You don’t actually believe in the multiverse. Neither do I. But we borrowed the idea anyway and now we run it on ourselves. Think about the last night you couldn’t sleep. You were thinking about the job you turned down, or the person you never called. And you weren’t really thinking about the decision. You were thinking about the you who made the other choice. That version has a life going right now, in your head, and it’s better than yours.

That version is fake. Not unlikely. Not out of reach. Fake. Look at how you built them. They took the other job, so they have the money. Do they also have the commute? The boss who owns their weekends? The three years in a city where they knew nobody? Are they ever tired? You handed them your wins and left out everything those wins cost. Real lives don’t work that way. Every good thing in yours came with a bill, and you paid it. Theirs came free, because nobody ever had to run the numbers on a person who was never alive. So today’s mission is simple. That person does not exist. You are already living your best, worst and fullest life.

Nick Wright said something on his podcast after LeBron signed with the Sixers that gets at this. He was arguing that nobody has loved basketball more than LeBron, and then he stopped himself: LeBron’s love of the game can’t outrank anybody else’s love of the game. His analogy was parents and their kids. No parent loves their kids more than another parent loves theirs. And it isn’t that we’re missing the measuring tools. There is nothing there to measure. No shared unit, no outside vantage point to measure from. Two people walk out of the same concert, one of them crying and one of them shrugging. There’s no instrument you could point at either of them to settle who heard more.

Fullness works the same way. It’s a first person experience, not a score. Which means you can’t live a fuller life than someone else, and here’s the part that matters, you can’t live a fuller life than yourself either. There is no other you to lose to.

So where did the idea of a “fuller” life come from?

Sapiens has a useful idea here: the collective myth. Human beings are unique in our ability to believe a story together, and it’s the belief itself that holds the thing up. Nothing else. Look at the money in your wallet. It’s cotton and ink. It buys groceries because a few hundred million of us have agreed to act like it can, and the day we stop agreeing is the day it goes back to being cotton and ink. Government is the same trick at a bigger scale. It exists because enough of the population has bought into the idea that this system works and agreed to abide by its rules. That’s the whole foundation.

Collective myth is not a bad word. It’s the most productive machinery we’ve ever built. Getting a group to move toward a common goal is how humans multiplied our output beyond anything our bodies could do alone.

The “fuller life” is one of these myths. We all own stock in it.

Religion, philosophy, self-help, whatever you want to call it, boils down to a framework for living. Something to fill the ambiguous parts in with directives. Most of us would rather operate in the known, where the steps are clear and there’s moral clarity. My guess is that some combination of religion, social media and free time created the perfect storm: we now have both the space to imagine a fuller life and an endless feed of examples of what one looks like. Your grandfather could compare his life to maybe forty people. You can compare yours to forty people before you get out of bed, and every one of those forty is showing you their best day. So we spend our time chasing it, and we lose.

We lose because the game is rigged. Not rigged against you specifically. Rigged in the sense that the finish line was drawn on paper. Try it yourself. Picture the fullest version of your life. Maybe it’s the family or the career that gives you the safety, love and comfort you’re after. It sounds perfect, and it’s a figment of your imagination. More than that, it’s a snapshot of what you want right now. It has this month’s problems in it, and only this month’s problems.

Go ask the version of you from five years ago what a full life looked like. You’ll get a real answer, a specific one, and there’s a good chance you’d turn it down today. Some of you got the exact thing you asked for back then. You got the job, the house, the relationship. It arrived and it was good for about a month and then it came with a new set of problems you didn’t know existed, and now there’s a new picture in your head of the life that would fix those. That’s not a failure of imagination. That’s just what the imagination does. It runs one picture ahead of you, permanently, and it will still be running one picture ahead of you on your last day.

I’ll be honest about what comes next, because I just spent four paragraphs telling you that our stories are load bearing and mostly invented. What I’m about to offer is another story. I believe the universe gives us what we need. If it isn’t an opportunity, it’s a lesson, a redirection toward something else. I can’t prove that. Nobody can. But I know which of the two stories I’d rather live inside, and it isn’t the one where a better version of me is out there running up the score.

This might all sound like nonsense to you, and there are conditions on it. Circumstances exist that make this a luxury. There are realities to having your basic needs met, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But if you have the time to read a blog post, the blessing of sitting around thinking about how your life could be better, then first of all you’re lucky, like me. And second of all, your mind has already drifted toward the alternate version of yourself. The one who covers up all your flaws and hits all your goals.

Here’s the thing about that person. They aren’t in another timeline. They aren’t anywhere. And everything you keep assigning to them, the discipline, the timing, the nerve, was always sitting here with you, in the one set of days you actually get.

So pick a better myth. Not the one where a finished version of you already exists and you’re behind. Pick the one that says two things at once: your life can change, and you are already doing the best you can. Those don’t fight each other. The first is about direction. The second is about the verdict you hand yourself while you’re moving. You can work toward something and still refuse to grade yourself against a standard no living person has ever met.

Wake up. Life is happening. Instead of daydreaming about the full life you want to live, notice that at this exact moment you are living your fullest life. It may not be what you want for the future, but we aren’t there yet. You have time. Be patient. Like everyone else you’re only doing this once, for the first time. We’re all just figuring it out one day at a time.

Is new always better?

A tremendous amount of change has happened to me in the last three years. I’ve lived in three different states, had four different jobs, and seen marriages, babies, divorces, and some pretty unpredictable stuff. It keeps life fresh, like an experiential Instagram feed. The issue comes when there isn’t something new. When the same mundane things repeat. I’m not the kind of lad to love routine. I enjoy certain rituals, but I also like something new to tickle my brain. Breaking up routine makes me feel more connected to what’s really happening. But do I always have to be in motion to feel connected? Is new always better? That’s Barney Stinson’s one rule for life in How I Met Your Mother, but is it a sustainable way to live? Maybe it’s the stage of life I’m in, or the transient city I live in, that shapes how I see change, but what scares me most is everything stopping. Doing the same thing over and over again. Yes, balance is key, but who ever actually achieves true balance in life? Is new always better, or is anything that isn’t the current thought or task just better in my hedonic mind?

Intentionality & asking why

After a bender in Japan a few months back, a few lads and I sat drinking soju outside a Lawson’s. This was no Socratic seminar, more a series of drunken proclamations about life and our deepest fears. The memories are hazy, but one of my friends kept repeating the same line, “I want to live my life with intentionality,” and it’s the only concrete thing I think we talked about. The next morning I woke up still in my clothes on the floor of the hotel room, with vague memories of intentionality. Since that night I’ve been putting everything through that lens, asking why I’m doing certain things. It’s a simple reframe that has sparked deep introspection.

Few things truly matter

Working a corporate job, sometimes you feel like every day is a new Cuban missile crisis. We spend hours mulling over decisions, pulling more data, asking more questions, and talking ourselves into circles. But when you zoom out, you see the picture for what it is. A single dot on a canvas the size of a mural. The Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule, applies here. Spend 80% of your time on the 20% of decisions that truly matter. For the rest, make a decision, and if you get it wrong, go back and fix it. If you can put the decision off, make time for what truly matters instead. Applying this is hard. We’re social creatures, and the decisions we make are often made with the agreement of a group. It takes seeing the bigger picture to know what truly matters. For everything else, just make a call and move on.

Every conversation does NOT need my opinion

Listening, truly listening, takes focus. It means turning off the inner monologue that jumps from topic to topic like a pinball machine. In conversation, I’ve realized there are really only three reasons to speak up. To organize your own thoughts. To ask a question. To share your opinion. We all love the third, but I’ve learned it’s needed the least. It finally clicked why we love the third option so much. It’s an attempt to get someone to see your thinking and agree with it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the strongest forms of emotional intimacy is when someone seems to read your inner monologue back to you. Taking the words right out of your mouth. To feel truly heard. But hearing someone doesn’t mean forcing your opinion onto them. The purpose of listening is to give the conversation what it needs. My buddy Mark put this perfectly last week while listening to one of our new friends talk about her situationship. “Do you need support or a solution?” Only offer an opinion when the other person asks for it, or the conversation absolutely needs it. Often advice is just someone else’s judgments projected onto you. My buddy Michael said one thing to me when I called him almost three years back, unsure what to do about my career. He asked a few clarifying questions, and then, when I finally asked for his advice, he said, “I think you know what you need to do.” He was completely right. Now I try to reserve my opinions for my own decisions, and only give one when I think it can actually benefit the person or the conversation, rather than imposing my viewpoint on others.

Good enough is good enough

I took a pottery class. Not my idea, but I was happy to join. Art is something I’ve never been truly gifted at. I’ve always appreciated it because it’s something I could never do. Back to pottery class. As our teacher walked us through the steps of shaping the clay, I followed her every movement. When it was time, I dropped the clay on the wheel and began shaping it. After a first fail, where I put a hole straight through the bottom of my bowl, we went for round two. Then I finally got it. The clay was centered, the bowl took shape, and next thing you know I had done pottery. It looked good. But then I thought it could be better, so I tried to refine it. Add a deeper edge. Fill out the bowl more. Then it all collapsed. The whole thing folded over, and I looked toward our instructor in disbelief. How could I have destroyed something I worked so hard on? Then she said something that’s been on my mind ever since. “You gotta know when good enough is good enough.” Damn, that one hit. The bowl was fine before I started perfecting it. It would have been perfectly passable. Instead I reached for the extra few percent, and it all collapsed. Ever since, I’ve been applying this to everything. It ties back to the Few things truly matter point: when you reach good enough and the thing doesn’t truly matter, let it go. Move on to something that actually deserves your attention.

The work is never done

I’m deep in brown Instagram these days. Mostly because I’m the exact target demographic for these creators, but I stick with it because, through the humor, they’re sharing a message many of us connect with through our shared culture. One of them was a guy playing his parents, and the running joke was “you’ll have fun in med school,” aimed at a kid grinding through high school and undergrad. The satire is that med school is not a party, and it punctures this false sense that once you do the work, then you finally get to enjoy. Here’s the dirty little secret: the work is never done. Both the work you do for a living and the work on yourself. You’re a constant work in progress, and guess what, so is everyone else. I used to believe a myth. That one day I’d make a ton of money, marry the woman of my dreams, have a wonderful family to care for, and then, only then, I could relax. I was terribly wrong. Each stage of life comes with new challenges. This doesn’t mean we’ll be under constant pressure for the rest of our lives. It’s about a reframe toward work. If I look forward to the challenge, enjoy the process, and balance it with enjoyment, the work can be sustainable. This isn’t an exact science. It’s a unique formula you’ll have to figure out for yourself. I’m slowly starting to accept that there won’t be some giant “ah-ha” moment where I sit back on my laurels and admire all the hard work. Instead, it’s a hike. We march slowly, stopping to take in the beauty, but always moving forward one step at a time.

I hope some of these lessons resonate with you. The purpose of writing this isn’t to preach the way to live, but to share what I’ve learned. These are lessons I’ll keep learning every day, and there are many more I’m still looking forward to. Onwards!

Years later, I’ll look back on my first summer in New York and remember what a special time it was. It’s only June and this summer has already been filled with so many memories and so much communal happiness. But I’d be lying to myself, and to you, if I said every day was as euphoric as what you’ve seen online. Still, this is something we’ve needed. To feel like things are actually going our way. That things can get better, that we aren’t on some slow march toward dystopia.

New York is hard. By no means is this an easy place to live. You have no privacy. Very little quiet. My savings account has been thoroughly neglected. You feel like you can never keep up. Everyone is hotter, wealthier, funnier, and more interesting. Some days I feel like a Mr. Potato Head in a world full of Barbies and Kens. Luckily, I know New York isn’t representative of the rest of the world. Since college I’ve lived in almost every corner of the country, from big cities to small towns, and that’s the perspective I brought with me.

It’s a city where you have to unapologetically be yourself, because people can sniff out the bs from a mile away. There’s no reason to endure mediocrity when excellence surrounds you. The city is full of chameleons, sure, but it’s also full of options. If you’re a “plain toast” kind of person, putting on whatever facade gets you through the room, people will get bored of you. There are so many interesting people here. Why waste a second on someone with the personality of a white sedan?

This was my dream. Since the beginning of high school. One of my uncles was your classic New York lad. NYU finance grad, Wall Street banker, living it up on the weekends. I didn’t want his exact life, but I wanted the zeal and energy he had for the one he was living. I tried to get here many times, and it took me almost a decade, but I made it. It was the right time. Finally getting here has given me a rare chance to reflect. Not just on what’s ahead, but on how I got here. It’s let me look deeper within myself and back at my life through a sobering lens. One that’s taught me as much as it’s challenged me.

While writing this, I found the perfect way to sum up what New York has meant to me so far. My very first intern manager shared this nugget with me: never be the smartest person in the room. If you are, find a new room. New York is a room where I’ll never be the smartest person, and I love that. It means an endless opportunity to be challenged, and most importantly, to learn.

I’ve only scratched the surface, and I cannot wait for what’s next.

My schedule used to be way more packed. In high school, between zero-hour class, regular coursework, after-school activities, lunch student council, and nightly homework, every hour from dawn to dusk was spoken for. By any objective measure, I was busier then. But it feels like I have less time now than I ever have. I rarely call friends and family because I’m so busy letting months of valuable life slip by before I hear their voices again. I push off watching that movie because there’s just so much to do that I can’t justify two hours on anything that isn’t the task currently swimming around in my head.

But does it have to be this way?

It all routes back to intentionality. Why am I doing the thing I’m doing? When you bounce from task to task, your mind never gets the space to ask that question. Instead, you exhaust yourself or flood the zone with more work until the capacity to think about intentionality disappears entirely. And here’s the thing: busyness doesn’t shrink on its own. Through AI, I’ve been able to automate a ton of tasks that used to require my direct involvement. Has that meant less work or more free time? God, no. The cup just gets refilled. There is always more to do if you let there be more to do.

This is most revealing when someone asks how you are. That’s a question about your emotional state, about what’s actually going on inside. Are you sad, happy, anxious? Something else entirely? But instead of an answer, you get hit with “busy.” The biggest non-answer of all time. It’s the “all of the above” on a multiple choice test where none of the options actually apply. People list off deliverables: a work deadline, a birthday party, an upcoming wedding. None of which has anything to do with how they are. What’s giving their life meaning. What they’ve been learning. What they’re actually feeling underneath all of it.

And nobody pushes back. It’s accepted as a fact of life. Because I guarantee that when I say “busy,” the person asking isn’t really listening to my list of tasks anyway. They’re already running through their own.

When we’re anxious, there’s an itch to do something. To smother that feeling by burying it under activity. Busyness is the nicotine patch to anxiety’s smoking addiction. Temporary relief, not a solution. The to-do list becomes a place to hide. Every checked box is a moment you didn’t have to sit with the harder question of whether any of it actually matters to you.

So busyness never ends unless you build a dam. You have to freeze the flow deliberately and give yourself the space to reflect. To ask yourself what you actually want, what you actually feel, and why you’re spending your time the way you are, before someone else has to ask it for you.

Next time someone asks how you are and “busy” is right there on the tip of your tongue, stop. Ask yourself the real question. You might be stressed. You might be burnt out. You might be lonelier than you’ve admitted. You might actually be doing great and just forgot to notice. Any of those is a real answer. “Busy” isn’t. It’s just a way of staying in motion so you never have to find out.

I believe we are in a trust recession. And the only way out is accepting that some of the pillars we built our lives around have collapsed.

To illustrate how the average person moves through the world right now, take the armadillo. It scavenges alone. It digs tunnels alone. Millions of years of evolution gave it that distinctive defense: roll into a ball, let the leathery armor do the work, shield yourself from whatever wants to hurt you. The armadillo exists in a purely defensive posture.

Society today is a sea of armadillos.

Evolution pushed the armadillo into this protective, solitary life. Something similar is happening to us as we enter the second half of the 2020s. We have deep distrust in institutions, in fact, and worst of all, in each other. But here’s the thing — that distrust was warranted. There are predators in the world that wish the worst on us. So we curl up tighter, because there’s only one thing left we trust: ourselves.

The purpose of this essay is not to compile a list of broken institutions or to be a nihilist waving the white flag. It’s an observation — one meant to nudge us, at the micro level, toward trusting each other again.

Getting burned by someone you trusted is a specific kind of terrible. It’s the final Jenga piece that sends the whole tower down. We tend to fault ourselves. To wonder why we didn’t see it coming, then begin questioning everything. The defense mechanism is to armadillo curl inward, shut the world out, protect what’s left. But that only feeds the cycle.

The reason your trust was broken is not because you are untrustworthy. You placed your trust in the wrong place. It happens. And once it does, you have two options. You can gaslight yourself into believing something is fundamentally wrong with you, keep swallowing false narratives. Or you can pick up a magnifying glass and get smarter about who and what you trust. Bridges will burn. That doesn’t mean you can’t build new ones; better ones.

I wish I could hand you a guide or a checklist: trust this, don’t trust that. But everyone’s threshold is different. What I will say is this: from misinformation to AI to the male loneliness epidemic to wealth inequality, so much of it traces back to distrust. And if we keep looking to our leaders for the fix, they will fail us. The solution is bottoms-up. Individual. Each of us has a responsibility to uphold the social contract of trust. That’s scary. But that faith — messy, risky, sometimes painful — is the fabric holding us together. If we choose another path, the world ends in a sea of armadillos.

I want to close with a mantra I’ve been telling myself each time I feel my trust shaken:

Your trust will be broken. Good. It is an opportunity to examine how you trust. To go deeper. The real failure is giving up on trusting at all. Trust is the antidote to the fear and anxiety rampant in the world.

Karma.

Karma, unlike some other Hindu beliefs, has penetrated the cultural zeitgeist. Those with no ties to Hinduism use the word to generalize the idea that good will leads to good outcomes and vice versa. It is something the lay audience can comprehend about Hinduism that does not involve the complexities of polytheism. Many say it, but how many truly believe it? How many live their lives with karma as the lens through which they make every decision? As a sports talk show addict, I remember Colin Cowherd sharing the moment he knew Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback, was the right face of the franchise — and it had nothing to do with on-field play. Instead, it was a moment when Prescott attempted to throw a cup in the trash, missed, and instead of leaving it, walked over to pick it up. This moment stuck with me, not for the correlation between littering and quarterback excellence, but because it is a perfect example of living karma. To make the right decision with no direct reward.

This is my story of karmic realization.

Pontatoc Road connected the two most important places in my life between third and sixth grade. At the top of the road sat my childhood house, and as you followed the windy, two-lane, cracked road until it ended, you would dead-end at the Jewish Community Center of Tucson, the home of my youth basketball league. The road itself is shit. Cracked, the lines fading — in desperate need of repair. It curved along the contours of the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. As you scaled the ups and downs, little sand ditches — what we called washes in Arizona — stood to collect rainwater for the rare occasions when we got rain. Remember this for later.

Sundays were a holy day for me growing up. Not because of religion, although I was dragged to Hindu Sunday school as a kid. Sundays held the two most important things in my life: Arizona Cardinals football and JCC basketball games. Sundays would dictate my mood for the week. Starting in second grade, I joined the Red team. A full season and a total of one basket scored. We had one play. Give the ball to Cooper, get out the way — or as my Dad still calls it, “Coop up the middle” — and it worked beautifully. Each Sunday, my Dad and I would pile into his 3-Series BMW convertible, where the car sat so low to the ground you could feel every bump and rock in the road. That journey up and down Pontatoc Road, listening to smooth jazz on NPR, became my pregame ritual. This is where I fell in love with the game and where some of my fondest memories live.

My final year of JCC basketball, I was on the Black team. The squad was mediocre, but we played hard. We hustled, ran a great 2-3 zone, and tried to run an early version of the Warriors’ motion offense. One Sunday evening, towards the end of the season, we were matched up against the Blue team and one of my childhood best friends, Akash. Not only was Akash the most skilled of our friend group, he was the best player on his team. But there was one secret: I knew him. His tells and all his favorite moves from our hours of playing in each other’s driveways.

Tip-off. It’s a close game. By my standards, I’m having a legendary game. Eight points. The score is tight. Blue Team: 25. Black Team: 23. Akash, on the other hand, was doing his best mid-2000s Kobe impression and had 23 of his team’s 25 points. Despite this, the game was close, and for the first time all season, we had a shot to beat a top-tier team in the league. There are 20 seconds left after my coach calls timeout. The ball is inbounded and swung to me on the wing. I see Akash staring right at me, and I know I have to attack him. I begin to drive to the rim before I’m swarmed by the entire Blue team. Whistle. Foul. Now I’m going to the line with a chance to tie the game.

I spin the ball through my hands. Let the first shot go. Make. A slight sense of relief hits me, but I have to make the second or we lose. Then I release the second shot. Swish — game tied, but there are still 12 seconds left. The Blue team inbounds the ball to Akash, and I pick him up at half court. I keep thinking to myself, “Let anyone else score besides him,” because I cannot contribute to the mythical lore that will surround this game if Akash hits a game-winner on me. He starts his drive and gets the step on me. Panic sets in, and I have to go for the ball. I reach in, slap his hand, and the whistle blows. It’s a foul on me, and Akash is headed to the line. Shit.

Next thing I know, we are standing around the free throw line and I’m praying he misses so we can at least have a shot at overtime. He shoots the first one. Makes it. My heart sinks as he hits the second one. Three seconds left. We inbound the ball, jack up a prayer that misses the rim by a mile, and the game is over. We have lost.

After the game, my Dad and Akash’s mom come up to us and give us kudos, but I’m pissed. We walk back to my Dad’s 3-Series while he continues to give me a pep talk, but I’m not having it. Replaying that moment and imagining everything I could have done to change the result. I jump in the passenger seat, and my Dad flips NPR back on, but I angrily shout “turn this off” as I want to stew in my failure. He obliges but tells me to watch it. We pull out of the JCC and begin the journey up Pontatoc Road. My Dad can still sense I’m upset and says to me, “Kiran, it’s just a game. You played well. Don’t worry about it.” And then a rush of anger swells in my chest. Instead of dropping it and moving on with my life, I turn to him and yell:

“Dad, you don’t understand because you suck at basketball.”

And that’s when he lost it. That same anger began to swell in his face. His eyes began to bulge, his lips pressed into a hard line, and then the yelling started. “Don’t talk back.” But I couldn’t stop myself, and I upped the ante. We continued to yell back and forth as the 3-Series rounded the dark hills of Pontatoc Road, feeling every crack and bump. Finally, he’d had enough. I had pushed him beyond reason, and he pulled the car over half a mile from home. “Get out. Walk home.” I protested, but he was adamant. I exited the car in my Kobe 6s, slammed the door shut, and he drove off into the night.

“Fuck, bitch, shit,” I screamed, crying and kicking the road, angry beyond belief. I began stomping down Pontatoc Road, kicking every rock out of my way, the game now forgotten, all my anger directed at my Dad. As I started climbing a large hill on my way home, I peered over the horizon to see the 3-Series pulled over in the wash. My Dad had come to his senses and pulled the car into the wash to wait for me. I walked toward the car and saw my Dad standing outside. When I approached, he turned to me and said:

“Kiran, I’m sorry. I should not have kicked you out of the car. But you cannot talk back.” I began to release my anger. By this point, things had gotten out of hand. A late-game foul had somehow turned into me getting kicked out of a car. Then he said something I will never forget: “By the way, the car is stuck. I need you to push.”

Karma, bitch! This is what you get for kicking me out of the car, I thought.

He jumped back in the car, and I put my hands on the trunk, using my eighty-four-pound body to try to move tons of German steel out of that wash. I pushed with all my strength as the wheels began to spin. Sand kicked up in the air, and the car sank further down. We tried again, only for it to sink further. By now, we had realized help was needed, and my Dad reluctantly made two phone calls. The first was easy — AAA for a tow. The second was the conversation he dreaded: calling my Mom to come pick me up while he waited for the tow truck.

He explained the situation, and I could hear her yell “What?!” followed by some shouting I could not make out. A reminder: we were a total of a two-minute drive from the house. I could see our neighborhood from the ditch. When my Dad hung up, he told me my Mom was coming to pick me up and that he would stay and wait for the tow truck. A few minutes passed, and I saw my Mom’s Honda Odyssey crest the hill and drive down. I could see her face — glasses pushed up on her nose, hair in a ponytail, anger written all over her.

She opened the automatic door, and I jumped in the back seat, out of smacking range, as she gave my Dad a death stare. The door shut and the yelling began. I’ve forgotten the specifics, but the summary was that I needed to learn to control my anger and stop talking back. We got home, I was sent directly to bed, and I fell asleep. Hours later, my bedroom on the second floor above the garage began to vibrate as my Dad pulled into the garage below. I knew he was in for a screaming lecture from my Mom — one I had already received. The next morning, as my Dad took me to school, we both apologized to each other and moved on from that day.

To this day, we love telling this story. With age, it has only gotten funnier. When we left Tucson, we drove down Pontatoc one last time to admire our ditch. Yes, there were many lessons in this story. Anger control, sure. Not talking back, part of it. But upon retelling it, I’ve realized the true lesson was that actions have consequences. My displaced anger toward my Dad caused me to get kicked out of the car. His anger toward me led him to get stuck in a ditch. Karma had bit us both in the ass that night.

And that’s what makes karma more than just a saying. Although karma may be rooted in Hinduism, it is universal to humanity. David Foster Wallace, in his famous Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water,” captures this when he speaks about the water we all exist in. He describes the fallacy that you are the center of the universe and urges us instead to consider others. That is what karma is — thinking about the world not with yourself at its center but as a part of a larger tapestry. Knowing this, that we all swim in the same water, why wouldn’t you try to pay it forward? To give someone the help you may need someday. To put good energy into the universe without expecting direct repayment. Because it will come back to you. It may not be as immediate as my Dad getting stuck in the ditch directly after kicking me out of the car, but it could come in a form you never expect. I will get off my preachy soapbox, but if you don’t believe me, try it. Think about your actions through this lens. Even if you don’t tangibly see the results, the mindset shift is enough of a payoff — where you see others not as people trying to take from you, but as people you can help.

Karma will always come bite you in the ass. Natural consequences are a real thing. Extend your hand to others and watch how the world is no longer a scary place but a large ocean where we all occupy the same water.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a crude and, frankly, inappropriate joke about ICE during an all-company call. This has been reported by multiple sources, and I am not disclosing anything confidential here. I have avoided posting about my work because, one, it’s less interesting than a lot of other things, and two, I have seen firsthand what retribution can look like when someone speaks their personal views online. I’m taking a risk in saying this, but history does not judge the cautious. Part of life is accepting the consequences of your actions. Everything is a trade-off, and I am accepting the consequences that speaking with moral clarity here may affect my employment status. But after thinking long and hard and sleeping on it, I realized I must say something.

Back to the comments. In a vacuum, an off-color joke is not the end of the world. But stacked on top of the many other comments from Benioff, and reporting on Salesforce pitching to help ICE hire agents, this is a pattern, not a one-off incident. It raises a larger question: what can we as employees in the tech community do to show our moral clarity while continuing to build the products and services that will change the world?

The tech industry has always been a dream of mine. As a child of the App Store era, tech was positioned as the endless opportunity to build and do good in this world. That was a farce. Not that tech cannot do good, but the idea that good is the only thing it does.

What is particularly frustrating as a member of the tech community is the cognitive dissonance that exists among our leaders. They promote values, donations, and giving back, but when the light is not shining on them, they are just like every other capitalist, looking to improve the bottom line. Speaking out of both sides of their mouths. The reason I wanted to work in tech was not to strike it big but because I saw how it improved my own life, and I wanted to be a part of something that was making life easier for others so they could truly enjoy the human experience. It is something I am passionate about and spend hours of my free time learning more about. I wished I would not have to pick between my passions and my morality.

I hope what I’m doing here is providing the same moral clarity I had wished for from our leaders, but it is painfully obvious to all of us they won’t. So let me say it clearly: as a concerned citizen, I am against the forceful use of ICE to terrorize law-abiding people under the guise of border safety. I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, less than a hundred miles from the border, and I know both the blessings and the pains that immigration brings to a community. But it was integral to my life growing up, and in a very real sense, it is what makes our country great. My grandparents came to this country in search of better opportunities. My hope is that one day I won’t have to leave to do the same. I cannot carry the same cognitive dissonance our leadership has demonstrated.

I will continue to think of ways we as a tech community can hold our leaders accountable for their words and actions. To all those who are affected by what is happening in this country, know that I will fight the good fight along with you.

Reach out if you ever want to chat. I’m here to support. Love you all.

1

Wired: “Salesforce Workers Circulate Open Letter Urging CEO Marc Benioff to Denounce ICE.” Wired, 10 Feb. 2026, www.wired.com/story/letter-salesforce-employees-sent-after-marc-benioffs-ice-comments/.

2

BBC: “Salesforce CEO apologises for saying Trump should send troops to San Francisco” BBC News, BBC, 17 Oct. 2025, www.bbc.com/news/articles/clykvypl9gxo.

3

New York Times: The New York Times, 16 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/us/salesforce-benioff-ice.html.

*If you don’t get the cover image of this just know salt melts ice

We became friends in middle school, although we had known each other for a while. Our families had circled each other for years in the same community until we began to swim together. The families grew closer until we were invited to Thanksgiving one year. Everyone else had people their own age to hang out with—she was my age companion.

She went to the other middle school on the opposite side of our little suburb. Rival schools. But it was a small town and we were all connected. That first Thanksgiving, I was nervous. We had very little in common—what was I supposed to do with her for hours on a November Thursday? We showed up, my sister split off with her older sister, my brothers went to play on their iPads, the dads went to grab a drink, and the moms went to the kitchen. It was just us (and her younger brother) as the crew for the evening.

As we walked toward their playroom, I spotted a drum set and discovered we both played—with the same teacher. We started talking about the people we knew in common, scrolling the early versions of Instagram on my iPod Touch. My nerves were gone. She was the first girl I was truly friends with. One I could talk to about anything.

After that first Thanksgiving, the families grew even closer. It helped that our older sisters became great friends, and with that, sibling hangouts became a regular occurrence. We would spend hours at each other’s houses—watching movies, swimming in the pool, waging nerf gun battles and playing hide-and-seek all around the house. Her mom made the best cookies (chocolate chip with a little orange zest) and our group became a little unit.

By seventh grade and the next Thanksgiving, we were great pals. Showing up that year was exciting. Our social circles had condensed. My friends at school knew her friends, and we even had a long-running joke that we were cousins. That was the year we became our closest. Every weekend we were at their house. We would iMessage on my iPod Touch, although she had the iPhone 5 while I was still reduced to my Walmart Blackberry. At the end of seventh grade, two big things happened. First, influenced by my parents, I transferred to her middle school for eighth grade. Because of this, I threw an end-of-year party at my house, inviting everyone from both schools. This was the beginning of us becoming even closer.

The summer was amazing. I was excited to be going to school with her. We plotted who we would hang out with, who the cool kids were, what we were excited about. The discussion of where we would go to high school started to come up. By this point in puberty, I had discovered a new desire: popularity. I had always had friends, but there was something more I craved—status. It started in seventh grade when I switched friend groups. These were the “cool” kids. The ones everyone wanted to sit with. The ones with the co-ed hangouts. The starters on the basketball and soccer teams dating the competitive dancers. The guys wore neon Nike shirts and basketball shorts while the girls were decked out in Abercrombie booty shorts and Aéropostale tops. Man, 2014 was a simpler time. As I got ready for my new year at the new school, I began to plot how I would integrate into their social circle.

The year started off wonderfully. We were in band together. We had math and English together. The friend group I found myself in was the companion guy group to her girl group. After school, we would walk to the local grocery store to hang out. On Fridays, we would carpool to one of our houses. This was the most intertwined our lives had ever been.

In the fall of 2014, my feelings began to turn. Maybe it started with my sister asking me if I had a crush on her. Or maybe I arrived at the conclusion on my own. Either way, it hit me: I did have a crush on her. And now I was scared. What if my feelings weren’t returned? What if my parents found out? What if people at school found out? I was paralyzed for months. We continued to hang out, but it became more painful each time—this thing I wanted to say sitting right there on my tongue.

One night at her house, we were playing hide-and-seek again. We decided to sneak outside and hide in her sister’s car while her brother searched the house. Sitting squished down, stacked next to each other on the floor of this car, I saw my opportunity. We were alone, practically cuddling—I should say something. But then I started simulating the realities. What if this fucked up everything? What if she rejected me? I stared at her face, at her beautiful smile newly revealed after her braces came off. And I froze. Didn’t say a word. The moment passed. I opted to continue the fantasy in my head because it was easier that way.

Pretty soon it became obvious to my friends that I liked her. Middle school boys are ruthless. Every time they saw us talking, they would poke me in the ribs, teasing me. But I was still paralyzed by the fantasy in my head. Then the pressure came. My friends started getting their first kisses, getting girlfriends, and I began to panic. I was falling behind. In a moment I regret terribly, I made up a rumor—that she had sent me pictures—to boost my street cred with the guys. I severely fucked up. My pubescent brain had decided the acceptance of those boys was more important than the trust in our relationship, and from that moment, I had destroyed everything.

A week passed before the news got back to her. I should have seen it coming. Once it reached her, I was done. She texted me one night and then called to curse me out about the rumor I had spread. She ended the conversation with five words: “I’m never speaking to you again.” And she wouldn’t—for the next three years. The rest of eighth grade was miserable. I left that friend group and found a new one. Even though we were family friends, she refused to talk to me, to even acknowledge my existence. She had every right. I was a dumbass who said something I never should have said. By the end of eighth grade, it was clear our relationship was over. I had missed my chance, and it was time to go our separate ways. Ninth grade started. Different schools. No contact.

I moved on—or so I thought. My new school gave me an entirely new friend group, one disconnected from the world I had come from. A fresh start. I wanted to put everything that happened in eighth grade behind me. But a part of me kept it tucked away in the back of my mind: At some point she’ll forgive me. We’ll reconnect the way we used to. And then I’ll finally work up the courage to share my feelings, which very much still existed. Social media began to torture me. I’d see her with other friends, other guys, having a blast. I knew she had moved on to bigger and better things. So I bided my time, hoping for another shot.

We arrive at senior year of high school. I had changed a lot. I was starting to let go of the fantasy—and then my family’s annual Halloween party came around. By this point, I was there just to hang out, not to trick-or-treat. Most of my friends were driving by now and had left to go do other things. I lingered around the house until, unexpectedly, she showed up. We had continued our yearly Thanksgiving dinners, but those were always superficial. Halloween felt different. We greeted each other and I asked if she wanted to go sit outside and catch up.

The two of us settled onto the outdoor couch at my parents’ house. For some reason, the firepit was going in Arizona fall weather, but there I sat in my Derrick Rose jersey, asking her about her life and college plans. She shared her recent acceptances, the clubs she was involved in, and we caught up on mutual friends from middle school. As the conversation went on, I was transported back to my eighth-grade self, crouched in that car during hide-and-seek, wanting to spill my guts but not wanting the fantasy to end. I went with a cautious approach instead: “Hey, it was really good catching up. Let me know if you ever want to hang out.” She replied: “For sure, would love to hang.”

A few weeks later, I texted her about seeing a movie and grabbing phở. I picked her up and we drove to dinner. The conversation was immaculate. We talked about some tea with a YouTuber we both watched, bounced between the most random topics, and just had a wonderful time. We went to see the movie—and for the life of me, I cannot remember what we saw—because I was playing my own movie in my head. The future I hoped for with her. The girl I had pined after since the seventh grade. After the movie, I dropped her back at her house and noticed the ticket stub sitting in my cupholder. Something told me I needed to keep it, so I stuffed it into my wallet. The hopeless romantic in me decided to hold onto it, imagining that once we were together, I could show it to her as proof that I had always liked her—just like in the movies.

We Snapchatted, texted off and on—though it was mostly me doing the texting—until the torture became too much. The fantasy, once exhilarating, had turned painful. Each daydream snapped me back to a harsher reality. And so during winter break of senior year, I laid it all on the line with a Snapchat message. I sent it and immediately turned off my phone, pacing the room as I simulated every possible outcome. After what felt like an eternity, I turned my phone back on and began furiously refreshing.

A few hours later, I had a response.

When I saw the blue light pop up, my heart stopped. I waited a beat before opening it. A paragraph appeared, and I ignored most of it except for one sentence: “I do not feel the same way.” It broke my heart. As I write this, I can summon the same feeling—my heart dropping, my stomach turning, my eyes beginning to well up. I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the floor, staring at the cream tile, wondering why the fuck I had let myself get this wrapped up. I was devastated. And I knew, truly, that it was over. I had to move on.

I did see her a few times after that. My family went to her graduation party. We happened to be at the same functions. But then college began—she went out of state, I stayed in state. COVID happened. My family moved away from my hometown. We lost touch for good. My life has changed leaps and bounds since that night I sat on the bathroom floor staring into the lights, wondering if I could ever survive the embarrassment.

I did bounce back. But I have fallen into the same trap since—or at least I think I have.

It wasn’t until today that I was able to put a word to this experience, one that defined so much of my early relationship with love and feeling.

Limerence.

Intrusive, obsessive romantic infatuation that exists only in your head. It is a high you can never fully shake and a comedown that makes you question why you took the drug at all. In essence, it is unrequited love—but the kind where you set yourself up for the fall.

When I look back at this story, I can trace the exact moments where my thinking went sideways. In that car during hide-and-seek, I had the girl I liked literally pressed against me, and instead of being honest I ran a simulation. I chose the version of the moment in my head over the one right in front of me—because the fantasy was safer. That became the pattern. Every time reality asked me to be vulnerable, I retreated into the movie I was directing in my mind. The one where everything worked out perfectly, on my timeline, with the exact script I had written.

And when the fantasy wasn’t enough to sustain me, I made it worse. I spread a rumor—traded her trust for a sliver of approval from guys whose names I barely remember now. I chose status over substance, the fleeting validation of boys in neon Nikes over a friendship that actually meant something. That was the moment I learned a lesson I wish I hadn’t needed: you cannot build anything real on a lie you told to feel important.

Even after she cut me off, I didn’t really learn. I spent three years refreshing her social media, narrating a reunion in my head, convinced that if I just waited long enough the universe would hand me a second chance. I kept a movie stub in my wallet like it was a prop in a love story—not because it meant something to her, but because it meant something to the version of us that only ever existed in my imagination. I was writing a screenplay for two when only one of us had read the script.

The truth is, limerence isn’t love. It’s a story you tell yourself to avoid the terror of actually being known. Real love requires you to show up without a script. To say the thing in the car. To risk the friendship. To hear “I do not feel the same way” and survive it—not on a bathroom floor wondering where it all went wrong, but standing up, absorbing it, and still believing that honesty was the right call.

This girl and I will not end up together, but the feelings were deeply formative. My first experience with limerence. Definitely not my last. But I now see the pattern clearly enough to name it, and I think that’s where change starts. I don’t want to be the guy who keeps a ticket stub for years, building a cathedral out of a coincidence. I don’t want to simulate every outcome before I open my mouth. I don’t want to choose the fantasy because it’s easier than the risk.

What I hope for—what I’m chasing now—is the version of love where I actually show up. Where I say the thing when I feel it, not four years later over Snapchat. Where I let someone know me in real time, not through the curated highlight reel I’ve been rehearsing in my head. I want the kind of love that doesn’t need a plot twist to feel exciting—one that’s built on the ordinary, unsexy act of just being honest.

Limerence is the Matrix. I’ve seen it now. And it is time to wake up and join the real world.

Thank you to this girl for teaching me a lesson I hope will pay dividends as I chase the real thing.

Onwards.

“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.”

— A Greek dude named Socrates. You might’ve heard of him.

Now let’s unpack this quote. Simply put, it is curiosity without judgment. Wisdom, in Socrates’ eyes, is knowing what you don’t know. Answers are fool’s gold—appearing all-encompassing until the next problem crops up. From this quote we can understand something transcendental about the human experience in Ancient Greece.

But life has become infinitely more complicated. Socrates could not fathom the interconnected and complex society we exist in today. While writing this, I began a thought experiment: What if we resurrected Socrates for one day and gave him access to a computer? I wonder what questions he would ask. What would surprise him, and more importantly, what would feel truly familiar? There is a reason we return to these texts and call them “classics”—they describe something fundamental to the human experience.

So why, in the current era, if I turn on social media or even ask someone for advice, am I flooded with answers? Prescriptions on how to live life. The steps toward success. Socrates would call these people stupid, but they’re not. They have been conditioned to expect answers because they have been promised them.

A more modern example. Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist, once said:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

Powerful, given the nature of his work—trying to answer the unanswerable questions, to solve the fundamentals of the universe. But it is this core thinking that matters: never having the answers, but instead recognizing that the journey toward an answer is the true experience.

At what point did we abandon the wisdom of Socrates and Feynman and pursue the false promise of answers? This is a story of how we lost our way—but also how we can find our path back.

A Woman & Her Laptop

Buzz, buzz. She thinks it’s the classic phantom notification, but then another buzz followed by a loud ping echoes through the TSA security line. Her socks glide back and forth on the linoleum tile as the static electricity builds. Like a model emerging onto a runway, her Samsonite bag appears on the belt. Eager to grab it, she approaches. Then a hand in blue rubber gloves snatches the bag and disrupts its journey back to her. The interrogation begins.

“Ma’am, is this your bag?”

“Yes, it is.”

She approaches the bench as the agent begins unzipping. First, they pull out her toiletry bag. Like a Walgreens checkout, the agent inspects each serum, bottle, powder, and container. Her eyes dart around, trying to look innocent, even though she is.

Buzz.

She feels it again in her purse but remains unbothered as the inspection continues. Now it’s onto the clothes, where the agent ruffles through her Zara blouses and Calvin Klein suits. Then the verdict:

“You are free to go, ma’am.”

She shoves her belongings back into the Samsonite. Wiping fingerprints off her phone screen, she watches her Slack notifications pile up like pancakes on Sunday morning:

8:28 PM @Angela: What’s the update on this project?

8:29 PM @Angela: Can you fix slide 38? The alignment is off.

8:31 PM @Carl: Can you walk me through the analysis on slide 45?

In the span of three minutes—an eternity in the corporate world—her overlords had summoned her back. Throwing her purse over her shoulder and dragging her Samsonite across the airport tile, she finds her target: a bench to collapse on.

How did she get here? Not at the airport, but here. As a child, she pictured her future boss-self strutting through airport halls like she owned the place, the world at her fingertips. While studying, she imagined the luxurious life she’d be living—high-rise apartment in the city, weekends out, summer trips to the French Riviera. Instead, she sat on this bench like Forrest Gump, replaying her life story.

Then she is interrupted—not by work. This time it’s American Airlines.

AA6798 New York JFK — Delayed 4 hours until 11:45 PM

If there is such a thing as winning the lottery, this is its opposite. Like an avalanche tumbling down a mountain, she feels a sense of hopelessness, like nothing will ever break the streak. Staring directly into the Apple logo on her closed laptop, her brain racks through everything that has happened in the past ten minutes. Bombardment by TSA, by work, and now by American Airlines. Then an epiphany occurs. She thinks to herself:

No one is going to die if I don’t answer these messages right now.

A sigh. A brief moment of reprieve from the world on her back. She is overwhelmed. She damn well does not have the answers—but she can’t even begin to question how she got here. Realizing it’s time to mobilize, her laptop returns to its place nestled in her purse. She grabs her bags and begins her quest down the airport hallway.

Hudson News catches her eye first. The blue cursive logo attracts her like a moth to a light. The bright fluorescent glow of the fridge section blinds her as Cokes, coffees, and pre-packaged sandwiches line her sight. Looking around, she realizes she looks directionless—and feeling the pressure to give the appearance of direction, she heads toward the book section. The irony is, she is truly directionless. She had played the game perfectly. Stellar grades, sports, extracurriculars, and acceptance into the college of her dreams. The game continued in college: sculpting herself into the ideal applicant, never missing an opportunity for an internship or any professional development. Then, in January of her junior year, she received a call from an unknown number.

“We’ve really enjoyed getting to know you through the interview process and would love to offer you a position as a summer intern!”

It was all worth it. She finally had the validation that playing the game paid off. She had achieved her goal. With the burden of experience, she now realizes what a shortsighted goal this was. Her mind replays this memory as she scans the book section. Her gaze lands on it.

Neon covers the pages with big bold text: Hacking Your Way to Habits: Ten Productivity Hacks to Change Your Life.

Only $17.99 to change my life. She feels it’s promising something that does not exist, but she ignores herself, grabs the book, and opens page one. She’s pulled into the magic dimension of productivity—where her apartment is spotless, she has time for her workout class, time to date, and even that precious downtime. The picture is vivid. She can taste it: that same feeling she had during the call that put her on this journey.

As she walks off, her mind drifts—not toward work, not toward her newest purchase. She remains skeptical of this book’s promises and wonders where this all started. With a $17.99 productivity manual in hand, she experiences what might be called the Airport Bookstore Epiphany—that moment when you realize you’re about to pay money for someone else’s certainty about your uncertain life. The book promises transformation through ten simple steps, as if human complexity could be debugged like software. She wonders, not for the first time, when we started believing that life’s messiness could be solved by following someone else’s instructions.

Shuruppak Decides Documentation Is Important

In ancient Mesopotamia, there once lived a man named Shuruppak. He was the king of his city, one that bore his name. On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, Shuruppak had achieved a great deal—surviving a potentially mythical flood and building a revolutionary idea for the time: a society. Shuruppak was, as they say, him.

But there were two things he knew. First, he had a son. Second, his time on this earth was limited. He had been decorated with a wealth of life experiences and wisdom he wished to share. During Shuruppak’s time, society was in the early innings. Millions of years of hunter-gatherer lifestyles had left documentation as an afterthought. Skills were learned through practice—how to track an animal, which fruits were safe to eat, what a snake in the grass sounds like. But as farming communities and later cities grew, these practical skills became less important. Survival was now based on your ability to influence those around you and work with others to achieve your basic needs. Shuruppak had acquired new skills and wanted to share his wisdom. So he decided to document. He wrote down instructions on how to live a successful life, aptly named

The Instructions of Shuruppak. His wisdom started practical—“you should not locate a field on a road”—but moved toward life advice: “You should not pass judgment when you drink beer.” Through broken tablets and scholarly translations, we are given a window into the life and values of Shuruppak. But this is not an ancient Mesopotamian history text.

So why do we care about Shuruppak?

Not for the wisdom of his answers, but for the example he would set.

His writings are the earliest documented example of this phenomenon: providing answers through the lens of lived experience. Four thousand years later, a woman in an airport will pay $17.99 for essentially the same promise Shuruppak made for free—that someone else has figured out the code for living well. This is a tale as old as civilization.

Here’s the kicker:

If Shuruppak—or anyone, for that matter—had figured out the universal answers, why do we keep writing?

Back in Terminal B

She exits Hudson News with a new wind in her sails. With time to kill and a new book in hand, she is cautiously optimistic. Maybe this is the one. Returning to that same bench, she cracks open page one. As her eyes dart back and forth, she feels it again—like a rubber band snapping back.

Buzz. Buzz.

Snapped out of her trance, she fumbles to find her phone:

8:53 PM @Angela: Following up on the above message

Letting out an audible sigh, she reluctantly closes the book, adding a crease on page two to mark her eventual return—already planning her relationship with wisdom she hasn’t yet acquired. As she reaches for her laptop to answer Angela’s message (the one marked “URGENT” despite containing nothing that couldn’t wait until next Tuesday), she catches a glimpse of a group of five college guys approaching the same Hudson News. One of them looks exactly like her old friend from college, if her old friend had been frozen in time at the precise moment when the future still felt like a menu of infinite possibilities rather than a series of obligations that had somehow chosen her.

She watches them with what might be called Airport Envy—that particular ache you feel when witnessing people who haven’t yet discovered that optimism has an expiration date. Their whole energy radiates that specific twenty-two-year-old confidence of uninformed optimism. She imagines the ignorant bliss that exists in their universe, where “networking” still sounds like an opportunity rather than a desperate scramble, where “following your passion” hasn’t yet been revealed as advice only rich people can afford to take.

One of them—the obvious ringleader with his duffel bag draped over one shoulder like some kind of adventure-movie prop—turns toward Hudson News and shouts to his pack with the particular volume of someone who has never once considered that the world might not want to hear his thoughts:

“This trip is about to be legendary!”

His hat is propped on hair that hasn’t been cut in months, the kind of intentional dishevelment that requires both youth and the certainty that dishevelment looks good on you. His friends echo agreement, someone mentions snacks, and they converge on Hudson News like a small army of possibility—unaware they’re about to participate in the same ancient ritual of seeking answers that has disappointed humans since clay tablets were cutting-edge technology.

He enters the Hudson News and receives that same buzz, buzz she felt. As his friends scatter on a scavenger hunt for snacks, he peels off into the book section. His surroundings exist only as a backdrop to the blinking red notification on his screen. Fumbling his phone out of his pocket, he swipes up furiously—only for his phone to reject his face and refuse to unlock. He tries again, gives up, enters his password the old-school way. Then he sees it:

Subject: Application Update

The Hudson News disappeared. The flight, his friends, his future—all of it dissolved into those two words. His eyes scan the store, finding his friends across the aisle reviewing snack options. He has a moment of solitude. He navigates to the blue mail app with its striking red “1” above it. At the top of his inbox lies the Application Update. He pauses, knowing he exists in a space between possibilities. Both doors are open, the future still unwritten—but the current pulls him to click.

We regret to inform you…

Then he feels it: the Disappointment Drop—that sensation where your heart plummets to the core of the earth, where you want to curl up on the floor and shield yourself from the reality that just struck you. His mind transitions into the sitcom-finale montage—fragments of his imagined future playing in rapid succession. But unlike a sitcom, there are no happy endings. He pictures himself moving back to his parents’ house. Back to his high school bedroom, the one he swore he’d never return to. It feels like quicksand—the more he tries to escape, the deeper he sinks. His spiral is interrupted:

“Hey man, we’re going to grab a pre-flight beer. Want to join?”

Paralyzed by the news, he declines for a minute, opting to stay in Hudson News a little longer. The excuse is snacks; the reality is a moment to process. The rest of the guys set their sights on the bar, leaving him behind to reframe a reality only he knows about. Senior year had been one of metamorphosis. He started college flying blind, following directions that led him to higher education without ever questioning why. But as a student, he existed on frozen time—a world of limitless possibility. He was the pre-revenue company with endless growth projections. Now he’d just had a date with reality: the crushing one of a directionless life, arriving on the other side of this trip.

Maybe he should just join his friends at the bar and forget about it—kick the can down the road. He begins to orient his body toward the exit, then stops. He realizes where he is. The self-help section. Maybe something here can help. One title snags his gaze:

How to Make Your Twenties Matter and Build a Meaningful Life

A reprieve from the spiraling. He retrieves the book from the shelf. Skepticism strikes first. He had spent the last four years attending countless career seminars, molding his personality into the desired applicant template he’d been presented with. The contract was clear: prepare, follow the directions, put in the effort, and you will receive the job offer—your ticket to the next station of life. He followed directions. He is currently directionless in the Hudson News.

Opening the book, he’s immediately struck by the author’s confident tone—the kind of voice that suggests life’s complexities can be solved through better time management and clearer goal-setting. The first chapter promises to help him “design his decade” and “build career capital,” terms that sound both sophisticated and achievable. The familiar dopamine hit of potential transformation floods his system. This could be it—the roadmap he’s been missing, the instruction manual that college forgot to provide.

He flips through chapters with titles like “The Power of Weak Ties” and “Why Identity Capital Matters,” each one promising to unlock secrets that successful twenty-somethings apparently know instinctively. The author writes with the authority of someone who has cracked the algorithm of early adulthood. He feels that familiar surge of hope—the same feeling he got before every job interview, every networking event, every career fair where he convinced himself this time would be different.

Standing in the fluorescent glow of Hudson News, surrounded by overpriced magazines and airport novels, he experiences the Self-Help Seduction—that moment when someone else’s certainty about your uncertain future feels worth $17.99. He doesn’t yet know that he’s joining a tradition stretching back thousands of years, a long line of seekers convinced that the right book contains the answers they need.

The business major in him briefly wonders how big this industry really is. If he just dropped $17.99 for two hundred pages of paper and ink, how many other desperate twenty-somethings are doing the same? Who is the patriarch of this “self-help” category? Little does he know, the answer involves another young man who also failed at everything he tried, in an era when failure felt even more final than it does today.

The Man Who Failed His Way to an Industry

Samuel Smiles failed at everything. Business, medicine, journalism—each career path ended in disappointment, each venture collapsed under the weight of his own incompetence or the indifference of the world around him. In nineteenth-century England, there was no safety net, no career counseling, no LinkedIn profile to polish. There was no one looking out for you except yourself. All Samuel had were his own bootstraps, and he was getting tired of pulling them.

He needed help, but there were no hands willing to pull him along. The only hand he had was the one attached to him—and it had proven remarkably unreliable at building anything resembling success. If no one would help him, he would have to help himself. A phrase that would eventually make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

But first, Smiles had to survive his own failures. Like the graduate standing in Hudson News clutching his career guide, like the woman with her productivity manual, Samuel Smiles was a seeker before he became a guru. The difference was that Samuel lived in an era when you couldn’t order wisdom from Amazon or download it as a podcast. If he wanted answers, he’d have to create them himself.

And so, in 1859, Samuel Smiles wrote the book that would launch a million others: Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct. It was part autobiography, part philosophy, and entirely convinced that success was simply a matter of following the right instructions. The book promised that anyone—regardless of background, education, or natural talent—could transform their life through discipline, perseverance, and moral character.

It was, in essence, the same promise our graduate just paid $17.99 to hear, packaged for an industrial age that was creating new forms of anxiety about success and failure. Smiles had accidentally invented the template that every self-help author since would follow: take your personal story of overcoming struggle, extract universal principles from your specific experience, and present these principles as a replicable formula for success.

The book sold 20,000 copies in its first year—twenty times more than the average Victorian publication. By the time of Smiles’s death, it had sold over 250,000 copies, making him wealthy through the simple act of convincing people that wealth was achievable through simple steps.

But here’s the Smiles Paradox: if self-help actually worked—if his book truly contained the universal formula for success—the self-help industry would not exist. The fact that our recent college grad is standing in an airport 165 years later, holding yet another promise of transformation, suggests that Samuel’s answers might not have been as universal as he believed.

The Bar

With his eyes set on the bar, the graduate finally leaves Hudson News—having entered and exited as a changed person, or at least someone carrying the promise of change in paperback form. Walking in, his friends have established territory: beers in hand, voices elevated to that particular volume young men use when they want the world to witness their confidence. He tucks his new bible under his arm and feels that familiar surge of optimism. Maybe this will provide the instructions four years of university had failed to deliver.

His friends cluster around the far end of the bar, their energy creating a gravitational pull that draws attention from nearby travelers. Including a middle-aged man sitting alone at the bar’s corner: a quarter-full glass of red wine catching the overhead light, a book pinned to the table with his finger pressed on page three. But his attention isn’t on the book—it’s on the group of guys, their easy camaraderie, their assumption that the world is designed for their entertainment.

“Where are you guys headed?” the older man asks, his voice carrying that particular tone adults use when they want to connect with youth they no longer possess. The wine slides into his mouth as the lads eagerly share their itinerary: London to Barcelona, Barcelona to Ibiza, Ibiza back to reality—though they haven’t quite accepted that last part yet.

The older man laughs, wishes them well, and the graduate catches something in the man’s expression—not envy exactly, but a kind of wistful recognition that this era is long gone for him. His mind seems to drift back to his own younger years, when adventure felt like a birthright rather than a luxury, when the future stretched ahead like an unlimited expense account rather than a series of bills coming due.

The guys file out to catch their flight toward ten days of fun. The man remains at the bar alone. He peels back the book pinned to the table to reveal its title: Living Alone: Finding Yourself. Page three. His reading glasses are glued to his forehead as he stares at the blurry text, attempting to look interested—but this is not the first time he’s attempted to read this. The seat adjacent is ice cold. No one is nearby to fill it, and the only company he has are the words on the page and the bartender polishing a glass.

He played by the rules. A company man through and through. If they needed him early, he was there. Staying late, he brought an air mattress. Paid time off was a foreign language. Working hard meant less time finding the woman of his dreams. In his mid-twenties he found himself finally taking time off—but not for him. It was to attend the parade of bachelor parties and weddings his friends seemingly held every weekend. Each one a brutal reminder. Every reception had its ritual: couples crowding the dance floor, swaying back and forth, staring into each other’s eyes as Michael Bublé rang through the hotel ballroom. Something needed to change. He was not showing up at the next wedding and sitting on the sidelines.

Working late one day, a coworker asked if he was seeing anyone. He said no. She asked if he was interested in her friend—one who had just exited a toxic relationship. Having returned from the sidelines of yet another wedding, he knew it was time for action. So they went out. Drinks followed by dinner, followed by the obligatory first-date questions. He often thought of first dates like preparing for an interview—the answers rehearsed and vanilla, exactly what the audience wanted to hear. It worked. She was interested. But was he? Motivated by the fear of the sidelines, he asked her on a second date. When he worked late, she made him dinner. It was practical. And knowing his time for the spotlight was waning, he continued seeing her.

The next spring he took two full weeks off—the longest he’d ever taken. One week for his wedding. The second for his honeymoon. It was finally his turn. The event was beautiful. Those who had relegated him to the sidelines were now forced to watch him glide on the main stage. The honeymoon was immaculate—a piña colada dream. They returned to the condo they now co-occupied. Sometimes he wished he’d never gotten on that return flight, that he’d pitched a tent on that beach, sipping piña coladas forever.

Arguments became more common. Little things became big things. Tongues were held. Reservoirs of resentment piled up until, years later, it hit a breaking point. The dam had broken and there was no way to plug it. They had to go their separate ways. He took another week off—this time to move into a one-bedroom apartment. He sat there alone in his empty bachelor pad, replaying every argument and every awkward silence as a montage of pain. Grabbing his phone, he booked a one-way ticket to Singapore—a lifelong dream. While scrolling through United Airlines, he saw an ad for a book. One that offered him a path forward, much like this ticket did.

One Amazon Prime delivery later, he sat at that airport bar with his finger pressed on page three—a universal signal of attempted self-betterment. In italics on page three lay the hook that reeled him in: “Discovering Your True Self Post-Divorce.” The words rotated like a Ferris wheel in his head. The years had given him one prevailing lens: skepticism. He joked to himself—Maybe I should write a book like this—and reflected on how, in his lifetime, these “life” user manuals had only multiplied.

The Answer Machine

If Samuel Smiles prescribed Advil, twenty-first-century luminaries prescribed opioids. What started as a slow burn Smiles ignited in Victorian England became a wildfire in the modern world. The modern individual is overwhelmed with answers. Trends live and die faster than ever, and anyone with a platform has become the next Smiles—dispensing relationship advice, career counsel, fitness plans. We ended up here through simple economics: technology allows for an endless supply of content, while consumers have been sucked into the endless flywheel of answers—one that preys on our desire to seek truth but leaves individuals with more uncertainty than before.

Then came the internet, social media, and the pandemic—each adding fuel to our desperate search for answers. The gatekeepers of the old publishing world disappeared. Anyone with a smartphone became a guru. And we—anxious, isolated, overwhelmed—kept clicking, kept scrolling, kept buying.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the inflection point. We had slowly drifted toward a virtual world, but most of us still conducted ourselves the way humans always have: gathering in communal spaces—work, school, church—to socialize and communicate. We had communities. Then we went virtual. The World Health Organization put a number to what we all felt: anxiety and depression up more than 25%. We were alone, afraid, and desperate for anything that promised relief.

The irony of anxiety and depression is that it feels like a solo journey, despite most of us walking the same path. When feeling this way, you search for anything that gives you the slightest reprieve—drugs, alcohol, any vice. But the vice almost everyone seeks is answers. Look no further than December 2020, around the holidays, when self-help book sales rose 15% compared to previous periods. The pandemic highlighted some of our deepest and darkest fears and sent us spiraling for solutions. This was no flash in the pan. In 2021, self-help sales rose another 10%. In 2022, another 12%.

This is the world we live in. We’re not changing that. But we can change our approach.

The Wrong Questions

This brings us back to our travelers and the problems they face.

Back in Terminal B, the woman stares at her productivity manual and wonders: What if I became more productive and still felt empty?

At the bar, the graduate grips his career guide and asks himself: What if I followed all the steps and ended up miserable anyway?

And the divorced man, finger still pressed on page three, finally allows himself to think: What if starting over means admitting I never knew myself at all?

These are the questions the books in their hands cannot answer. These are the questions that matter.

All three have valid uncertainties about their futures and how they want to conduct their lives. The issue is they will never find resolution—especially not in those self-help books or on an Instagram reel. There are a multitude of corporate workers who feel their work is meaningless and overwhelming but choose to stay because the counsel they sought doesn’t apply to them. There are young graduates who enter adulthood with endless optimism but are saddled with the realities of the job search and end up taking the job they swore they’d never find themselves in. There are people who follow the “safe” plan only to find their lives upside down with a midlife crisis on their hands. Our travelers are not unique. They represent a small handful of real people who struggle each day on this journey.

We are playing a game we are meant to lose

So how do we win? We win by playing a new game—one where the objective is not the answer to the question, but the question itself.

The old game: “How do I get promoted?” leads to a tactics checklist. The new game: “Why do I want to be promoted?” leads to self-discovery. One game has a finish line. The other has no end—and that’s the point.

What I Know Is That I Know Nothing

It all clicked for me when I read this Socrates adage:

“Every time you gain a greater understanding, it creates even more questions than it answers.”

I was two years out of college, sitting in my apartment late at night, surrounded by the accumulated debris of someone searching for answers—half-finished journals, bookmarked podcasts, a browser with thirty open tabs of career advice. I’d been trying to answer the question “What should I do with my life?” for months. I’d made lists. I’d done the exercises. I’d followed the frameworks. Nothing worked. The answer never came—or rather, every answer that came felt borrowed, like wearing someone else’s clothes.

Then I read that Socrates quote again and something shifted. I realized I was asking the wrong question. “What should I do with my life?” assumed there was a right answer I was missing, a combination to a lock I just hadn’t cracked. But what if the question was “What am I actually curious about right now?” or “What makes me forget to check my phone?” The first question led to paralysis. The second led to discovery.

It’s a childlike wonder that leads to asking “and then what happens?” until you reach the point where you’re sitting with genuinely unanswerable questions. I started a blog after graduating college where my primary goal was to write about the lessons and experiences I’d had. But here’s the truth: most blogs are self-help masquerading as story-driven lessons. I wrote about my answers to the college experience, navigating my work at a startup, the nuggets of wisdom I’d begun to pick up. The issue was there was no comprehensive theme, nothing giving me purpose to write outside of a distant hope that it would provide my life with meaning. Like the Buddha, I thought if I clacked on my computer enough, the ideas would flow and I could preach the gospel.

Then I read the Socrates adage again and realized: I know nothing.

It’s this epiphany that reframed the whole equation for me. I’ll never have answers. Neither will you. And that’s not just alright—that’s freedom.

The Art of Questioning

The art of questioning is not about driving to an answer. It’s about the conversations you have along the way—the many micro-realizations that emerge once you take time for introspection. The branches upon branches of spiraling topics that may bring you some new meaning or point you in a direction. This is one of the biggest blessings you can have: the opportunity and ability to ask yourself a question and take the time to critically think through where it leads.

When I stopped asking “How do I find my passion?” and started asking “What made me lose track of time today?”—that question led to “Why does writing do that for me?” which led to “What was I writing about?” which led to “Why do I care about that topic?” which led to “When did I first start caring about this?” Five questions in, I wasn’t closer to an “answer” about my passion. But I understood something essential about myself I’d never noticed before.

But we cannot just ask any questions. There are two cardinal sins of inquiry, and committing either one defeats the purpose entirely.

The First Cardinal Sin: Asking Questions for Optics.

These are the questions you think you’re supposed to ask. “What’s my purpose?” “How do I maximize my potential?” “What’s my five-year plan?” You write them in your journal because that’s what self-improvement looks like. You post them on social media because deep questions signal depth. But you don’t actually care about the answers. You’re performing inquiry, not practicing it. How do you know if you’re committing this sin? Easy: you never follow up. You ask “What’s my purpose?” on Sunday morning and never think about it again. You’re asking because you think you should, not because you’re genuinely curious.

The Second Cardinal Sin: Avoiding Questions Out of Fear.

These are the questions that keep you up at night—the ones you actively run from. “Am I happy in this relationship?” “Do I actually like my career, or just the salary?” “What would I do if I weren’t afraid?” These questions terrify you because the honest answer might require change. So you buy another self-help book that asks easier questions. You seek answers to questions you don’t care about to avoid the questions that matter. How do you know if you’re committing this sin? You feel relief when you’re too busy to think. You fill every silence with podcasts, music, scrolling. You’re not avoiding answers—you’re avoiding the questions themselves.

Instead, we want to ask questions of ourselves that force introspection where the answer is not clear. To put it simply: we should only ask questions we care about the answer to.

Here’s the litmus test: Does the question make you uncomfortable? Do you want to avoid thinking about it? Does it follow you into the shower, into your commute, into the moments before sleep? That discomfort is your compass. That’s the question worth asking.

Not “How do I get promoted?” but “Do I even want to be promoted?” Not “How do I become more productive?” but “Why do I feel I’m never productive enough?” Not “What should I do with my life?” but “What am I doing with my life right now—and do I like it?”

What I offer you is what no self-help book will: not a system with ten steps, but a framework for understanding yourself, the people in your life, and the work you choose to do. This is a practice, not a program. There is no checklist. There is no finish line. There is only the ongoing, uncomfortable, endlessly rewarding act of asking questions that matter.

This is not a framework to find answers. This is a practice for living with questions—and discovering that living with questions is better than dying for answers.

This is your choose-your-own-adventure of philosophy. Unlike the books from your childhood, there are no wrong turns—because every question leads somewhere worth going.

Let’s return one last time to our three travelers, walking away from Hudson News with their self-help books in hand. Each one believes they’re holding answers. Each one is holding the wrong thing entirely.

The woman will realize her productivity problem isn’t about time management. The graduate will discover his career crisis isn’t about finding the right job. The divorced man will understand his loneliness isn’t solved by self-discovery workbooks.

They’re asking the wrong questions. Soon, they’ll learn to ask better ones.

So will you.

But first, here’s your opening question—not to answer, but to sit with, to wrestle with, to let it change you: What am I really asking for when I seek advice?

Don’t rush to answer. That’s the old game. In the new game, we sit with the question long enough to hear what it’s really asking.

Welcome to the practice of questioning. Let’s begin.

I sat in the basement of ASU’s business school, half paying attention to “Data Mining Fundamentals,” as I frantically emailed my recruiter. “Hey, I know the internship starts in two weeks, but can I switch from NYC to SF?”—this after almost getting scammed trying to find New York housing. A sliding doors moment. What began as panic has led to years of memories. A few months later, working in Alabama, another email arrived from my internship manager: “Hey, I know you started a role, but we’re hiring if you’re interested.” I replied instantly. Sliding doors moments got me here, but everything else is what kept me.

I was warned before moving. What about the crackheads? The car break-ins? The Tenderloin? The picture of this city was painted before I ever stepped foot in it. But thank goodness most of that was overblown. Yes, those things exist—they are a sad reality of policy, economics, and broader societal failure. There is work to be done, and I hope it continues. But it did not ruin my experience, because I chose not to let it. When you accept the faults of a city, the way you accept the faults of someone you love, you can truly fall in love.

My San Francisco was filled with beauty instead. Gorgeous parks, stunning views, one-of-a-kind people—so much packed into a 7×7-mile city. The irony is that this chapter held the least professional or academic focus of my life. From afar, everyone in SF seems like a grinder, working to make the next billion or climb the next rung. But as I got closer to it, I started to reject it more. I’ll never fully understand how a city with such immense natural beauty is home to industries that take us away from experiencing it. That juxtaposition gave me the greatest gift: the opportunity to step back from constant striving and assess my life. To learn what I actually enjoy—and especially what I don’t.

An argument could be made that this self-discovery could have happened anywhere, and maybe it could have. That’s the fun of hypotheticals: we’ll never know. But it did happen here, and the combination of right time and right place made it all possible. If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering why I’m leaving. I don’t have a concrete answer. It’s a mix of personal desire to live in New York, family, and work—but underneath all of that, I felt a sense of complacency about what I had gotten out of SF. It’s time for a new challenge, so I can grow more, discover more. This could end up being the wrong call, but it’s not irreversible. An “open door” decision: if you walk in and it doesn’t fit, you can walk right back out. At this moment, it feels right.

Although I’ve tried, words can’t fully capture what this time has meant to me—or what it will mean as the years pass. This has been a sweet part of the journey, and my only hope for the next chapter is that it’s as good as this one.

Goodbye, SF. Onwards.

A few fun memories from the last two years, with people I love:

March 9th, 2024 - First birthday in SF & bonfire with my birthday buddy Div

March 31st, 2024 - Mark, Edgar, Brooke (& Qike not pictured) tearing up SJ

April 8th, 2024 - One of many picnics featuring my BeReal attempt

May 12th, 2024 - Clay St lads tear up the Mission (PS Drunk Abhi is a top-tier person to be around)

November 3rd, 2024 - Parents + Brothers visit & seeing Coit Tower

March 9th, 2025 - Birthday & Bonfire Pt. 2 and the legend Etash

March 22nd, 2025 - The ASU Walking Crew enjoys the sites ft. Claire T & Karuna

March 25th, 2025 - Anotha beautiful picnic at Ft. Mason

May 3rd, 2025 - Nob Hill Run Club (HQ at Clay St) Launch Party Bar-tending view — no photos were taken while bartending because I respect the craft

May 22nd, 2025 - The Big Three (Xosh, Ash & Kiran) enjoy Key Klub

August 28th, 2025 - The Roomies take on House of Prime Rib

January 14th, 2026 - Goodbye Dinner + Trivia at Xoshwins

Despite this fact, my recent feed and conversations have been dominated by the reflection and projection a new year brings. “25 lessons from 2025.” “What I learned this year.” “2026 predictions.” New Year’s itself was arbitrarily set by Pope Gregory XIII hundreds of years ago, but the process of reflection and projection is extremely valuable. We should do it more than once a year.

Instead of resolutions, I start the year with a theme—something that will guide my decisions. It stems from a mix of goals, desires, and things I can’t quite put a finger on. Hot take: there is no need to set concrete goals at the start of each new year. You’re setting yourself up for failure. Two reasons. First, life changes and goals shift. Second, goals should be created throughout the year and carried into the next, not manufactured on January 1st.

But the point of this post is not to debate the virtue of New Year’s introspection. It’s to share what I hope for myself and others in this new year: to do things “for the love of the game”—because it is hard, and the accomplishment that follows is the most addictive high you can get.

Continuing the game analogy from last year’s post, I finally internalized what makes people great at their craft. Talent, for sure. Luck, definitely. But above all, they love the process of what they do. In sports, coaches are notoriously full of clichés when they step up to the podium, but if you read between the “we’re going to give it our all for four quarters” and “this team is a great group of guys,” the great ones always talk about the work and the process. Game day is no surprise to them because they’ve spent the preceding days and weeks putting in the work. The only reason they can is because they love the game. As my fellow five-foot-six king Nick Saban says, “Know what you want to accomplish and focus on the process rather than the outcome.”

So for me, the theme of this year is to pursue things for the love of the game. To fall in love with the process. When what’s mundane to others fascinates me. When I wake up and my thoughts drift toward the work—not out of stress, but out of excitement. It’s this alignment between motivation and work that breeds the highest sense of accomplishment.

Maybe that’s why most people make it to February. For a few weeks, the love of the game is real. The goal for me this year is to make it last a little longer.

Happy New Year—and let the game continue.

Over the next few years, our upstairs playroom became a homemade A24 studio, pumping out my sister’s music videos, our six-time sequel movie “Welcome to Hawaii,” a talk show, and many top-ten videos ranking everything from Disney Channel stars to my favorite NBA players. We did this purely for the “love of the game”—to go through the creative process and take an idea and make it into something. Maybe it was boredom, but the only audience was ourselves, and that’s the way we wanted it.

After we moved out of our childhood house when I graduated from high school, somewhere in the shuffle we lost that iMac and tragically had not backed up any of the videos. Those first movies, gone, only to be remembered.

Now as I get older and the memories begin to fade together, I felt the desire to document again, and this time to save it. So this year, in my free time, I began to document trips and other fun events. I spent some time re-learning to edit, and I’ve got some exciting news:

I’ve started a YouTube channel.

Why? To reconnect with my childhood love of making videos, but for me it’s just to document, to practice new skills, and to share memories with others. Everything else that comes with it is gravy—my only metric for success is to be able to watch these videos back years from now, cringe a little bit, but have fond memories about great times. I’ve already uploaded a few fun videos from this year, but expect a lot more to come over the next year. Stay tuned for trip vlogs, DJ sets, video essays, and some more surprises along the way (have a big announcement coming early next year). I hope you’ll choose to follow along. Till next time!

Subscribe here

and stay tuned

A few years back, Jack decided to run a marathon. Unlike many who jumped on the marathon fad via peer pressure or herd mentality, Jack did this purely for himself. At the time I remember thinking “ain’t nobody got time for marathon training,” which made his commitment even more impressive given we were still in school. Months of training culminated in race day, which Jack got off to a beautiful start. He crushed the first ten miles as we watched his location cruise through the route. The pace began to dwindle, but Jack kept chugging along. As we sat on the other side of Tempe Town Lake looking across the bridge for Jack, we saw his tracker showing twenty-six miles. We waited. No Jack. We waited some more—maybe the tracker updated wrong. Still no Jack. Racers way behind Jack’s pace began to finish and concern began to sink in. Working with the race coordinators, we found Jack passed out 0.2 miles from the finish line. An ambulance ride and ER visit later, Jack discovered he’d had lactic acid been building up in his kidneys the entire race.¹ Jack never finished that race, and this is my abstract fear: pushing myself to run a race when there are clear limitations that will prevent me from finishing.

I have no plans to run a marathon, but in my career, how do I avoid collapse?

At first I looked toward those ahead and successful in their careers as an example. What do they do? How do they manage? I started by observing from afar—the way they speak about work, what they do outside of it, the energy they bring each day, if and how much they complain, whether it seems like they’re bullshitting you or themselves. But then I straight up asked them. I was expecting conceptual advice, but I was surprised by the practicality. Silence notifications, have a routine, find things that give you energy, go to bed early (I could go on, but you get it). Social media is full of these surface-level tips. But all those who genuinely seem to enjoy their work share something deeper.

The common thread is obsession. All they do is think about work. They stop working because they physically cannot. They want to daydream about it. Work is never truly over and that doesn’t bother them. Their cup is fuller when they’re doing the work versus not. Looking back, doing the work is the achievement, not the outcome. The key to it all—they want to obsess and enjoy doing it. Another way to define this is the opposite of the Severance² premise. In the show, employees undergo surgery to sever their brains from work (innie) and personal (outtie) with no memory of each other. The idea is you care so little about work, you’d rather sever yourself so you never have to think about it. It comes from a sense of deep disconnection and avoidance. But if you’re obsessed, you want to connect, to immerse yourself in it.

Mark Manson writes about this in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck³:

“A good life is not a life without problems. A good life is a life with good problems.”

I’ll take it a level further: the good problems are the ones you want to obsess over. From the moment light hits your eyes until you drift off to sleep, your mind constantly toils around the work. When someone asks “how are things,” you bring this up first with enough passion to give a TED Talk on the spot. But you never tire of thinking about it. The deeper you analyze, the more adrenaline flows through your body. That’s the quest I hope to go on with my work—to find the “good problems” I’m obsessed with.

Obsession is a unique experience and finding it is a deeply personal journey. There’s no right or wrong, no clear answers to what the right kind of obsession looks like. Like the Supreme Court defined pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio, “you know it when you see it.” It’s an intangible feeling you recognize when you stumble upon it.

Jack eventually found his race—the one his body could actually finish. He runs marathons now without collapsing, having figured out what works for him. I’m still searching for mine. But I know now the goal isn’t just to avoid collapse at mile twenty-six. It’s to find work so compelling that stopping feels harder than continuing. To find the problems I’d rather obsess over than escape from. That’s what I’m chasing—not a finish line, but a race I never want to end.

¹ Jack was completely fine and has subsequently run multiple marathons. Do not feel sorry for him—he’s an athletic and good-looking beast who I love dearly.

² Severance is an Apple TV+ show with two seasons out now. I highly recommend watching it—it’s one of my favorite shows currently airing.

³ I highly recommend reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Mark Manson also writes an incredible blog.

This came up a few weeks back when I couldn't make it to the performative male look-alike contest in Dolores Park. After the Timothée Chalamet, Jeremy Allen White, and Dev Patel lookalike contests took off (I was at the Dev Patel one), someone decided to parody the whole trend. From Partiful, Instagram, and even Hinge, I couldn't escape this event. My roommate went and texted me afterward: "These lookalike competitions are getting old. But it was funny. No one was too original. Just like 'I love women blah blah.' Someone did throw out tampons to the crowd—that was funny. But I have a take on this whole 'performative male' shit. I'll tell you more IRL.”

When I got home, his take stuck with me, "The whole thing is derogatory toward men who actually care, lumping them with those who don't and overall creating a negative connotation with being in touch with your feminine side."

He was right, and it made me think about why I'm so afraid of being labeled performative in the first place.

Back in high school stats class, we were shown a chart of NBA vs. WNBA salaries as an example of bias in datasets. Somehow we devolved into a debate about pay disparity in professional basketball. This was pre-Caitlin Clark, when women's basketball wasn't mainstream. My take—and I wish I had kept my mouth shut—was that men's basketball players are paid more because the NBA brings in more revenue than the WNBA.

Now this take does NOT account for why the NBA makes more, which stems from centuries of sexist societal factors. It does not mean that I agree with the current state of things and think it should continue this way. But before I could explain; the knives were out. All the women in my class, including my teacher, turned on me, and the most brutal debate of my life commenced.

The bell rang, class ended, but the debate didn't. For days afterward, it was brought up in different classes, with me as the poster child of anti-ally takes. It reminded me of the Parks & Rec scene where men protest for "male rights" and Leslie strikes them down. It got so out of hand that we had to have a discussion about ending the debate, but the damage was done—most notably within myself.

My big takeaway from being lumped into the "male rights" group was simple: keep my mouth shut and just agree.

That fear—of being labeled an "anti-ally"—runs deep, and I think it's exactly what creates performative behavior.

So here I am, walking around with my tote bag and matcha, and I know how it looks. But let me tell you why I actually do these things:

I read bell hooks because I picked her up in a bookstore without knowing who she was and thoroughly enjoyed All About Love, which inspired this post I wrote. I started drinking matcha because I destroyed my stomach in college and couldn't have coffee anymore. I carry a tote bag because I'm not trying to pay SF bag fees, plus we're helping the environment. I thrift because it's fun, I've found good pieces, and sometimes American sizing doesn't fit my skinny brown boy build.

Every single one of these choices has a real reason behind it. But the moment you see them all together, you assume performance.

This is the impossible tightrope we force each other to walk: Be outspoken, but be authentic. Perform, but only if you mean it. But also, speak up.

Instead, I want to offer an antidote: empathy. Who gives a shit what others look like or are doing if you can't understand them as a person?

I was listening to this podcast with Marc Maron where he said something that changed my mind: "Empathy is a skill that has to be learned and exercised." He used to think empathy was inherent, but now believes it's a muscle that must be worked out.

This reminded me of David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College speech, "This Is Water". He starts with a story about two young fish swimming along who meet an older fish going the other way. The older fish nods and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" The young fish swim on, and eventually one looks at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

When I first read this freshman year of high school, I completely missed the point. My fourteen-year-old self couldn't comprehend what I know now: all of life is the water, and the sooner you realize we're all swimming in it together, the easier it becomes.

I wish DFW was still alive to snap us out of our latest attempt to not see the water. If he were around, I think he'd amend his speech:

Water is not performance. Water is empathy.

The whole performative male thing represents our collective failure to see the water—to understand that maybe the guy with the tote bag and bell hooks book actually just likes both of those things. Maybe he's not performing for you at all. Maybe, just maybe, we're all trying to figure out how to be decent people, and judging each other's methods isn't helping anyone.

Stoicism tells us judgments are our opinions projected onto the world. So when you see me with my tote bag and assume performance, you're telling me more about your own fears of authenticity than about mine.

On a personal note—apologies for taking a two-month hiatus. I have not stopped writing but have focused on some longer-term projects which you may see here. One is about questions and the other about community. Stay tuned, and if you are interested in hearing more, give me a call.

Thanks as always for reading!

These two men couldn't appear more different on the surface—a Muslim politician navigating the brutal machinery of New York politics and a wilderness adventurer from Alaska sharing family expeditions with millions of viewers. Yet both have demonstrated something increasingly precious: the courage to be authentically themselves, even when it might hurt them.

Before exploring what authentic action looks like, let me share what it decidedly does not. For my eighth-grade graduation, I was consumed by one thing—being the most fashionable. I had already spent all my birthday money on a pair of Wolf Grey Jordan 3s, and my mom took me to the department store to buy the shirt and tie I wanted. There was one thing I needed to complete the look—a Louis Vuitton belt.

I asked my parents for it, but I'm sure you can guess how that conversation went. Then it occurred to me there might be a cheap way to acquire one on a website called Alibaba. I ordered my $8 Louis Vuitton belt, and after a month of wondering if it would actually arrive, it showed up. Pumped, I wore it to my graduation to the admiration of my peers.

My Alibaba Louis Vuitton belt is a prime example of not being actually authentic. Instead, I was guilty of obfuscating the truth to portray the image I wanted. But I've learned something recently—you can actually get more admiration for displaying the truth because it's a rare thing.

Back to Zohran—his rise from polling at less than one percent to becoming the presumptive nominee stunned political observers, but those who had been watching closely weren't surprised. In an interview with The Breakfast Club, Zohran was asked about his views on congestion pricing. TL;DR: congestion pricing is a tax on car traffic in New York City with the intention of reducing congestion. So far, the policy has been unpopular with many residents sharing their frustration with this added price.

Mamdani could have answered this question by taking an easy swipe at congestion pricing, explaining how terrible it is, which would have aligned with the views of a majority of New Yorkers. Instead, he did the opposite.

He said, "I believe that the one thing New Yorkers hate more than a politician they don't agree with is one they can't trust, so I'm going to tell you the answer I say in every room. I am somebody who has supported congestion pricing."

This was followed by an audible "woah" from the host, which illuminated the rarity of authenticity. Many celebrities and politicians have gone on The Breakfast Club, and the hosts have heard every pre-baked answer possible. So when Zohran answered honestly and gave them his authentic views on the topic, surprise ensued. After seeing this interaction, I knew Zohran had something special and was striking a chord many were unable to because they were being inauthentic. As the pundits have now attempted to explain his win as a policy victory or socialism taking over, I see something simpler—New Yorkers appreciating someone being authentic with them.

Now to Luke—about a month ago he posted a video titled "Goodbye" which immediately sent a chill down my spine. He shared that this would be his last video for a while and explained the amount of time and energy he had spent making content. But then he said:

"But even good things can be taken too far, and I think I'm starting to reach this point. But I'm not just talking about the time and energy I've spent making YouTube videos—I'm also talking about the attention it brings."

Luke then went on to share that his family had been viewed billions of times across YouTube and other platforms, the fame it had brought his family, and his desire for his family to have the privacy and safety to live "normal" lives. He made a decision authentic to his values and those important to him, and it made me respect him even more. In a subsequent video, someone asked Luke why he doesn't expand his empire to a TV show. He responded by saying, "It's easier for my family to live a normal life if it's just myself and a GoPro instead of a whole camera crew." Luke values his family and their protection above all else. Connecting the dots, it's easy to see how Luke arrived at this conclusion. While I'll miss the weekly Outdoor Boys content, I can appreciate someone being actually authentic and taking action to live his desired life.

When it finally clicked in my mind why I enjoyed watching Zohran and Luke's content so much, I began to self-evaluate. Am I actually being truly authentic? Is this even possible? The short answer is yes—we have the blueprint, but the key is you cannot be afraid of the consequences, and in short, "Don't give a fuck." I wrote about this before in Being Unapologetically Yourself, but I see Zohran and Luke as taking the last step towards authenticity—taking action in line with their values.

Think about the actions you take in your life. Are they actually authentic to your values? If not, follow the examples here or others—don't buy an Alibaba Louis Vuitton belt. This Oscar Wilde quote sums it up perfectly:

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

Onwards, my friends.

He would say about his daily routine: "I would walk for six or eight hours a day, composing thoughts that I would later jot down on paper." In a day, his only objective was to walk, think, eat, and sleep. His sole focus was on connecting the dots from past ideas, some generated by him, others borrowed from others, and writing something entirely new. No agenda, no schedule—just time.

Now, Nietzsche lived in an era where information was not nearly as democratized. He had no Wikipedia or ChatGPT to consume and analyze tremendous amounts of information. Maybe walking the forest the entire day was the most effective way to organize your thoughts? So I went to find more modern examples of what a creative does in a day. In this Reddit thread about the day in the life of an artist, I found a few interesting quotes:

"At times we don't have the luxury of routine."

"I don't draw or paint every day, but I do something in my studio every day."

"Work until fiancée gets home (yt/sketches/page layouts/painting—depends on the day), usually forget to eat until then. Doggos out just before fiancée returns home."

"I paint from the time I wake up until I go to bed at night. I get out of bed at some random hour of the day—usually before noon—make coffee."

Every post had one common thread: no structure, no different than Nietzsche. Creatives spend their days unstructured, not in thirty-minute or hour-long increments. Paul Graham explains this disconnect and coins the Maker's and Manager's schedule. He outlines how managers operate around meetings while makers like to spend their time unstructured. Issues arise when you combine the two. Graham does point out an important caveat to the difference between the two schedules: "Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule." This is why many of us working in corporate America are at the mercy of our calendars.

So if we spend at least five days of the week working or at school on the manager's schedule—when are we allowed to be creative? To make things? To be on the maker's schedule?

The answer is simple: if you don't make the time to be creative, it won't happen. Simple answer, yes, but extremely hard to execute. I personally run into the conflict between the two schedules each day. Often it feels as if I'm a severed employee, with an innie and outie. At work, my day hinges on the meetings and action items I need to perform. Outside of work, when working on projects like this piece of writing itself, I have to code-switch to the maker's schedule.

It's hard to do both, but after reading Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, I now had the tools to tackle both schedules. Pressfield coins the enemy of creatives and calls it resistance. It can be simply defined as the rubber band holding you back from achieving your creative outcomes. The only way to defeat resistance is to face it head on and just do the thing. Step one is to confront resistance.

The advice is two-fold and comes only after you confront resistance and enter the maker's schedule. A blessing occurs. You are visited by the creative angels. I'm not particularly religious, but I believe in the creative angels who will bless you with ideas once you stare down resistance and join the maker's schedule. It's happened to me—on walks, at coffee shops, on the plane—when I confronted resistance on the maker's schedule. Ideas are like flies; they stay with you for a bit until they go buzz in someone else's ear after a while.

I'm in the early innings of my battle with resistance and building the maker's schedule into my life, but I know if I allow myself to be creative, the angels will follow.

One friend repeatedly muttered "it's just water" and persevered through getting her pants and shoes wet in the process.

Another would always wait, observe how others were crossing, and then assess a path based on those observations before crossing shortly after.

Then there was one more friend who tried to figure out the only path that would not get him wet, even if that meant hiking upstream significantly.

It's been a few months since this hike, but I still reference it as a prime example of truly individualistic problem solving. No herd mentality or external inputs. Only each other and our shared experience.

Sometimes I wonder if I have too much information at my fingertips. Truly, I have never known any different. I'm a twenty-first century kid, a creature of the internet. My entire day usually consists of typing on a device, the same one you are using to consume this post. But I'm not here to dispute the virtues of technology. I'll leave that to the more well-informed. What I have been curious about is: what if all of this technology didn't exist? What would I know? How would I think? How would I problem solve?

This river-crossing experience made me re-contextualize many of the beliefs I have held and question where they originated. Is it a true belief I have, or one inherited from the collective psyche of the world? Do I believe this because of my values or because of what I see others doing? Do these influences conflate with each other? Let's unpack a few examples, common ones from my own life.

Should I be dating? Seems like most of the conversations I have with friends (who are single) are about dating. "Wow, Hinge sucks" or "Went on this terrible first date" tend to be great conversation starters. It is entertaining to hear others' stories, but often it makes me question myself, wondering whether I should be matching my peers in terms of interest and activity. A bit more thinking led me to a different question: "Do I want to do this thing?" Asking a different question can lead to a drastically different answer.

Should I be traveling? When we aren't talking about dating, I'm blessed to have people in my life who have the disposable income and time to travel. Often we share about our past and upcoming adventures. We all pine after the “digital nomad “lifestyle, but does everyone truly want it? Traveling is financially and time expensive. Things go wrong, you are uncomfortable, so if your only metric for happiness is the clout you'll get from sharing your travels online or with others, why spend the resources to do it at all?

Should I go to X social plan? Sometimes I'm tired or don't want to socialize. But we worry about the optics of not going somewhere. Missing out on something important. Maybe this is a legacy of the COVID years where we missed out on everything, causing us to overcorrect and try to be present for everything. But if you aren't in the right state of mind to enjoy an event, is it truly worth attending?

Should I be working at X place or getting Y degree? We talk about our day jobs a lot. Most of these conversations focus on where we're going next in our careers. Many of us are younger, meaning the bulk of our working lives are still ahead of us. We worry about staying ahead of our peers and maximizing our professional accomplishments. The key question lies in whether we believe in the work we are doing or the things it provides. Would you still do your job or follow X degree if money and prestige weren't factors?

Notice how all of these questions start with should and not want. If you start a sentence with "should," it means you feel pressure to do something but don't actually want to do it. If you wanted to do it, it would already be done.

But what if we turned off the noise and enjoyed doing what we truly want to do? That's what the joy of missing out is. Not caring about what the collective expects but instead doing what speaks to you personally. Taking joy in not doing what others think you should do, but instead being present for what genuinely matters to you. To do this, you have to find the joy of not taking the path most commonly followed.

The joy of missing out is not about missing out on life but instead being present for the things you actually want to be there for, not the ones you feel like you should do. You only have about four thousand weeks in your life, so don't waste them. Enjoy missing out because you are enjoying being present for yourself.

That visceral experience of love has stayed with me, though understanding it fully has been a journey. Like many other aspects of being human, I take many skills for granted. The ability to read or write came from teachers who spent time teaching me these skills from a young age. Now they feel inherent, as if I was born with them, but I believe we begin as blank canvases. Tabula Rasa, as philosophers like Locke, Descartes, and Freud coined it. Genetics matter, but I'm of the persuasion that your experiences shape the person you become more than what's baked into your DNA. Is loving inherent? For me, the answer is no—it's a skill I'm now trying to learn.

Many of us believe in the fairytale of love: the right person will come along and unlock this treasure chest of warmth and comfort that sat dormant within us. Rex Orange County might sing that Loving is easy, but anyone who's spent time swiping through dating profiles on Hinge knows it's anything but. In the debate of nature versus nurture, I'm on the side of nurture. We are not born with the ability to love, but it's one of the most important skills we need to learn—one that is lacking in today's society.

For a while, it seemed like others were able to open up way easier than I could. I could make superficial jokes or talk about superficial love, but when someone would ask me a deep, thought-provoking question about love, I could feel the acid rising in my stomach. It made me uncomfortable. I felt like I was taking a test I didn't study for. It's easy for me to say "I love In-N-Out burger" or "I love LeBron James," but they don't love me back.

So why is it so hard for us to talk about love? Express it? Feel it? After reading All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks, I have a theory. I didn't know what love truly was, nor do most of us. bell hooks can explain this topic infinitely better than I can, but one thing I want to focus on today is a simple takeaway:

Love is not romance.

Growing up, I watched a lot of sit-coms and rom-coms. They still are my viewing comfort food. Across many of these shows, characters will start relationships with milestones. One of the largest is always when you say "I love you" to your significant other. It's portrayed as a monumental task to say these three words because it means ultimate vulnerability. These three words are reserved and carry a lot of weight.

In today's app-driven dating culture, we've turned finding love into a gamified experience. We're desperately focused on finding "the one" through perfectly curated profiles and witty prompts on Hinge, yet we've somehow made it harder to connect authentically. I think we should use the term more liberally, since I believe we love a lot more than we say it.

I have tremendous love for my immediate family, the friends I grew up with, the college I attended, and the wonderful people I have kept in my life since then. I love you all. Not in a romantic sense, but with the idea that I value you as people, appreciate your company, and would do anything for you. A fulfilling life can consist of this kind of love.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about "Loving Thyself," and reflecting upon it, I'm realizing this was the first step in my love journey. The post, in a nutshell, argued "If you don't love yourself, you can't love others," which rings true. That is the first step. Once you are comfortable in your own skin, the next step is to focus on others. Now, those "others" don't have to be romantic interests. Romance is an important part of life, but by no means is it the only way to live a fulfilling one. Approach your life like eating: love until you are absolutely full. Not over or under full.

Say "I love you" to those you love or show the acts that will provide that love. Relationships and dating are only one variable in the equation. We have so much love in the world if only our hearts were open to it.

Looking back at that day in the Pacific Ocean, I understand now what I felt wasn't just relief. It was love in its purest form—not romantic love, but the deep connection that keeps us afloat when the currents of life threaten to pull us under. Sometimes we drift away, but with open hearts, we can always find our way back to each other.

Love you all.

"First things first rest in peace Uncle Phil"

Iconic. No Role Modelz is quotable through J. Cole's sweet lyricism. I first heard the song in ninth grade, understood it later, and have finally internalized it now. Cole had no role models except the ones on TV. This got me thinking about the importance of role models in shaping who we become.

A while back, during an eight-hour drive home from Zion, my friends and I engaged in what became a legendary debate: Is capitalism good or bad? For context, we were college students about to join billion-dollar companies. Bias existed.

It started when a friend stated plainly, "I don't think capitalism works," adding, "we have so much inequality in the world, so why would this system work?" This sparked a debate that consumed our entire journey back to Arizona. We cited personal anecdotes, historical lessons, and a flurry of facts and figures.

The pro-capitalism argument distilled to this: If you can name a better system that provides more value than capitalism, let's adopt it; otherwise, this is the best we have. Years later, I've begun to re-examine this conclusion.

Why did I believe capitalism is the best system? Was it my high school economics teacher? Some YouTube video explaining the failures of communism? "American Exceptionalism" or Milton Friedman's free market ideals seeping into my consciousness?

While listening to No Role Modelz recently, it hit me: All of my role models had bought into and profited from the capitalist system. Of course I believed in it. But this raised a crucial question: Do I have the right role models?

Growing up, I wanted to be a doctor, largely because my father is one. My parents never questioned this rationale—both because I was just a kid and because it aligned with their values.

As a high school freshman, I shadowed a family friend who was a physician. During clinic day, I found the work draining and monotonous. "Surgery might be better," I thought optimistically. The next day, I observed an operation. Standing silently in the corner, watching a human body being sliced open was fascinating, but something in my gut told me: I don't want to do this. I couldn't imagine performing operations day after day. While helping people seemed fulfilling, I sensed there had to be another path for me.

Simultaneously, my entrepreneurial spirit was emerging. I had accidentally started a DJ company with a friend. A school project evolved into a health app concept, and summer boredom led to an attempt at creating a toilet paper company. The excitement of making money made me realize: there's a career for this—business.

When I told my parents about my decision, my father offered this wisdom:

"You'll never be truly happy if your only goal in life is to make money."

Despite my father's warning, my decisions and role models remained unchanged. During my senior year, I worked at a family friend's company. This "uncle" had built a tremendously successful business and was someone I admired deeply. I wanted to learn from him. During this same period, I became politically active and worked on a campaign.

Similar experiences followed over the years, but eventually I recognized a common theme: Greed.

Before you call me a hypocrite, let me clarify—these aren't bad people. I'm far from the most virtuous myself. But at their core, the role models I've had were driven by greed because our system rewards it. Who you want to become is a function of who you look up to. If we value money, we look to the rich. If we value power, we look to the powerful. If we value knowledge, we look to the knowledgeable. It's that simple.

A breaking point comes when you realize your role models no longer serve that position—either because you've changed or because you've learned more about them. I witnessed this with college friends who pursued consulting or banking. The partners at their firms seemed like ideal role models: wealthy, smart, accomplished. But through stories, they learned that some of these partners were not people they wanted to emulate. Many of my friends quit, realizing this wasn't the path they wanted. This kind of change is natural—I've experienced it, and I guarantee you have or will at some point.

I can't tell you what the right role models are, but the wrong ones are easier to spot.

Matthew McConaughey had a famous line in his Oscar acceptance speech: "My role model is myself in 10 years, and in 10 years my role model will be myself in another 10 years." You never stop evolving and learning from the day you're born until the day you die. The vision of your future self can propel you toward incredible achievements, but if that future self is the wrong role model, you can head down a dark and desolate path.

Who we look up to cannot be overstressed in our current moment. If figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump continue to be the predominant role models for our country, our citizens and systems will reflect that. Whether you believe these are the right or wrong role models isn't my point—what matters is that you ask yourself the question.

Who are your role models? Why have you chosen them? Should they continue to be your role models? Ask yourself these questions and don't fear the answers.

A younger Kiran sat at the table, a prisoner to my uneaten food. The aroma of dinner still lingered as everyone else in my family finished their meals, savored dessert, and began the nightly kitchen cleanup ritual. All the while, I remained frozen in time, stuck at the same stage while watching everyone progress to the next phase of the night. This was my punishment: stay put until I had finished what was in front of me. Each attempt at shortcuts—throwing food away, hiding it on the ledge, or sneaking it to the bathroom—was eventually discovered, leading only to more time at that endless table.

As a young adult, I'm still a slow eater. The irony is I don't approach the rest of my life like eating. Instead, I chew through ideas, thoughts, and emotions at breakneck speed. I would have been the first one finished at the table if we were consuming anything other than food. To put the adage simply: I try to eat the whole burrito in one bite. This concept extends further to other adages:

Don't sprint through the whole marathon. Don't climb Everest in a single step.

These can be called hyperbolic impossibilities—attempts to do things at once & too fast. Let's break this down one at a time.

At Once

I still maintain the bad habit of reading the last page of a book or looking up a movie synopsis before finishing the film. Why? Impatience, mainly. Perhaps it's a symptom of the instant gratification world we inhabit, where waiting feels like a punishment rather than part of the journey. Often, we want to jump to the end and experience the satisfaction of completion without the process. I love the feeling after running but hate every step during it. We're so focused on the destination that we forget the significance of the path itself.

Too Fast

A few posts back, I wrote about Hedonic Adaptation. Here was the quick blurb about that:

"I recently learned about Hedonic Adaptation, which illuminates humans' constant desire for more. It's what has made us brutally successful in conquering this world. Accomplishment feels like Ariana Grande's dating life: 'Thank you, next.' It makes sense—this is programmed into us."

Even when we accomplish something, we immediately want to do it better and faster. I work in the corporate world, where each year our target metrics increase, our budgets decrease, and we're expected to deliver faster. Time is money, and we all want to do more with less time. It's an endless cycle of acceleration.

Is the impossible feast even a bad thing?

Not inherently, but it carries consequences. Most notably: burnout. This was the impetus for this post. I've been trying to eat the impossible feast, but the bigger the bites and the faster I chew, the more exhausted I become. Attempting to eat the impossible feast will push us to do things better—it's what has made humans extremely successful. But at what cost?

Understanding the pitfalls and knowing when—and most importantly where—to put your energy is key. That's the paradox of balance: it can never perfectly be achieved. Yet we continue attempting things that aren't feasible. Why?

We carry false images of what we should be doing. I thought about this in the context of traveling. Traveling is expensive, taxing, and sometimes stressful. Why do so many with disposable income choose to do it? True, many are genuinely curious about the world, but is that actually why most people do it? The cynic in me believes it's the optics—posting pictures online and flexing on those around you. There's status associated with it, so people do it. Going to the most places and talking about your upcoming adventures projects is the image of an interesting person, one you would want to emulate.

But we will never be those images. What we present to the world is never truly our deepest feelings. I had this epiphany recently: my Instagram will never be me. Just like rushing through a meal never satisfies true hunger, racing through life's moments never fulfills our deeper needs.

Maybe being a slow eater isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's a reminder that some experiences are meant to be savored, digested slowly, appreciated in their entirety. In a world that constantly demands more, faster, perhaps the real victory is in knowing when to take your time.

I want to end with gratitude. Thank you all for reading this. Over the past year and a half of posting on Substack, it has amazed me how many people have reached out with words of encouragement and their own lived experiences. Your stories and responses make this journey worthwhile.

One small (& optional) ask—send me a thought, lesson, or reading that resonated with you recently. Send it to me in whatever way you want; I'm curious to hear what's on your mind.

Until next time!