If this resonates with you, check out what we’re building at ren.so

In the summer of 2030, wearable penetration in the US is 85% with over half of adults wearing one regularly. At-home blood testing makes it trivial to test blood monthly or even weekly. Continuous glucose and hormone monitors are mainstream.

Sensors are so cheap that millions of non-diabetic consumers try them. Biohacker subreddits and Discord groups discuss Biolinq’s new continuous multianalyte sensor that can track everything from ketones to electrolytes. Epigenetic testing is a common part of annual physicals and every baby gets their genome sequenced at birth.

The catalog of successful consumer passive tracking products continues to grow—Throne for toilet-integrated stool and urine analysis, AirPods for EEG, Eight Sleep for sleep tracking. Brain-computer interfaces are a proven tool for patients with neurological conditions while everyday consumers use tFUS devices to help with mood and focus.

The future of consumer health is exciting—implantable tooth sensors to track food intake, GI pills that measure gut health, and general purpose molecular sensing all have real paths to become hit consumer products in the next two years.

But healthcare has never just been about measurement and testing. Advances in hardware and testing make it easier to observe what is going on in patients’ bodies. The trend that matters, for the past decade and the next, is that the cost of producing causal evidence about oneself is falling. By orders of magnitude. Better, cheaper hardware, combined with smarter software, are driving down the cost curve that matters most for patients: how do I know if something worked for me?

Take blood glucose. Millions of people want to answer the question which foods are good or bad for my blood sugar? Ten years ago, running that experiment cost over $1,500 and required a doctor’s prescription:

Dexcom G5 receiver — $600
Dexcom G5 transmitter — $600
Dexcom G5 weekly sensor x4 — $300
Copay for doctor’s visit — $50

There were also no real consumer apps to track and analyze data. Five years later, the same experiment cost 75% less. The Dexcom G6 was a $400 transmitter, no receiver, and $300 for a month’s worth of sensors. The Libre 2 got rid of the transmitter entirely and cut sensor cost in half. Patients still needed a doctor’s prescription, but there were now consumer apps that could track and interpret their data—and companies like Levels and Nutrisense bundled sensors and an app for a $400/month subscription.

Today, anyone can buy CGM sensors over the counter for less than $100/month. Tracking apps are abundant and ChatGPT can analyze your data. That same experiment is now 95% cheaper than it was a decade ago.

Over the next five years, Chinese manufacturers entering the US market will reduce hardware costs another 30-50%. Improvements in wear time will double the lives of most sensors. Apple and others are working on optical sensing which could bundle glucose monitoring into a wearable. A $400 Apple Watch could give multiple years of sensing. There is a path to reducing costs another 90%.

N-of-1

Why does all this matter? Medicine and healthcare today are built around population averages. The randomized controlled trial is humanity’s best solution to a set of constraints—it was expensive to segment patients, coordinate them at scale, and measure them continuously.

Those constraints are lifting: wearables and D2C testing provide rich profiles that can segment populations by biology and proactively find subjects. Software can help coordinate thousands of patients anywhere in the world. And continuous measurement removes the need for centralized and expensive trial sites.

The individual does not care about population averages if they can get an answer about themselves. Phase III data matters much less in driving patient decisions if the n-of-1 data is easily obtainable. As the cost of acquiring data about oneself continues falling, we believe consumers will allocate their dollars and time to things that are proven to be effective for themselves.

What does the world look like if the cost of n-of-1 evidence continues to get cheaper?

The test slot economy

Consumers can now get an answer to “does X work for me?” in weeks. Answers are cheap, but not yet too cheap to meter. People still need to run the experiment—take a drug or supplement, wait for it to wash in, measure for long enough to get a statistically meaningful result. Most experiments will take around 4-8+ weeks. Stacking interventions that target the same thing hurts attribution. Some interventions will also have washout periods.

In a year, the average person probably has 40-45 clean experiment weeks where they aren’t sick or traveling. At 6 weeks per experiment, that yields a maximum of ~7 per year. With optimized scheduling and stacking, that might increase to 10 or 12 per year.

The scarce resource is test slots. Therefore the most important question is: what should I test/experiment with in my next slot(s)? Whoever can best answer that question will direct a large chunk of the $150B+ Americans spend out of pocket on supplements and drugs every year. This is one of the questions that Ren aims to answer for consumers.

Luckily, there is valuable data from other people who have run experiments. The first shape of business solving for the test slot economy is a database of verdicts from thousands of users, filterable along axes such as bloodwork, genomic markers, lifestyle, and goals. Experimentation is a multiplayer product where people get guidance from others who have committed time to running experiments on themselves.

The test slot allocator starts as a pull product that users actively go to and search, but as the corpus builds and individual response measurement gets better, it becomes a push product. It reads fixed and stateful data, and proactively recommends experiments that have the highest expected value: “try magnesium right now because your training load is increasing and your recovery is getting worse; people with similar profiles saw 2x the population average effect” or “your biological aging test showed aging pace at 1.2x and slightly elevated HbA1c; ask your physician about metformin because users with similar metabolic signatures saw aging pace drop by 30%.”

Over the next five years, testing and measurement will continue to improve and the cost curve will continue to fall. The behavior of self-experimentation will become ubiquitous, and the asset we are building is longitudinal data overlaid on observational data across millions of users. Each experiment is a labeled piece of training data. We will begin to predict how different interventions will perform without running the actual experiment. The simulator will replace the wind tunnel and we will make the test slot economy obsolete by making experiments too cheap to meter.

Today, consumers search PubMed or Reddit to see if magnesium will improve their sleep. Tomorrow, Ren will give them the answer along with what other interventions are most likely to help. We will denominate healthcare in outcomes and make it abundant for everyone.

Thank you to Kyle, Vishal, and others for thoughtful feedback and discussion.

Every business is subject to a form of gravity that makes it harder to survive. More competition, markets get saturated, new technology makes something obsolete. The world changes and the long arc of that change is that, over a long enough time horizon, margins compress as technology makes everything easier.

The job of an operator is to make sure the business adapts. And to build the business with structural advantages so that its resources and existing advantages get stronger as the business gets stronger.

For most of history, operators made decisions on decades, or at least multiyear, long time frames, primarily because factors like competition, market saturation, and new innovations were unlikely to have a material impact on a shorter time frame.

This is no longer the case. AI has compressed the timeline to create enterprise value. Never in history has it been easier to create software that makes money.

Simultaneously, humanity’s frontier capabilities are expanding extremely fast. What is possible vs impossible changes on timescales that we are not used to. You may build software for an occupation that does not exist in 24 months. Companies change how they allocate capital when they project SOTA models to be 10x better a year from today. The net effect is that EV can also be destroyed, at scale, very fast.

Vector databases are one example. The problem of “how do models access private data?” is a real problem and there are customers willing to pay real money for a solution. Two or three years ago this was the problem to solve and allocate capital to. Today, most incumbents have vector search. But what is more relevant is that a lot of this problem was solved simply by models getting better. GPT-3.5 launched with a context window of 4K tokens. Today, you can feed models 100x more data, they can call APIs, and search through file systems.

The half life of software-based EV has never been shorter. Things outside of software have always been slower to change—moving atoms is inherently slower than moving bits. But even in software, 20 years ago you could build an ostensibly simple and easily commoditized business, but figure out and develop structural advantages via execution. Many SaaS companies did this: build the product, sell to customers, do integrations—now you’ve created switching costs.

If your goal is to create, or allocate capital into, durable EV, it is becoming increasingly necessary to be precise about where durability comes from ahead of time. The characteristics of durable EV are largely the same. But the shorter half life of EV means it is much harder to earn durability through execution.

It’s easy to see how the friction to creating software is and will likely continue to approach zero, and it’s not an incredible leap to say something similar will happen to other business functions—creating marketing assets, recruiting, FP&A, etc.

When the friction to replicating anything approaches zero and you strip out all the LLM-written code, marketing materials, and automations from a business, what is left? The rate of decay will only increase from here. How will you build durable EV?

My big update for the year is that I dropped out of school. Long story short, I’ve joined Multicoin Capital to invest in early-stage crypto startups. 

I also successfully took a semester off of school, spent my first summer in New York City, turned a few internet friends into IRL friends, reached 1 year of the podcast, (unsuccessfully) returned to school, and ran a marathon.

12 months ago, I distinctly remember telling myself I’ll consider my gap semester to be a success if 12 months from now, my life looks very different. I was excited at the idea that my life could turn into something I couldn’t even imagine. 

With hindsight, I can say that type of romanticization is overrated. Stuff happens so quickly, you lose track of what you could or couldn’t imagine and it just becomes your daily life. Looking back on the year is the opposite of that Steve Jobs quote. It’s actually quite difficult to connect the dots looking back, but easy to do looking forward. In January, when life hasn’t completely resumed from the holiday season and the density of a full calendar year hasn’t dawned on you, it’s easy to come up with stories of what the year will be. In reality, very few years are punctuated by a single consistent story throughout.

What I learned

I read a tweet that criticized the mindset of “don’t take life too seriously, you don’t need to know what you want when you’re young.” 

I used to really believe that—and I still do—but the past year taught me that if you want something really bad, if you’re truly serious about it, the universe tries really hard to make it happen. But it does so in quiet ways. It takes the work you’ve put in months or years ago, and brings it back, surfacing it to the right people at the right moments. A cold email, a tweet passing through the timeline, a blog post you shared without thinking. The best opportunities always seem to pop up nonchalantly, hiding as casual moonshots among everything else you have going on in life. This was true for every single thing that happened to me in 2023. A year of great stories with inconspicuous beginnings.

Something I’m still learning is to have faith. At least twice this year, I felt lost, back-against-the-wall, and uncertain of the future. Both times, I turned out okay. I’m learning to have faith not only in myself, but in the world—that it is abundant enough in opportunity, goodwill, and luck to get you to where you need to be.

2024

This year, I’m going to take more things more seriously. Writing, reading, my health, my relationships. Good stuff happens when you lean into things.

I’m getting serious about building a lifestyle that’s aligned with what I want. When you’re in school, it’s easy to convince yourself that your lifestyle is subject to constraints—you don’t get to decide where you live, what to spend time on, and what’s important. For the first time, I’m in a position where I can literally design my life any way I want, and I want to take that privilege seriously.

Other stuff:

More rituals. I want to craft rituals that make me excited to live.

More “order of magnitude” changes. No more gradually easing into things—just 10x it and see what happens.

More feedback loops. More introspection, reflection, writing, and experimenting. I rarely find time to just sit and think about how my week went. I’m giving myself time to consolidate stories and think about what I want.

Bucket list things

1. Run a sub-5 minute mile

2. Host gatherings

3. Learn to surf

4. Dunk a basketball

5. Meet more internet friends IRL

6. Spend meaningful time in SF

2023 favorites

1. Favorite books: The Course of Love, Alain de Botton; Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami; Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins

2. Favorite places: Pier 2 (NYC), Mogutable (NYC), Caffè La Serra (Venice)

3. Favorite essays: salad days, The Dark Forest of R&D and Capital Deployment in AI, Things to Do in New York City

4. Favorite objects: New Balance shoes (993 and 2002R), AG1 water bottle, Audio Technica ATR2100X microphone

Discover Reddit in fourth grade through a CGP Grey video. Become fascinated with what it means to have "community" on the internet. Start with r/AskReddit and r/Jokes. Quickly figure out that the best stuff is always in the comments.

Read Reddit everyday. Notice that people online talk differently. They're funnier, wittier, and easier to understand. Make an account, but be too scared to say anything. Don’t worry, soon you’ll get bored of lurking and work up the nerve to comment. Help internet strangers build gaming PCs. Feel proud of yourself when someone thanks you for your advice. Feel a weird kinship with users in the subreddits you frequent. Stalk someone’s profile for the first time. Think about how cool it is that there is a digital history of someone's online life. Notice as you turn to Reddit for more and more of your interests: r/swimming then r/EDC then r/IOSsetups. Later on, r/debate, r/Formula1, and r/tennis. 

Start watching a sport for a reason you can't remember. Be confused at first. Realize that Reddit is by far the best place to learn about whatever sport you're watching. You can become an expert just by hanging around people who talk about it a lot. Read through old posts to learn the history. Figure out what people think of the athletes and teams. Spend too much in GOAT debate rabbitholes. You feel smart, but eventually you'll need to learn to think for yourself.

During this time you also get into podcasts. Maybe there were ones before, but Cortex is the first one you remember. It’s hosted by two people who make a living through creating stuff online. You don’t think this is all that cool right now, but it’s going to have a huge impact on you later on.

Get really really into productivity tools. Calendar apps, note-taking apps, todo apps (especially todo apps). Scare your friends with how much money you spend on them. Discover productivity YouTube: Watch videos on Notion, how to study effectively, the best books to read, and why you should be earning passive income. Realize that your obsession with productivity tools is actually an obsession with lifestyle design. Hear about Tim Ferriss and listen to his podcast. Have a desire to become great at whatever you end up doing. Listen to an episode with Naval. Learn about startups for the first time. Decide it's not for you, but keep it in the back of your mind. Watch Ali Abdaal. Decide that creating things is pretty cool. Start by taking notes on the books you read. Keep a journal. Continue watching Ali. One day, without thinking about it too much, you'll decide to start a blog. I guess if you hear an idea enough, it becomes obvious. Have no idea what to write. You try to emulate the writers and creators you admire, but all you end up with are posts about productivity software and life goals. They’re good enough to share in the moment, but a few months later you take them down out of embarrassment. That’s okay—it means you’re developing taste.

Make a website to host your writing. No views, but it feels good to publish something. Congratulations, you have graduated from consumer of the internet to contributor to the internet. Continue to follow your intuition about publishing—you don’t know why, but making something and putting it out into the world feels like the most meaningful thing there is.

Discover another podcast, this one changes your life. One of the hosts really likes Twitter. Decide to give it a try. It's just celebrities and famous people tweeting, and none of your friends are on it. Give up.

Start college. Have no idea what you want to do. Your friends say they want to go into finance. Some older friends are in consulting. You mostly just want to have a job you can be proud of. Spend a semester and a half stumbling around. One weekend, instead of writing an essay for your poli sci class, write an essay about Malcolm Gladwell and trans participation in sports. Be a bit scared to publish it. Do it anyway and find out that people appreciate your perspective. Decide to take writing more seriously. Follow some writers and podcast guests you liked on Twitter. Your timeline is a weird mix of tech bros and nomadic writers. You still don’t really know what the point of Twitter is or how to use it. Notice that people on Twitter talk differently. Different than real life, and different than Reddit too. The profile pictures on your timeline become familiar faces. Begin to form opinions about people and decide you like some better than others. Go see who they’re following and follow them too. Your feed is transforming into reflection of who you are and who you aspire to be.

Read a blog post about how to use Twitter. You need to reply to people and actually tweet. Huh. Start replying. It feels weird at first, and when you look back at your early replies, they are weird. You need to fine tune how serious you want to come off online. A few weeks in, you get your first follower. It’s a surreal feeling that someone liked what you said enough to follow you.

At some point, though I forget when exactly, you learn about crypto. You think it’s cool because no one really knows what they're doing and it's possible for a young person to become an expert. Join Farcaster. It's like Twitter, but there are only 1,000 people on it. Try saying something and be surprised that real people give you real answers. Have conversations on Farcaster. It's the first time you 1) are forming relationships that are based on intellectual connection and 2) are forming relationships that are based entirely online. Reach out to people. Video call with strangers. Most of them you only talk to once, but some you keep in touch with. A few months later, you’ll host a brunch and meet a dozen of them IRL. 

Double down on meeting people online. You make a rule for yourself—that whenever you read something you like, you’ll reach out to the author and ask to chat. You will have 50+ of these calls over the next year. Still be in awe, even as you write this, that you now have a handful of close friends whom you met on the internet. You start to expand your realm of possibility. The internet teaches you that a conversation with anyone is one (or two, or three) cold DM away.

Realize that Twitter is where culture propagates on the internet. It's where people share their most unpolished thoughts and where people are most willing to connect with strangers. If our physical lives happen at workplaces, campuses, and 3rd spaces, online life takes place on Twitter. Try to think about what your life would look like without Twitter, writing online, and the people you’ve met. It’s really hard to imagine because these things have had such a profound impact on you. It’s weird that almost every job you’ve had has come from Twitter, and you’ll be inviting internet friends to your wedding, and writing is something you’ll probably do for the rest of your life. It’s funny how all this means so much to you—this big game we call the internet. A microcosm of connection, status, and community that often feels greater and grander than the physical world. Feel grateful you found this place. That you are a citizen of the internet.

Updates & links

• I will be in Austin through October 21—say hi if you’re around!

• I finished Going Infinite and I think the criticism is overly harsh. It’s less an investigative piece into why FTX collapsed and more a vignette of SBF and his personality. In that context, I thought it was really good.

• Freestyle rapping is one of the most cognitively impressive things one can do. This video impresses me every time I watch it, especially J Cole and Juice WRLD.

I have a confession. I'm not sure what ambition really means. I know a popular definition has to do with goals: pursuing high status goals is ambitious.

I don't like this definition. Most people would consider wanting to be good at chess more ambitious than wanting to be good at video games, even though both are just made-up games. The distinction of what is high status is arbitrary.

Another definition has to do with difficultly. Someone is ambitious if they want to do a difficult thing. This is a little better. But would you say someone is ambitious solely for wanting to do a difficult thing? There is a difference between having an ambition and being ambitious.

Instead of first trying to define ambition, let’s see what qualities are prevalent across people we would consider to be ambitious. A common quality I see is a sense of discontent. Ambitious people aren’t satisfied until they get what they want.

I like this definition the best. It has less to do with the goal, and more to do with the attachment to the goal. To be ambitious is to want something really really bad. Bad enough that you actually go out there are try to make it happen. So bad that you can never be happy until you get it.

As a student, I've struggled with making school my full-time job. I think wouldn't it be nice to only focus on classes and getting good grades? life would be so straightforward.

I like the idea of only worrying about one thing. It gives you a clear purpose and direction. But school never feels like the right thing to be focusing on—there is always something else more exciting and more important.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he said it was a common experience for ambitious people. This caught me off guard because I don't consider myself extremely ambitious. I don't have a burning desire to change the world, make a billion dollars, or be the best at something. I also don’t have an urge to do difficult things.

But what I do have are strong feelings about how I want to live. I have an idea of what I want my life to look like, and I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied until I achieve it.

For the past few years, I've felt discontent—even unhappy at times—because there is a gap between the person I want to be and the person I am, and the path to closing that gap is unclear.

I'm anxious all the time, I think I’m behind in life, and I feel lost. I look at other people to see if they feel the same, but they don't worry and seem to have their lives figured out. I'm realizing that this is because we are ambitious in different ways.

I'm reading the new Elon Musk biography, and I’ve noticed that the qualities that make someone successful, often contribute to their flaws. For example, with Elon

• He is obsessive. This lets him work insane hours for long stretches of time, but also makes it hard for him to maintain personal relationships.

• He is laser focused and good at putting aside emotions. These traits help him make tough business decisions, but also make it hard to empathize with people.

My ambition, or whatever you want to call it, is why I do what I do. Every nonconventional thing I’ve pursued is, at least partly, a search for a missing piece that might close the gap between my current self and my ideal self. But it’s also the reason I’m discontent, anxious, and confused.

I don't know how to have one without the other, or if it's even possible. I don’t consider my ambition to be a bad thing. I’m glad I do what I do. Looking back at the last few years of my life, I’m really really happy with how I spend my time—even if it makes me unhappy.

Updates & links

• This Naval podcast was influential for me. The line that stands out is “desire is a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

• I’m on a journey to become a Strava influencer. If you would like to help, give me a follow.

• Some photos I took in Italy:

Bad beliefs can just take hold for some reason

Ideas just pop into our head. We think yeah drawing IS really hard, I could never be good at it and then spend years avoiding it. The worst part is when when you finally decide to overcome your fear and pick up a pencil, of course your drawing is going to be shitty because you’ve spent your whole life not drawing.

But if you continue to draw, you quickly realize drawing isn't as hard as you thought and you might actually be kinda good at it.

• I grew up believing I was bad at math. The exact moment I started believing this was in 6th grade when I found out I didn't qualify for my middle school math team. After that, I went through life genuinely thinking that math was something I’d never be good at. Later in high school, I chose not to test into an accelerated math class and picked debate as my extracurricular instead of math (which many of my classmates did).

• I used to think the 200 breaststroke was the hardest event in swimming. This belief can be traced to a humorous article in a swimming magazine that said the 200 breaststroke was the hardest. Unfortunately for me, I was a breaststroker and after I started to believe this, I dreaded swimming the 200 at meets.

Our mental models are sometimes wack

Someone came up with a way of thinking about something a long time ago and we just decided it was right. We might recognize that it's not really a good way of thinking, but no one has come up with something better to replace it.

• As a debater, the way you think about debate evolves like the midwit curve meme. At the beginning you are the dimwit and you think debate is a silly game where you have to convince the judge to vote for you with fancy words and smooth talking. Then you get introduced to technical debate and learn about offense differentials and prereqs (you are in the midwit stage). Then you finally realize the way to win is indeed to get the judge to vote for you. Sometimes that's with fancy words and smooth talking, other times with more complicated technical arguments. Some people never get past the midwit stage. They get stuck losing rounds and wondering why the judge screwed them. But in reality, their mental model for the game is what is screwing them.

• The way we hire is wrong. Interviews and technical assessments evaluate people over short periods of time while under pressure. For most jobs, people work over longer timeframes and under less pressure. To see how someone would actually do on the job, a work trial makes more sense.

• You don't have to check email 1000 times a day.

We get stuck using the wrong tools

A tool will be designed for one thing, and then that thing changes over time and the tool is no longer perfectly suited for the job. Or maybe a tool designed for one thing happens to be 90% good for something else so no one makes a specialized tool for the other thing and we end up stuck with a tool that is mostly good but not great.

• Web browsers might fall into this category. They were created when the internet was very young and web pages were very different. If you created a web browser from scratch, it’s hard to imagine that the interface would be the same (The reason this hasn’t happened is probably because people are used to the current interface and web browsers are very hard to make)

• The word processor is the wrong tool for writing first drafts.

Off-by-an-order-of-magnitude errors

Who decides on what the “reasonable” rate of progress is? Or what is an achievable goal? No one does, but for some reason, we don’t think we can be the ones to decide for ourselves.

You are probably severely underestimating what you’re capable of. Take your goals, your training program, your process… and 10x that shit. Sounds impossible? Maybe, but you should try just to be sure.

• I suspect this might be happening to me with my marathon training. On my long runs, my heart rate is very low, averaging less than 135 bpm. There is enough buffer to run 45-60 seconds faster per mile, while keeping a reasonable heart rate. The only way to find out is the try running faster.

• This guy who pulled 140% of his max deadlift because he miscounted the plates.

Updates & links

• New podcast episode coming out this week, I was traveling all last week and didn’t have time to edit.

• I’m a fan of the new Elon Musk biography. It’s an entertaining read + unique perspective that makes him seem incredibly human.

• Visited Mogutable, a delightful homegoods store, in Williamsburg.

• Discovered that NY pizza is better than Italian pizza (by a significant margin) and Italian gelato is better than American gelato (also by a significant margin).

• I want to write my own version of this.

This week, I'm exploring ideas related to craft, dedication, and doing great work.

I had a revelation about whether I actually want the things I tell myself I want. I say I want to write more, to become a better writer, to grow my audience, and to make writing a bigger part of my life. But if I look at how I spend my time, I dedicate a few minutes every day, and an hour or two over the weekend, to writing.

The time I spend writing isn't intentional either. I almost never dedicate time to improving my craft. I've been operating under the (lazy) assumption that just writing and reading will make me a better writer.

This might be true, but it's not the approach of someone truly dedicated to a goal. If you want to make the NBA, or were simply serious about getting better at basketball, you would do much more than shoot around casually a few times a week.

So what does it mean to be dedicated? To live a dedicated life?

I spend a lot of time reading books and listening to podcasts about people who've achieved great things. Every single one lived and breathed their craft.

Mike Tyson: "[fighting is] all I did because that's all I wanted to be... anything you asked me about fighting I could tell you"

Paul Graham: "Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem"

David Goggins: "Be more than motivated, be more than driven, become literally obsessed to the point where people think you're fucking nuts"

Not just in their mindset, but their habits and behaviors:

Cristóbal Balenciaga: sewed every day for over 70 years straight

Michael Phelps: didn't miss a day of training for 5 years

Kobe Bryant: would practice shooting and dribbling, even when he didn't have a ball

When I originally wrote about shifting scales, the core idea was compounding benefits. But in the context of dedication, shifting scales takes on a new meaning. I'm learning to shift my scale for what a dedicated life looks like. 

Paul Graham says you need to be spending unreasonable amounts of time on what you're working on. That means it should feel excessive and make you question whether you're doing the right thing.

I believe I know what dedication feels like. In high school, I was truly dedicated to becoming the best debater in the country. Back then, I would spend my nights and weekends doing research. Even after winning a round, I would re-give my speech hundreds of times, trying to get it as close to perfect as possible. I remember locking myself in the basement for hours saying the same words over and over again.

With writing, I've never thought too deeply about how to get better. My mindset has been focus on consistently producing rather than optimizing individual pieces. 

This makes sense if you're a hobbyist writer who spends 2 hours a week on writing. It's easier and more fun to write without worrying about editing, cutting, and the quality of your work. It also does make you a better writer over time, but the pace of progress isn't the pace of greatness.

With a hobby, you'll do it as often and as intensely as you can, while still having fun. But when you pursue greatness, you'll do it as often and as intensely as humanly possible, in order to become the best you can be. Hobbies turn into dedications when you become willing to tolerate pain.

To answer a question I asked in "successful people," dedication is one explanation for why success feels inevitable for certain people.

For example, Kobe Bryant, even from a very young age, was far more dedicated and obsessed than his peers. In high school, while other kids celebrated a canceled practice, Kobe was furious that he wouldn't get to work on his craft1.

How could someone like that not become great?

On the other end, can you imagine someone who writes 2 hours a week becoming a great writer? Maybe, but it feels more like wishful thinking than a sure thing.

Updates & links

• Released a podcast episode last week, listen here.

• Marathon training is ramping up—working my way into double digit mile runs this week.

• I’m going to be in Italy from Sep 24-29. Send me your favorite spots in Rome, Florence, and Venice! Follow along on my Corner.

• Enjoyed this essay on passions by Heather Havrilesky

• If you’re in NYC, you should join the Olive Tree Writing Club—I’ve had only good experiences meeting new people and getting new ideas..

One thing I didn’t like about daily writing last time around was that it didn’t encourage me to dig past my initial thoughts on something. There is only so much depth to be discovered in a single 15 minute writing session.

This time, I’m going to be compiling my thoughts from the week every Sunday and publishing an annotated + expanded version with (hopefully) more depth. The daily posts are shared on Twitter.

Progress

Regarding progress, the ideas I’m most drawn to are 1) markers of progress and 2) the weird feeling I experience upon reflecting and looking back.

How can we use markers of progress to motivate us to achieve long-term goals? In my original post, the idea I was getting is that we often lose track and lose faith in our processes. The mundanity of life can wear us down and make us forget why we’re doing something or that we’re even doing something at all.

However, markers of progress, and reflecting on those markers, remind us that change not only occurs, but it happens much faster and more intensely than we imagine.

The core feeling that you experience from reflecting on markers is that you no longer recognize part of the person you once were. You might remember what you we’re going through, but the feelings of anxiety/excitement/whatever don’t exist in the same way.

When I look at a photo of my first apartment in NYC from January, I remember the blend of eagerness and fear I had. But compare that to today, I’m different. If I went back, I wouldn’t feel the same. That is change, and if in the right direction, growth.

I’m the kind of person that has trouble putting in effort if I don’t see results. It honestly might be my greatest weakness—either a poor reception to delayed gratification or a lack of faith in myself and my processes. Either way, finding ways to measure and reflect on progress feels like it should help.

So far, all of the markers I’ve talked about measure the macro—the broad strokes of how my life is going. But what about for specific goals? I have trouble achieving the same level of emotional resonance. For example, if I want to read more books, reflecting on how many books I read the previous year or looking back on what books I was reading last year is a fun exercise, but doesn’t make me feel like a different person.

So maybe it’s an issue with the goal. It’s easy to get that weird fuzzy feeling of growth when your goal has a scope as big as your entire fucking life. But when it’s to read 25 books this year instead of 20, it’s less clear that growth is occurring.

One way to get around this is to tie even your small goals to the person you want to be. This is a strategy I learned when contemplating whether to take time off of school. I spent so much time thinking of what I wanted to do with my time off, and not enough time thinking about the kind of person I wanted to be coming out the other end.

So if your goal is to read more, set a number, but also consider how you want to change from reading those books. That might involve picking specific books for specific reasons (I want to read The Art of Gathering to become a social facilitator and host my friends) or writing a reflection on each book you end up reading (this book changed how I think about climate policy).

After all, what use is a goal if the process of achieving it doesn’t change you as a person?

Time off

I initially wrote that I was observing two different types of time off. However, I think they might actually be the same thing. Time off is when your behavior is no longer guided by external obligations. If you have no obligations at all, you might experience that sense of peace I wrote about (time off #1).

But as I wrote, that feeling is no way to live (at least for someone like me). Peace turns into restlessness. And in response, you might begin to create obligations for yourself. The key difference is that these obligations aren’t external—they’re motivated by, set by, and enforced by you.

If I were to put these ideas together into a single actionable piece of advice, it would be that time off is worth taking, whether it be via a gap year or an adult equivalent. We spend most of our lives living through external obligations (school, job, family) that few people get the chance to live out their own.

In order to figure out what matters to you, and how you want to spend your life, you need margin—time away from everything else.

The ideas above come in a variety of shapes and sizes:

• Paul Graham has written about the importance of deciding what to work on, discovering what you like, and relentlessly pruning bullshit from your life.

• Jake has written and talked about how his gap year in college and career changed his life for the better.

Salad days (and street photography)

This was my favorite concept from the week. I was rereading this essay and one of the comments praised the title (salad days). I’d never head of the phrase before, but I now know it is exactly what I’ve been seeking the past few years of my life.

Not just my lifestyle, but also in my writing style. I like sentences that perfectly articulate feelings of optimism, nostalgia, contentedness, and carefree living. My guess at why this writing resonates is that, right now, I have moments where I feel like I’m living through salad days, but it doesn’t feel like these are my salad days. Good writing takes me back to the salad day moments and reminds me that there were stretches where I was thriving (seemingly) effortlessly.

Many of the concepts I’ve written about are just as much aesthetics as they are tangible experiences. This is important because if you can embody an aesthetic, you can reap the benefits of the lived experience without the cause-effect you might think it requires.

For example, I was chatting with my friend Manansh who was offering advice to me about being bored in class. I would consider myself to be a curious person, but that curiosity is conditional—if I find something I click with, I can spend inordinate amounts of time learning about that thing. But what if you could adopt curiosity as an aesthetic? In other words, what if you were unconditionally curious?

This sounds odd at first because we’re so used to the cause-effect relationship of behavior. But just as we can unconditionally love, we can learn to be unconditionally curious.

With salad days, one way to think about it is that salad days are the effect of many things lining up in your life. Another way is to live as if you’re already in the salad days. Practically, this looks a lot like what I wrote in my street photography post: when you intentionally look for something, it’s easier to find more of it, and if you spend your life looking for it, you live a life of it.

Ingredients for a salad days aesthetic (just a starter kit, not comprehensive):

• moments where you think if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is

• acting spontaneously

• sunlight

• serendipitous interactions

• catching up with old friends

• waking up with too much energy

• good music

Updates & links

• This format is a new experiment—let me know what you think. Good stuff and bad stuff appreciated.

• I’m back at school. It’s a bit weird to be taking classes again after 9 months off. Not sure how I feel just yet.

• I enjoyed this essay from Nicole on falling into life.

• I have a podcast and we’re going to be releasing weekly episodes again. If you like what I write, you’ll probably enjoy it too.

It’s been a while since I’ve set aside time to write. Oddly, I haven’t felt a strong desire to do so. It doesn’t feel like something is missing from my life, though I do fear that I’m losing my sense of identity as a writer (hence this post).

I don’t know if I haven’t written anything because I don’t have anything to write about, or if I don’t have anything to write about because I haven’t written. For me, writing often is thinking.

So what’s been on my mind?

I’ve been inspired by unstructured writing. Two of my favorite Substacks, Bookbear Express and Griefbacon, are almost like diaries. Just collections of thoughts, slightly temporal and unpolished. So far, nearly all of my writing has been structured thoughtpieces, but I want Nonlinear to lean more in the direction of diary.

So what’s been on my mind?

1. Summer is coming to an end.

It went by really fast. I’m realizing that living “real” life is a lot harder than living at school, but also a lot more fun.

At school, your focus is singular and well-defined. There are assignments with clear instructions and deadlines—it’s just a matter of doing the work. Also, everything you need is in a very small area. You spend a surprising amount of time and energy just looking for and traveling to places.

But those things also make living at school less fun. Life feels inherently constrained. We go through the year never believing that a life-changing moment or serendipitous meeting could happen at school. It just doesn’t feel possible because life happens in such a bubble. It’s not sterile, but it’s reminiscent of a laboratory–confined, controlled, and safe.

But there are some parts I’m excited for. I look forward to having a routine that doesn’t blow up every week for some unexpected reason. And to getting back two hours every day not having to do all the things you need to do just to survive in New York.

2. I feel different.

Ahead of every semester, I feel optimistic about how my lifestyle will change. I won’t say it never does, but reality never seems to meet my optimism. I don’t know if this time will be different, but I think I am different as a person.

I feel like, for once, I have a little bit of breadth of experience in life. When I meet new people, I feel interesting even though I hate that I think that. So much of first impressions is optimizing your behavior to impress the other person—or at least leave a positive impression. I’m not entirely sure why, but that pressure is lighter recently. I’m more okay with surfacing my “true” personality earlier. I’m unapologetic in my first interactions. I talk more, though often at the cost of listening less.

In the context of my goals, I have a renewed drive to be more proactive with my social life. To become more of a facilitator—someone who reaches out, hosts, and finds new people—than a passive participant. Reflecting on why I wrote that, I’m unclear on what the bottleneck has been. Part of it is a nebulous discomfort with interacting with unfamiliar people. It’s not something I’m naturally inclined to, and requires extra effort and attention.

But maybe that’s changing. If you can build even the beginnings of a community in the “real” world, then building one at school begins to look easier.

3. How do you figure out what’s important?

I know some people who I’d characterize as very good at figuring out what is important in the context of short to medium term goals. Short to medium term being goals that are a bigger than “projects,” but don’t quite reach the level of life goals.

I have friends who made it their goal to break into a certain career, and did so relatively straightforwardly (?) and with seemingly minimal sacrifice and stress. I also have friends who, despite achieving the same goal, visibly struggled and sacrificed to get there. Some people are good at working on the right things while ignoring what doesn’t matter. It’s a really useful skill to have, especially as the time frame lengthens. It reminds me of Paul Graham’s "How To Do Great Work.” Figuring out what to work on is often the hardest, but most important thing to do.

When people have it figured out, the result is sprezzatura, one of my new favorite words. It means the appearance of effortlessness, ease, and nonchalance, that is actually the result of careful study and craft. I think sprezzatura is the result of figuring out what truly moves the needle, and working hard on those things while not caring about the rest.

Other things

• I enjoyed the most recent episode of Founders about Paul Graham

• My new favorite app is Corner (follow me!)

• Reading about what investing in AI looks like

• Will be in China for the second half of August, then Austin for a week, then Philly (let me know if you’re in town)

A few weeks ago, I heard an observation that has stuck with me: there are two sides of the fine dining spectrum.

On one end are places like Alinea in Chicago. The chefs are gastronomists—each dish is a wild and unique take on food that pushes our limits and what we believe is possible. We find depth in the creativity of the way the food is prepared and presented.

On the other end is a place like Jiro Ono in Japan. There, the dishes are stripped to the essentials with an emphasis on quality. The fish is sliced by sushi chefs who have been perfecting their craft for a literal lifetime. We find depth in the simplicity. We're not used to eating foods in their purest form, so the experience becomes something special.

This dynamic exists in at least one other place, though I suspect many more. In writing, there are two sides of what we consider to be great writing. Writing that is novel and breaks conceptions of what is allowed and possible. Shakespeare comes to mind—we find deep meaning in the complexity and ingenuity of his writing.

J Cole is another one. His lyrics have double and triple entendres, wrapped in hidden meanings and clever word play. The result is supremely innovative writing that takes multiple reads to understand and appreciate.

The other end is simple writing. Writing is beautiful when it can communicate something we ourselves can't articulate. Complex and squirming ideas in our brains that we can half-picture but struggle to form into words. William Zissner and Matt Levine come to mind for this.

I came across the phrase "photo-negative reflection" in a recent Helena Fitzgerald post (a writer I would classify as the latter type). Our tastes for good food and good writing are photo-negative reflections. Many things in life are photo-negative reflections.

I have a working theory that the human experience is really about the extremes—the minima and maxima of what you feel. Last year I wrote this about Federer's retirement:

A career's worth is not determined by how it stacks up against other greats. Nor is it determined by victories, slams, or titles. When you decide to move on from tennis into a new chapter of life, your career is about what you've experienced. What was it like to win your first slam, hit that tweener, or just feel the emotions of playing in front of a huge crowd.

You can decide to rank your career against others based purely on performance. Or you can decide to acknowledge your fortune to have experienced something that few (if any) people ever experience.

More recently, in conversations with a friend, we talked about how lengthening the range of possible experience as a point of optimization. What would it mean if you were happy all the time? What would that feel like and what does it even mean to be happy?

One view might be that emotions aren't sacred and how we feel is a result of some chemical reactions in the brain. But given that we don't really have a way to inject happiness into ourselves (opiates aside), the search for extremes feels worthwhile.

I’m back in NYC for the summer—say hi if you’re around!

The NBA playoffs

The NBA playoffs (go sixers) have been going on for the past three weeks which means there are games worth watching nearly every day. My baseline quality of life is a bit higher knowing that, on any given day, there are many hours of basketball available to watch if I want. It's like having a TV show that you're really into and look forward to watching every night or weekend.

Building things to look forward to, even small things like episodes of a TV show, into your life is a high leverage and underrated way of improving baseline levels of happiness. They say half the fun is anticipation, so wouldn’t it be nice to be anticipating all the time?

I advocate for this practice, but on multiple scales. You should have a daily or weekly thing to look forward to like a TV show or brunch with friends. Something small that occurs frequently.

You should also have something more substantial to look forward to on the 6-18 month time horizon. Maybe moving to a new city, getting a promotion, running a marathon, or launching a project. Most people do a decent job at this (even if unintentional) because the structure of life is somewhat conducive to big milestones every year or so.

Finally, you should have something slightly more substantial than your daily/weekly things that happens every month or so. My freshman year of college was pass/fail so I had quite a bit of free time on my hands. My thing to look forward to was trips scattered throughout the semester. Every few weeks, I'd visit a friend or meet them in a new city for a weekend. I scheduled them often enough that it always felt like one was around the corner, and it made life a lot more enjoyable.

Songs that make you feel alive

I talked about this on the podcast, but I recently discovered how powerful music is as a way to influence mood. Well maybe I already knew that, but now I'm actually using it to make my life better.

I listen to music when I wake up to help me get out of bed and it just makes the start of the day more positive. Sounds corny, but it's legit. You can also put on music when you're feeling tired and you'll find a new wave of energy.

I also listen to single songs on repeat when working. I'm not sure why, but it's really effective for when I'm writing and makes the process more fun.

What I'm listening to right now: Coffee Cake (Benson Boone)

This one coffee place in Brooklyn

When I was living in New York, there was this one coffee place I frequented (the name will remain a secret because I don't want it to get crowded). I did a ton of solid writing and work at that place and I'm convinced it might be one of best places to park yourself for an afternoon in the city.

It has pretty good coffee (not a coffee snob so my standards aren't too high) and a nicely decorated + spacious interior for working. The people who work there are nice and the place has all the amenities I need for a multi-hour visit: bathroom, wifi, outlets, and a variety of seating options (regular tables, high tables, a couch, and outdoor seating).

And most importantly, it's never crowded. It's one of the few coffee shops I've been to anywhere that consistently has a table available. On top of that, it's a block away from a much more popular coffee place that 1) isn't as nice and 2) is always crowded.

Every time I go, it feels like I've stumbled upon a secret hidden gem. Everyone else pours into the well known place while I look at the crowd inside through the windows and go straight to mine.

Silly internet games

Specifically, silly internet games that go way deeper than necessary or expected. The ones I'm a fan of are Basketball GM and Universal Paperclips.

These are, on the surface, silly internet games. But they are delightfully detailed with more depth than one can appreciate, even after many hours of play.

I like it when things are crafted. When a product is given more attention than it should under any reasonable standard. When it is clear it was made by someone obsessed with it.

Basketball GM, in particular, is endlessly playable. I've spent hours just looking at the stats from my past seasons just because they go so deep. Everything you could possible want to know is there.

Nice weather in a big city

The first nice day of the year in a big city is special. I don't think what I have to say about this will be better than what Helena Fitzgerald has already written so I'll just point you here.

Within the tech and tech-adjacent circles I’m part of on the internet, a number of essays and tweets have been making the rounds about what makes someone a person you want to spend time with.

This is definitely a worthwhile question to answer. So much of our life experience is colored by the people we share it with. However, there is a concerning amount of emphasis on having friends and seeking out people who are smart, thoughtful, and (the worst one of all) “interesting.”

The obsession with interesting makes me uneasy. Friends aren’t resources for intellectual stimulation or new insights. I don’t want my friends to like me because I read niche blogs or have things to say about crypto. It comes dangerously close to conflating knowing a lot, reading a lot, or having thoughtful things to say with moral goodness. (Worth noting that interesting isn’t a negative trait. I would prefer my friends to be interesting, but it feels superficial to prioritize it.)

If I think about what kind of person I want to be close friends with—my best man at my wedding, people I would do anything for, the ones I can rely on when I’m at my lowest—smart and interesting really aren’t front of mind.

On top of that, it doesn’t feel right to pressure people to be “interesting” in your sense of the word. Everyone is interesting. Every person in the world has a literal lifetime of experiences that have shaped who they are. They have internal thought processes and distinct worldviews that you won’t find within anyone else. It’s a matter of giving your interactions enough time and care to discover these.

You shouldn’t feel obligated to be friends with everyone or pressured to get along with all people, but “interestingness” is a poor heuristic for finding genuine connection. It’s time we realign our priorities and recognize that our preoccupation with being interesting is symptomatic of a flawed view of friendship.

Ava of Bookbear Express made an observation I think about often:

It’s not about what you find intellectually cool, or what seems like the best “opportunity.” Those things can be important too, but they don’t matter if you hate doing the thing…

You have to do the thing you actually enjoy doing, not the thing you find conceptually exciting.

It’s easy to convince yourself you get along with someone because you like the same books or because they’re extremely perceptive in conversation. You can be intellectually stimulated when you spend time with them, but the feeling of leaving a thoughtful conversation is qualitatively different than the feeling of returning from a night of karaoke.

There is intellectual fun, and there is fun—old-fashioned, forget about the world, I could do this forever type fun. You might think you could spend the rest of your life debating AGI, but you’d be missing out on the fun that lets you surrender to life.

There’s a tendency to romanticize and overrate relationships with intellectually compatible people because we can clearly imagine how they play out. We can see how the other person might make us more thoughtful and inspired. We have ideas and fantasies of the person we’ll become after years of friendship.

But for friends we have old-fashioned fun with, it’s harder to see the evolution. We can imagine having a good time, but it feels like eating junk food—great in the moment, but not contributing to our long-term goals. This is wrong and short-sighted.

When have you felt most alive? What moments have changed you? The moments that come to mind often arrive in unexpected ways. If I think about my favorite (and most meaningful) interactions, they’re rooted in the emotional rather than intellectual. We attach more meaning and weight to moments that deliver raw, limbic resonance. The stuff of hearts, not minds.

Aspiration and ambition

The obsession with interestingness comes from a model of friendship that views friends as vehicles for ambition: you have an idea of what you want out of life, and friends are chosen with those priorities in mind.

An alternative view is that friends are aspirational. You know you will change and grow, you acknowledge you don’t know for certain where you’re going, and your friends are the people you most want to share that journey with.

This is all pretty woo-woo and hand-wavey, so here’s Agnes Callard to clarify the distinction:

Ambition is the process of improving one’s lot by making a large change whose value one fully grasps in advance. It aims to satisfy desires rather than to acquire desires.1

Prioritizing interestingness makes sense if you view friendship closer to the ambition end of the spectrum. You have an existing value system and friends are selected to maximize whatever utility function you’ve decided on.

The thought process might go something like if I curate my friends and optimize for smart/thoughtful/interesting then my life will be richer with the ideas and interactions I care about.

For example, you might want friends to:

• Inspire you to be more ambitious because you value doing big things and having an impact on the world

• Make you think deeply about topics because you value intellectual curiosity

• Teach you about things because knowledge in those areas contributes to your goals (career, personal, whatever)

Notice, these are not bad things. You could do a whole worse than seek out people who inspire you and teach you new things. But what if we viewed friends as more aspirational?

Aspiration, according to Callard, is “the process of value acquisition.” It’s how we learn to see the world in new ways:

If you just think about most of the things that you value right now, like in relation to your career, your kids, some hobbies you have, some of your, like, political values or ideology—if you just go back far enough, there'll be some point in your life when you didn't value those things…

Aspiration is how you got from there to here. How you came to care about the things that you care about.2

Rather than curating friends based on our first-order values, our friends are ways to develop our values and how we see the world. And I don’t mean through emulation, but just from sharing experiences. So instead you might want friends who:

• Will make every effort to be there at important moments in your life

• You trust deeply and feel comfortable sharing with

• Instinctively ask you to join them in whatever they’re doing

It’s difficult to visualize how these friends will make our lives richer because they end up shaping how we see the world. Today, there are things you value that you didn’t 10 years ago. What you consider the “good life” today is different than a decade ago. Your idea of thriving back then might be a bleak existence today.

This view acknowledges that there is more to friendship than what can be gleaned for our immediate goals and that sometimes people can influence us enough to fundamentally change who we are.

This comes closer to the core of my aversion to interestingness. Prioritizing it feels cold and arrogant. To be so sure about something so complex and nuanced as what you want to value in life. It doesn’t leave room for you to be completely and utterly wrong about something core to who you are.

A new north star

Given all of this, what should we look for in friends? What is a better north star to guide our relationships?

One thing I keep coming back to is open-mindedness. I’m drawn to people who don’t take themselves too seriously. People who move through life with a certain nonchalance that makes them eager for the unconventional and unusual. These people can laugh about anything and like to have fun.

Something I appreciated when living in Austin was my friends’ willingness to do anything at any time. Basketball until 1am? Yeah, we got five. Someone wants to go to happy hour? There’s a group ready to join you. I remember us discussing a Super Bowl watch party literal hours ahead of kickoff. Nothing was planned yet, but there was never a doubt that we would get something going.

These friends expand our boxes of possible experience. Spontaneity and unconstrained eagerness feel good because they are exercises in doing without thinking too much. Having the thought I want to do this, and then immediately being able to do the thing with people you care about silences the voice of “reason” in our heads.

When we surround ourselves with open-minded people, we are able to live the life of our intuition. We act on what feels right before we can convince ourselves otherwise.

Without these people, we rationalize reasons to stay in the comfort zone. We limit our aspirational opportunities and we never give ourselves the chance to have our minds changed and our world opened up. Far more than the ability to talk deeply about a Substack essay, write code to solve difficult problems, or ask thoughtful questions, we should value the people who stop us from turning our instincts into unmade decisions.

So stop looking for interesting friends3. Actually, it might be the best move to ignore everything I’ve written up to this and give up the idea of seeking out an archetype of a person or even specific traits or indicators. The premise that we can intellectualize and hack our way to the most meaningful friendships is, very likely, misguided.

Socialization is a really fundamental part of the human experience. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe we weren’t meant to think too hard about what goes into a good friendship. Maybe thinking is simply the wrong tool for the job. We don’t need words, precise concepts, or standardized signals for friends we like in order to identify them.

For all the people who have written about what goes into making a person magnetic or attractive as a friend, putting words to a feeling doesn’t make the feeling any more real. You’ll still know when you just click with someone, and you’ll still experience the highs of friendship even if you don’t realize why.

On the spectrum of a calculated search for friends to an unconditional acceptance of people, we might all do better to lean the other way.

Thanks to Manansh for reading drafts and helping me think about this topic.

Negativity is fun. This is an expansion on what I previously wrote:

It’s also boring to be positive about things. Being positive is the agreeable thing to do—the default perspective. You’re positive when you’re trying to be polite and not piss anyone off or disqualify yourself. When you say you don’t like something, that’s less agreeable. You run the risk of alienating someone or coming off poorly, and it’s this risk that gives people the sense you’re being authentic.

Asking someone what they think is overrated is a great question. Just make sure you hold the line on what counts as overrated. Here’s why:

• It’s good material to connect on, especially if you have the same or opposite opinions.

• It’s not a common thing to ask. The novelty can lead conversation to unexpected places.

• But the best thing it does is reveal something about their taste. Also asking for something they think is underrated is the ultimate combo. You figure out where they form their own opinions, detached from popular sentiment and external influence.

Things I think are overrated

• Titanic

  • This movie has no business being 3+ hours long. You need Godfather-tier acting and writing to pull that off, which this movie doesn’t come close to.

• Contra

  • I mean, it’s interesting and you should consider a visit for the novelty, but definitely not worth a Michelin star and $150+ per person.

• Milk Bar

  • I don’t know why anyone goes here.

• Los Tacos No. 1

  • Mostly a symptom of all Mexican food in NYC being extremely mid.

• Work-life balance

• Getting good grades

  • Depends on what you want to do (grades are probably important if you want to go to grad school), but I think students spend too much energy relative to what it get’s them + don’t consider the high opportunity cost.

• Working on things that are “venture scale”

• Solo travel

  • It’s about people, not places.

• Being “interesting”

  • I will probably have an entire post dedicated to this, but it’s something I feel strongly about. Within the tech/tech-adjacent circles I’m part of on the internet, there is a concerning amount of emphasis placed on having friends that are smart, thoughtful, and “interesting” people. Not saying those are bad traits (they’re very good traits actually), but they really shouldn’t be in your top five characteristics to look for in close friends, IMO.

• The AMEX Platinum card

• Self-help books

• Museums

Things I think are underrated

• Jurassic World

  • This movie is fun and endlessly rewatchable.

• McDonalds

• Joining Twitter

  • Legitimately life-changing for me. Why we aren’t encouraging all young people to do this, I do not know.

• Group trips

• Sitting in silence, together

  • It’s peak connection.

• Attending college sports games (D1)

  • Some of the most intense camaraderie I’ve ever felt. Pure energy, in the best way possible (I say D1 because I think there is a minimum threshold of spectators in the stadium for this to work).

• Pickup basketball as a way to make friends

• Being a vibes/energy person

  • In tech, there’s lots of status associated with being highly technical/a great engineer. However, just as important are people who consistently bring positive energy to a team. Someone who shows up day in, day out and makes everyone else happier and work more fun.

• The AMEX Gold card

• Listening to the same song over and over again

  • Especially useful for when you’re working.

• Academia as a career

• Lifestyle businesses

• James Harden

• Finding fulfillment outside of work/career

When I swam, my coach would write out the working set on a whiteboard. Some days the set was easy, most days it was hard. But every couple weeks, there would be a monster on the board. Something off-the-charts difficult, a set that made your chest tight and breathing shallow. You would look at the squiggles on the board and suddenly be overwhelmed with a sense of doom.

You know in two hours, you’ll have swam what’s on the board, but you have no idea how. It appears impossible and unconquerable. 

For the first few months of my time off from school, I was working at a startup. We were a small team, just three people for most of my time there. One of the funny things about working a startup is that no one really knows what they’re doing. This can be good because it gives you a lot of freedom. But it sometimes sucks because no one has been where you are going. There are no rules, best practices, or pre-outlined steps for how to do your job.

My first month there, we had a goal of hitting a certain number of users. As we approached the deadline, it was becoming increasingly doubtful we would hit our goal. What do you do in this situation? There is a seemingly impossible thing that has to get done and there are no sure ways to succeed. You just have to stare down the challenge and do it.

What I felt while working was uncannily similar to what I felt looking at difficult sets as a swimmer. How do we react when we face a challenge that we must overcome, but can’t even see the path to doing so?

I’ve read other people write about “staring into the abyss.” Even though it seems they are getting at different ideas, I like the phrase and it feels like the right way to describe what I’m referring to. Looking at insurmountable challenges is like desperately searching for an answer that doesn’t yet exist. You scan what you know and what’s already been done, but you don’t find what you’re looking for.

I’m advocating for people to put themselves in situations where they have to stare down at the abyss more often. It’s one of the most uncomfortable things you can do, but you can see and feel the personal growth happen in real time. 

Learning is literally when you previously didn’t know something but now you do. Your mind has to struggle and make connections that didn’t before exist. Facing challenges that you have no idea how to solve is like injecting this process into your veins. You have something you not only don’t know, but have no idea what the process is.

You start by looking at the levers you’ve already pulled. You think maybe I just need to try harder. Sometimes this works. This is actually how I got through most of my swim practices which makes sense when you realize that one of the main levers for improving at swimming is your cardiovascular endurance.

But for more complex problems, try harder only gets you so far. Instead, it requires you to discover new levers and do things you didn’t know were “allowed” to do (stuff like cold emailing, starting a company, doing things that don’t scale, making wacky internal tools and dashboards).

It also increases your sense of self-efficacy and agency. To look back and know that you did something you previously didn’t think was possible. The weird thing is, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what you learn from living through these experiences. The value is less of a tangible/technical/hard skill and more strengthening your ingenuity muscle.

I came across this thought1 on Plexus:

I feel like we need to have more respect for people that epically fail. My heart cannot take epic failure but my mind wants to take big risks. I think we need to have less conversations like “you’ll get em next time” and more conversations around what did you actually learn and what did it empower you to do next or how do you plan on recovering. Failure is such an emotional experience, it breaks a ton of people and is probably the most human thing you can do and one of the most vulnerable.

Our hearts cannot take failure, but our minds recognize the value in taking risks. 

Something I heard a while back that has stuck with me is self-confidence is built by setting out to do hard things and then doing them. It’s a rewiring of your thinking—where you train yourself to believe when you say you’ll accomplish something.

Staring into the abyss trains you to believe you can figure out the answers to unanswered problems and the solutions to insurmountable challenges. It doesn’t make you immune to failure, but your heart becomes a little less scared.

I dislike a year as a time period for goals and making life changes. Priorities change and what you want in January is going to be different from what you want in August and December. What ends up happening is that goals set in January reflect how I was feeling at that time.

Now that we’re officially into Q2 of 2023, I thought it would be a good time to check in and see how things are going.

I’m mirroring the format of the original post. The optimal way to read this might be side-by-side with the original post.

Keep doing

• Travel. Outside of trips between NYC and home, I’ve only been to Austin (twice) and San Antonio this year. I don’t have any solid plans, but would like to visit Philly in the next few weeks and China at some point in 2023. Other than that, it’s more of a wait-and-see kinda thing.

• Spending time with close friends. I lived in Austin for basically all of February and it was nice. Coming to New York, I underestimated how hard it would be to cultivate a social life with all my friends still at school. Living among your friends is an underrated aspect of the college experience and my time in Austin emphasized that. Coming back to NYC from Austin felt a bit like the depression you feel after finishing a TV show: there was a hole in my life where all my friends used to be.

Less of

• Fake work. More on this below.

More of

• Reading. I read a lot in January, very little in February, and have been trying to get back into it March - now. In January, I deleted Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter from my phone and spent my morning commute reading on the Kindle app. I blazed through Money Games (would recommend) and Robert Iger’s memoir (also recommend). Since then, I’m not sure if the books I’m reading are less interesting but, I’ve been bouncing between a couple without making significant progress on any (except for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow which was very good).

• Writing. Pleasantly surprised at how this is going. I had a slow start to the year because work was taking up most of my time, but since leaving, I’ve made progress in the places I wanted to. I published my piece on EchoShadow ahead of the unofficial deadline I set for myself, and have been writing consistently since then. I also had somewhat of a revelation for what I want out of writing online, and writing has become one of the things I’m most excited for in 2023.

• Community at school. No progress to report because I’m not at school, but my mindset towards this is pretty similar to what I was feeling in January. I haven’t been doing the best job of keeping up with friends from school and other parts of my life. To remedy this, I’m experimenting with a “personal CRM” in Notion to track the last time I spoke with someone and how regularly I’d like to catch up with them.

Stop doing

• Energy drainers at school. In January, I said I didn’t want to take classes that take up a lot of time and/or I don’t enjoy. My mind is a bit split on this because I don’t want to use it as an excuse for avoiding hard things (foreshadowing). In an ideal world, I’d take challenging classes and use them as an opportunity to learn and grow. However, from experience, I know that I’m more likely to end up resenting the class and either underperforming or doing the bare minimum to get by. I don’t have a solution I’m satisfied with yet.

Start

• “Real work” and embracing hard things. Looking back, I didn’t have the right mental model for real and fake work. It’s a two-sided issue: stop doing fake work and start doing real work. I’ve done a good job at avoiding the intellectually stimulating, but ultimately not important, fake work. But it hasn’t had the desired effects on my life because I don’t think I’ve fully embraced the other side. I like to think I did real work at my job—I certainly learned a lot. But outside of work, I can’t confidently say I’ve embraced real work and hard things.

  • My mindset frequently switches on the hard things aspect. A line (I forget from who) I resonate a lot with is what if it were easy? I think there are invisible life scripts and stories we tell ourselves that convince us to grit our teeth and power through when small changes that make things “easier” might be better for achieving our goals.

  • One area I’m thinking this way is how to schedule my day. In January and March, I woke up at 7:30/8:00 most days and went to the gym. Getting out of bed was a real struggle and I fell into a slump towards the end of the day. The obvious solution would be to wake up later and go to the gym in the afternoon when I find myself getting less focused. That’s what I’m trying now, but I avoided this because it felt like taking the easy way out.

  • There’s definitely a balance to be struck. My latest line of thinking is that I should have specific activities set aside for the sole purpose of challenging me. Something like a long run every weekend. That way, I can do what works best for me, but also keep a level of challenge and difficulty in my life.

Bucket list things

• The only item I’ve worked on is the marathon. I ran a few times when I was in Austin, and since returning to New York I’ve tried to keep that going (mostly on the treadmill because it’s cold). Now that the weather is warming up, I’m going to find a route/trail and do more road running.

Other observations and notes

• Williamsburg is a much better place to live than lower Manhattan. I’m currently in the LES/Chinatown area and it feels so chaotic all the time. Traffic sounds, people, and too many subway lines to keep track of. Living in Williamsburg feels more realistic for someone like me.

• I constantly feel FOMO/like I’m not taking full advantage of living here. Not only are there lots of things to do, but living here enables you to do things you can’t elsewhere. There’s a pressure to be meeting people, going to events, and visiting new places all the time. It’s unreasonable to do everything, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m squandering an opportunity.

  • I think part of this is that I’m only here for a bit. I like the idea of living in a place because living in a place is an ongoing process of uncovering a it. Through the roots you put down, you find areas that speak to you.

• Something I’m thinking about more and more is that to succeed on unconventional paths, you need some level of irrational belief and faith that things will work out. I had a tough time readjusting to New York after a month in Austin. There was a period of maybe a week or two where I would get tightness in my chest (anxiety related, I think) at random moments throughout the day. It eventually went away, along with most of my apprehensions around moving back.

  • Bigger picture, it’s been a whole separate journey trying to make sense of how I’m spending my time. Sometimes, I get the sense my life in on pause while all my friends are making progress. Other times, I feel incredibly grateful that I get to do all these weird and wonderful things. I’m becoming more confident that I can make something out of any situation, and that I’m smart enough and can work hard enough to end up somewhere I want to be, regardless of what happens.

I was a debate kid in high school. I competed in public forum all four years, though I'd say I only started taking it seriously my sophomore year.

I was pretty good at it—my senior year, my partner and I were pretty confident we could beat any team in the country, and we went into tournaments with the intention to win, not just break or reach a certain outround.

Debate is no longer a part of my life, but it was one of the most influential and important things I've ever done. Competitive debate is unique and trains you to think in ways you can't get elsewhere. This is everything I have to say about debate.

1. Debate is not about persuasion

At the highest level, debate is a technical game with distinct and objective win conditions. This is the reason you might have seen videos of high school kids speed-talking at 300 words per minute. They're not trying to persuade the judge in the conventional sense. They talk fast because debate is a game of competing arguments and being able to say more is an advantage, all other things equal.

2. Learn to identify win conditions

Debate has very clear win conditions. Most technical judges operate on an offense-defense model. You win the round if you achieve an offense differential over your opponent. In that sense, it's much simpler than you might initially believe. 

In life, it's helpful to be clear and precise about what success means. Figure out what needs to get done and work from there.

3. If you're not winning, you don't actually understand it

I don't think I truly understood debate until halfway through my junior year. Looking back, it's almost like I wasn't even sentient my first two and a half years. I had no idea what I was doing and the little success I had could probably be attributed to luck.

But after internalizing several fundamental concepts around debate, I started to see success—more consistently and to a greater magnitude. Once you understand how debate works, at its deepest level—I'm talking the axioms of the activity—what to say in a speech becomes obvious 99 percent of the time.

The hard part is that before you do, it's hard to tell you haven't. You don't know what you don't know. Anything you work on outside of understanding debate at its core is peanuts compared to actually figuring it out.

You might think you get it, but if you did you would be winning tournaments.

In real-life, I sometimes get a similar feeling that some people just have it figured out. The game of life is less defined so it's hard to make a blanket statement that you can just “figure it out,” but I think it's worth trying to determine what axioms or core principles you need to understand to have outsized advantages in life.

4. Once you figure out the game, it comes down to effort

After you figure out debate, most of your gains are found through topic research and prepping out specific teams and strategies. If the teams you'll inevitably face in late outrounds all understand the game, it will come down to what kind of informational advantage you have.

Part of this is information about the arguments—do you have better responses, responses to their responses, etc. Some of it is also specific information about the team—what is their strategy, what are their weaknesses, etc. To win, you need to learn this and it really comes down to how much time you're willing to put in.

I still practiced more conceptual stuff, like refining speeches and strategy. But most of it was topic specific and the rest yielded only marginal improvements. I will say that speech redos specifically were great for building round vision and confidence. Many hours were spent re-giving speeches from rounds that I won in order to make them as close to perfect as possible.

5. Big wins can unlock potential

Honestly, this might be in tension with #3, but big successes are often breakthrough moments in debate. There are many teams who, after one big tournament run, become perpetual presences in deep outrounds of tournaments. Maybe it's because they figured out debate before their big run, but sometimes it's a mental block.

A real-life analogy might be Roger Bannister and the four minute mile. People can easily convince themselves that something is unattainable without good reason for believing so. Sometimes it takes someone doing the "impossible" to recalibrate expectations and goals.

6. People make decisions for a reason, even if it doesn't make sense to you

Debaters love to complain about judges. "Lay judges"—judges who don't evaluate rounds as a technical game—receive the most complaints. This usually happens because debaters debate as if the round is being evaluated on the offense-defense model when in reality, the judge has a completely different model for how debate works.

The true win condition of every debate round is to get the judge to vote for you. We don't typically think of it like this because it's not practical, but it does reveal an insight.

The judge has to vote. At the end of the round, they must move their mouse on Tabroom1 and select a winning team. Something is going on in their minds when this happens, whether or not it makes sense. Maybe one team had a banger line in one of their speeches, maybe one team was dressed better, maybe the judge just flipped a coin—but there is always a reason.

As a debater, you need to figure out what mental model the judge is operating under. It is a failure on your end if you can't effectively communicate a reason to vote for them. Understand this and dealing with lay judges becomes much more bearable.

7. Debate is a hive-mind (and the best debaters take advantage of this)

A funny thing would happen in the debate world. If a successful team said something that sounded cool, the entire debate circuit would start to parrot it. If enough people start saying something, everyone beings to think it's true.

This took the form of catchphrases, clever responses, analogies, and even entire arguments. Certain ideas, if they caught on, became ingrained in the debate meta and people would accept them as true without scrutiny.

The best teams would take advantage of this—both ways. They would repeat these ideas to quickly shut down arguments, but also question them when facing against them.

The lesson here is that it's easy to convince yourself that something is hard, complex, true, or that you don't understand it when in reality it just doesn't make sense. Have some trust that, if you have studied and scrutinized something, you can identify a bad argument.

8. If you want to be great, you need to relentlessly pursue improvement

Debate was one of the few things I can describe my attitude towards as relentless. There are individual speeches that I've given over a hundred times. I willed myself to read research papers and entire books on ostensibly academic and "boring" topics. In the weeks leading up to a tournament, my arguments and strategies were all I could think of. I have dozens of gigabytes of voice notes, round recordings, and speech redos that I would listen to in my free time.

I attribute a lot of my improvement to being obsessed with winning and getting better. It's difficult to become exceptional at something without some obsession. Obsession makes everything easier—motivationally, but also logistically. When you're obsessed, you think about how to improve outside specifically allocated practice times. You have a clearer sense of what needs to be done. You worry less about how to do something and more about just doing it.

9. Don't get played by clout

As teams achieve success, they begin to accumulate clout among the debate community. You start to recognize names and perceive debaters as larger than life. Don't think this way. Every team is beatable, and it's easier to win if you believe this.

Obviously, it’s hard to think this way if you've never beaten a team with clout, but once you do, you realize that they're like every other team. They write their arguments with (more or less) the same resources you have. They have to make tough decisions and sometimes get flustered. Learn what makes them better on average and trust that there exists a combination of words you can say that will win you the round.

10. The best teams care

I used to hate it when teams did well despite not putting in much effort or caring about debate. I desperately wanted to be like that—someone who could just show up, win, and then walk away to something more important. But it didn't take long to realize this wasn't possible for me.

It's possible to do well without trying too hard, but with the best teams, you could tell they cared. It's incredibly hard to outperform someone that lives & breathes something, works hard, has talent, and cares deeply about winning.

It's okay to care about something. It means you have skin in the game—you're putting your identity on the line. You are making it known that you want to win and you’re going to do everything you can to win. If you don’t, that’s a failure and there is nothing you can point to as an excuse.

It’s scary, but it’s okay. People should care about more things. Living any other way would be boring (and lame).

Link dump

• Shout out to Riley Wilson’s piece on competitive tennis for inspiring me to write this

• Thinking about how to design a life closer to friends thanks to this and this

• Social lists are a pretty cool idea

Something I think about a lot is social interaction. The whole stack—how we meet people, get to know them, connect deeply, and evolve our relationship. In the past, I’ve written bits and pieces of my thoughts, but I keep coming back to the topic because it’s never the whole picture.

This is everything I have to say (for now) about talking to people. A manifesto of sorts.

It’s hard to pick where to start, so I’ll lead with a personal observation. When I meet someone for the first time, I’ll often keep a running note of things to talk about with this person. If we have a conversation, I’ll write down anything notable that came up and points to follow up on. If I think of something I’d like to ask them or talk about, I’ll note that too.

I did this with the last person I dated. I kept a list of things I wanted to know about her and things I wanted her to know about me. I remember checking in the bathroom during one of our early dates.

More recently, when I met my friend Manansh, I kept a note with interesting blog posts and ideas I came across that I thought he might find interesting.

There’s no point to this story, but it’s actually a very good case study for many of the subtopics within talking to people that I want to explore.

First impressions

Meeting people you care about for the first time is scary. First impressions are scary because the stakes are legitimately high. Part of my motivation for keeping a note is that I want to be prepared and keep the conversation running smoothly—no awkward silences or confusing monologues. But as you get more comfortable with a person, you become more okay with sounding dumb and taking your time to form ideas.

When you know someone well enough, there isn’t anything to prove about yourself. With close friends and family, there isn’t much you can say that will make them not like you, let alone change their opinion of you. They already have a strong sense of who you are and will interpret your words through the lens they already see you through.

You don’t have the luxury of charitable interpretations with less familiar people. Sure, they can be charitable in the sense they won’t assume bad intent, but we can’t control how their mind subconsciously makes sense of our words and how they construct the narrative of us in their head.

Everything we say in initial interactions is used to calibrate the other person’s internal concept of who we are. And the stakes are high because after calibrating, that’s how they begin to view us.

Basically, first impressions are important and that kinda sucks. It’s tough because even “being yourself” from the beginning can backfire. It says something about you if you act comfortable around unfamiliar people. Imagine someone cracking some politically incorrect jokes the first time they meet you. Maybe you’d vibe with that, but it might also be off-putting—even if you’d do the same with your close friends. The context of an interaction colors how we interpret it.

Closeness

This is why the process of becoming close to someone is so tedious. It’s risky to be 100% yourself from the start, even if your true self would get along well with the other persons’ true self.

Instead, we resort to the most agreeable versions of ourselves and slowly find tune what we say until we find out matches. This is dreadfully unfortunate. It’s inefficient and there is so much room for error. For a long time, i’ve been looking for ways to supercharge the process of becoming close with someone. I wonder if there is a better way besides slowly peeling back layers.

I have some friends I feel very close to despite not having many one-on-one interactions with. I love these friends and consider myself close to them because I feel like I’ve seen their authentic selves—it was just revealed in ways other than conversation.

I really like the idea of sharing an authentic self and I think it strikes deeply at what it means to get close with someone. To see someone when they aren’t trying to impress or come off a certain way. When they reveal to you a side of themselves they normally keep hidden. You feel like you’ve been let in on a secret, and that they trust you and value you enough to share it with you.

Shared experiences

Shared experiences have been a way to supercharge the process of closeness. I’ve become close with many of my friends during group trips.

Low social optionality is a great concept to describe why certain experiences are better at creating closeness than others. The social optionality of a situation is how easily you can move from one interaction to another. On the high-end of the spectrum is a party or networking event where it’s perfectly acceptable, and often encouraged, to roam from one conversation to the next until you find someone you like. On the other end would be a long car ride with someone. In that situation, you can’t just decide to talk to someone else because there is no one else to talk to.

Low social optionality forces us to go beyond first impressions. When we calibrate our internal sense of someone, we rely a lot on pattern matching. Things people do and say that remind us of other people or types of people we already know.

For example, if someone says they’re an artist, there are probably certain personality traits and a general vibe you associate with that. You might attribute those traits to that person without them actually exhibiting any. It’s a useful way for our brains to process information, but it can be inaccurate. With low social optionality, if we decide we don’t want to just be alone, we have to look past our impressions and continue interacting with the person to truly connect with them.

Some other factors that make some shared experiences better at creating closeness:

• Suffering

  • Going through an unpleasant experience seems to be better for forging close relationships than positive ones. I think part of this is that people like to complain about things. Conversation flows easier and you develop camaraderie around complaining about how bad something was.

  • It’s also boring to be positive about things. Being positive is the agreeable thing to do—the default perspective. You’re positive when you’re trying to be polite and not piss anyone off or disqualify yourself. When you say you don’t like something, that’s less agreeable. You run the risk of alienating someone or coming off poorly, and it’s this risk that gives people the sense you’re being authentic.

• Alcohol

  • Maybe a hot take, but I’m a proponent of alcohol as a social lubricant and way to make friends. It’s actually a really effective way to achieve closeness. Under the influence, it’s easier to be vulnerable. We lose some of the inhibitions that keep us from revealing our authentic selves.

Being valuable

When we meet someone, we feel pressured to provide value via conversation. You want the other person to learn something, be entertained, or to just care about what you have to say. You want them to like talking to you and think it’s time well spent.

This might sound harsh, but if I’m having a conversation with someone I just met and I’m uninterested, I’m less likely to reach out and take steps to cultivate a relationship. So for someone you want to cultivate a relationships with, providing value feels really important (and it kind of is).

The notes I keep are a way to keep conversations around topics where I think I can provide value—either by sharing something interesting or asking about something the other person likes talking about. But I think this is a fundamentally flawed way to anchor a relationship.

Today, my conversations with Manansh are much more free flowing. We usually start with some catch up—little updates since the last time we spoke. After that, we just talk about whatever we’re thinking. I think we’ve reached a place where we have similar enough interests and thought patterns that we can think out loud and create a conversation out of it.

In close relationships, you no longer feel the need to share something about something. You can just say what comes to mind and the other person values you enough to pay attention. Not because they think they’ll get some novel insight or value, but because they care about you and want to give you their attention.

Wrapping it up

To go back to the observation I led with—every time I kept a note for talking to someone, there came a point where I stopped. I just felt I didn’t need to anymore.

The reason, I believe, is a combination and culmination of all the things I’ve written about. Once a first impression is set, there is to affect. As I got to know someone, I cared less about providing value. Closeness was built and I became comfortable with talking about anything or nothing at all.

This is the ideal place to be. Peak connection is when you can both sit in silence and just appreciate the other person’s existence.

I. A family history

When I saw that people were able to communicate on the internet when they were across the ocean, I hated myself for being born a few years too early to catch that time. 

— my mom

My dad came to the United States in 1992. My mom came two years later in 1994, and eight years before she had me. Many of my friends are the children of similar immigrants—born in China and moved to the US for grad school with no money and no backup plan. 

There is something to be said about uprooting your life and putting yourself in a situation where failure isn't an option. It’s hard for someone from my position to appreciate, but it definitely changes you as a person. Little anecdotes here and there don’t do the whole story justice, but they're the best I have. 

My dad looks back fondly on the time where Burger King had a dollar Whopper deal. He didn’t have a car, and couldn’t afford to take the bus everytime he wanted a sandwich, so he would buy ten whoppers at a time and eat them for the rest of the week. The first one was great, but by the end of the week they were cold and you were just sick of Whoppers. But then he would do it all over again next week. My friend's dad has a similar story, except with donuts: there was a period of his life where he lived on three donuts a day, one for each meal.

I'm fortunate, but also a bit unfortunate, to have never experienced true hardship—at least not like my parents. I order UberEats and had a dining plan at school. I might not ever know what it's like to have to make something work in order to survive. If my parents couldn't pay for school, or find jobs, they would lose their visas and be forced out of the country. They left China for a reason and there was nowhere else to go. I'm embarrassed to say, but the worst case for me is I move back in with my parents while I figure my life out.

My dad paid my mom through school with credit cards. I guess 30 years ago, balance transfer fees weren’t a thing—he would pay tuition with a credit card and open new credit cards to pay off the older balances. It resulted in a long chain of cards paying off cards until he made enough money to finally pay off the balances on his own.

Despite the hardships, my mom considers these parts of her life to be some of the best. There was a sense of optimism and it can only get better from here that permeated daily life. I suppose there is something oddly reassuring about grinding out life and chipping away at what's in front of you. It focuses you and forces you to cherish every bit of progress. They had a few  pressing worries—but only a few.

After finding a job after graduating, Fei [my dad] borrowed $900 from a classmate to buy his first car, an '85 Dodge. Except for not having air conditioning, the car had many good features, such as being able to run (though not fast), a bench seat in the front that could fit three people, and a spacious interior that could hold all of his belongings: a few boxes of books and clothes, and a small table.

— my mom

Immigrants, especially those from my parents’ generation, typically have the skills and credentials to succeed—they are all college educated, most with graduate degrees. But in the US, they lack advocates and people who appreciate their efforts. Our parents are scrappy and know what it's like to be at rock bottom. They understand what it means to live with urgency and have a unique appreciation for hard work. Family has and always will come first.

At the same time, they find it difficult to take shortcuts. I argue with my parents over working hard versus working smart. They sometimes don't fully appreciate the few, but notable, advantages they have in life (like having an undergraduate degree before coming to the US) . There are so many aspects of this story that I want to explore—hardship, risk, failure—but this story is fundamentally about people. In the bits and pieces I hear from my parents, I keep coming back to the names and characters they met along the way. How do immigrants, people with little status and network, create the conditions for success?

For centuries, the answer has been the formation of ethnic enclaves—the Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, and Jewish neighborhoods of the world. They require tremendous trust, coordination, and effort. But small groups born of necessity can turn into thriving cities. Within ethnic enclaves, life-changing connections are routine.

My parents didn't live in a Chinatown, but they found community among other Chinese students and new grads. My dad frequently recounts his first Thanksgiving in the US. My mom wouldn’t come to the US for another two years, and my dad's only connection was my aunt a few states away. My aunt's boyfriend at the time drove from Boston to Albany and back in the middle of the night to pick up my dad so he didn't have to spend Thanksgiving alone.

My parents found pockets of community in unexpected areas. They placed their lives in the hands of friendly strangers, making themselves vulnerable but also opening themselves up to profound connection. These physical communities served as safe havens and entry points for immigrants to enter unfamiliar worlds.

After settling down, the role of these physical communities changed. The daily grind to survive became less intense, and priorities shifted to starting a family. The next big milestone was having kids and it required a totally different community and set of people to get through. In some ways, becoming a parent is similar to immigrating—suddenly placed in an unfamiliar situation, with high stakes and no option of quitting. 

In 2004, ten years after first landing in the United States, my mom found another enclave, except this time, it was online. The community, EchoShadow, is best described as a digital phenomenon. A little-known spot on the grand map of the internet of which traces barely exist today. It was weird and wonderful, and I feel the need to tell the story of it before the internet forgets.

II. Echo of laugh, shadow of love

On the way to our house, this mom's family asked her "So what's your friend's name? What does she do?" 

She didn't know my name or what I did, but when she got here, we chatted like old friends and her family said "I thought you said you didn't know her.”

The truth is we know each other so well on EchoShadow. We know our kids' names, we saw our kids' pictures, we shared personal stories, but we never revealed our real names.

— my mom

Before EchoShadow, there was Wenxue City. Wenxue City is a social bulletin site, similar to Reddit, for Chinese expats. It’s still very popular today with nearly 3 million monthly visitors. Within Wenxue City, there are subforums for different topics, and one of these subforums is for new parents—a place to share the experiences and anxieties of raising kids for the first time.

While niche, Wenxue City is still a big community. The idea of EchoShadow arose out of an argument on Wenxue City. I don’t know the details, but there was a growing need for a tighter, more intimate cohort of moms. So, a group of a few dozen moms migrated from Wenxue City to their own forum on Yahoo Groups.

This was a short-lived migration because, spoiler, Yahoo Groups sucked. In a true moment of “necessity is the mother of invention,” one of the moms enlisted her husband, who worked in IT, to set up a custom website for the group. They built a home server and wrote (or pirated) a software package that was essentially a mini Wenxue City, complete with sub forums and moderation tools. In the spring of 2004, echoshadow.com was born. The name originates from the mom's online signature, "echo of laugh, shadow of love."

At its peak, EchoShadow had maybe three to four hundred moms from all over the world. Today, some of my mom's closest friends are EchoShadow moms. She has met many, but knows many more by only their usernames.

In the beginning, EchoShadow moms were all in their first years of parenting. The conversations were mostly about raising babies—sleep training, toilet training, which car seat or high chair to buy, and of course, baby pictures. The conversations later evolved to be about daycare and preschool, then about extracurricular activities, music lessons, and sports. 

As people got to know each other, they branched out and things even got heated at times. In 2007, after the Virginia Tech shooting, EchoShadow was split in an intense debate on gun control. EchoShadow also began to develop a culture—beginning with little traditions and idiosyncrasies, and eventually expanding to physical gatherings and projects.

In the early days, the forum introduced a publicID for users to post anonymously. The first ID was "guess" and used for people to guess baby pictures. Later, everyone was required to register a unique ID to post—moms frequently named themselves in the format of "X mom." For instance, my mom was "辣妈" which was short for "mom who loves spicy food." Other names (roughly translated) included "Big YangYang's mom" and "Little Wolf's mom."

In the summer of 2004, EchoShadow had its very first in-person gathering. Moms in the DC area organized a baby get-together where I met my best friend, Josh. Over the years, there were many other gatherings and in-person events—primarily in the DC, NY/NJ, and Bay areas where the concentration of Echo moms was greatest. The Echo network also saw families host each other. My mom hosted Echo moms visiting from Seattle, Ohio, and New Jersey. Similarly, my family visited Echo families in China, Toronto, and California.

I have trouble describing EchoShadow in a few words. Capturing how tight knit the group was and how they were able to organize and mobilize is difficult because they are outliers among online communities. My favorite story, the one that captures what kind of community EchoShadow was, is when they made a book. 

For Mother's Day in 2005, Echo moms began sharing stories about their mothers. As more people shared stories, the community had the idea to create an essay competition. A committee was formed, a deadline was set, and keychains with the EchoShadow logo were created as a prize. The competition aspect was later scrapped, but EchoShadow was able to collectively produce 18 essays which were compiled and printed into a book. My parents still have copies in our basement today.

Other notable projects include a holiday card collection, a mommy and me event, and many fundraisers. One was for a boy in China with Leukemia in need of a bone marrow transplant. The story made its way to EchoShadow and the community began to raise money for the boy. EchoShadow also helped its members—raising money for a mom who lost her home to hurricane Katrine, and birthday gifts for a kid whose mom died of cancer.

It's these stories of kindness and sacrifice that make me excited about digital communities. They’re proof that authentic connection can be found on the internet, to the same depth or even more, as offline. The greatest thing the internet does is enable us to meet people we otherwise wouldn't know exist. Today, your best friends can be online personas you've never met in person. We can accomplish more because of who we know and who we can coordinate with.

To me, it's the ultimate aspiration of any online community: EchoShadow created life-changing connections, mobilized and organized its members, and filled a deep need in a small group of people's lives.

I don't know if another EchoShadow will ever exist again. EchoShadow was created and thrived under specific circumstances. The members were in the right stage of life, had just left their previous online home, and—possibly entirely by chance—promoted a culture of vulnerability and authenticity.

The community shut down in 2014. There wasn't exactly one reason—server issues, the rise of WeChat, kids growing up—these things all contributed to the decline and end of EchoShadow. Today, the community still exists, though in a different form.

Rather than a single platform, WeChat groups have taken EchoShadow's place. There are different groups dedicated to travel, cooking, kids, and more. But to join, you need a referral and someone to vouch that you're part of the original echoshadow.com group.

My mom still keeps in touch with her Echo friends. We had lunch with a few last Spring. I hear updates about where kids go to college, what they’re up to, but I get the sense it’s a distinctly different feeling than ten years ago.

But just because something isn't what it used to be, doesn't mean it wasn't once great. I like to imagine that, for people like my mom, EchoShadow was like that unfamiliar figure you meet on a pilgrimage or kind stranger that helps you navigate a new city. An ephemeral connection that you remember for the rest of your life.

III. An epilogue of sorts

Another aspect of the EchoShadow story is the kids. I grew up as an "Echo baby" and many of my earliest interactions were with other Echo babies. Meeting Josh is probably the most salient example of how EchoShadow changed my life. We met in a park in 2004 and spent the next 19 years growing up together. In the past 12 months alone, we’ve lived together, visited Europe together, and started a podcast together. We have plans to continue this well past the age where it’s socially acceptable.

However, I know the experience for us kids is incomparable to what our parents had. Most of us just follow each other on Instagram and visit every once in a while, usually when our moms want to catch up. We don't have the sense of camaraderie that comes with living through a transformative period of life together. But EchoShadow has shaped us in less conspicuous ways.

I spoke to some other Echo kids to hear their similar stories. I heard from one who made friends with an Echo kid in the same dance class at 4 years old. Later on, they helped them move their stuff into college and spent Chinese New Year together. A little connection that culminated into a kind act nearly 20 years later. Another Echo kid I talked with credits EchoShadow’s group purchase of Singapore Math textbooks with his journey into academics and math competitions. 

The biggest thing we have might be a quick look of recognition and understanding when we hear how someone else grew up. A hint of ah, I gotchu from being raised in households that constantly talked to each other. I'm a bit sad that us Echo kids don't have the same community as our moms. But even more, I'm worried that only a few of us really understand the impact the community had on our parents.

I set out to write this story as a narrative piece, something you might read in the New Yorker or listen to on an episode of Serial. But honestly, I'm not sure exactly what story I want to tell. I’m not sure who, if anyone, will resonate with it if it didn’t touch their life. I’m not sure if the experience I’ve described is too niche for most people to care about. While the history of EchoShadow is interesting, it’s not really what I need everyone to know. Only how much it meant to people like my mom.

The immigrant experience, and specifically the one my parents' generation went through, is under-appreciated. I think we’ve come to believe that because it was common, it wasn’t notable.

— me

Writing this ending, it feels like this piece has turned into a way to just learn more about my parents. A common theme my friends and I discuss on our podcast is how growing up in different parts of the country shaped who we are. The conclusion I’ve seemingly come to is that, despite huge variations in how we grew up, we get along because of our parents’ shared experience. They were changed by their experience and it trickled down into how we were raised and how we’ve come to view the world.

Listening to how my parents navigated that time of their life just makes sense. I don’t know what I would have done in the same situation, but the stories of family and optimism on the backdrop of scarcity and uncertainty feel perfectly set in the narrative of how life should go.

I understand this isn’t the satisfying conclusion that makes a piece great to read. I’m not able to tie the story of EchoShadow into a nice narrative. I haven’t figured out what I want someone reading to take away. I haven’t deconstructed the elements that made EchoShadow succeed nor do I really want to. I honestly just want to sit down with my parents and hear more of their story. Starting as early as they can remember and ending with today.

Thank you to my parents for taking the time to tell their story. Also thanks Manansh for reading drafts.

Last night, I was reading some substacks that fell into the bucket of writers who don't take themselves too seriously (in the best way possible). I mean people who write casually about niche topics most people don't care about, and don't have the most thoroughly scrutinized arguments but put them out anyway.

It gave me a wind of inspiration because it feels like I can do that too. To be someone who publishes regularly about stuff that's interesting to a humble group of people and has a cultish following on Twitter. I know some of those things are status related, but the essence is to be a person who has an idea and shares it with the world in a somewhat unique and interesting way, and adds at least a little bit of value to someone's life.

It feels like an epiphany because this is what I want out of writing on the internet. To write to test out ideas, to self express, to turn thoughts into words, to articulate, because it might be fun, to impress someone, to keep a record, to see if I can, because one person in the world might like it.

For me, there is something magnetic about this style of writing. Personal, niche creation. To read something that could have only been written by the person who wrote it. Publishing pieces that are a bit less polished and a bit more raw and authentic. Writing with realness and a splash of nonchalance.

When I did my 30 days of blogging experiment, I didn't publish pieces to my substack because I was worried about spamming my whole mailing list with decidedly lower quality writing. In hindsight, I'm conflicted on this choice. Yes, there was some bad writing. Like this one where I write about wanting to fast and experience ketosis. I'm not sure that added value to anyone.

But, we tend to be bad judges of our own work. A common trope for internet creators is that the low-effort, spur of the moment video/essay/tiktok is the one of that resonates with people the most while the one they poured their soul into goes flat.

My solution to this is the be radically open to what people have to say and think about your work. To consistently produce and share. I have a running note with ideas for things to write about. There are 46 items in this note. When I have an urge to write, I'll usually open up this note and see which idea I'm drawn to.

Most of the time, I'll find one and start writing but get stuck because I realize that I don't actually have that much to say about it. The ideas that typically make it out of my text editor and on to the internet are the ones I put off but keep thinking about. Eventually, the idea brews enough for me to have enough to say about it.

In all honestly, I don't think I'm a good enough writer that even my polished and well thought out pieces are going to be significantly better than what are basically just my journal entries. If you can't be good, put out of lot of shit am I right?

Daily blogging lowered the bar for how much I had to say, but I'd like a way to lower the bar for what I have to say. That's what I'm trying to do—be more open to sharing seeds of ideas and opening up my thought process. If I'm open enough about this, and can output enough work, I think there are enough people out there going through similar thought processes for my writing to be valuable.

I think the world is a fundamentally better place when more people can access authentic and meaningful conversation—even if it's asynchronously. My favorite podcast, Not Overthinking, is my favorite because it feels like I'm part of a conversation that I want to have but can't get anywhere else.

That's also what I try to do with my own podcast. I want to talk about topics that people think about, but for whatever reason, don't come up in conversation—even with their close friends. So far, that's been stuff like relationships, therapy, making friends, and feeling out of place. When we hear these things—conversations we desperately seek—we feel acknowledged and closer to one another.

For me, writing is an underexplored avenue to achieve this. This is an objectively not great piece of writing. I've been disorganized and incoherent at times, and it won't resonate for many people. But I think it's authentic. And for the right person, I hope it makes perfect sense.

Also…

• I’ve been struggling to find good pictures/art/thumbnails to pair with writing I publish on substack. If anyone has any advice or suggestions, please let me know.

• The substacks that inspired this:

  • LOL (lots of links)

  • Experimental History

I've come across a few too many people complaining about superficial conversation, small talk, and the general sentiment of talking about nothing. It seems like, for many people, the ideal scenario would be meeting someone and jumping straight into talking about their hopes and dreams.

In Not Overthinking, Taimur makes an interesting distinction between talking about something and talking about nothing. It's what it sounds like—talking about something is conversation centered around a tangible topic, usually a shared interest. Talk about nothing is ephemeral and of little consequence in the grand scheme of a relationship.

I don't think the best relationships are built on talking about something. Relationships predicated on talking about X have a small voice wondering when is this going to run out? You feel you need to provide value to keep the connection going.

That's not to say we don't talk about more profound things. The capacity to talk about something is still important. It indicates a willingness to be vulnerable and authentic.

With my best friends, I'd say 90% of our interactions are about nothing. The latest NBA game, what's for lunch, asking questions we kinda know the answer to. There is no expectation of deriving value from of a conversation outside of the other person's presence and attention.

It's a nice feeling—to appreciate someone just for existing, rather than whatever insight they have to offer. With the right people, sitting in silence is just as nice as connecting on something deeper. We should learn to enjoy talk about nothing, especially with those closest to us.