully purchased from the 24-sample group reported less satisfaction with their purchase, despite having more options. In the most classic sense, less is more.

Psychologists call this choice overload: the more options we face, the harder it is to decide, and the less satisfied we feel afterward. And this applies to everything, as “increased choice decreases satisfaction with matters as trivial as ice cream flavors and as significant as jobs.”

This is why, now more than ever, having a system for finding clarity and making decisions is essential. When everything is available, what matters most is knowing what you actually want.

Defining clarity

Clarity, as we will define, is the process of decision-making that feels sound enough that it leaves no regrets.

No one can predict the future, and uncertainty is an inevitability. Assumptions and trade-offs, then, always exist in every decision.

Clarity is the full awareness of these trade-offs, the acceptance of the underlying assumptions you are making in your decisions. This requires openly acknowledging your unknowns, and making it concrete where you can (even if it’s not a perfect representation). Something like, "I'm betting on X because I believe Y is true."

The ingredients of clarity look something like this:

• Assumptions on how you are going to get the thing you want

• Trade-offs

• Self-knowledge on how much you will enjoy the end result

• Self-knowledge on how much you can bear the risks and trade-offs

Note that clarity is not a specific end point or goal. Clarity is not, “I know I want to start a company one day.”

Rather, clarity is explicit decision-making. Like the scientific method, you have a hypothesis that you make a decision based on, and then through experimentation you accept or reject it.

An example of clarity

Joining this startup was not an exercise of predicting the future with a perfect crystal ball. I don’t know for certain if this will become a unicorn or somehow flop tomorrow. And there were very real downsides; taking the role meant leaving a job and company I genuinely enjoyed.

But it was an exercise of being honest with the specific uncertainties and risks that came with this decision. I had to be clear and comfortable with the precise bets I was placing. Though of course there’s clear risk; you may still find yourself scalded by reality, but each decision refines your intuition and calluses your resolve.

I mapped out what would be important to me.

• I assumed that this startup was in a favorable space and that the market was growing

• I assumed that this was a winning team because they had clear technical moats, a second-time founder, and strong values that are accretive to ambitious startup teams (high-agency, craftsmanship, etc)

• I assumed that my role would be important because I could own a P&L, design a GTM motion, stand up a team, and shape product vision

Clarity is the process by which I map out all of my assumptions here. And since most of these assumptions boded favorably, the decision was clearly a-go.

The role of outside advice

April’s note: This made sense to me so far. But unlike him, I’m the type who likes to crowdsource opinions. I’ll Google “asian lashes mascara recommendation reddit” before buying anything, happily mining strangers’ experiences for gold. So I wanted to know, what is the role of outside advice in making decisions?

Outside advice is useful, but only up to a point. It can give you information, but it can’t tell you what “good” looks like for you. The heavy lifting in clarity comes from defining your own criteria: knowing why this choice matters, what your non-negotiables are, and what trade-offs you’re willing to accept. That process is the real work of clarity; mapping out your assumptions about what matters and why.

Only once those foundations are set does outside advice become valuable. Reviews, feedback, and other perspectives can validate (or challenge!) the hypotheses you’ve already formed. For example: “This mascara works well for Asian eyelashes” only matters if you’ve already decided that feature is important to you.

That’s why clarity can’t be outsourced. Advice can help refine those assumptions, but it can’t create them. My clarity will never look exactly like yours, because our needs and values differ. You can borrow information, but the conviction must be your own.

Clarity is built, brick by brick, through refinement of your own worldview and hypotheses. Even when taking the leap is scary, decisions will still be solid because they are grounded in your own logic. And of course, trial and error will sharpen your decision-making processes. That’s how clarity compounds: on ground you’ve laid yourself.

II: How do you practice clarity?

Every week, I sit in a café to write. I publish far less than I draft, but the act itself is what matters. Writing forces me to locate mental fog and disperse it, a concerted and deliberate task.

Consider the opposite. The first major decision many of us face as young adults is where to go to college. I remember friends in senior year approaching their thinking in frenetic five-minute bursts scattered throughout the schoolday. They’d call it “putting a lot of thought into the decision,” but really it was the same ideas circling chaotically, with no underlying logic that would eventually lead to a resolution.

But what if, instead of these haphazard moments, they had carved out just one deliberate hour? An hour to sit down, map out what they valued, identify their non-negotiables, and weigh the trade-offs of what mattered to them in a university experience? That single block of focused effort could have yielded more clarity than weeks of anxious circling.

That’s the difference I’ve found in practices like writing, journaling, or meditation. They transform thought from scattered bursts into deliberate inquiry, a system that can be practiced to yield clarity.

The mechanism itself is simple:

• Identify the decision you face

• Clearly list out the defining factors that are different across options

• Categorize these factors as non-negotiables, important, and nice-to-haves

• Map out your assumptions, bets, risks, and trade-offs

• Act

• Finally, review the outcome and refine your judgment

Take, for example, my career pivot: Should I quit consulting to join a startup?

• Define the decision: Stay in a stable, prestigious role or join a fast-paced but potentially risky startup?
  List the defining factors: In this case, it’s career. So the factors look roughly like stability, income, work-life balance, learning curve, mentorship, prestige, career trajectory, personal impact, and upside potential

• Categorize them: For me, accelerated learning and trajectory are non-negotiables; strong culture and mentorship are important; and work-life balance goes entirely unconsidered

• Map assumptions and trade-offs: “I assume I’ll learn faster at a startup but sacrifice some safety. I’m betting the autonomy, skills, and network I build will outweigh the risk I take in the long run”

• Act: Take the startup offer

• Review: Afterwards, I’d ask: Did this role actually accelerate my learning? Did I find the culture energizing or draining? Was the financial risk manageable? Did this choice sharpen my sense of what I value in work? Which assumptions proved true, and which didn’t?

Repeat this enough, and clarity stops being a rare breakthrough and starts becoming a way of operating. Each decision becomes a data point in your history of making decisions. Each outcome, even the painful ones, sharpens your intuition for the next call.

On top of that, you don’t need to wait for a life-altering inflection point to practice this. You can build this muscle daily, by writing, thinking in bets, pressure-testing your own logic... these are small reps that stack. The more often you practice clarity on the “small” choices, the more natural it feels when the “big” ones arrive.

Clarity comes from deliberately cultivating a process of thought and reflection. And in the long run, that’s how I’ve learned to make decisions I don’t regret. Not because every outcome has been perfect, but because every outcome has been mine.

Many thanks to Logan Kieller for collaborating on this essay with me. For more of his work I’ve loved, check out: Idea Black Holes and More Metal Less Ore

Everyday, I think about the fact that we are hurtling through space on a floating rock. It’s pretty existential, but it also makes me really, really happy. Because it makes my pursuit of perfection seem extraordinarily trite compared to how truly rich and absurd everything is. I’m able to find greater joy in the little things, like the fact that I am sitting at a cafe this Sunday morning, writing on my little laptop, nursing a flat white, watching beautiful strangers pass me by. All while floating through space.

It’s ideas like these that keep me going, buoy me back up when I get too lost in my own thoughts. So writing things like lessons often reread helps me return home to myself, little stories that remind me again and I again the person I want to be. Enjoy.

I. You cannot compare

It is impossible to compare yourself to others, because you are truly unique

No one is walking the exact same path as you. No one has your exact starting point, family, upbringing. Your distinctive mix of strengths, tendencies, weaknesses, demons. Even if you had the exact same goals as someone else, you would still walk a different path to achieve them, because you carry with you your unique background and way of doing things.

A dear friend Y hiked the Pacific Coast Trail, a long hike of 2,650 miles that stretches up the rocky coast of California. It takes about six months to walk the totality of the trail, traversing landscapes of gold-dusted desert valleys and snow-covered spines of mountains and everything in between. But even if most everyone travels North on the exact same trail, you will have a wholly distinctive PCT experience.

You’ll walk faster, or maybe slower. You bring with you different gaits, different gear that’s best suited for you, different injuries. Maybe you’ll need to take more breaks, maybe you won’t. It may take you longer to walk the trail, or maybe you’ll complete it in five months.

Even the same trail will yield different journeys, so comparison is futile. In life there is no “all else being equal.” It doesn’t exist, so just focus on your own path.

II: You are not special

You are not so special such that the worst possible scenario will always and uniquely happen to you

I mainly use this thinking to help me assuage my anxiety.

Read more

I’m at a lake. Just moments ago we pulled past a stone gate where someone waved us through, and now we’re driving on a winding road bracketed by lush trees. I’m chattering away with my friend’s dad who picked me up at the train station, and I’m asking him about what he used to do in a prior life before he filled his days with tennis and golf. I love meeting my friends’ parents, because then you get to see exactly where they come from, the people who made them.

He tells me a bit about his career, and I tell him that I only know about commodities trading because I read the book The World for Sale. He said he also read it, and could indeed verify that the larger than life events were in fact, true. I ask him how he knows this, if he knew all the characters personally, jetting about the world and trading billions of dollars of oil.

Yes, he says, I knew all of them. And the book exaggerated their personalities a bit, but it was mostly accurate. Mostly accurate! Incredible to me, that this mild-mannered man who is driving me is also a character in a world that was so grand and bizarre that it merited a book. I read things and I watch movies, but that’s different– I’m not really part of any of these stories, only an observer. I’m not an an agent, an actual character.

I wonder what it’s like to be a part of the world like that.

I’m shucking oysters. I’ve never heard of the word shucking before, but now I’ve been recruited into doing so after enthusiastically raising my hand to help. This was before I learned that it’s apparently an unpleasant task that no one else wants to do. But I don’t mind being helpful, I’m a guest after all, and I’m curious to learn what the task actually entails.

I’m led out to the back lawn where we bring the bin of oysters with us, placing it atop a stone ledge next to where we will be eating dinner lakeside. One of the other guests, the one who brought the oysters, is showing me how to do it. She’s a cultural anthropologist and teaches at one of the universities in New York, and I ask her about her research. I learn that there’s a branch of cultural anthropology that focuses on finance and economics, bankers and Wall Streeters. I tell her that I once dated a trader and that I too felt like a cultural anthropologist of finance. She laughed, and asked me what that was like. He was arrogant, but paid for a lot of nice meals.

She hands me the oyster knife, a blunt flat-edged instrument that you jam into the base of the shell to pry open. I’m honestly not so great with anything that requires strength, but I manage to shuck open four in the time it takes her to do fifteen. It smells like fresh ocean, and we steal a moment to gulp some down in between shucking.

Someone pours champagne, we clink glasses to my first oyster.

We’re eating dinner. I didn’t know what to expect when I first came, but it seems that all in all the party is about twelve, not too big and not too small. Couples line the table, blonde men in polos and dark-haired women who are tall, slim, and gorgeous. I ask them about their lives, and they tell me that they work in finance, commute into the city on weekdays, but come up here on weekends where it’s peaceful and there’s space. This is the life that I want, I think, but the path and the sacrifices seem unclear. Do I ask them bluntly, overtly– your life seems lovely and I want it, how do I get there? Seems like it would interrupt the flow of the conversations, so I smile and say nothing.

A pleasantly-pace dinner conversation ensues. Someone announces to the table that the cultural anthropologist has been selected to do something very prestigious (and pronounces the word like “prest-ih-gious”) and I know I’m in for a treat. Apparently she’s been selected to redesign the exhibit of one of those globally-renowned museums. I wonder again, what it’s like to be an actor in this world, do things that people know about, talk about.

Most everyone is international or third culture in some way, and half the table is conversing in Russian. Someone brought caviar and crepes, which apparently you’re supposed to load up with sour cream and fold into a hand-held roll. I say that it reminds me of Peking duck, and everyone seems to understand. I don’t know why I find that so surprising, but I guess I’m not used to being in a space where most everyone is effortlessly cultured, worldly.

They ask me about my job, and I’m grateful that it’s a recognizable name brand. When I first got the offer, none of my family or my friends back home had ever heard of it. But in this world here, somewhere upstate, everyone seems to know what it is. Perhaps one of the greatest comforts in life is not having to explain yourself; though I find more and more when I return home, the more I find myself explaining.

I say that the work is hard, but I feel like I’m learning a lot and that people are nice. I say that I’ve recently realized that real life is not like school, and people so rarely go out of their way to teach you things, which I find ultimately kind of unpleasant and disappointing. But my tone is fun and bubbly and people laugh. It’s good to be entertaining, optimistic, smile a lot. It’s gotten me this far in life, so I keep on going.

It’s night time, and we’re filing out on boats. The sun has long set, and fireflies come out like soft sparks gleaming gold. There’s going to be a fireworks show, and people are kayaking across the late to see it closer. I think it would be fun to kayak, but I’ve never kayaked before. So I sit out on the dock with my friend, and we talk into the night.

Later, I’m shown to where I’m staying. The house is wooden, beautiful, and at least three stories from what I can tell. There’s a mini elevator in the center of the winding stairs, and I learn it’s called a dumbwaiter and that back in the day it was used to transport food and cargo. I love old historical houses, there is so much quirk and character.

Incredible, I think, to be standing in a part of history in this way. Is this what I crave– story, narrative, legacy? I wonder why I’m so compelled, and if it’s because I feel displaced by being an immigrant, so far culturally and physically from my history, that I latch onto any semblance of something else that is old, that might connect me to the past, any past. Perhaps desire for legacy has something to do with fear of death, or maybe desire to be a part of something bigger. But I’m not thinking about that then, I’m just staring at the beautiful paintings on the wall.

At night, I look up my friend’s dad on LinkedIn. I realize that he co-founded a fund that I had applied to a couple of months ago and been rejected from. I can’t believe I wanted to work at this fund so badly– still do– and now I’m at the founder’s house. It’s strange, but I don’t think I can just ask him, hey can I work at your fund. I think you’ve met me as a person and think I’m cool, and I promise I’m smart enough and besides I’ll work really hard. Is that how it works? I’m not sure, and so I say nothing.

These social spaces always feel so foreign to me, but in some sense I’ve always felt foreign. From birth, with my immigrant background to growing up in the American South, to being a transplant in California, and now New York. I’ve always had a feeling that I never truly belonged, which makes me feel meek, afraid to take space. But then I think of my parents, how different their lives were in China, and what it took to learn English at thirty, start over. It gives me courage to try new things, meet new people, enter new worlds.

In the morning, I wake up much later than I’m used to. I’ve slept so well it’s unexpected. I go downstairs, pour myself some water, and duck past the french doors to walk about the property aimlessly. I walk all the way down to the lake, and it looks different in the daytime. The reflections of trees around it paint the edges green, and all the way on the other side I see houses that look like small castles. I wonder what it must be like to live here, have a small patch of grass to call my own, somewhere away from the hustle and bustle where time dilates differently.

The water is gorgeous, enrapturing to look at, the way it ripples with rhythm. The surface sparkles at the very top where the sunlight glazes the wave’s edge, but the water itself is a deep blue hue stretching out towards the forest. It’s so crystal clear, birds are chirping and the sun feels so warm against my skin. I jump in.

More so than usual, the last few days have been a flurry of simultaneously doing too much and not enough. I finally installed the AC in the living room even though it’s almost July. I’m late to things, and I make promises that I forget about. I get overwhelmed doing things, I get antsy doing nothing.

But I want to dignify some of the thoughts that have made a home in my mind. As I often write about, I admire my friends very deeply, and I feel lucky that they encounter (what I think) to be super cool or thought-provoking media that they send to me. I’ve liked these ideas so much that I want to share them here with you.

#1 Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism, depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han

Podcast by Philosophize This! (episode link here)

Someone recommended this to me, and it’s so good I’ve since forwarded this to over 10 people. Byung-Chul Han (the philospher discussed) writes about how our modern, achievement-driven society has made us obsessed with ourselves and our personal success to the point of narcissism. This is because, for the first time in history, we’re collectively burdened with the deeply existential question: What should I do with my life?

For example, centuries ago, there was no expectation of class ascension. You could feel relatively satisfied by completing a “good day’s work,” and you would never be incentivized to till the soil a little harder. Things are simple, you marry another serf you like, and you’re happy with your lot in life.

Nowadays, we are inundated with the “you can be anything you want narrative.” This might sound liberating, but actually creates overwhelming pressure to constantly “do better,” self-optimize, and measure our worth against that. No surprise, this leads to a large increase in depression, anxiety, and even plain self-contempt.

If you’re like me and stake a lot of your identity on your achievement, then listening to this is like taking a breath of air without even knowing you were underwater. Thankfully, Byung-Chul Han is pretty pragmatic and gives actionable solutions to these problems. It’s given me a refreshed look at what it means to enjoy things, take life for what it is, and really make space for other people. Give it a listen.

#2 Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.

Podcast by NYT’s The Interview (episode link here)

I’ve read snippets of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but I’ve never had a full glimpse or appreciation of Ocean Vuong’s life journey until this episode. He has some fascinating takes on goodness and kindness as an intrinsic property, and it makes me wonder about ways we can try to cultivate kindness intentionally in our lives. Also interesting is he shares his own life experience straddling two wholly social milieus and the loneliness that comes with class mobility. There’s a specific example that sticks in my mind of when he bails his cousin out of jail:

“Come to this 24-hour bail bond.” MacArthur genius? Who cares? New Yorker? Who cares? In a way, that’s refreshing… I don’t come home as Ocean Vuong, the writer, I come home as Ocean, the nephew, the cousin who’s gonna buy my new Yeezy’s.”

#3 The Materialists

This was such a fun watch! A hypermodern late-stage capitalist spin on the classic love triangle. Very beautiful people, very beautiful problems.

What I love about this film is (1) how it brings the conversation about wealth and love to the forefront and (2) that it portrays this conversation as inevitable and pragmatic. People may differ on where they land in this debate, but I believe strongly that this is a conversation worth having. If you believe that marriage is fundamentally a joint partnership, and one’s financial resources have a significant impact on the lived experience (we do live in society), well, there you go.

I can’t help but compare it to Celine Song’s only other film Past Lives, where Song again brings a very pragmatic take to love, romance, and marriage. Both movies make the distinction between true love and a successful marriage, and both movies explore how certain connections bond people forever. Romantic, no?

And this move had such banger quotes too. My favorite is by far:

We’re talking about people. People are people are people are people. They come as they are.

Snippets of thought-provoking text messages

• From L: People are super winner take all. The top 10% of people in my life contribute thousands of times more than the bottom 90%

• From P: As you get older, you realize all that fortune cookie shit is true1

• From S: How are you shaping the next season of your life? And personality traits will you adopt to to do this well?

There really isn’t a graceful way to end this post other than “hope you also enjoy this smattering of random philosophical things I find deeply interesting.” And the natural follow-up of: please comment here or in the group chat if you end up listening to any of these podcasts because I’m curious how it has affected you, too. Let’s be more kind and thoughtful together…? At the very least, think on it a bit more. That’s it for me for now.

1

Fortune cookie laundry list in question:

Lately on my commute through Midtown, I’ve noticed a new crowd milling about the lobbies of glass office buildings. Dressed in crisp suits and shined shoes, they smile so wide, walk with a bounce in their step, and look fresh out of high school—

Which means intern season is upon us.

There once was a time when I was a summer intern. I finished junior year, moved to San Francisco, and started my first big girl corporate internship. I wore ill-fitting slacks, roomed with fellow interns, and religiously attended Tuesday Happy Hour with a summer fling from Princeton who interned in private equity. Ah, what a time. 

But that was then. These days, I’ve been at the job long enough to manage an intern of my own, and suddenly, I’m the one being peppered with questions: What does it mean to be professional? How do I do a good job? How do I make the most out of this summer? 

What a great question that is: how do you make the most out of your summer? I sense their excitement, their nervousness, their eagerness, and I begin to craft a thoughtful response, things I wish I knew about when I first interned. Unlike a lot of kids, I didn’t have parents that were lawyers or businesspeople or anything like that. There was so much I didn’t know and so much I wish I did differently.

This is a letter to my 21-year-old self and all you summer interns out there.

What does it mean to get the most out of your intern summer? I didn’t have a super clear idea back then, but if I were to do it again, I would define “getting the most out of my summer” as: (1) having a lot of fun, (2) figuring out if this job was right for me, and (3) learning as much as I can. There’s also the part where you probably want a return offer, too, which happens to fold in nicely with “learning as much as you can.” So let’s talk about that first. 

On doing a job well done

I’m typically not one to advocate for putting in effort for effort’s sake, but there are pragmatic reasons to do well: you get a return offer and you end up learning more.

At this point, you’ve had your orientations and probably had many tips thrown at you as to what constitutes “doing a good job.” So think of this as a guide as to the few things that are most important when it comes to doing well.

I want to first orient you to the context of an internship. Most folks working there have probably been there for, at the very least a year– which means they’ve had a full year of focused experience where they clock-in and clock-out every week, 5 days a week, for at least 8 hours a day. They will do things at least 50 times faster than you, if not 100. However, for us, it’s extraordinarily fun and rewarding to have an intern and watch you learn and grow. 

Here are tips I shared with my intern buddy on what it means to do a good job: 

Tip #1: Take notes! If I could tattoo this to my forehead I would. Take notes! During meetings, details and comments will be flying through the air, and it feels like you have 2% of the context and you barely understand anything. Take notes anyways! There will be so much that you don’t know, and that’s okay. The best and fastest way to learn is simply by being the spongiest of sponges– pay attention and take notes! If you were to take away literally one thing from this essay, it should be this.

Candidly, you will probably be confused for the majority of the internship, and especially confused at the beginning. But you will learn the most and be the most engaged if you religiously take notes on everything for every meeting. 

And I mean everything. Write down who is there, what’s being talked about, questions being raised, word for word if you can. Try to keep track of who the head honchos (partners, managing directors, what have you) are, and what kinds of things they say— these are what other people will be thinking about the most. After all, once you start to really understand what everyone else is thinking about, then the job truly begins to click…

Tip #2. Ask questions! But ask good questions. 

Okay, so we’ve established that there’s going to be a lot of things you don’t know. That’s okay, we know this about you, and we do want to help you learn. But at the same time, we are balancing our very real priorities of getting other shit done. So please please ask questions, but know that there is an art to asking good questions. Below is a smattering of simple best practices when you are asking questions.

• When you don’t know something, always, always google or ChatGPT first. You might not know it because it’s internal jargon used instead of general industry terms. Doesn’t matter, spend the 5 seconds Googling. 

• Keep track of a list of questions. You don’t want to overwhelm your supervisor with pings all days, so if you have questions, track them somewhere. See if you can answer them yourself, and if you can’t, ask them when you see your supervisor next. 

Beyond that, constantly be asking yourself what you think is most important or how the pieces link together. When you show genuine enthusiasm and curiosity, other people will respond kindly… which brings me to last, but not least.

Tip #3: Have good vibes and be excited! 

This is super cheesy, but it’s real, I promise you. You are the annual most exciting thing to happen to the team. It is always so much more fun when you have someone who is young, eager to learn, and not yet jaded (kidding… sort of). People are excited to coach you! And the reason for that is: you are excited to be here! So show your enthusiasm, express curiosity about the things you are learning, the things that surprise or delight you. It is a refreshing reminder to us that it is a privilege to do the kind of work that we do, see interesting problems up close, have the perks we do. So go to Intern Happy Hour, and have a blast.

There are a number of other things that are best practice to follow. Try to have work that is easy to follow (remember showing your work in math class? You have a supervisor checking your work, so showing your work here is good too). Overcommunication is better than undercommunicating (but in batches or mini-meetings, not sporadic pings). Less work done correctly is better than more work done sloppily. These are all good to follow, and things you will learn in due time. But the important things still stand— take notes, take notes… and have fun!

My intern summer was one of my favorite summers I’ve had in my entire life. I kid you not when I say that summer changed my life. It felt like I was learning a lot, seemingly about everything. There was work, but there was also everything beyond that. I probably learned the most from the people around me– my intern friends, who I thought were so thoughtful, wicked smart, and had such interesting paths they were striving towards. It was a converging of paths, that summer intern house, trading stories back and forth of all the other things we’ve seen, tried, and wanted to do next.

Embrace what is to come. It’s a sweet ride ahead. Oh, and take notes.

This is Part 1 of my series on “how to make the most of your summer”, advice to summer interns. Maybe I’ll make a Part 2 on this that’s “how do I know if it’s a good fit for me” or “what to learn about yourself from this"…