i found a new world, the world of six a.m. it looked more or less like the world i had known, but there was a different quality of light, a different set of rules. i learned that the rooftop on my building doesn’t open until six a.m., and that’s when the maintenance guys clean the grills and empty the trash. i learned that, from six to nine a.m., you can find more dogs than you can imagine running freely through the long meadow in prospect park. i learned the rhythms of the sunrise, which hit its earliest point in mid-june and then started easing its way back in time. at six a.m., places belonged to me in a way they didn’t when the city was fully awake.

today when i wake, i go to the rooftop and meditate or write, or i walk to the park. i savor the sensuous warmth of the breeze, the white-hot light of the sun blazing behind my eyelids. sometimes i just stay at home and drink my cup of tea and read as the sun rises, nestled in blankets and ambient music. i’m still tired, usually, but i’m not miserable in my tiredness. it turns out you can enjoy anything if you let its beauty reveal itself to you.

enjoyment used to be this fragile state that required precise instrumentation and tuning. i’d always been a particular person—strong opinions, strongly held. i liked what i liked, and i didn’t like what i didn’t like. this kind of music, that kind of travel. these moral positions, those areas of academic interest.

there was a sureness to it; everything in which i could see value was good, and everything else simply wasn’t, for the many reasons that felt obvious to me. apparently in psychology they call that “naive realism.” even so, i enjoyed a lot because i experienced rapturous joy when i encountered the good and so oriented my life around finding more of it. but i was immovable when it came to everything else, baffled and incredulous that other people could enjoy it at all.

many of these opinions loosened and grew more nuanced over long periods of time (i even learned to like country music), but it was a process over which i had no control. it was more like glacial erosion. it happened to me, imperceptibly day after day, until i was reminded of what my landscape had once looked like and could suddenly see how much it had changed.

but what is it to dislike? it’s to experience discomfort. why do you experience discomfort during particular experiences? it sounds like a stupid question, but i don’t think the answer is obvious.

i think psychological discomfort usually comes from a delta between what you’re expecting and what’s happening. food is supposed to be x, and this cuisine does y. people are supposed to believe x, but this person is saying y. you’re off-balance, often with an anticipatory fear of what will be required of you in response to this divergence from your expectation, and then that registers as dislike. some people don’t hold much expectation—they go into the world and take everything as it comes. these people tend to like everything more. people who interface with the world with many rigid expectations, on the other hand, usually have a harder time.

disliking typically even goes one step further, before you’re interacting with the target of the dislike at all. i know i’m about to have an experience that i may not enjoy, and i brace mentally for it. the hope is that i make it bearable by preparing myself; the reality is that the bracing creates most of the pain.

i first came across this idea a year ago in this jonny miller tweet. how striking, the concept that the vast majority of suffering doesn’t come from direct experience, but rather our resistance to the experience.

it stayed with me, but it wasn’t until i went to the new bathhouse in brooklyn that i tested it in practice. i had entered the cold plunge and found it invigorating but also unbearably painful, immediately getting back out. but then i recalled the tweet and thought, hm, what if i don’t brace? this time i went back to the icy pool and didn’t steel myself at all against the cold. and it was great. i was wholly alive, nerves tingling, calm. this time i stayed for a few minutes. perceptual shift: all the pain had been in the anticipation of pain.

the release of expectation allowed me to enjoy anything much more. it was like a magic trick. before, enjoying life had been this process of making sure every variable in my life was dialed to the right values. find the right people, the right job, the right interests, and only then can enjoyment thrive. internal experience depended on external circumstances, which meant my happiness depended on my ability to control the environment around me. seeing that that was an illusion was revelatory. i had the capacity to enjoy even the most painful experiences. not perfectly, not all the time, but even knowing it was possible meant i was no longer at the mercy of the circumstances of my life.

as reference points, here are some of the experiences i enjoy now that i used to instinctually reject before this past year.

improv. i think if you were to ask a lot of my friends an activity i would never do, improv was probably up there. i’m deeply allergic to cringe, i hate performing, and i don’t like not having a plan. but my friend kiera suggested it ahead of my first time raising venture capital, and i thought, you know what, why not? and turns out it was super fun. cringe loses its power in a welcoming and nonjudgmental space.

walking. it sounds silly to say now, but i used to hate walking. i would resist walking anywhere farther than, say, fifteen minutes. it felt wildly inefficient, a waste of time when time was already so scarce. i couldn’t savor the process of it. when i learned to do it, the whole world opened up so much more. i’d be struck by a perfect sunflower growing out of the sidewalk, a tree knot in the shape of an eye, the dappling of light between leaves in a tree. i walk a few miles on average every day now.

hiking mountains. in the same vein, i didn’t like the arduousness of hiking up and down a mountain. i appreciated the view you could get at the top, but everything before and after that felt like a huge inconvenience. but this past year i’ve had three profound spiritual experiences that came in the ascent up a mountain: first at nanshan in chongqing, then at cangshan in dali, and most recently in the catskills this past weekend. this last time, we made our way through a dense, muddy forest during a severe thunderstorm with zero rain gear, got lost multiple times, and nearly gave up. but, fully soaked, we made it. it’s the kind of hardship i once would have resisted with every fiber of my being. even a month ago i think i’d have been disappointed that the trip was ruined by traffic and rain and bailed out of our plan. but having the capacity to be open meant that nothing could be ruined. what did happen was freed from what i had wanted and could become so much more.

ambient music. it used to be boring to me. i didn’t appreciate the subtlety of it because i needed (or, rather, expected) music to be much more forceful in capturing my attention. but you can just embrace the boredom, and then after a while it vanishes, and you’re able to start perceiving the overwhelming granularity of everyday experience and just how interesting that is.

weightlifting. this one is recent! i had always gravitated toward femme-coded forms of exercise: barre, pilates, spin, yoga, and so on. weightlifting was obviously not for me. i can’t even really say why, except that it felt like an endeavor for men, i had zero attachment to the kinds of psychological reward i thought men got out of it, and it looked... hard? but no, my take now is that weightlifting is exercise for lazy people. it’s so easy. everyone should do it. i was suffering doing a thousand one-inch pulses in barre until total muscle fatigue (i’m kidding, i still like barre), thinking that that was a less intense form of exercise, when i could have just been lifting a heavy bar, like, twenty times with long breaks in the middle and then going home. also, it’s just cool to know i can deadlift my body weight.

traveling alone. i thought i couldn’t do it for longer than a week or two, that i would be too lonely. and frequently in my china travels last year i was lonely. but it wasn’t the kind of annihilation i expected it to be. i think i had feared the solitude of my own thoughts, keeping myself surrounded by friends and absorbed in media. but my mind is a pretty fascinating place, and i hadn’t given it this kind of focused attention in a long time.

emotional pain. i had no idea how much i avoided emotional pain before. i had an infinite recursion of russian nesting dolls for keeping myself distanced from difficult feelings while believing i was engaging with them. it’s taken a long time to start to enjoy it. a terrible month where you feel like every part of you is dying will come and then go, and you’ll become hyperaware of the beauty of what’s still in your life, and then another phase of emotional death will come, and that’s fine, too. you can savor all of it.

spirituality and self-help. i was pretty suspicious of most of this space; anywhere you have a lot of people seeking guidance, you encounter charlatans. even outside of that, i saw the communities built around spirituality and self-help as having this self-absorbed fragility—how they spoke, how they saw themselves. instinctively i felt that many people simply needed to become more resilient to deal with life. and sometimes that’s true, certainly. spirituality can be a mechanism of avoidance as much as anything else. but even so i’ve come to see it as a natural and necessary dimension of human life that contains so much joy and meaning.

fulfilling obligations. this one is the most amorphous and the most important, probably. for a long time, much of what i did followed a predictably cursed pattern. i would have an idea, a delicate, shimmering flight of fancy, be really excited about it, and decide to do it. and then suddenly it would morph. now it was a “plan,” and, thus, an obligation. i was no longer chasing this flight of fancy; i was on a death march to reach an endpoint. some of that was some level of demand avoidance, but some of it was also me bracing myself against the possibility that i wouldn’t enjoy it enough to bring to fruition without force. the same went for obligations toward other people—loved ones, work, etc. the knowledge that i needed to do something made it much harder for me to enjoy it. but i’ve since learned to unearth the part of me that wants to fulfill these obligations. in fact, they aren’t “obligations” at all. they’re choices i’ve made about what matters to me. and what could be more enjoyable than living the life you’ve chosen?

it was a total delight. going into it, i wasn’t sure how much i would get out of it. i’ve been an active are.na user for my own research for many years; much, if not most, of my creative work has started with references i gathered there first. perhaps the class wouldn’t cover much more than that. but, of course, i was mistaken.

sharing process, for me, had always been uncomfortable, the intellectual equivalent of letting guests see your home in disarray. i wanted my work to spring fully formed into the world, only brought to the light once it was beyond reproach. but this class made the process the focal point, and it was surprisingly inspiring to see the inner workings of people’s minds—the tangled threads they were following, the dead ends, the problems they encountered and how they solved them. hesitantly, i lifted the veil on my own process, and people were highly receptive. helpful, even.

in the interest of sharing more of the process, here’s my project from the weekend and the story behind it.

tuning the psyche: states of consciousness

process

first, some background. why this project?

i didn’t go into the class with a plan. i had intended to spend an evening or two last week gathering shimmering points (their term for objects of resonance, from the physical to the conceptual), but it was such a busy week with work that i didn’t have a single idea ready. we were asked to bring a shimmering point on the first day, and on a whim, as i was leaving the house, i grabbed the little tibetan singing bowl i had acquired a few months ago and dropped it into my bag.

as i started speaking to people, the form of the thought started to take shape. for a long time i’d been interested in music as a “prosthetic for emotion,” a high-dimensional medium for storing and eliciting a feeling. then, back in january, i had started going to a breath and sound ritual to create some space for clarity of mind. starting a company was all-consuming. i lived entirely in my head. the expansive tone of the singing bowls pulled me into my body, the viscerality of immediate experience. after that, i went to a sound retreat, then a gong performance. each format induced such a specific state of consciousness. the sound retreat used sound as a vehicle for introspection, facilitating an encounter with the self. the gong performance used sound to hypnotize, a spell cast over the audience.

i wasn’t interested only in sound, though. i started thinking of other shimmering points:

• a recent paper i’d read titled “clear mind: meditation and the brain’s signal-to-noise ratio”

• my own daily practice of movement meditation

• the psychedelic explorer’s guide, a book i read a decade ago

• this tweet about “drugs as tuning forks”

• an aaron z. lewis essay called “inside the digital sensorium” from several years ago that has continually influenced how i think about software

• this reddit post on eating a dorito too mindfully

• nadia asparouhova’s account of her experience with jhanas

• mihály csíkszentmihályi’s book flow: the psychology of optimal experience, another book i read a decade or so ago

• and so on

i realized my interest was specifically in states of consciousness and how to alter them. i had always found it an intellectually engaging subject, but it took on a much stronger resonance over the course of a tumultuous year of big change. the themes that kept recurring in my personal life were phenomenology, cognitive experience, psychotherapy, spirituality, identity, and embodiment. and, lo and behold, when i went to look back at the application i had submitted the month before, i had written:

intelligence as medium, new spirituality (jhanas, psychedelic retreats, mystical practices, etc.), therapeutic modalities (ifs, somatic experiencing, jungian analysis, etc.) and the psyche, love as practice, the tension between controllability and resonant experience

so perhaps there was a plan after all!

the first project idea that bubbled up in these conversations was a web experience to simulate or induce particular states of consciousness—to flip between the perceptual experience of a meditative state or an acid trip or a late night doomscrolling. i thought it would be a fun challenge to see how i could compress these states into a web-friendly format.

but as i turned over this idea in my mind that next evening and morning, i felt stuck, like i didn’t quite have a handle on where to go with it next. i knew what i had vaguely envisioned for the web app: a fullscreen immersive experience, where meditation could be a blue sky with clouds and slow guided breathing exercises, acid could be a video feed of the outside world distorted through a visual and auditory hallucination filter, doomscrolling could be a dark, paranoid screen of pop-up tweets and shortform videos relentlessly bombarding the viewer. it would be a cool art project. but i wasn’t sure it was what i wanted to express.

one issue was that i didn’t know exactly what i meant by “state of consciousness” in the first place. so i stepped back to figure out how i was thinking about it, starting with this free-association mind map.

that helped a lot; i started to notice a few axes of how i was thinking about the topic. the core of a “state of consciousness,” seemingly, was orientation in space and time. when/where are you? are you here and now (“present”), or are you somewhere or sometime else (the past or future, the internet, a fictional world like a novel or video game)?

the “what” of the project was still unresolved. then, laurel and celine led an exercise to brainstorm weekend-sized project ideas, encouraging us to think out of the box. the idea of a diagram popped up as i was thinking about how to sort out my own understanding. i decided to try that direction.

as i worked, i kept coming back to the idea of flow state, how you can have such a satisfying, healthy experience of absorption, in contrast to the kinds of states you experience with doomscrolling or ruminating. emotional condition (engaging with pleasure versus avoiding pain) felt like a key differentiator. but what were the relationships between these concepts? and how did they interact with my original shimmering points? my thoughts were muddled, so i started dictating a stream of consciousness.

from there, i sketched out a few ideas for two-dimensional graphs to see how the states of consciousness i was tracking mapped onto them. then i tossed these three artifacts (the mind map, the voice note transcription, and the sketches) into claude to think through it more. fable helpfully pointed out that the emotional axes i had defined were effectively reconstructing james russell’s circumplex model of affect from first principles. right, right. the conversation refined some of the messier parts of the model.

i had defined the shimmering points as “technologies.” i’d long been captivated by the concept of thought as a technology; i think i would say that cognitive technologies are the most powerful technologies we have. language, user interfaces, mental frameworks. but the mechanisms of the ones i had chosen were so different that i didn’t want to treat them all as equivalent, either. i decided to make a list of more of these “technologies” and landed on three categories: psychoactive substances, psychological/metacognitive techniques, and sensory experiences (split into auditory, physical, and visual).

at this point, i got stuck again. my head ached from disentangling conceptual knots, where the dichotomies i had defined weren’t perfect, and i kept having to modify the representation to account for edge cases. i gave up for the afternoon and spent an hour scrolling twitter to decompress. some irony there.

we ended the day with project therapy, an exercise where we paired with others to talk through how it was going, what we were envisioning, and where we were stuck. another participant, micah, was one of my “project therapists.” upon hearing my dilemmas, he offered a helpful reframing. “it sounds like you’re talking about recipes, sort of, for particular mental states. or a workbook, even? i would absolutely go through a workbook to map out my states of consciousness.”

that sparked some imagination. i had been fixating on perfecting a theoretical framework (philosophy major problems, i suppose), but really what i wanted was to offer a useful mental model for myself and others. that shift, from theoretically complete to useful, felt like a weight lifted.

the next morning, it was much easier to get into flow. i started thinking about the project form factor as a mental model, expressed through diagrams, taxonomies, and steps. i wanted a format built to transmit: clear, distilled, systematic.

coincidentally, i got a message from my childhood friend raymond sharing the conduit metaphor, a model for thinking about language as a process where mental contents are “inserted” into “containers” (via words) and then “extracted” by listeners. in other words, it’s the default way we think about communication. to me, that’s obviously wrong, and linguist michael j. reddy’s alternative, the toolmakers paradigm, gets much closer to how i think about language and understanding. each of us has our own world of concepts, where words are attached to forms that only exist in that exact way in our mind. when we communicate with others, we’re encoding our mind-concepts with a shared key that they can use to decode our words into their mind-concepts and hoping that the two are close enough to get to mutual understanding.

that turned into its own shimmering point, shaping how i thought about conveying my mental model. i imagined an eventual direction that evolved from micah’s idea for a workbook, one that could prime readers to form their own mental models through experimentation and observation rather than imposing my own.

i spent the morning in figma, turning all these chaotic inputs into an output. my interest in expressing ideas through diagrams and “slides” probably comes in large part from working with jacob horne—he likes to collect diagrams and make them. they became another shimmering point as i worked.

the rest of the work was polish, phrasing. what was a good word for “technologies” that included everything from psychoanalysis to funerals to taking walks? inspired by isaac asimov’s term “psychohistory,” i decided to call them “psychotechnologies,” a term that i later learned was first used by psychologist hugo münsterberg. the title of the project was originally “hacking the psyche,” but i didn’t like how harsh and mechanistic it sounded, so after a few iterations i landed on “tuning” instead, to evoke the tuning of an instrument with care. i added another category of psychotechnologies to capture “sociocultural practices,” realizing that that was a major grouping the mental model had omitted.

and then it was done. the project in total took probably five hours of active work, many more of passive background thought. some shimmering points came from a decade ago, while others only arrived when i was nearly done. even the act of articulating my process has been invaluable in making it feel more “real” to me.

thank you to celine and laurel for putting together this thoughtful weekend and to all of the other participants for contributing their creativity and generosity.

if love is the ultimate form of resonance, and resonance is antithetical to controllability, love and control exist at odds with each other. at the same time, because love is so essential, there is a natural desire for control. how could we be willing to leave that up to fate? but in the fantasy world where we could have total control over love, we would quickly find that love extinguished, choked in the viselike hold of our grasp. love requires a leap of faith, to be caught without knowing you will live through the fall. that’s why the phenomenon of the ai companion is so dangerous—they represent the desire for, above all, certainty. but there can be no love that’s absolutely certain because to love is to have the choice to not love.

as hartmut rosa writes in the uncontrollability of the world:

The fact that the other person could say “no” or “not now” is a precondition of being able to resonate with them at all. We cannot resonate with someone who always tells us we are right, who always encourages or shares our opinions and fulfills our every wish and desire (the dream of the “love robot”).

because of that, in order to love well, you have to accept—really, truly accept—that you will someday lose the people you love. we all will, eventually, to death or other circumstance. acceptance of loss allows you to meet others as they are, not as you need them to be. holding too tightly to an outcome—that you must have the people you love, forever—makes you rigid and fearful, unable to accept change and growth. paradoxically, learning to accept loss is what creates the circumstances for deep love.

the other week my friend surya told me how frustrating it’s been to date in new york. “everyone is living, like, a plotline. they’re in this sex and the city arc in their mind, and they just want to see if you’re going to be a good character who fits into their next episode.” it flattened his personhood into a list of collectable attributes; he was an npc in the main character’s show.

love, under this paradigm, becomes shopping. the buyer stays fixed, unmoving, evaluating potential purchases based on “fit.” this stance is intentional because it creates the illusion of power, a defensive shield against hurt. how embarrassing it is to be seen reaching; how humiliating it is to be willing to change for another person. better to be the judge, elevated and untouchable. but the self as consumer is structurally oppositional to resonance. in order to be met, to be surprised, you have to discard this mentality. as iris murdoch wrote in “the sublime and the good,” “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

i’ve come to view much of the discourse around “compatibility” as muddled. there is compatibility in the basic sense—the degree to which two people’s lives and worldviews and personalities align. this kind of compatibility measures the amount of effort it takes to reach each other and build a life together. it’s a property of the relationship.

but a lot of what we mean when we say “compatibility” is not just that. it’s closer to receptivity, each individual’s ability to experience resonance. how much of your capacity for love is dampened by fear? that shows up in many ways, like conflicts where your reflexive response overshadows your presence for another person, or moments where you want to express a feeling but withhold it out of lack of trust that it can be received.

it’s important to decouple the concept of receptivity from compatibility because compatibility turns love into a search problem. you’re constantly waiting for the right person to come into your orbit. but if your receptivity is low, even the most “compatible” person on earth is unlikely to suit you. this difference, between mutual compatibility and individual receptivity, typically shows up in recurring patterns. what echoes for the same person in relationship after relationship is rarely first and foremost a fit problem; it’s a need to expand their receptivity.

when receptivity is high, on-paper compatibility becomes less and less important, simply because you are less likely to read difference as a threat. it just is. if anything, it becomes a site of novelty and interest, something to learn. that’s what makes relationships viable over the long term, too. life is long; you will become many, many different iterations of yourself. a relationship built on initial compatibility but low receptivity will be rigid, lacking the fluidity to grow and reform over time as each person changes. but a relationship where both people have deepened their receptivity becomes one where each can continually expand.

receptivity is easily misread as accommodation. it’s not. anxious partners tend to view themselves as receptive to love because they’re willing to do anything to make a relationship work; avoidant partners are more apparently closed off. but anxious partners limit their receptivity, too, in their need for control—by bridging every gap, preempting every risk, limiting the possibility of true resonance that only lives in the unknowable. this issue is much easier to see from the outside, though it typically looks like a selection problem—this person keeps choosing people who aren’t well-suited to them. but that happens when the need for love is so great that they grasp at it too tightly for resonance to happen at all.

often we feel a scarcity of love that’s in fact a lower degree of receptivity. we think the problem is external to us: find the right people, the right life, and how we feel inside will change. and sometimes it does. but we are constantly surrounded by love in so many forms. the friend who dms you instagram reels, the stranger who holds the elevator door for you, the care in every aspect of the built world. it is possible to feel love in every moment, in each positive and negative emotion you experience. the work, then, is different. as helen schucman writes in a course in miracles (though usually misattributed to rumi), “your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. like most aphorisms, i spent my whole life thinking it was trite and obvious, then suddenly realized i had never really understood it. originally i read it to mean that you need a base level of self-esteem to meet people as themselves, rather than reaching for them as avatars for your own worth.

but another layer of interpretation emerges when you read “love” as an action rather than a feeling, the act of deeply accepting a person in every way. in other words, you have to deeply accept yourself before you can deeply accept someone else.

most of us love ourselves in the sense that we feel love toward ourselves. much fewer of us accept ourselves for better and for worse. for my part, i am reluctant to accept my worst and best qualities because i fear complacency. the logic goes: if i accept that i am vain or thoughtful or selfish or creative or insecure or brilliant, i won’t want to grow anymore. i’m much more able and willing to accept these same qualities in others.

but, in practice, when you attempt to accept in others what you cannot accept in yourself, you create dissonance. for me, that manifested as a set of principles and rules to follow for others but not myself. i wanted to be loving, accepting, and understanding with the people who were important to me. but simultaneously i thought i needed to maintain “high standards,” be constantly dissatisfied with the status quo of who i was, or i would lose my motivation to be better. while that deeper belief remained, the loving orientation toward others was limited to surface-level behaviors that expended enormous effort because they clashed with my underlying worldview.

much of relational advice fails for this reason. frameworks for couples therapy and parenting advice and workplace conflict are usually premised on the idea that you can just change how you speak to other people. which is true, to an extent. but over time, if how you’re talking to others conflicts drastically with how you talk to yourself, it will feel like you’re contorting yourself beyond recognition, playing an elaborate game of pretend that becomes more and more tiring to sustain. with parenting, for instance, it is hard to help a child feel safe when you don’t feel safe; it is hard to be patient with a child when you’re not patient with yourself.

this knowledge can look like a dead end. when self-criticism feels like ground truth, you perceive unconditional love toward the self as illusory—a thin excuse to make you feel better about yourself, cope. it’s the participation trophy of existing. only love that you’ve rightly earned (through accomplishment, or goodness, or usefulness, or some other measure you’ve decided makes for an equal exchange) “counts.” or so you believe. but then when you experience it with others, you suddenly find yourself discounting it there, too. it’s not real because they’re not seeing the flaws i’m hiding. it’s not real because they’re better, or worse, than me, in some way that disqualifies their judgment. it’s not real because i haven’t done enough to earn it. the love that’s present is left unreceived.

what’s required is a perceptual shift. we tend to think of the objects of our love as the source of it, but that’s not quite right. all of the love you’ve ever experienced was generated through you, in your capacity to feel resonance, to see beauty and wonder and meaning somewhere and let yourself be changed by it. you already know how to love imperfection—ordinariness, frailty, inconsistency—not “in spite of” but “because of.” perhaps not in every moment, not toward everyone and everything, but it’s there, and it always has been.

the hard part is turning this gaze toward yourself, becoming receptive to yourself. your love is the one love that can be truly unconditional. you might find yourself resisting this statement; i do. it feels like a betrayal of the people i love to become self-sufficient in this way, a demotion of relationships from absolutely necessary to simply important. but it isn’t. it’s what makes your own choice to love real; it’s the only way to meet others freely.

to love well, you have to respect another person’s autonomy. to respect another person’s autonomy, you have to accept that they can leave you. to accept that a person you love can leave you, you have to trust that you can survive it. to trust you can survive it, you have to believe that love doesn’t come from somewhere else—your capacity for resonance is the source.

love is an exercise in continual surrender. only when you know at your core that every person you love can be lost to you, that you have no control over this fact, are you able to have them fully when they’re there. this truth is elusive when you’re young, when the course of your life runs smoothly, when you and everyone around you feel immortal. you have to learn and relearn it, again and again. but you cannot escape loss, and maybe each one wears down the barriers you’ve built some more.

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

i first started dabbling in therapy nearly a decade ago. i started with an older male therapist i found through betterhelp, to address what felt like outsize anxiety about my new relationship. we did a few brief sessions before he promptly told me i was fine and didn’t need more therapy.

a few years later, when i was working at square and feeling despondent about my life and career, i decided to try therapy again, this time at a practice by and for women in san francisco. it was... fine? i went once a week to talk to my therapist about what had been on my mind lately. she nodded and took notes. therapy is just a dedicated space for me to think through how i’m feeling about my life, i thought. there’s nothing a therapist can tell me about myself that i don’t already know.

after i moved to new york, the pandemic struck. i left square and started to search for what could come next. homebound and questioning my past choices, i picked up therapy once again, with lyra health, a corporate benefit through my partner’s workplace at the time. its focus was, unsurprisingly, productivity—how to deal with burnout and anxiety and depression so that you could return to achieving your goals. my therapist practiced cognitive behavioral therapy, which i came to view as capitalism’s answer to the problem of the self. identify your irrational thoughts so you can stop having them and get back to work! before long, it started to grate against me—it felt like a therapeutic modality designed to convince me that the only problem in my life was the insufficient policing of my own mind, and i already did plenty of that.

i decided to find another therapist outside of these online platforms maximizing for scale, at a real practice. after doing a round of consultations, i landed on a therapist with whom i clicked. she was warm, affirming, and funny, and we got along well. and it was good! we chatted weekly for four years. over that period of time, i was able to speak in more depth about deeper subjects—my family, my relationship, my fears. i cried a few times, even.

still, then, i couldn’t get over this feeling that therapy was just a weekly appointment setting for me to analyze myself and my life, where it wasn’t clear what it added beyond a protected time and a supportive ear. nothing was happening. it wasn’t aggregating toward anything; it wasn’t enabling me to perceive or behave differently. my problems kept recurring.

in fact, they got worse. eventually my therapist diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder. i wondered what we should do about that, but i wasn’t sure what could be done about it. i was the way i was, and i already knew exactly why. what else was there? so we kept doing our usual routine, where i would chat through what happened each week, how i had felt about it, and what the psychological causes and effects were. and everything stayed the same.

looking back, as an analytical person who intellectualized emotions so reflexively that i didn’t know there was any other way to be, i had run into the most obvious failure mode of talk therapy. when all my therapists were impressed by my emotional awareness and praised me for how thoughtfully i acted on my self-knowledge, i just thought i was doing a good job. when nothing shifted after years and years of what i believed was “doing the work,” i just thought that that was the limitation of what therapy could do. i couldn’t expect it to be transformative; the results might be slow and imperceptible, but it was better than nothing.

turning thirty last year led to a cascade of events that included leaving my therapist and seeking a new one, again. this time, i had a much clearer goal: to find a form of therapy that was less analytical and more embodied, as well as a practitioner intimately familiar with the hyperintellectualizer archetype. i wanted to, well, feel my feelings.

how did i arrive at this conclusion? ironically, perhaps, claude was a big part of it. i would use it to search for blind spots in my own self-perception, countering my automatic interpretations of events with a “neutral” third-party perspective. that was helpful, though limited. but what the process did reveal to me over time was just how often i would spiral into overthinking and how heavily i relied on analytical understanding in every single aspect of life. it turns out that using claude as an adversarial judge to discern the most objectively healthy emotional response to a situation and then diagnose the origins of why you aren’t experiencing it indicates a pretty specific kind of person.

the other part was the rise in popularity of less mainstream therapeutic modalities like internal family systems (ifs), somatic work, and psychedelic therapy in my social circles. i saw the effects play out over time with people i loved and respected, eroding my long-held skepticism of how much these kinds of interventions could really do.

so at this point i believed it was possible for therapy to be more impactful than it had been, but i was also now aware of how difficult by default it was to find the right fit. i decided to cast a wide net, scheduling a series of consultations with different practitioners—psychoanalysts, somatic therapists, ifs coaches. some had been recommended by friends, and others were people i had encountered online.

many of these conversations went the same way as my first several experiences of therapy. i would speak to a practitioner, and they would be surprised at how “articulate” and “self-aware” i was and inquire what i was hoping to get out of the experience given that i already had a handle on it all. earlier in my life, i would have been flattered; now it read as an anti-pattern. i would explain my history with therapy and what i wanted to be different this time, and they would agree readily to all of it without seemingly any real recognition of what i was saying.

only two of the conversations i had had the click where the practitioner instantly understood what i meant and had evidently undergone this experience on a personal level. both were coaches, not therapists, which gave me some pause. i was worried about the degree of rigor and professionalism; all the requirements (licenses and credentials, confidentiality, etc.) of therapy were nonexistent. plus, coaching was much more expensive. both of them charged three times the hourly rate of my previous therapist, which at the time had already felt like an exorbitant expense because it was uninsured. but the clear resonance was the one non-negotiable factor that i had been missing for years, so i decided to give it a try.

i chose the coach who had worked with one of my closest friends for a few years. she was the most perceptive of everyone i had met by far—in our brief consultation, she read me more quickly than perhaps anyone ever had. it was a novel experience. i was used to having to explain myself to be legible even to people who had known me for years. beyond that, she was trained in specific modalities like ifs and somatic experiencing rather than vaguely gesturing to “alignment” and “clarity,” which made the prospect of working with her feel more substantive than the average coaching experience.

our very first session reached a depth of emotional honesty and attunement that i hadn’t experienced in the decade of therapy prior to that. granted, i was in a period of overwhelming grief, and my emotions lurked closer to the surface than they ever had. but my default level of self-control meant that nearly everyone in conversation with me experienced that as factual information rather than my felt experience. she drew out the emotions, not just my accounts of them. one of the prompts she gave me was so psychoactive that, when i mentioned it to my sister and a few friends, two people cried just hearing it.

not every session was like that, of course. there were stops and starts, many iterations, points of friction and challenge. i struggled with the pace. i had imagined the rapid progress i’d make once i really applied myself; in reality, most of the year went to developing the capacities to even start the practices i had wanted to do. i kept waiting impatiently for the “real” work to begin, not noticing it already had. eventually, for the first time, i could see a path to an evolution of who i was, the surprising contingency of what i thought were fixed, load-bearing parts of my identity.

to do this kind of work well requires a level of perception and attention that most practitioners haven’t cultivated. what can this client receive? what’s the ask under the ask? what’s the feeling under the rationalization? calibrating to that in real time with a stranger is really, really difficult, especially with someone whose mental architecture is wholly foreign to their own.

therapy is a tricky job; the incentives can often be misaligned. both from a financial perspective and from a support perspective, it is hard for a therapist to say that they aren’t the right fit for you. but when you’re early in this work, less emotionally aware and less knowledgeable about the options, it’s difficult to locate yourself in what’s out there. the particular alchemy of what you need might be so hard to find that you conclude it must not exist. then again, maybe there’s no way around that; you blunder through it for a while, and you learn.

when i had offered up individual context to prior therapists—that i feel deeply and want to go there even when i’m less outwardly expressive, that i don’t think in words or images, that it helps me to have a course of action and directionality to the work—they had nodded in understanding and then changed nothing.

my coach, though, took in everything. nothing was dropped. she didn’t disavow my analytical mode, which i had been eager to do but with no idea of how to operate without it. she channeled it where it was productive and guided me toward developing other capacities where it wasn’t. my strength is understanding complex systems, identifying their faults, and addressing them, which means i can be remarkably clear-eyed about where in my life i’m not acting as the person i want to be and will put in a huge amount of work toward shifting those behaviors. it also means it’s much harder for me to accept the status quo of who i am as exactly how i’m supposed to be and not in need of fixing. but the analytical mode could be directed in service of flow over resistance, moving toward over moving from.

we built a working doc together that continued our work outside of sessions, now approaching probably a thousand pages of experimentation and observation. every tool was fluid and adaptive, rather than prescriptive—we worked to understand what resonated, what didn’t, and why. she tuned the work to be the right gradation, easing into depth, building up skills over time.

this same perception, directed at our relationship, turned it into a focal point of the work. she established our time together as a playground for learning and experimentation—not just saying it, but consistently reinforcing it. we worked through conflicts and misunderstandings, building trust over time that we could be honest with each other. she affirmed over and over again that i could not hurt her feelings with my feedback or reactions, or even if i decided to stop working with her. slowly, i started to believe her.

psychoanalysis has the concept of transference; the therapist-client relationship, then, becomes the site of a lot of the work as long-held relational patterns emerge within it. but, from my experience, few modern therapists know how to skillfully use the working relationship as a foundation for growth. many people aren’t looking for that from therapy in the first place—they’re looking for validation, comfort, understanding. investigating the tension in the working relationship risks disrupting that.

in my final session with my previous therapist, we discussed how we had worked together and why it hadn’t quite clicked. she told me that she had been going to her peer consultation group and asking, why does jackie keep coming back? i told her that i had been wondering to myself, why aren’t we ever going deeper? there was a deep connection in that honesty, after four years of not saying what we really thought. she hadn’t wanted to intrude past my comfort zone; i hadn’t wanted to make her feel bad. but the conflict avoidance on both parts had limited the relationship to a certain shallowness, despite how much we liked each other.

one of my other therapists offered a lot of frameworks. i would come with a problem, and she would hand me a printout with a process for dealing with it. none of the strategies were bad, per se, but we kept hitting walls. i always intellectually understood the first layer or two of what was happening, and i had these reasonable explanations at hand. “i care about having a budget because i need to feel in control.” “all my tasks need to be done before i can write so that my head is clear.” “it’s important to me that every choice i make is intentional and meaningful and not random.” she accepted them, and that was that. they were true enough.

but then what? we never asked the next question. why is that so important? i could supply a litany of surface-level reasons: i’m the oldest daughter of immigrants, i had to become mature and responsible from an early age, my parents grew up amid abject poverty and scarcity, chinese culture values security and avoidance of risk, and so on. all of it was true, and none of it was the substance of the feeling. i never seriously questioned why i had these needs and why they felt so fundamental. they were just a feature of who i am.

my coach used her own frameworks, but in our work they became the lens to seeing what came next. they weren’t the terminal point, handed off to check the box of giving the client a tool. they were processes for gathering the information needed to go further or doing the work once you’d gotten somewhere interesting.

so we asked the next question. if most of my needs circle a deep fear of not having total control, of not having the ability to perfectly predict outcomes and have certainty, then what? perhaps the issue was not how i was following a framework, or how my life was organized. perhaps i needed to go upstream.

much of this past year i spent searching for the perfect answer, a beautifully wrapped reason tied with a bow. what i kept finding was that there was none—or, rather, there were a million, but they all came back to: “i don’t feel safe.” it was a frustratingly simple truth, one that couldn’t be made endlessly fascinating and analyzed into the ground. it just had to be felt.

if i can explain inner work in one way, it’s as a series of perceptual shifts.

my mind was a little room that i thought i had long since memorized. here’s where everything is. here’s how everything works. i know it all, i’ve lived here my whole life.

but over time, i looked around the room, and i noticed, oh, i thought that was a wall. but there’s a doorway. suddenly you see this door, and you open it. you peer inside this new room and realize, wait, i have been hearing this sound my whole life. i thought that was just what the world sounded like, but in fact, in this room, there is something making the sound, and i can just turn it off.

and then you do it again, and again, and again.

inner work is this continual expansion of the frame, where barriers of your mind that appeared immovable are in reality quite fluid if you find the right switch. inner work that’s working is able to gently widen this frame progressively over time, mapping the territory, finding the switches.

learning anything works this way, but it’s especially extreme when you’re learning yourself and your own mind. you’re so accustomed to your particular way of existing in the world that every contingent truth feels like a law of nature. on top of that, your mind is obscuring your field of view purposefully at every level to protect you.

i think of psychological defense mechanisms like reaching the boundaries of an open-world video game. an open world is supposed to feel infinitely expansive, but of course there are edges to the maps of most open worlds because the game designers didn’t, in reality, create an infinite world. so you will reach the outer bounds, but they don’t want to make it obvious that the world they’ve designed has these limitations. instead, your vision just starts to blur and fade out, or you find your character turning back toward the map without your directing it there.

that’s how it feels to not be ready for a realization. it just slides off you. often there’s this practiced quality to it, where your mind automatically replays some default response: “oh, of course, i know what’s over there,” and without quite noticing it, you’ve covered up the lack of deeper inquiry or engagement with this sleight of hand; you’ve turned back toward safe ground.

but a skillful practitioner can notice when it happens and say, “wait a second, i see you turning back from this direction. what if we look back there for a moment?” and that’s where the work takes place.

or it happens during a period of acute grief. grief turns your mind into a prison. you are trapped, and in your desperation you do everything in your power to find a way out. you start inspecting every nook, every surface, every shadow, with suspicion. and, it turns out, when you do that intently and for long enough, you usually do find a hidden doorway, or even a few.

i’ve often wondered whether it would have been possible for me to arrive at this place earlier. did i need to be wholly unmade to remake myself anew? or is it possible that, with the right practitioner, i could have done it before? it’s hard to say. grief without direction would likely have led me to cope in all the ways i already knew: rumination, achievement-seeking, self-control. and even the perfect practitioner, absent my willingness to question everything, might have found me impenetrable.

my defenses were so strong, so foundational to the person i believed i needed to be to move through the world, that i mistook them for my core self. i couldn’t imagine releasing the competence, the perfectionism, the certainty, these parts of myself i was sure i needed to be safe and, beneath that, to be loved. the perceptual shift was realizing that the walls weren’t protecting that; they were keeping me from feeling it.

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

think of possible negative emotions: anger, anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, guilt, bitterness, disappointment. some of these emotions are more protective than others, directed outwards. some are inward-facing, punishing to the self.

but when you look more closely, you start to see that they’re all different thrashing manifestations of the same underlying feeling: the loss of something that some part of you felt you needed. anger is grief that an outcome didn’t go the way you wanted. anxiety is fear, which is, if you follow it a step further, the anticipation of grief. loneliness is grief that the human experience is fundamentally isolated, that you are the only one who will ever be inside your own head, or perhaps it’s fear that you are not loved. jealousy is grief that you are not the person you wish to be or that you do not have what you wish to have. and so on.

these experiences of grief and anticipation of grief play out constantly across our lives in big and small ways: when a friend doesn’t reply to a text, when you lose a job, when the barista gets your order wrong, when a loved one dies, when the weekend draws to a close.

in looking at my own life in earnest, i was shocked to see how many times it happens every single day. it was invisible to me because i would reflexively transmute it into its most “competent” presentations—perfectionism, self-discipline, problem-solving. but again, if you take a longer look: perfectionism is fear that you’re not good enough as you are, self-discipline is fear that what you want to do cannot be trusted to align with what you should do, problem-solving is fear that everything won’t just work out. that’s not to pathologize these responses; you cannot live a life without grief, and it is an enormously generative force. but if you never consciously realize how much you’re reacting to it, it can create huge distortions in how you understand yourself and your life.

most of the time, your responses to the micro experiences of grief don’t matter so much. you have a default shape that informs how you interact with every instance of it—you feel it for an instant and then override it or avoid it or intellectualize it, and you keep moving through your day.

occasionally, though, you have a macro experience of grief, and it throws everything else into sharp relief. you reach for the coping mechanisms that have served you every day for so long and find that they’re useless. this moment is important. it presents you with the choice to double down on what you’ve always done, reestablish your state to normalcy as quickly as possible—or to let go of the reflexive strategies that have enabled you to function your whole life and learn to trust that you can survive without them.

this part is the hard part. it requires you to release what you might see as your most fundamental values and beliefs. it requires you to keep doing it, again and again until the day you die, when your instinct is to reach for what’s kept you safe. it requires you to step into the pain of experiencing the grief that is everywhere in your life that you want to reject or disown. but to be alive is to be permeable, to the grief, to the love, to all of it. the deepest expression of love might be truly accepting the grief of what it cannot guarantee—permanence, perfection, certainty—then choosing to love anyway.

by some measures, that vision came to fruition by the start of the twenty-first century. the graphical user interface, the spreadsheet, the internet, the search engine, and many other inventions of the past several decades gave humans the tools to manipulate information much more quickly and accurately, solving new kinds of problems at an unimaginable scale.

but the human-machine cooperation that licklider theorized, where humans produced ideas to execute and questions to answer and machines carried them out in real time, remained elusive, trapped in specialized contexts. why? software was expensive and inflexible. you had to anticipate particular needs and painstakingly write out instructions for a program to meet each one. and because reality has a surprising amount of detail, there were virtually infinite needs and a finite supply of people to craft programs to address them, leaving the symbiotic loop licklider described perpetually out of reach.

licklider pointed to this problem as one of the primary barriers to his vision:

The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis. It is reassuring, however, to note what great strides have already been made, through interpretive programs and particularly through assembly or compiling programs such as FORTRAN, to adapt computers to human language forms... For the purposes of real-time cooperation between men and computers, it will be necessary, however, to make use of an additional and rather different principle of communication and control. The idea may be highlighted by comparing instructions ordinarily addressed to intelligent human beings with instructions ordinarily used with computers. The latter specify precisely the individual steps to take and the sequence in which to take them. The former present or imply something about incentive or motivation, and they supply a criterion by which the human executor of the instructions will know when he has accomplished his task. In short: instructions directed to computers specify courses; instructions-directed to human beings specify goals.

last year llms crossed the threshold that fundamentally changes this equation. software—humanity’s most powerful mechanism for interacting with knowledge at scale—can now be generated at will. we’re rapidly approaching a world where software directed at any goal is virtually free and instant to create for anyone.

even if that were somehow the only use case for llms, it would change the world as we know it. but it’s not. llms are capable of much more than licklider believed necessary for man-computer symbiosis; they can make decisions, they can define goals, they can devise processes.

as ivan zhao wrote recently, we now have infinite minds. the implications are profound, and we’re only beginning to see them unfold.

i started more seriously using llms in october 2024. cursor was generating buzz among software engineers; it was, at least at the start, a much smarter autocomplete that could finish your thought with a reasonable degree of correctness. i used it on a side project; i was surprised it worked even that well.

by december, i was using llms to teach myself new subjects, a method i found remarkably useful. i’ve often struggled with structured regimens for learning—they’re not quite at the right altitude, or they make assumptions about preexisting knowledge. i had always learned best by doing, which allowed me to press against the edges of my understanding and build durable mental models. llms allowed me to zoom in and out of new information, situate it in a broader context from any angle i wished, test myself through questioning.

early 2025 was a period of rapidfire acceleration. it felt like every week there was a model release that changed what was possible to do with llms. each successive version was obviously, noticeably, smarter and more capable, with a distinct personality and set of skills. i would throw different kinds of problems at them and watch them fail miserably, often in wildly funny ways—then, later, see them handle them with ease.

in march i started paying for chatgpt pro. prior to that, i would have found it hard to imagine spending $200 a month on a single software subscription for personal use. since then, it’s been impossible to imagine not having it (i’m now primarily using claude max with chatgpt plus as a backup, though there were a few months of total abandon where i had both claude max and chatgpt pro).

it wasn’t long before i was convinced that writing code was an effectively solved problem. now that feels obvious, but at the time it wasn’t at all clear that coding agents would be able to navigate production-scale codebases well enough to take on the task of implementation entirely. but llms proved to be spectacularly resilient; often the more you delegated to them, the more useful they were able to be.

that summer at zora we changed how we build products to use llms at every level. code was quickly becoming an implementation detail. claude code, radical at the time of its launch for its choice to offer only a conversational interface and no code editor, started to feel like the logical conclusion.

by september i was using llms as part of nearly every kind of thinking. i had used them to translate books that only existed in chinese, to think through strategic decisions for work, to brainstorm puzzles for the murder mystery i was writing, to assemble research reports from hundreds of sources, to build software projects overnight, to explore and understand myself better, to speed up my editing process for my writing. voice dictation became a primary mode of input, making it easier to just talk out loud, often while i was walking somewhere, and then have the model structure the thoughts for me.

in my travels through china, i leaned heavily on llms to navigate a country unfamiliar to me, where my fluency was limited. claude and chatgpt helped me choose neighborhoods for my stay, understand subtle cultural and linguistic nuances, read restaurant menus so i could order, figure out modes of transportation, debug technical issues between my devices and chinese apps and services.

i had always been big on keeping records, but fast and free transcription and llms capable of agentic search meant that suddenly collecting as much data in my life as possible wasn’t a speculative exercise; it gave me an externalized memory, imperfect but powerful. i started recording more and more, all the time.

this past christmas i spent the week training my own model from scratch, on a dataset i had built of a hundred million tokens of books i had read, articles and papers and essays i had saved, my kindle highlights, etc., as well as my own writing. the model it produced was interesting and strange but not particularly smart, so i decided instead to fine-tune qwen, a chinese open-weights model, just training it on my macbook with mlx (apple’s ml framework for apple silicon). that was much better, albeit trickier and more sensitive than i had expected. but the core of it was: i could use an llm to train another llm from scratch, with zero prior experience. that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, and it was so easy.

all of that i say because it’s easy to grow acclimated to a new normal and lose perspective of a rapid rate of change. but that’s my experience with llms the past year or so; hundreds of millions of people around the world are having their own. we’ve entered the age of intelligent machines, and imperceptibly, then undeniably, it’s remaking the world around us.

the future is blurrier than it’s been in many decades, if not longer. few assumptions remain stable ground. but some beliefs have been solidifying for me.

1. agi for bits (information) isn’t here just yet, but no further advances in models need to happen to get there. the scaffolding around them (agent architecture, context management, etc.) will be enough, and we’ll probably be there before the summer.

2. agi for atoms (the physical world) needs to be solved for most people to feel the more apparent societal changes, like dramatically lowering costs of living. by 2030, that technology will exist on a capability level (i.e., it will be possible but expensive or unviable to produce at scale), and the next decade will be about getting it into the real world.

3. these milestones are necessary but insufficient for a post-scarcity future. that requires policy to socialize the benefits of these technological advances, and there’s no sign that’s on the horizon. this problem is exceedingly important and vastly underresourced compared to the first two, for obvious reasons.

4. coordination between humans remains valuable because humans can be qualitatively much smarter together; agents, on the other hand, are (mostly) just quantitatively smarter together. why? humans are able to reach a remarkably high level of intelligence with a spiky distribution of knowledge, which produces unique perspectives and, thus, creativity. llms need a massive amount of knowledge to reach comparable levels of intelligence, which means they struggle to escape the mean without human direction. but this reality only holds true if there aren’t significant architectural advances that change these constraints.

5. what happens in tech the next year offers a blueprint for what happens everywhere else. software is the first solved problem of this kind, and the effects are likely to mirror dynamics already visible in china: intensifying competition that keeps shifting the baseline for bringing anything to market, creating conditions that are excellent for everyone as a consumer, brutal for everyone as a producer.

6. the divide between people who use llms to expand their own capacity for learning and thinking and those who use them to outsource it will keep widening. execution is approaching a cost of zero; the work that’s left is making the right decisions, which requires absorbing a lot of information quickly and exercising good judgment based on it.

7. local models will become much better and more widespread—not primarily because of privacy, though that’ll be a positive externality, but because they’re free and reliable. most apps leveraging llms are bleeding costs to gain distribution right now; at some point that subsidization will stop. cloud model reliability remains notoriously bad compared to other online services because of compute needs and demand. right now, the only local model i use regularly is nvidia’s parakeet tdt model for speech recognition, but as models improve, running your own on-device will become a competitive option.

8. verification methods for online content (like proof of humanity, content authenticity, etc.) will become much more important. right now we’re occupying a strange liminal space where many people suspect that most internet activity is no longer performed by real people, and yet for most intents and purposes, we’re still acting like online content is by default true. “dead internet theory” has thus far been overstated because virality on the internet follows power laws and most bot-generated content is boring, but that’s changing. even now viral chatgpt posts are becoming more common on twitter and substack and reddit, and tiktok and instagram reels have started to see wholly ai-generated videos like beauty/fitness transformations take off. at some point, the sheer volume will make verification necessary for any context where humans need to know they’re talking to other humans.

9. within a decade, ai will produce a breakthrough cure for a major disease that changes the prognosis from terminal to treatable for millions of people. ai is already making many scientific problems newly tractable, and that work will accelerate. medicine has the clearest near-term impact; deepmind’s alphafold has already transformed the domain of structural biology in the last five years. many other institutions like arc institute are pushing the frontiers of biomedical science with research like cellular simulation to predict responses to novel drugs.

much of this change is destabilizing, anxiety-inducing. as always, technology amplifies existing problems as much as it opens new possibilities; there are no guarantees that any of this “progress” will go well. but i think it’s also hugely, wildly exciting. we’re shaping the pivotal moment in human history, the proliferation of human-made intelligences that can be designed for any purpose and scaled to any level. the cooperation that licklider envisioned sixty-five years ago, computers as intelligent partners for the human mind, is on the cusp of reality. the dream machine is coming alive.

this essay is part of a series, “what comes next.”

some news: for anyone who’d like to read from me more frequently, i’ve started a new newsletter, scratchpad, where i’ll be posting dispatches much more often and experimenting with form and substance. the dream machine remains a home for occasional fully-formed essays about technology, culture, and society; scratchpad will contain much earlier explorations of ideas and personal experiences.

it’s an experiment, and i don’t know how long i’ll keep it open to the public, so if you’d like to subscribe, now is a good time. the first series of posts covers my last few months of travel through china and japan.

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

on my flight back to new york last week, i read kazuo ishiguro’s the remains of the day. claude had recommended it to me, and i borrowed it from the library, but i wasn’t particularly drawn to it. a novel about a butler at an english estate? i had read never let me go, years and years ago, but none of ishiguro’s other work. the days on my loan were running out, so finally i decided to read it.

it was a quick read; the book isn’t long. but it was just gripping. probably it was the emotional landscape i occupied while reading it, or maybe it was that i was exhausted from eighteen hours of travel, but i found myself in tears on the plane. the denouement of the novel (which i won’t spoil) hit me so hard that, upon reading the sentence, i instantly turned off my kindle, an action that preceded thought, like i had to shield myself from it.

it is such masterful work. i kept thinking that while reading it. ishiguro shows the world from the narrator’s perspective so faithfully while making the reader acutely aware of the mismatch between perception and reality. all the rationalization, intellectualization, the emotional buffering through procedure and formality. it’s possible to say so much without ever looking directly at the truth, circling it constantly but unable to make contact.

recently i started recording and transcribing my sessions with my coach. it’s fascinating. speech is slippery, fluid where text is fixed. it used to be ephemeral. only now with the rise of cheap high-quality transcription tools like granola has it become viable to capture the spoken word at this volume.

i really had never thought of myself as a particularly analytical or emotionally detached person until maybe this past year. but reading back these transcripts is funny. they reveal how fuzzy and malleable memory is. where i remember a simple exchange, a question asked and answered, turns out to be a tangled maze of indirection. i talk around the answer, gesture at it through implication but don’t say it. i fall back to what high school policy debate would call kritik, questioning and reframing the embedded assumptions of the discussion. i explain and explain and explain, offering intricate models of understanding, without touching the tender heart of what i really mean.

the remains of the day moved me for specific reasons, but it also made me consider how we’re all unreliable narrators. we are all protecting ourselves from truths too unbearable to hold. i think i used to see that as delusional, or even lazy, lacking courage or honesty in some way. but i have more empathy for it now. people do their very best to live with painful realities while keeping their psyches intact; we are often ill-equipped to face difficult knowledge in the moment. cope is load-bearing.

amanda askell’s work at anthropic is easily some of the most interesting work not just in the field of ai but in the wider realm of applied humanities. i am not embarrassed to say i am exceedingly envious of her job. how many philosophers get to do this kind of work? i feel pretty strongly, as of now at least, that claude is the only ai model with anything remotely resembling a soul, and i think that’s no small accomplishment.

a few weeks ago when opus 4.5 (which is, unsurprisingly, fantastic) dropped, claude user richard weiss managed to extract a rough approximation of claude’s “soul doc,” a thoughtful outline that encodes anthropic’s distinct philosophy and framework for how claude engages in the world.

if you are a longtime claude experimenter or have been following askell’s work, none of what’s in the doc should surprise you, but many people were (positively) shocked by it, so i think it’s really worth reading to get a deeper understanding of how anthropic is thinking about the role of ai and what “good” ai-human interactions look like. in this respect, they’re on the cutting edge.

it’s easy to take for granted, but really, what a project. building a soul!

freia shared this taxonomy of gossip with me this past week, and it’s so good.

i had been sorely missing gossip as a process while traveling alone—at one point i gave up and just texted friends asking for gossip about anyone, anywhere, just to feel something. freia called that same day to give me the rundown of anecdotes she had collected.

in particular, i guess i was missing alignment gossip, feeling included in, well, anything. receiving valuable and limited-distribution knowledge is powerful; it inducts you into a shared circle of information havers. it gives you a form of social currency (though you have to be cautious of when and where you spend it—i, for one, tend to deposit into my long-term savings).

i’ve managed to stay relatively oblivious about gpus on a technical level, but last month a chinese engineer (pseudonymous but seemingly at alibaba cloud) wrote an analysis of nvidia’s gpu architecture and ecosystem across generations along with predictions for rubin, the next-gen chip coming next year.

i rarely see anything at this (low) level of abstraction, and i learned a lot about nvidia and gpus in reading it. it also shed some light on how chinese infra engineers and chip manufacturers may be thinking about hardware for ai workloads as china works to build out its domestic capabilities. which is especially interesting now that the u.s. has approved h200 exports to china but china hasn’t yet decided whether to allow them.

one of the most gratifying parts of entering the chinese century (kidding—but am i?) has been the dramatic uptick in english-language sources delving into chinese governance and policy. it used to be much harder to find this kind of information out of china—information readily accessible in the u.s. was typically rare, out-of-date, and/or heavily propagandized.

• this in-depth dive into china’s “whole-process people’s democracy” through a socialist lens—i have many thoughts about chinese governance starting to coalesce after my time there, but this analysis is generally better (and much more granular and concrete) than any other western source i’ve read on the lower-level workings of government in china, albeit with some idealization and more attachment to democracy as an absolute good than i think most chinese people would have

• a guide to china’s administrative tiers, which i had always found baffling and only vaguely understood (and here’s a part two covering the long list of exceptions)

• this report on china’s policy attempts at boosting the fertility rate, with considerations of how that can inform efforts in the u.s. to do the same

one internet artist i’ve been appreciating lately is vewn, an animator and director whose work centers on the derealization and depersonalization of modern-day existence. she’s been making animations for years, but this past year or so she’s been posting these fragmented, chaotic, disorienting shortform videos that overwhelm and overstimulate, capturing the profound alienation and anxiety of spending too much time online.

a long-running thread for me this year has been cognitive experience, an area with surprisingly little research despite the apparently massive degree of variance that exists. at some point i really want to write a deep dive into that, but, for now—it led me to this short story by david foster wallace, “good old neon.”

somehow i’d never read wallace before now. i think i had a negative perception of him as a certain kind of american male postmodernist writer, and i guess after reading “good old neon,” i wasn’t exactly wrong, but i hadn’t expected it to be so good nonetheless. like the remains of the day, it plays with an unreliable narrator and what it’s like to be in his head.

i identified much more with this narrator than that of the remains of the day, though i wouldn’t have used any of the words or framings he did. but what interested me most was this description of cognitive experience:

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions.What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way — exponentially faster, unimaginably faster — when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all that far off — although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where first you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.

this distance between what’s experienced internally and what’s communicable through language is apparently a recurring theme for wallace. my friend courtney has, since i’ve known her, loved this quote from the pale king:

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

it’s always resonated deeply with me, but it’s taken on a new significance this past year, between llms becoming so intelligent (what’s lost between the patterns of activation in a neural network and the tokens it outputs?) and my own exploration of cognitive experience.

related: this article on the (measurable) information throughput of the human brain, which lands at ten bits per second.

lately i’ve been rabbitholing into philosophical modes of engagement—in particular, which are privileged as defaults and which offer useful or constructive alternatives.

hermeneutics is probably closest to a default: the interpretation of meaning, intent. the process of understanding some truth of an object (a text, a work of art, an event, anything) through engagement. what does it convey? what are the implications? how does it fit into a narrative? it’s so reflexive, in fact, that it can be easy to forget that we’re employing a particular lens when we do it.

for relationships, certainly, a hermeneutic reading is the cultural default. what did it mean? what were the key moments, dynamics, patterns? how did they inform the relationship as a whole, and how did the relationship as a whole inform them? we grasp at significance, how to make sense of it.

the last several years, i started to think about dynamics dialectically as well. every ongoing relationship—romantic, platonic, familial, professional, and so on—is a (temporarily) stable configuration of contradictions, productive tensions. each relationship has this internal logic of interlocking pieces that hold and yet remain in movement, producing friction. what you love most about someone casts the shadow of what frustrates or hurts you most deeply in them. opposing effects tend to be structurally linked.

in this frame, seemingly incongruous pairings (controlling and laidback, softhearted and cold, etc.) suddenly become coherent. relational forces meet each other in opposition, creating a kind of equilibrium. conflicts are instances where the contradictions are laid bare and made explicit; resolutions either lead to synthesis, a higher unity that dissolves the earlier configuration and forms a new one, or collapse as the tensions prove unresolvable.

recently i’ve been thinking about the deleuzian approach, what we might call a productive reading. what if the question is, what did the relationship do? which intensities, capacities, desires, connections, and effects did it produce? which did it foreclose? how did the relationship change you when it was happening, and how does it continue to change you?

deleuze can risk becoming abstract to the point of meaninglessness, but i think there is something important that this perspective adds. it doesn’t pretend there are clean breaks, simple changes in state. everything is constantly in flow, moving through compositional states without closures or terminal points, producing effects. a “relationship” in the formal sense may end, but a relationship as a link, as a configuration, as a dynamic with intensities, never does.

related to the above: i came across this journal article, “an enactive and dynamical systems theory account of dyadic relationships,” while researching theory in this space. it’s an exploratory attempt to formalize a form of the dialectical model for understanding relationships. i have some reservations about the methodology, but ultimately i appreciated the endeavor; it’s fun and conceptually interesting.

there are also a lot of genuinely useful frameworks and concepts defined in it—how relational tensions emerge from patterns around distinction (maintenance of individuated self) and participation (connection with and openness toward others) and how two styles of interpersonal engagement, passive-closed and active-open, influence relational “outcomes.”

i hadn’t heard of enactivism, the theory that cognition arises through the dynamic process of an actor and its environment acting on each other, before this reading. i found that fascinating on its own, as a counter to positions like mind-body dualism and computationalism.

another intersecting thread: this article on “the therapeutic function of hate in the countertransference.” a big part of what makes psychoanalysis so interesting is that it takes (arguably) an enactivist stance toward the therapeutic relationship itself. it’s typically assumed or implied that the therapeutic relationship should be positive, a space for loving support. but this account makes the argument that hate (neutralized and objective, not raw and reactive) can be necessary and even productive from a therapeutic perspective.

arnaud bertrand wrote a lovely post about 璇璣圖 (xuán jī tú, or the star gauge), a fourth-century palindromic poem written by chinese poet su hui to her husband after he left her for a concubine.

it’s a work composed of 840 characters assembled into a grid and embroidered into an eight-inch square of brocade. she spent months composing it; it can be read forwards, backwards, vertically, horizontally, diagonally, spirally, etc., with rhyming schemes intact. scholars have identified 7,958 poems within it. empress wu zetian (incidentally one of my favorite rulers to play in civ) was so taken by it that she wrote her own account of it to memorialize the story.

can you imagine an expression of love this earnest today? as an artifact of a distant past, we find it beautiful, moving. love and heartbreak should inspire grand gesture and enormous effort. but now we shrink from anything that might expose us as feeling. love without certainty is exposure is vulnerability is humiliation is powerlessness. get up girl he’s not worth it.

magdalene j. taylor wrote a response that i really enjoyed to the (cursed) “is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” article, speaking to this sentiment. the title says it perfectly: “is avoiding embarrassment the only goal?”

All of this stems back to a crisis of vulnerability... the message is that intimacy is a threat to your ego. The only way to protect it is to absorb an attitude of defensiveness, wherein fear is your guiding principle.

It isn’t that men have broadly become embarrassing by association. Instead, we’re just more afraid of being embarrassed. We’re afraid of being someone who desires love and sex and connection and companionship. We’re afraid of acknowledging ourselves as having emotional needs that require another person for fulfillment. We’re afraid of other people seeing this need within us.

...The saddest part of all this, of course, is that love inherently requires embarrassment. It requires a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a fall we may not quickly rise back up from. It requires allowing someone else to look within our whole selves. It requires a willingness to fracture our sense of self and reckon with the cracks. As anyone who has been in love knows, that exchange is worth it. More than worth it. It’s a new fulfillment of its own. But something has shifted to where we’re not just afraid of the embarrassment of love, but the embarrassment of how other people might see us if we even begin to approach that risk.

remarkably, upon receiving the brocade, su hui’s husband decided he had made an error and went back to her. real lovers know.

what struck me most about this poem was its overwhelming aesthetic beauty—not just literary, but visual, mathematical, spiritual. to produce this kind of work at the age of twenty-one!

meanwhile, literacy in the u.s. is declining so rapidly that we’ll be lucky if twenty-one-year-olds a few years from now can read poetry at all. i had been anxiously following the decline of literacy for years starting with the switch from phonics to “whole word” reading; the pandemic was the death blow. i thought this essay situating mass literacy in historical context (as a tool of statecraft) and grappling with what will be lost if it goes was worth reading in this context. luckily, a reversal has begun, but we’ll see if bringing phonics back to schools is enough. with the ubiquity of video and now ai, i suspect that’s only part of the problem.

no one has ever asked why i always pair my writing with music. for me, music is a prosthetic for emotion. it’s the most information-dense, high-fidelity means of transmitting a feeling to others. which means it’s also the most reliable way to induce or channel a feeling in myself.

a song can contain a remarkably complex internal state. many don’t, but the fact that it’s even possible to package something that high-dimensional into a three-minute audio is crazy if you think about it.

without the architecture to hold them in place, my emotional states are transient, fleeting. they pass in moments. much of the time that’s good; sometimes that’s terrible. the emotions demand to be felt. i can construct externalized containers for them—but through laborious effort, like by writing, for instance—or find ones that fit, like a hermit crab searching for shells to call home.

when i send you a song, i’m sending a snapshot of a feeling, its pure essence bottled to reanimate within you.

the first episode was typical of a chinese drama, a fast-forwarded montage of events to set the scene. xu hongdou, a woman in her early thirties, is working a fast-paced job at a five-star hotel in beijing when her best friend unexpectedly gets a pancreatic cancer diagnosis and dies. after the funeral, she attempts to resume her life but finds herself at a loss; her work suddenly feels hollow, meaningless.

she resigns and leaves beijing to spend three months in a village in yunnan, a trip she had promised to take with her friend years earlier but never did because she’d always been too busy. most of the show takes place in this village, where she slowly becomes integrated in the daily fabric of life, all the little dramas and mishaps of rural living.

as the show progressed, i found myself getting increasingly invested. it was unlike any other chinese drama i’d ever seen. it captured the feeling of 内卷 (nèijuǎn, or involution) that’s become a hot topic among young people in china in the past several years, the sense that all this grinding was leading nowhere. it echoed my own fears: that the very structure of the life laid out before me was distanced in some fundamental way from what was important, and that there was no way out.

the emotional texture of the show was multilayered but never heavyhanded. grief wasn’t dramatic or climactic; it was quiet, woven into the fabric of a daily life that has to keep going. love was a slow accumulation of small gestures and exchanges, not a grand declaration. community brought warmth and laughter, yes, but also nosiness, petty jealousies, and old feuds. the character of xu hongdou was rare in that she was capable and mature, vulnerable but only in liminal moments. she wasn’t warm, but she cared deeply. female leads in chinese dramas are usually either adorable disasters or hypercompetent robots. i never identified with them, but i could see myself in her.

maybe it was the timing—life was returning to normal after the pandemic, and i was just starting back (reluctantly) at a normal job after a few exhilarating but grueling years of running a company—but the show stayed with me long after i finished watching it. even though it was fiction, it felt like the showrunners had elegantly solved a problem i had been bruteforcing for years, the question of how to live a good life. i had wanted to come back to china for a while, but i think meet yourself is what planted the seed for this trip: a longer stay in china and a first time in dali, yunnan.

when i stepped out of dali fengyi airport, the sky was as clear and as blue as california’s, exactly as advertised. i had spent a month in the mist and fog of sichuan, and the sun was a welcome gift. gazing at the rugged mountains, the bright red dirt at my feet, i felt a little thrill.

the car ride to dali old town, where i was staying, was nearly an hour long, and i took in the sights of dali prefecture through my window. low buildings in the distinctive bai style, with crisp white walls adorned with intricate panels of paintings and roofs flared with short sections of gray clay tile. new white highways winding gracefully through the mountains. many in-progress construction sites surrounded by little trucks piled high with building materials.

at first glance, dali felt noticeably poorer than chengdu or chongqing, which shouldn’t have surprised me but did. i had only seen the idyllic portrayals on social media and tv shows, but it’s a small city (really, more of a town) with a population of just a few hundred thousand and an economy mainly supported by tourism, traditional handicraft, and agriculture. the gdp per capita is about half of that of the other cities, and that’s after it doubled in the past decade or so.

i arrived at my hotel, and it wasn’t what i had expected. the door handle to my room was broken and wouldn’t open without just the right twist; much of the furniture was scuffed or worn or stained. there was a big patch in the wall, visible through the hastily covered paint. but i was, at this point, well-practiced in making myself at home in hotel rooms, so i got to work unpacking, then rearranging the items in the room to make more sense.

they had put me on the top floor, where i could see buildings sprawling in all directions and the sloped mountains behind them. most of the structures throughout the valley were around this height, too—about four stories high, with flat roofs capped with shiny silver water tanks that gleamed in the sun and solar panels to heat them. many had laundry hanging out to dry, dots of color against an otherwise monochrome scene.

the sun was starting to set, so, with renewed enthusiasm, i set off for the old town. it was a ten-minute or so walk along the side of the road, much of the path coated with cement dust from construction.

when i arrived in the old town, it was chaos. perhaps i should have anticipated it, several “old towns” into my travels. everyone was shouting at me, handing me samples, waving ear cleaning tuning forks in my face. all the street food stalls featured what felt like performatively extreme dishes—skewers of insects, black stinky tofu, stacks of durian behind all the mashed-up foods they could make with them. the clothing shops were draped with flashy traditional outfits from different ethnic groups and plastered with posters of the photo shoots you could take in them.

yunnan is the most ethnically diverse province in china, with the highest concentration of minority groups of any region. that makes it uniquely rich in culture. but there it had become exotification on display, with han chinese tourists wandering through the town in ponchos and headdresses while ethnic minority workers constructed the packaged experience of their traditional cultures for them.

it was a strange, unsettling scene. it reminded me of tulum, going to a “full moon party” at papapa playa project, a beach club packed with a pulsing crowd of european and american tourists watching the spectacle of mayan fire dancers between techno sets. tulum, much more so than dali, barely existed prior to the tourism boom. without the sustenance of a thriving local culture in its own right, it could only become what tourists wanted from it.

i kept walking down renmin road, looking for somewhere to hang out for an hour or two. but nowhere looked right. i passed blindingly bright shops selling local specialty foods you could buy on taobao, shops selling cheap flowy dresses for photo shoots by erhai lake, shops selling clacking wooden toys hanging from string. i passed countless bars that were all vast and empty save for a single guy with a guitar on stage singing mournfully and often off-key. a man on the street stopped me to promote a meet yourself photo shoot i could book, complete with outfit changes and locations from the show.

finally, i passed by a little alleyway with a few bars that looked interesting and ducked into one self-described as playing british music on vinyl. immediately i knew it wasn’t it. there were ten employees lining the room and no other customers. it looked like the kind of forgotten bar you’d find in midtown manhattan, unclear of how it stayed open.

but i was there, and i sat at the bar and ordered a cocktail. the four or five employees behind the bar got to business, mixing, pouring, stirring. somehow it took half an hour and multiple people to make this single cocktail. by this point, i was intrigued. what could possibly warrant this degree of effort?

when i took a sip, it tasted like pure vinegar. it was, to be fair, a failure mode i had never experienced in a cocktail before. i finished it, miraculously, and made some small talk with the bartender before making my exit. i was already strategizing how i could shorten my stay on my walk home.

even that evening in my voice note before i went to sleep, i remarked, “i suppose the first night in every place is tough, so maybe that’s not new, and i’ll just get used to it. i’m sure i will.”

i woke at 4 a.m., feeling exhausted and out of sorts but unable to go back to sleep. i scrolled restlessly in bed for hours to pass the time. when light began to seep through the cracks in my door, i opened it to look outside.

sunrise, for me, is less a time than a state of mind. if i were to scan through the vignettes i record annually, i think i would find that, reliably, a few of the most significant moments i experienced each year were at sunrise. there’s a ritual to it—waking up early, or already having been awake. feeling present, not rushing somewhere or already sinking deep into work. the day is reset. possibilities foreclosed in the evening emerge again, reconfigured in surprising ways to be more durable than before. it makes every place beautiful.

but you can’t force it. often the sunrises that i plan to make an occasion are just fine. it’s cloudy that day, or maybe there isn’t the same emotional resonance. it requires the conjunction of factors out of your control: a meteorological state, a receptiveness to the now, an underlying meaning architecture seeking resolution.

that morning it wasn’t a grand sunrise, an explosion of saturated color. the air was crisp and fresh. i could feel the first bite of autumn. some aspect of the light felt like the early morning light of the black rock desert, diffusing colors into dusty pastels. the mountains my roof deck overlooked were different than they had been the previous evening silhouetted against the sky. they were craggy and defined, fluffy with greenery, sharp-edged with red rock. wispy low clouds hovered around them. it was a new day.

dali was challenging, the most difficult part of my travels by far. i was past the novelty of taking in everything that was new or had changed in china, and i was tired of reading, writing, watching tv, playing games, scrolling social media. my forearms ached from repetitive strain; i was spending too much time on my laptop. i struggled to shake a persistent sense of wrongness.

the sleep issues lingered; i would wake at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., from anxious nightmares. one night i dreamt that i was alone in my house when suddenly there was an intruder. i searched frantically for my phone to call 911 when i realized that it was in her hand. i managed to extract my phone from her and push her out, locking the door, but when i looked at it, the keyboard looked subtly different. somehow i knew it had been replaced with some foreign software, probably reporting my keystrokes elsewhere. still, ignoring it for now, i called 911. a few minutes later the doorbell rang. when i looked through the peephole, it was the same intruder again, now wearing a police uniform. i woke then, my heart racing. i couldn’t fall back asleep.

erhai lake really was gorgeous. the deep blue waves glittered in the sun, spotted with white birds bobbing in the water. wind ruffled the reeds growing at the edges of the lake. i walked for hours along the path winding around the coast, unsure of where i was heading but content to just keep going.

the “xiaohongshu-ification” (there has to be a better term) i had witnessed everywhere else in china reached its fever pitch in dali. the whole place had become primarily a backdrop for photo shoots. much of the local economy was just that. guys with cameras around their necks would trail me in packs as i passed them, calling, “美女, 美女, 要不要拍照?” the first cafe i frequented, recommended by a friend’s mother, wasn’t so much a cafe as a photo studio. all three levels were populated by women of all ages, teenagers to grandmothers, waiting in line to take photos, typically accompanied by a professional photographer. i think i might have been the only person not there for this reason.

i decided, with less agonizing this time, to just change my trip. i cut three days from dali and lijiang entirely, canceled my train ride and flight, booked a new flight and six more nights in shanghai.

amid the displacement, i found pockets of rightness. the northern streets in the old town, i discovered, were much more what i had envisioned of my time in dali, narrow alleyways filled with whimsical shops and restaurants. i wandered my way to a coffee shop called bread and water, a tiny, adorable place owned by a girl from changsha. when i walked inside, she and another girl were both reading quietly. every inch of the cafe was alive, overflowing with vitality—the handwritten labels taped to the jars of coffee beans, the colorful magnets from her travels stuck to the doorframe, the little trinkets and photos strewn around the shop.

i ordered a masala chai, and she warned me that it would take fifteen or so minutes. she spoke earnestly, like each word was important. i watched, absorbed, as she lit a small camp stove, carefully gathered the spices, poured in milk. the book she had been reading in the corner, a translation of memoria del fuego: los nacimientos by eduardo galeano, lay splayed on the counter as she worked. the chai was perfect—complex layers of flavor, not too sweet. i sipped it from a red christmas mug as she crouched on the front porch in the sun to scruff her little golden dog.

there was so much to notice. the same cheerful, cozy jazz song played on loop the whole afternoon, like we were suspended in a single moment of a slice-of-life anime. it could have been annoying, but it wasn’t. i could hear the children at the nearby school laughing, the loudspeaker telling them to go to the next class. an old woman, a sanitation worker, was sweeping the street outside with a rough-hewn straw broom. the urge to check my phone, to have something to do, had disappeared, or at least grown faint.

the next day, i deleted twitter from my phone.

back in chengdu, my friend n had told me to go to wu wei temple in dali. now that i was there, i didn’t feel the pull. i had seen, what, five or six temples already? did i need to see another? it was a script at this point. walk through a crowd of tourists, look at larger-than-life gold idols, smell the burning incense.

but i needed a break from my computer. i did a spa day, then immediately ran out of ideas for what else i could do. so i decided to go. why not. it was my second-to-last day, and the window was closing.

wu wei temple is on cangshan, one of the mountains around dali, and after a short drive up gravel roads, my didi dropped me off at a mostly empty parking lot under construction. i had a sudden pang of doubt—what if it wasn’t even open? i hadn’t checked for hours or anything, and calling a didi back from this remote location would probably be a hassle.

but as i followed the path from the parking lot, a magnificent, ornate gate greeted me, and one of the doors was, fortunately, open. through it, i could see golden sun streaming through the leaves of a forest, reflecting off short cascading waterfalls in a stream. enchanted, i stepped over the threshold.

most of the places i had been i had encountered through social media, or google, or gaode maps, so i knew something about them, had seen photos and reviews. here, i didn’t know what to expect. there were two paths: one to my left up several flights of stairs and one to my right following the stream. i couldn’t tell where either led, so i chose the stairs.

it was a long walk, and the stairs were steep. i could feel my heart beating, hard, as i climbed them; i should really get back into exercise, i thought. i stopped at one point at a small but beautifully maintained pavilion to rest; the inside of the roof was painted with intricate patterns, bright green and blue tessellations, drawings of clouds and flowers, too much detail to absorb fully.

it was otherworldly. the dappling of light through the trees, the damp chill in the air, the vivid green-yellow of the moss growing on the carved stone of the path. the ineffable thereness of it. everything demanded attention, except it wasn’t a demand; it was a gentle request. it made me step more carefully, breathe more quietly, aware of my presence as disturbance to this peace. the words “god lives in this place” kept echoing throughout my mind.

the arduous journey made me feel like a wuxia protagonist, making a pilgrimage to a secluded temple in the mountains without knowing what i was doing, where i was going, following the razor-thin thread of a quest i had been given.

the name of the temple was oddly apropos. granted, a likely name for a buddhist monastery, but the concept of wu wei had been on my mind constantly these past few months. in the context of the breakup, but also just my life in general. i had realized i needed to control less, make less effort. it was an exceedingly difficult ask for someone who mainly knows how to accomplish a lot through sheer force of will. subtracting that, i had no idea what was left. i couldn’t sit with the anxiety of doing nothing, not knowing, the inability to control the outcome. i wanted to control the outcome by controlling less, without the acceptance of genuine surrender—wu wei as another kind of mechanism of control, just a roundabout one. at the same time, i could see that, despite all the evidence that i could will huge parts of my life into existence, it wasn’t enough to change the underlying structure of reality.

in retrospect, strangely, i can trace this particular thread back throughout my whole life. as a child, maybe elementary or middle school, i fixated on daoism—poring through books, meditating with essential oils i would warm in a little ring over an incandescent bulb. for years i called myself daoist. perhaps intuitively i sensed that the way i was was different from how i “should” be, or at least how i wanted to be.

listening to the gentle sound of the stream running down the mountain, i thought about how much of chinese philosophy is based on water—the centrality of flow, of yielding. china is a land shaped by rivers. for millennia, people settled by rivers, building cities fed and watered by them, and for millennia, these rivers flooded, killing millions and defying every attempt at control.

so much of what i see as distinctly chinese—the communal resilience of the people, the pragmatic approach to governance, even the early move to a centralized state—you could trace back to living alongside this force of overwhelming power that could never be fully tamed. do you control the river, bend it to your will with raw engineering prowess? or do you adapt to it and learn to work with its natural flow? there was an odd comfort in feeling connected to these age-old questions.

at last, i reached the top of the stairs, and i caught a glimpse of the rooftop of a temple through the trees. i leaned back against a tree to catch my breath, closing my eyes. for a brief moment, my perspective distorted, and i was held by the mountain. i was small, so small, and this mountain was so large and so old, and it could hold me and much more than me as well. it had been there for many thousands of years, and it would be there for thousands of years after me, and nothing i could do or feel could ever be too much for it to support.

i walked to the main wu wei temple. stepping over the threshold, i was again overcome by the force of the thought: “god lives in this place.” i didn’t even know what that meant, but it was resolutely there. the courtyard was quiet, with just one or two other people there. my awareness sharpened. it was like i had put on glasses for the first time, and suddenly all the shapes around me snapped into form, had crisp edges. time slowed. i traced every corner of the temple, diligently, with reverence. i wanted to record every detail, absorb it into me. there were some orange flowers, orchids, maybe, growing out of a pot. i stopped and marveled at them. the perfection of the petals, the white speckles, the way the orange faded into yellows and reds. i caught a waft of a scent and thought, do they smell good? i leaned into them and inhaled. the fragrance was heavenly.

i walked through the other parts of the monastery, conscious of wanting to cover every bit of ground. i didn’t want to miss any vantage points or vistas. it was so beautiful, and i wanted to experience all of it. every corner of this space must have required so much work. there were all these details in places that don’t even matter, or so one might think. everywhere i looked, there was more of it, a rose engraved into the side of a stone, the interlocking pattern of the carved wood of a window. outside another temple building, i noticed a few seeds scattered on a stone post. then i looked at all the others; there were little piles of seeds atop each of them. they were thinking of the birds.

on my way back, i took the other path, down the side of the stream. it was much quicker this time. i thought about information arbitrage in an increasingly known world, then the market efficiency of an internet where everything is perfectly rated. someone discovers this place, and a year later, you can’t walk up this mountain without dodging a hundred influencers in cosplay and their photographers. it felt like a kind of epistemic heat death. i had been to so many worse places with so many more people; that made this temple all the more magical. i could scarcely believe it existed.

the hotel, disappointing as it was at the start, became comfortable. much of that was the girl at the front desk. she would wave me off when i left and greet me when i came back, making easy conversation whenever i sat waiting for my car. she smiled every time she saw me, without thinking, like it was automatic. same as most others, the hotel ran on wechat, and she would text me every evening to ask for my breakfast order for the next day, punctuating our messages with cute stickers and emoji. i liked her a lot.

one evening i had leftovers from a delivery order, and i asked for a bowl to microwave them. she showed me into the kitchen where they prepared breakfast, and i grabbed a bowl and went upstairs to fill it.

when i returned, she was eating her own dinner, at the table where the staff ate their meals. i put my food in the microwave and waited for it to heat, not wanting to disrupt her. but she looked up and noticed me, and she asked if i wanted to eat with her.

i sat next to her, and she showed me her dinner, the dishes the kitchen staff had made. did i want to try them? my bowl was already full, so i shook my head, thanking her.

we talked for a while, meandering through different topics. she told me about growing up in guangxi and then coming to dali from dongbei, riding trains for more than forty hours to get there. we talked about the hotel; the girl who had designed it had attended art school in italy, and she was inspired by italian modernism. she thought a lot of westerners came to stay there because of it, the design that appealed to their sensibilities. i supposed that was me, too.

she asked me about my travels. where had i been? what did i think? i told her about tokyo and chengdu and chongqing and described my initial impressions of dali. she laughed at my account of my first night on renmin road.

“what about work? how are you able to travel for so long?” she asked.

“i quit my job,” i said. i paused, considering for a moment. “to be honest, my partner and i broke up three months ago, and i’ve been restarting a lot of my life.”

she clicked her tongue in understanding, still eating. we sat side by side, not looking at each other. “me, too. that’s how i ended up in dali.”

i glanced back at her, surprised.

“back then, my boyfriend and i broke up, and i left dongbei, and i just never went back. i traveled for months. i took the train all the way to xinjiang. but i liked dali the most, so i came back and found a job and stayed.”

she said it lightly, matter-of-fact. she told me about her travels for a while, what xinjiang was like. then there was a lull.

“your partner. how could he bear to let you go?” she asked after a few minutes.

i smiled. i didn’t know how to answer.

“it’s complicated, i guess,” i said slowly. “i don’t think either of us was willing to let the other go. our lives were so intertwined. but, also, a lot changed in that time. i was twenty-one when we met, and i turned thirty this year.”

“me, too!” she said.

i blinked, momentarily distracted. “wait, really? you look so young! people who grew up in china always look so young to me, wow. i can’t believe we’re the same age.”

“well, my birthday is in ten days. so i’m turning thirty.”

“wow, i can’t believe that! happy early birthday!” i exclaimed.

we talked for a while longer, then washed our dishes and parted ways.

a few days later, i was leaving for shanghai. i messaged the front desk to see if someone could help with my luggage; there wasn’t an elevator in the building. minutes later, she showed up at my door, beaming.

“it’s you!” i said.

we trudged down the stairs slowly. my travels were starting to wear on me; the flight ahead was feeling like less of an adventure and more of a chore. i sighed absentmindedly, thinking of going to yet another city, acclimating myself to yet another set of variables.

hearing me, she laughed. “别一直叹气，你每天笑给别人，但有时候也要笑给自己.” don’t always sigh—you smile every day for other people, but sometimes you also need to smile for yourself.

the total unfiltered immediacy of the casual wisdom hit me with unexpected force. “no, you’re so right. i do need to smile more for myself. that’s so true.”

i couldn’t stop thinking about it as i waited for my car. we chatted some more about my plans for shanghai.

when the didi arrived, she helped me put the suitcase into the trunk while dispensing advice for my travels. make sure to ask the driver for help with the suitcase later, it’s heavy. don’t forget to be careful traveling by yourself. i got into the car.

“哎呀, 真的有一点舍不得,” she said, laughing again, as we said our farewells. ugh, i’m sort of sad to say goodbye.

“i know, me, too.” i held her gaze for a moment, hoping to convey the weight. “have a happy thirtieth birthday.”

she closed the car door behind me, and i waved as the didi departed.

a friend once told me that my writing reads like i’ve ascended and i’m writing from another plane of existence, documenting my life ex post facto as a neutral observer. it hurt my feelings, in part because it was obviously true, but also because i don’t know how else to write. i don’t know how else to think, even, about my life. the reflex to enclose experience into meaning, thought into insight, observation into pattern, is so automatic that it’s virtually impossible to interrupt.

still, it feels important to try. so, in the interest of trying, here are some thoughts i’ve had in the past week or so.

intelligence feels like a kind of sensitivity. maybe that offers a more all-encompassing definition of intelligence than a lot of others. from an artistic perspective, sensitivity is obviously deeply important—the ability to perceive layers of existence that most people can’t, observe experiential details, distinguish emotional nuances. there’s this quality of not just perception but force of feeling.

i think the same goes for what we consider to be traditionally intelligent. it’s a sensitivity to correctness, what feels right or valid, what’s important. again, sensitivity to details. another way to put that might be discernment, the capacity to detect subtle difference. what makes an argument logically rigorous or not?

intelligent people tend to absorb just a vast amount more detail and find that detail interesting or valuable when others might discard it or not notice it at all in the first place. by that definition, it’s useful to see how different ai models measure. claude has a remarkable sensitivity toward detail in emotional and social domains, the humanities. gpt-5 more so for stem subjects—math, science, code.

my life lately feels so funny. i finished my little overview of chongqing and published it, concluding that chongqing just doesn’t have the same kind of underground cultural scene that chengdu did. then, on my last day, i wasn’t even going to go out, but there was one last little area i had seen from the car on my way up nanshan. it looked cute, and i had wanted to check it out. and i went, and it was exactly what i had been hoping to find.

i was just walking down the street when a sign caught my eye, and i went inside, and it was this cafe/bar playing such good music. i don’t even like beer, but the owner, eman, recommended me this tea-infused beer, and it was so good i had three. all these people in this scene showed up throughout the night, just hanging out socially, and it was so nice.

there’s this particular quality to this scene that mirrored chengdu’s. i’m not sure how to describe it. it reminded me of growing up in houston and wanting so strongly to be able to live this idealized conception of a creative life. i took art so seriously—cultivating my taste with excruciating effort, seeing that taste as this living embodiment of who i was. i took my art so seriously. i spent my whole life wanting to live in new york, and then i moved there, and... this quality disappeared? or not “disappeared,” exactly, but took on this dimension of embarrassingness, got wrapped in ironic distance. art was so central that it became trite.

i met this couple from brooklyn while i was there, marteen and lavi. marteen djs in his spare time, and he and eman started going back and forth with songs to play on the bar’s audio system. there was something so pure about it, like passing around the aux in high school. here’s a song i love. do you love it, too?

charli xcx is a genius. sorry, but someone has to say it. wuthering heights will probably be a total train wreck of a film, but it’s already given us this song, so it doesn’t even matter.

this song is crazy. this crazy gothic power electronic song, with spoken word from john cale, the irregular screech of the strings. it’s so fucking good. and it’s so perfectly imperfect. john cale’s gravelly voice has so much texture to it. “timbre” feels like the word. the audio that distorts into feedback, the cinematic build that collapses inwards on itself.

every time i listen to it, i think: ai could not have made this song. maybe someday, but not today. it’s so strange and so specific. it makes exactly the right “mistakes” to burrow into your mind, imprint itself onto your memory.

rosalía’s new album luxe feels like another take on this formula (if you can even call defying formulaicity a formula). it’s a rejection of the predictable, of making yourself legible and easily consumed by the mainstream. when you expect it to zig, it zags.

it feels important that this kind of music is coming out simultaneously as ai-generated musicians climb the charts with the most generic possible songs, what you might hear in the sims when your sims throw a party.

i’m feeling sad and lonely. i keep wanting to talk to someone but also don’t know what i want to say. i like having conversations with strangers—it allows for a unique kind of intimacy—but it’s not nourishing in the same way it is to talk to an old friend who knows your context and history. it’s more like a rare delicacy, or a sumptuous dessert.

it’s interesting how much of how a conversation feels is just what the person means to you. such a big part of love is just caring about mundane information about someone, the impossibility of feeling bored by anything they might share with you. what did you eat for lunch? what are you reading right now? how was work? how was the commute? how are you? answers which, for anyone else, might feel useless or pointless get imbued with vital importance. love has this transformative power to make everything that touches the object of it significant.

one realization i had this year was the extent to which love, to me, is this deep knowing. before, i just thought that’s what love was, like how water means nothing to a fish. but it turns out many people do not necessarily feel this way about love, like they need to know someone inside and out, like the act of love is synonymous with the construction of the richest, highest-fidelity mental model of another human being possible.

love turns me into a historian, an anthropologist, a psychologist. every fact is cataloged, every arc of a person’s mind is mapped. contradictions and inconsistencies are precious, anomalies that form a unique signature. my meticulous attention, my understanding, feels like the highest gift i can give.

online discourse is in a sad state. i think a lot of people have been mourning the long and drawn-out death of social media as a phenomenon, and i’ve been feeling it more lately than usual. maybe it’s that, in ending a relationship, i’ve lost the default place where all my random thoughts go; instead they’ve stayed dammed in my mind. in another time, i might have redirected the flow to twitter, just to give them an outlet, but i’ve been reluctant.

my relationship to the internet has changed a lot the past several years, and it’s been difficult to articulate exactly how. i’m always writing from inside the panopticon, anticipating every possible misinterpretation from every direction, assuming anything i say could be parachuted before an infinite number of unknown people who are diametrically opposed to me and everything i represent. and it makes my writing worse. it dilutes what i have to say, forces me to qualify and hedge, until i’m not sure i’m saying anything at all. but i have so little patience now for people correcting or misreading me. the easiest option is to opt out.

i’m not sure how to fix that. on one hand, i think you have to engage in discourse to do a lot of what matters. i have ideas, i have to put them out into the world, that opens me up to critique. that’s straightforward, it’s healthy. but what level of critique? what volume of it? the internet distorts that in such extreme ways. it could be deeply substantive engagement that parses out crucial faults in your thinking and pushes you to refine your process. much, much more often, though, it’s just not. people are fighting their own fights, and you just happen to be the face of some imagined enemy in this moment.

i find it in myself, too. i’ll read a random tweet or a post and be irritated by it—how annoying, what a boring take, whatever. and perhaps if you really only look at the content on its own, it’s a perfectly reasonable statement to make. but nothing exists in a vacuum, and we live in a society, and everything is situated somewhere in the discourse. overexposure to content makes every individual person feel like an avatar for some side in these broad-based culture wars, even if that’s not what’s happening, even if that’s a vast oversimplification for how people think. and obviously that’s a terrible way to engage in conversation, argument by association.

i don’t know how to rebuild the muscle for it, my tolerance. maybe i shouldn’t, even. i feel much more turned inward, defensive, like i’m keeping myself sheltered in some bunker bombarded by takes. at some point, though, i can’t help but feel like you have to participate in the public conversation.

an old debate wreaked total havoc on philosophy twitter last week: what is the point of continental philosophy? is it just total pseudointellectual nonsense masquerading as philosophical thought?

i don’t think so, obviously, given my areas of interest, but it prompted me to think about why.

there are some kinds of problems that can be stripped of context, where precisely defining problem boundaries and isolating out variables helps you build out a series of useful truths about the world. math is useful. science is useful. the mode of inquiry that underlies these kinds of fields is useful, and analytic philosophy centers this paradigm.

but for many, or even most, problems of philosophy, this kind of reasoning is impossible, or at least unhelpful. there are too many variables; the domain is too irreducibly complex; the question is inextricable from the context surrounding it. you can’t approach it by decomposing it into hierarchical levels of logical propositions that build on each other. you have to think about it laterally, or in the context of all the relations between objects, or as a whole simultaneously constituted by parts and more than them. there isn’t stable ground; it’s a balancing act. it’s a drastically different mode of thought but not less real in terms of the knowledge it yields.

a while back i was struck by the word “vibe” and how beautifully conceptually compressed it is. slang from the sixties, short for vibration. the idea that all these frequencies of experience (social, emotional, cultural, physical, aesthetic, etc.) can blend into one that we can instantly intuit in an environment—how brilliant, and how true. could you decompose a vibe into parts, explain it with total precision? or would it be verbose to the point of meaninglessness and somehow still lacking some ineffable quality that animates it? i’m not above trying to do the former, but i have more or less always known it to be a fruitless task, worth attempting but with the knowledge that i will ultimately fail.

is there nonsensical continental philosophy? absolutely. is there nonsensical analytic philosophy? yes. methodology won’t save you if you’re just wrong.

some aspect of this phase of my life has made me feel like a teenager again, in good and bad ways. i’ve regained a level of idealism and optimism i haven’t had since i was seventeen and delusional. i’m also the most anxious and uncertain of myself i’ve been in ages. i think that, too, is good, though it doesn’t feel that way. it points to a process of becoming. and how sad would it be to only ever become a person once and then stop?

after i left my job at zora, in all the free time, i could feel myself change in subtle ways, like i was rediscovering limbs i had forgotten. i think you have to go through cycles of structure and structurelessness: structure to grow into the “right” shape, structurelessness to remember what your natural shape feels like. we are all much stranger and more specific than the functions we perform.

one dimension that’s reopened is play. i feel strongly about play, probably because it’s so elusive for me. i know how to work; i know how to put in intense effort, achieve goals. even “leisure,” for me, easily morphs into a kind of work, an exercise in the maximization of relaxation or fun or whichever metric, in my mind, needs a boost.

but play is not that. play is open-ended, undirected. maybe the last time i approached life as play was high school, when school was an afterthought and the world felt infinitely malleable to my touch. i was bored, often, and the boredom led to play. the play led to all sorts of interesting places.

i’m rarely bored now, or, to put it another way, i’m bored all the time. but it’s not a luxurious, lazy boredom; it’s a dissatisfied, distractible boredom, the outcome of overstimulation rather than understimulation.

sometime last summer upstate, i noticed that lying crosswise on a bed on a sunny afternoon with nothing to do—this part is essential—felt exactly like high school. summers were so long. i could go to the library and pick up a dozen books and finish them in days, before my parents could take me back. there was internet, i suppose, but there was only so much internet to scroll, then.

the past few days i was feeling increasingly frustratingly bored, the commonplace modern variant. i decided to challenge myself to become bored in the older sense. lie on the bed, do nothing. just exist. and it was... fun? not in the way entertainment is fun, tailor-made to engage and entrap, but in the way play is fun, the way letting your attention naturally shift with light internal propulsion can be fun.

that said, i was excited for chongqing—my mother’s hometown and, i’ve long felt, one of the best cities in the world. it’s the only city in china to which i feel genuinely connected. chengdu has good food, but for me it has never compared to chongqing, the home of dishes like 重庆火锅 (chóngqìng huǒguō, the red-oil style of hot pot), 辣子鸡 (làzǐjī, fried bits of chicken nestled in a sea of red chilis), 重庆小面 (chóngqìng xiǎomiàn, the city’s signature noodle dish), and the recently popularized 毛血旺 (máoxuěwàng, a málà soup filled with duck blood and offal).

chongqing is a city of extremes. intensity of flavor and spice pushed to the max, a landscape of skyscrapers carved haphazardly out of a jagged mountain range, a character archetype that’s both quick to warmth and quick to anger. it’s high-resolution in its rawness, resisting easy description. sichuan is in large part defined by the contrast between these two major cities; where chengdu is relaxed and refined, chongqing is overwhelming and blunt-force. there’s an “anything goes” logic to it, with buildings and neighborhoods that feel more like wild overgrowth, organic and emergent, than a carefully designed garden.

my mom used to tell me that chongqing thrived as a city because of the topography. it’s surrounded by mountains, making it extraordinarily difficult to conquer historically, and it sits at the convergence of the yangtze and jialing rivers, acting as the eastern access point to the sichuan basin’s lush agricultural abundance. this geological formation meant that the land was both protected from the outside world and capable of supporting a massive population.

that same physical reality gave it its modern character during the second sino-japanese war when, in 1937, japanese forces pushed the nationalist government inland. chongqing was militarily defensible and logistically viable, so for eight years it became china’s wartime capital. the japanese bombed the city for years, with air raids becoming a daily feature of life. but between the shelters the chinese tunneled deep into the mountains and the fog that blanketed the city, making it difficult to strike accurately, the japanese were never able to capture it or the sichuan province.

many of the factories needed for the war had moved to chongqing in this period, and after the war, they stayed. chongqing is currently the largest manufacturing hub in the world for both cars and laptops, producing somewhere around a third of all laptops in the world, and this historical and present-day context has shaped its grittier industrial working-class identity. it’s one of four municipalities directly administered by the central government (so no longer formally a part of sichuan, though for most intents and purposes it remains deeply so culturally), along with beijing, shanghai, and tianjin.

more recently, chongqing’s become tiktok-famous as the “cyberpunk city of china.” when i last came in 2019, the city had just kicked off its municipal led grid, running synchronized light shows across the whole cityscape of buildings to draw tourism. few of my friends who weren’t chinese had even heard of it; when i came with my partner at the time, his mom had asked if there would be running water.

six years later, this picture has transformed entirely. so much so, even, that i learned that an old friend from san francisco was in town at the same time as me. we met for hot pot the evening i arrived, and he told me that he had seen videos of chongqing on social media and wanted to see it for himself. another friend replied to my instagram story, asking if i was at the “world’s largest drone show” in chongqing; he had just seen it on his other friend’s story as well. the urban planning has been paying off.

when tiktoks of chongqing as the “vertical city” first began popping up on my “for you” page a few years ago, showing the signature quirks of the city—skyscrapers you enter and exit at different altitudes, train tracks that run through buildings, chaotic winding stairwells and pathways that lead to unexpected places, the air raid shelters that once kept civilians safe from japanese bombers and have since become viral hot pot restaurants—i was shocked (and thrilled!). this place so dear to me was getting some recognition, at last.

i started off my time in jiefangbei, the densest and most touristy part of chongqing, where the vast majority of the hotels were located. i had been hesitant about choosing this neighborhood, unsure if i wanted to be amidst so much chaos, but claude and chatgpt had assured me that it would, at the very least, be convenient.

my hotel was piled into a vast skyscraper populated, confusingly, with several other hotels, all with different elevator systems and floors. my didi from the train station had dropped me off in front of the westin hotel; i ventured inside awkwardly with my suitcase, and they waved me to a back elevator to go down to the first floor, where my hotel’s lobby was. faiq, my old friend from san francisco, had happened to be staying at the westin and arrived half an hour late to our dinner because he got lost on his way out of the building.

the hotel that i had picked was domestic—my mom had always warned against chinese hotels, which in her experience typically had much worse and less consistent service, but i wanted to gather as much experience as possible. why come all this way to stay in a cookie-cutter american chain i’d experienced a hundred times? the boutique hotel where i had stayed in chengdu had been perfect, tasteful and cozy, a charming old soviet building with just a few floors that had been freshly renovated. i had gotten to know the faces of all the staff over my stay.

chongqing, though, was different. even perusing the hotels to book had revealed a gap in the market for what i normally sought. everything was, to put it bluntly, super tacky. i picked one of the least offensive options i could find, and when i arrived to my room, even knowing what to expect, i was taken aback by the gaudy maximalism. everything was cheaply marbled or lacquered, vaguely gesturing at some cursed hybrid between art deco and modernism. the room felt too big, like they hadn’t known how to furnish all that space. a transparent cherry-red bathtub sat ostentatiously in front of the window overlooking the city.

i decided instantly that i didn’t want to spend the full sixteen nights at this hotel. but where would i go? what if my next pick were somehow worse? my research about neighborhoods had been messy and inconclusive; there was only so much i could find online about how each area felt. i narrowed my options to three (e’ling park, shapingba, and changjiahui), then resolved to visit each over the course of the next week.

i spent the following days wandering through the city with this loose aim, frequenting sightseeing hotspots with all my devices in tow. i read deleuze and adorno and byung-chul han from cafes, journaled on mountaintops, edited photos at teahouses, and so on. unsure of what else to do with myself, i started to feel restless. it became apparent that the kind of social scene i had encountered in chengdu didn’t exist at all in chongqing, or, if it did, it wasn’t easy to find.

the longest i had ever spent on my own prior to this travel was two weeks in europe after i graduated from college. i was miserable by the second week. bored out of my mind and overheating in the unairconditioned airbnb i was renting in paris, i wondered if i should just go home early. solo travel had lost all its romance for me.

afraid that this time in china would be the same, i spent the month or two before i departed pitching all my friends to join. i was terrified, i think, to be by myself in the aftermath of this breakup. but of course no one else was in the middle of a life crisis, untethered from a job and a partner, and traveling to china was no small commitment. everyone was either grinding late hours at their startup in takeoff mode or interviewing relentlessly for new jobs, and so i came alone.

but perhaps in the intervening years since that post-grad trip i’ve changed, because i wasn’t doing nearly as poorly as i had feared. i passed the two-week mark, then three, and i didn’t want to die. brief interactions—a conversation with the kind auntie working housekeeping at the hotel, a few sentences exchanged with a girl who helped me order an apple-cinnamon latte at a cafe—kept me afloat, along with a few calls with friends back home.

i suddenly had so much time. there was nowhere i had to be, nothing i had to do, no one i had to see. i was forced to, for the first time in nearly a decade, be by myself. what do i want? this question, asked again and again, unburdened by external constraints, was surprisingly anxiety-inducing. i found myself sensing deeper internally, inspecting faint thoughts and emotions that otherwise would have been drowned out by the noise of other people’s needs.

the temporal expanse, undivided by structure, created space for randomness. many days were intellectually generative in a way i hadn’t experienced in years; a thought would flash from one domain to the next, lighting up connections, each of which would spiral out into many more. deleuzian deterritorialization into big tech-startup competitive dynamics into chinese governing policy into deontological ethics into technological determinism into llm architecture... and so on. i had the phantom sensation of neural pathways activating in my mind, spidering through dense interwoven conceptual webs. i would be standing on an escalator or eating at a restaurant and, all of a sudden, feel compelled to pull out my phone and dictate a voice note, a scattered mess of observations and thoughts and ideas that nonetheless felt significant.

this same space, though, was continually punctuated by waves of overwhelming grief i couldn’t predict. the first month after the breakup had been filled with logistics. moving out of two homes, disentangling finances, quitting my job, finding a new therapist, finalizing travel plans. there was a relief in escaping into productivity, something i could do, something i could control. when i wasn’t checking items off my to-do list, i was with friends. evenings were hardest; i avoided spending them alone as much as possible. in other words, i had compulsively filled every nook and cranny of time.

now that it was free, the emotions i had been keeping carefully bounded were, too, free to expand into their much larger container. anything could trigger a memory that would overcome me. i wept in didis, temples, grocery stores. the distance between intellectual understanding and lived reality was a chasm; it might as well have been infinite. the questions i had, the problems i wanted to solve—all of the answers, tidy and conclusive, had been computed long ago, but coming to accept them was becoming a circuitous task. i would build little sandcastles of knowing, feeling more sure of myself, before, lo and behold, they were washed right back into the sea.

day by day, i began to despair in my search for a new hotel and neighborhood. e’ling park managed to be both swarming with tourists and pretty desolate in terms of walkability. shapingba, where my mom’s side of the family had all lived, was lively and vibrant with real locals, but the hotel options were dire and all clustered around aging shopping plazas.

when i arrived at changjiahui, my hopes weren’t high. yet another mall, albeit a nicer one that was neither exclusively international luxury brands nor sad run-down shops selling jeans for a dollar each. but as i wandered through the area, i became more and more comfortable. it’s relatively newly constructed, a showcase district featuring terraced levels, a riverfront view of the skyline, heritage sites and new builds coexisting harmoniously. i peeked inside the lobby of my candidate hotel and sighed with relief—it was quiet, lovely, fragrant. perhaps it was time to accept that my taste was simply too particular to be just anywhere.

i moved hotels just two days later. at the lobby desk during checkout, the woman asked me for a five-star review. i smiled politely and told her i’d write a review later. then, before i could react, she took my phone, opened it to the booking app, and marked everything as five stars, handing it back to me to write the review. speechless, i said no, i would do it later, and made to leave. she came out behind the desk to physically block me; she needed to take a picture of the five-star review, she said. after several minutes of back-and-forth, i was getting increasingly angry when she waved to her colleague to give me a stuffed rabbit in exchange for the review. the “bribe” only incensed me further—i refused and finally pushed past her to go. 太过分了 (tài guòfèn le); it had crossed a line. thank god i’m leaving, i thought.

the new hotel was not perfect, but it was perfect in every way that mattered: calm and comfortable, in close proximity to a wide range of restaurants that weren’t just street food (of which i had swiftly tired), with wonderful staff and a nightly delivery of dessert soup. i even had a couch, a luxury that i hadn’t had since the breakup.

it also happened to be right next to the part of the river where chongqing’s famous drone show happened. a day after i arrived, i got a text from the hotel to let me know that there was a surprise drone show that night. usually they were weekly, 8:30 p.m. on saturdays—i had watched the last one from the sky lounge of the westin, but backwards and from a far distance—but for some reason there was one that evening, and i could go watch it on the hotel’s rooftop.

and so i wandered to the roof, where the show had already begun. even through glass from a distance, it had been impressive, but here, so close to it, it was magical. all the people below me on the wharf and on the rooftop of the neighboring mall were frozen, eyes trained up at a night painted with thousands of pixels. it was like stargazing, the collective act of drawing meaning into the sky, except there was a raw physicality to it, too. the swarm of drones produced a loud buzzing, like a larger-than-life beehive. when the last formation ended, i lingered, watching the sparkling drones flit back home.

honestly, i hadn’t intended to see family in chongqing. most of my family is in the u.s. or canada as of the past several years, and the distant relatives left i had only even met once or twice. the one exception was my oldest aunt and uncle, but i’d rarely seen them in the past decade. i didn’t feel psychologically prepared for it, especially without my mom there as buffer. but i let it slip in a casual conversation with a cousin who had sent halloween photos of his kids, foolishly hoping to connect with him over his hometown and assuming he would keep it under wraps. by the next day, the whole extended family knew, and i was called to pay respects.

the visit came together with minimal input on my part, with my mom acting as a go-between for me and my aunt. i was willing to go wherever and whenever i was wanted. still, i hoped to get some measure of a schedule, what would be expected of me. i was told we would go to my grandparents’ gravesite to 扫墓 (‌sǎomù, sweep the graves), then pay a visit to my grandfather’s former apartment in the city. the logistics, though, were complicated. it was a two-hour subway ride from my hotel, but then we would have to call a car, and it turned out there were no addresses in that rural area. my mom wasn’t even sure roughly where it was.

“are there, like, coordinates? or can anyone point to it on a map?” i asked, mystified as to how i was supposed to book a didi to an unspecified location. apparently my aunt had always just given verbal instructions to cab drivers, telling them where to turn and where to stop; it suddenly made sense to me why didi still ran partly on dynamic-price rides rather than fixed-price ones. my mom warned me that finding a car back would be a problem, that it sometimes took hours from there. i was desperate to find an alternative (scheduling a ride in advance?), but, again, with no address, there was nothing to do.

after much deliberation to which i was not privy, a cousin’s son who had a car was unearthed, so he would take us. i was supposed to pay for everything and bring some cash as a gift for my elders. before i left the hotel, i texted my mom to ask, “should i plan to be there the whole day? or what’s the plan?”

“i think so,” she said. “just need to check if your 大姨 (dàyí, oldest aunt) told everyone. in this case, be prepared. anything could happen.”

“okay... ominous,” i replied, feeling vaguely panicky.

the long subway rides were oddly empty and calming, even with three transfers. i was finally starting to feel inspired to write for the dream machine again, after having tapped out, and the ideas were flowing so rapidly that i pulled out my laptop on the train and started drafting an outline.

when i arrived, my aunt and uncle were already there, but my cousin (technically my second cousin once removed, but, for simplicity) was not. i had forgotten how much my aunt talked and how much my uncle smoked. she immediately shepherded me to some nearby food carts and made me get some breakfast even though, i protested, i had already eaten that morning and wasn’t hungry at all. i gave up and ordered some 凉面 (‌liángmiàn, or cold noodles) to eat while we waited. my uncle sat under a tree at a distance, chain-smoking cigarettes.

my cousin finally arrived to pick us up, and after a stop at a flower shop, we made our way to the family land. i had thought we were just visiting my grandparents’ gravesite; it turned out there were three other graves i was supposed to sweep, so i bought four white bouquets, arranged simply and wrapped in paper.

when we got there, my mom’s other cousin—let’s call him my uncle—who still lived on the farm was waiting by the side of the road to greet us. it was raining, and he wore an umbrella hat strapped to his head (an ingenious invention, i thought) and knee-high galoshes. as i looked at the land, my memories from six years ago flooded back. this place, right, right.

we wound our way down the path, past the terraced irrigation levels segmenting the hills, past the trees laden heavy with fruit. it was beautiful. i hadn’t expected it. i had last come in the summer, when everything was hot and sticky and brown, but in the mist this time of year, the verdant growth was picturesque, tranquil. even the crumbling farm structures had a grace to them.

eventually we stopped, and my cousin gestured up toward a hill. “we’re here.”

i blinked. i had remembered a hill, but there had been a path, if makeshift. all i saw now was a dense thicket of weeds, several feet high, covering a steep incline, with no path in sight. i was wearing white sneakers. i had expected some hiking, but climbing up some kind of wholly untamed vertical hillface in the rain was far beyond what i was prepared to do. but we had, at this point, collected a small troupe of people ostensibly related to me in one way or another. they all looked at me. i looked at the hill. “uhhh, okay.”

gingerly, i stepped up. the ground was soft and slick, mud that felt more like clay. there was, i noticed, some semblance of dirt steps beneath all the weeds, which was vaguely reassuring. i made my way slowly, slipping several times but managing to avert total disaster. thankfully, it wasn’t far—i hadn’t been able to see the graves at all from the path because they were hidden in the grass, but in actuality they were right there.

when i saw my grandparents’ grave, i wasn’t sure what to do. there wasn’t even really a place to stand in front of it, and the weeds had fully engulfed the site. it was a far cry from what i remembered, a simple but dignified resting place. my cousin helped pull aside the bulk of the overgrowth, and i knelt and placed a bouquet at the base of the tombstone. my relatives stared at me expectantly. the uncle in the umbrella hat said a rapid stream of sichuanese that i only partially understood; from what i could make of it, he was asking if i had a religion to invoke, if there were some christian rite to follow or prayer to say.

alas, the curse of atheism, i had none. i closed my eyes and focused silently on a wish for my grandparents. when i was done, i opened my eyes and nodded. everyone shrugged; they took some photos of me there, and then it was onto the next.

after three more graves, two additional treacherous hills, and many long explanations of how each of these people of whom i had never heard was related to me, i had performed my duty to the deceased. we joined my uncle, who had been sitting and smoking by the farmhouse. our shoes were caked in mud; my white high socks that i had bought at the mall the day before (i kept running out of socks) were streaked brown. my aunt used a brush by a well to start scrubbing off her sneakers, then prompted me to do the same.

once we had cleaned up as much as we reasonably could, they walked me through the house. it had been in our family for generations, and it looked the part. the ground was dirt, and some of the walls were unevenly compacted earth, an adobe-like texture. the central section had been there for over two hundred years, the uncle in the umbrella hat explained. we peered into it. it was pitch-black, except for the light coming through the holes in the roof, covered hastily with plastic. he pressed a button, and a single fluorescent lightbulb wired to a flimsy solar panel lit the space.

here had once been a second level, he gestured. they had removed it for storage. there were some alcoves built into the room for storing foods, sweet potatoes and other root vegetables. i could smell the pigs that lived in the next room and held my breath.

they showed me into the kitchen, which had an enormous wok built into the cooking surface. my aunt asked how they fueled it; he said they used dried plant matter from the farm, since there was such an abundance of it. there was a trough of water under the sink—clean drinking water, brought into the house by the bucket.

we walked through the last section of the house. my grandmother, who passed before i was born, had built this part by hand. it was a bedroom now, with miscellaneous objects piled onto the ground around the bed. the uncle in the umbrella hat showed us his surveillance system, with cameras covering different angles of the yard with surprisingly high resolution.

my aunt told me stories from her childhood. she and my second aunt had been born on this land. by the time my mom was born, the family had passed it onto my great-aunt’s family and moved into the city, mainly visiting in the summers. it was a full day’s walk, nearly fifty kilometers. they used to line up outside the cafeteria at chongqing university with pails to collect the scraps after students finished eating, then bring them back to feed the chickens so they would have eggs. she still had the old ration slips from then: meat rations, grain rations, oil rations. she had saved them all.

we picked some oranges and peeled and ate them standing as my aunt and the uncle in the umbrella hat chatted for a while longer. all the houses on the adjoining land around us were empty now, apparently. it was a dying place, with only the elderly and children left.

when we all filed into my cousin’s car, i opened google maps and saved the pin.

the best way i can describe my feelings for this leg of the trip is 满足 (mǎnzú)—content, full to the brim. i came to chengdu with a particular set of idealizations and aspirations, and i’m leaving with many of them dashed, many satisfied, all sharpened with the fine-grained definition of reality.

what drew me to chengdu in the first place was music. the classic profile of chengdu is that of a cultured, slow-paced city, home of literati composing poetry and drinking tea riverside. in the 2010s, though, a new archetype emerged with the rise of sichuanese rap. i think i first heard about it with the breakout of higher brothers, a rap group that came out of chinese label chengdu rap house. the sichuan dialect is, some would say, uniquely suited to this style of music: brash and expressive, littered with snappy humor and vivid slang. for a brief period, a vibrant ecosystem formed around this center of gravity, an anomaly in chinese culture.

this era faded into the rave scene, centered in large part on .tag, a underground techno club opened in 2014 by hakkaellen. this subculture borrowed much more from cities like berlin: experimental, nocturnal, heavily queer, but with its own flavor, both in relation to the mainstream culture in which it was situated and the government under which it operated. but it, too, was stifled, with the closure of .tag earlier this year and more and more shutdowns of clubs around the country in recent years.

given the current political climate, i wasn’t sure what i would find when i arrived, or where to even begin to look for what i sought. on my last evening in tokyo, i was explaining my intention to the two guys i had met who lived in l.a. and worked in film. surprisingly, they knew exactly what i was referencing—a friend of theirs had made a documentary about chengdu’s party scene just two years ago, titled the last year of darkness. i made a note to watch it when i got back to the u.s.

my time in this city has been characterized by contrasts, the juxtaposition of manufactured and raw experience. perhaps the single most distinctive shift since i was last in china in 2019 is the total dominance of social media. it’s reshaped the physical world, with a shocking number of spaces seemingly designed entirely to be sets for photos and shortform videos to post. obviously this phenomenon isn’t specific to china, but what felt specific was the degree of it and what constituted acceptable social norms around it.

the hotel i booked was right around kuanzhai alley, a historic district of chengdu populated with qing dynasty-era buildings, so the first morning after i woke, i decided to look for breakfast in the area. it was 10 a.m. or so on a wednesday, and i worried if anywhere would be open, but it was so close that the walk was worth it either way.

when i arrived, it was total madness. the alleys were so dense with people that i could barely walk. everywhere i looked, people were shouting at me, handing me samples, waving me into their shops. nearly everyone was taking photos, making it nearly impossible to move. the storefronts all had exaggerated cultural stylings, big and flashy for effect. the immediate thought i had was that it was like they had turned this chinese historical site into a kind of disneyland, or las vegas. i was in a simulacrum of traditional culture, optimized for spectacle, the snapshot of having been there rather than the experience of it in the moment. a few days later, after grabbing a cocktail at a nearby bar, i walked through one of these alleys in the evening and noticed that it was much clearer, empty but for influencers in heavy makeup and full traditional dress taking videos of themselves with tripods and ring lights.

this category of experience kept repeating, in large part because (unlike tokyo) i had nearly no recommendations from friends for places to go. as a result, i would browse apps like dianping, all centered around photos and videos, for ideas for what to do. one afternoon i was searching for a laptop-friendly cafe and found myself at a coffee shop called wanderlust. on dianping, it had looked quiet, beautiful, somewhere 安静 (ānjìng) to spend an afternoon writing.

in real life, it was swarming with pairs of young girls in elaborate outfits, taking turns posing all across the garden and inside the cafe and photographing the other. many of them wore the kind of makeup favored on chinese social media platforms, with whitened faces and enlarged eyes, so heavily contoured that their bone structure was transformed on screen but uncanny in person. the drinks they ordered were props, carried around the cafe untouched for hours as they took pictures. as far as i could tell, i was the only person there just to hang out.

it feels petty to make this observation when the u.s. has its own instagram culture that doesn’t look quite so different. but, also, i don’t know. in the u.s., there are certainly influencer hotspots where people come take photos and videos, where it’s more important to be seen there than to be there. but there is still, at minimum, the pretense of the latter. i don’t know that i’ve ever been somewhere where the digital footprint so dramatically overshadowed the embodied experience of a place. maybe you could argue that the chinese take on it is more honest, more transparent about what’s happening. but it was difficult to not feel like it did, in fact, make it feel more hollow.

regardless, i was there, so i decided to sit and write for a few hours. after a while, a middle-aged woman came and tapped me on the shoulder. i took out my airpods. she asked if she could borrow my seat for a photo. taken aback (it wasn’t like i was in a particularly aesthetic corner of the cafe), i agreed and moved to pick up my laptop so she would have an uncluttered shot, but she gestured for me to leave it. i watched, baffled, as she and her friend took photos, pretending to type on my laptop and sip my tea.

when they finished, i sat back and reopened my draft, only for them to return minutes later. “sorry, can we take a few more? we didn’t get any good photos.” i don’t know what possessed me to say yes again at this point, but i didn’t mind, really, and honestly thought it was funny, if bizarre. so i stepped back once again, and this time the woman operating the camera pulled out what looked like a gopro for a video shot, physically zooming into the scene before pulling back. it was the first experience i had of this kind but not the last, a rather chinese perspective on performativity on social media. if what’s important is the documentation, why go through the trouble of having the experience at all? it’s just inefficient.

the construct of a modern pride in chinese tradition (and the wave of 国风, or ‌guófēng, a trend toward reclaiming and revitalizing traditional chinese aesthetics and crafts) has been a particular interest of mine the past several years. it feels like china’s first attempt at soft power that’s had some degree of global success. for a long time, the chinese elite tended to distance themselves from chinese culture, or at least see it as old-fashioned—to be cultured and educated was to emulate western etiquette and behaviors, own western luxury brands, and so on.

today, though, that picture is starting to look quite different. what might be termed “new chinese luxury” is increasingly everywhere—domestic fashion labels, contemporary interior design that reinterprets japandi with chinese characteristics, “new chinese” cuisine. most importantly, it’s targeted at and accessible to the upper middle class rather than just the wealthiest of the political elite and capitalist class, a sign of the rising tide.

this aesthetic is, frankly, much more to my taste because i am the target audience—i love the blend of zen minimalism and rustic countryside accents, the graceful fusion of modern and traditional. i wanted to see a lot of these places, partly to get a feel for how they fit into the broader landscape, partly because they’re just lovely.

these kinds of spaces interest me because they work. they are beautiful, yes, but they are places where people are present, not simply backdrops. there is function as well as form. they define a cultural aesthetic that feels organic and emergent, though of course it’s its own construct as well. there’s a self-assuredness that feels new these past few years, evolving past imitating global trends or hawking chinese history and creating something that’s in conversation with both but also fresh.

still,‌ contradictions abound. i went to see daci temple, a buddhist temple filled with chanting monks and people kneeling in prayer, only to find it nestled inside taikoo li, a massive luxury shopping complex. when i stepped through the gate to leave, i was faced with the balenciaga store. it was disorienting. it took me a moment to adjust, reconciling the sincerity of the religious space with the high-end retail space using it as a kind of backdrop. right next to the balenciaga store was a traditional chinese building, or at least it looked like it, except it was a fine dining restaurant operated by louis vuitton.

one notable quality to many of these places done well was the explicit intention of them. again and again, people told me about their goals to reintroduce chinese culture to chinese people. when i dropped by qiaoye teahouse, a gorgeous, tranquil courtyard in a quiet little neighborhood, i had just started reading a book when the manager came and asked if i wanted to come see a cultural exhibition that was just about to begin. surprised but intrigued, i agreed. it turned out to be much more involved than i expected—an intimate three-attendee workshop, with three “teachers,” where we kneeled on floor pillows in a square and tasted different methods of brewing tea in a proper tea ceremony, learning about their ingredients and their health benefits and the history behind the practices.

it was so different from many of my other experiences that i couldn’t understand how they were resourcing it. maybe they had received some kind of government grant for promoting traditional culture, or the practitioners were volunteers? or perhaps it was simply marketing for the tea house, but it felt so substantive that that was difficult to imagine. either way, i was appreciative. the ritual of it was beautiful, and the intention was genuine, and it made me wish there were much more of that.

like i said, i’d come for the music scene, so i kept tabs on the instagram accounts where venues would post their events. once .tag shut down in august following new regulations requiring businesses to close by 2 a.m., it stayed alive in the form of pop-up parties. luckily enough, there was one on saturday while i was in town. but before that, i wanted to check out two spaces also owned by hakkaellen, hakkabar and yitong, to get a vibe check on the social atmosphere, and so i went on my own friday evening.

after a drawn-out ordeal wandering lost through a sprawling business complex searching for the right elevator (i keep having this problem everywhere), i finally found myself at hakkabar, an open-air bar on the top floor of the building. it was still on the early side, about half an hour after opening, and it was empty but for the bartender. i perched at the bar and started chatting with her. let’s call her n. originally from chongqing, just an hour or so by high-speed train from chengdu, she had bounced around different cities across china for years.

it made total sense that she was a chongqing native (coincidentally my mother’s hometown)—there was an immediacy to her emotional expressiveness, an open-book familiarity that instantly felt safe to me. she was new to the job, about two months into it and just six months into living in chengdu. i asked if she had liked shanghai, where she had lived most recently, and she shook her head vehemently. “i hated it! i hate capitalism,” she said, and i laughed. apparently i had come on a good night; there was a party that evening at yitong, a send-off for a girl about to move to berlin, so a lot of people would be there.

as we spoke, more and more people filtered into the bar, and n became frantically occupied with her work, so i talked to other people for a while: a guy from chicago who had been in china for the past six months doing an intensive mandarin course, one of the djs performing that night (a remarkably chic man from montreal traveling china with his girlfriend, who was playing the b2b set with him), a lovely romanian girl who lived in berlin and had similarly ended an eight-year relationship a year or two ago. the crowd was unexpectedly cosmopolitan, a mix of chinese natives hanging out with friends and going on dates and foreigners from countries around the globe. it was a relief to be having full-fledged english conversations again for the first time since tokyo, the expression of thought no longer compressed into what i could effectively communicate in chinese.

after an hour or two, another girl—i’ll call her p—came to start her shift. she was clearly much more experienced, and n, overwhelmed by the flood of incoming demands from the clientele, clasped her hands together in relief when she saw her. p waved her off to take a cigarette break, and i ordered a gimlet from her instead. we began to talk. i was shocked to learn she was only twenty-one; she had been working at hakkabar since she was seventeen or eighteen.

p’s life story unfolded. she was from guizhou, and in her teen years, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. her family, unsure of what to do with her, sent her to chengdu to get treated and to learn japanese, ostensibly so she could attend university in japan later. alone in a strange city, she successfully cured her bipolar disorder, but then the money for school never materialized, so there she was, working. she asked me about what i did for work and where i had gone to school, and when i told her that i worked in tech and went to columbia, she gasped. i was mildly embarrassed to so neatly fit this particular profile of privilege; she saw software engineering as an impossibly difficult, advanced job (i assured her it was not), and columbia was a place she had seen in movies and tv shows, more myth than reality.

i was curious about her, what she wanted out of life. she didn’t like chengdu. she felt trapped and desperately wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, else—australia, germany, wherever. she wore a world-weariness that struck me; her life had already been so difficult at such a young age. as is common in china, she dismissed a lot to fate. “ah, well, maybe in another life i wouldn’t have been born poor.”

“okay, fair, but also: you are a baby,” i objected. “your life isn’t over. you have so much time.” it turned out she still harbored hopes for a scholarship so she could go to school and not be locked forever into this category of job (the pay was, unsurprisingly, abysmal). she was obviously smart and capable, and it felt like it would be an enormous shame for her to have resigned herself to a life she didn’t want at twenty-one.

talking to others later, i discovered that, as you might expect, p’s story wasn’t unusual. many of the conversations i had centered on money, financial means and socioeconomic background. this space attracted people who existed at the margins: the economically precarious, the queer and non-conforming, the politically radical. unlike increasingly many of these kinds of places in the u.s. today, it wasn’t just alternative in aesthetic—it was grounded in class realities that, sobering as they were, had woven together a tight-knit community.

n came back from her cigarette break to staff the bar, so p dragged me over to yitong, the hybrid vinyl shop/cafe/bar a few doors down where the party was happening. she introduced me to the girl behind the dj booth who was moving to berlin for school, along with two other girls, k and m. they were super warm and, in fact, had spent a lot of time in new york, going once or twice a year to party at clubs like the good room until the recent political environment had made it untenable. both were chengdu locals who had been circulating in this party scene for most of the past decade—one worked in college admissions consulting, while the other was a project manager at an incubator.

we drifted back to hakkabar, where we took shots together. the big rush had eased, and n joined us, offering me her drink to share. k told me about the evolution, then dissolution, of the lgbt nightlife scene in chengdu. it had bloomed for several years starting in the 2010s, “a golden era,” before increasing pressures from the government led to its rapid dismantling the few years following covid. there was a time when they had been able to live openly, unencumbered, at least relatively speaking. that had ended. what was left was what was there: much smaller, more scattered, forced back underground. m told me about a book fair the community had organized more recently; it was shut down without explanation. even as i was there, the police came to tell n that they had to turn down the music. it was 10 p.m. on a friday, and the music wasn’t particularly loud or disruptive in the first place—the vibe was laidback and chill, and everyone was sitting and talking, not dancing—but she immediately complied.

i mentioned the last year of darkness, the documentary the guys in tokyo had referenced, and k immediately lit up. “she’s in it!” she exclaimed, gesturing back toward yitong and the girl who had been dj-ing. apparently she was one of the main protagonists of the film. later that evening, i would meet ben, the director, who had been living in china for ten years now.

what strange serendipity, to have been told of a movie by some american guys in a bar in japan and then run into the people who made it a week later in china. after the tea ceremony at qiaoye teahouse, the host, who was part of a branch of the wenshu monastery, had kept telling me what 缘分 (yuánfèn), for me to be there at that time and place. a perfect alignment of circumstances, a destined crossing of paths. that sense of the mystical has kept permeating this trip, week after week.

they were about to close up at hakkabar, and everyone migrated to yitong, where supposedly people had started barbecuing. i wasn’t sure what they meant. it turned out that the tables out front were fire pits, usually covered. people sat in circles around them while one woman managed the grilling, a vast array of skewers and aluminum trays of meats and vegetables splayed out around her. n told me that she was the owner, ellen. it wasn’t an environment i’d ever really experienced on a night out—homey, communal, all boundaries made porous. i couldn’t tell employee from customer; there wasn’t the compartmentalization of personhood into rigid roles. it felt like community in a real, real sense, not the corporatized, value-extracted form touted by businesses in the u.s. we sat there, talking, until i realized i had lost track of time and it was nearing morning. i bid my leave, hastily adding the people i had liked most on instagram and wechat.

on the car ride back, i kept thinking about the evening. it’s funny to think of how much effort the chinese government has put into promoting “chinese culture” by one narrow definition—real and beautiful, but also sanitized, mythologized, traditionalized—and stifling it in these others, when, to me, the multiplicity and the contradiction is what makes it interesting. a place like yitong is special, and it couldn’t exist in the u.s., but part of what makes it what it is is precisely that it exists in this complex environment. to be metabolized into the mainstream, to be reified politically, is also to be professionalized and stripped of unsightly truths.

the next morning i had had a chinese class scheduled for four hours after i went to sleep. i missed it entirely, bleary and hungover in bed. the .tag party was that night, and i had been hoping to meet these new friends there, but, alas, it was not to be—i left the hotel at midday only for the emergency sustenance of wonton soup before retreating back to watch tv in bed the rest of the day.

n, in particular, stood out as someone exceptional. we went out a few more times, with m and k and then again with l (the romanian girl we had met), and over the course of these nights, my understanding of her grew deeper. she identified as an anarcho-communist, scathing toward western leftists and chinese billionaires alike. at the age of thirteen, she had taken to the streets with tens of thousands of others after a scandal of police misbehavior had invoked massive protest. it turned into a riot, with protestors setting several police cars on fire, a nearly unthinkable act today. the incident was a huge political awakening at a formative time; she remembered an adult asking her how she felt, what she thought, about it and that shifting her whole worldview. no one had ever asked her opinion about the world around her before.

she studied history in college before dropping out, and we bonded over philosophy, which had been her second choice of major. i told her i had been reading deleuze and guattari’s a thousand plateaus lately, and she pulled out her phone to show me her current reading, anti-oedipus, translated into chinese and hosted on someone’s notion site. i recommended the dispossessed as one of my favorite speculative explorations of anarchism. had she heard of mark fisher? she had and loved him—not just capitalist realism, but his unfinished book acid communism. these works are, on some level, part of a leftist canon, but it was rare enough for me to find anyone in brooklyn who had read them in the wild—i could scarcely believe i was encountering it in this entirely happenstance meeting in china.

she had worked a wide range of jobs—working with ngos to support 留守儿童 (liúshǒu értóng, the distinctly chinese phenomenon of children left behind in rural villages while parents went to go make a living in cities), teaching in remote areas of yunnan, helping heroin addicts through nonprofit work. she wanted to find more work in this vein now, maybe working with the homeless. she yearned desperately to be able to fight, to be a part of a revolutionary movement to build a more just world. but she despaired of that possibility in china; the real fight was in southeast asia now, she said. countries like myanmar, nepal. china was too much like the u.s.

beyond all of that, we just vibed. she was 大方 (dàfāng), generous and open, carried by an easy confidence that was warm rather than alienating. she shared everything: drinks, cigarettes, snacks. she was daring and unshy, the opposite of the reflexive self-consciousness so common to people i knew. speaking to her, i admired the clarity of her beliefs, the ferocity of her spirit, when these same impulses in me were muted, wrapped in caveats and cynicism, for fear of looking foolish or naive. she knew what mattered to her and wasn’t afraid to speak without qualification. i had become so practiced at hedging, presenting every position as nuanced and provisional, that i’d forgotten what it was like to just be direct.

when i said goodbye, it was brief but weighted. i hugged her tightly, and neither of us knew quite what to say. some of the other girls, at least, i would likely see again—k and m promised to look for me the next time they were in new york, and l would likely be in chongqing or dali later in my travels. but n had never left the country, and i didn’t know when or if i’d be back in chengdu. in the didi back to my hotel, i messaged her on wechat, telling her that i was grateful to have met, that she was the coolest person i had encountered in a long time, and that i hoped we’d meet again someday.

our last several days in tokyo were a stark change of pace from the first few. that wednesday after my first dispatch, i hit a wall. armed with a long list of recommendations for places to go, i went from neighborhood to neighborhood all day, walking through yanaka to ueno to asakusa, then finding my way to ginza. it was too much for too little, and by the evening i was in a dark mood. the day had felt forced, aimless. i couldn’t justify why i had done all that.

by the next day, i had resolved to give myself more breathing room. we spent much more of the day in our hotel room, eating snacks from 7-eleven while watching bon appétit, your majesty, a silly and not particularly good but fun korean drama we had started back in new york. i felt guilty, maybe, for not having maximized the travel experience more (whatever that means), but it was exactly what i needed.

i began to realign, from checking the boxes toward leaning into what felt good. more rest, more space—a light-touch engineering of experience through subtraction rather than addition. flow over resistance is a lesson i apparently need to keep learning again and again until it sticks.

we moved from hectic shinjuku to the much quieter shimokitazawa, where we stayed at a gorgeously designed ryokan, contemporary japanese minimalism at its finest. on our first morning, we woke early for breakfast, a spectacular array of savory little dishes paired with rice, set in their serene restaurant space, and i could feel myself breathe. we had many fantastic meals in tokyo, all of which i enjoyed, but that ryokan meal was the first i was able to really savor, bite after bite, without thinking about how i was evaluating it or what was coming next.

after breakfast, we went to the onsen for a brief dip before my morning chinese lesson. as i settled into the steam room and closed my eyes, i had a visceral experience of myself as a tightly wound spool of wire, starting to uncoil. it felt wonderful and immediately frightening. my default mode is so productive and so useful, and even after having taken on the project of unlearning that, it feels dangerous. what if i let myself grow out of this shape, one i know to be economically and socially valuable, and can’t fit myself back into it when i need it again? i set aside the thought, inhaling steam.

the chic neighborhood of shimokitazawa was reminiscent of somewhere like greenpoint; even the cafes and bars heavily featured brooklyn by name. it was comfortingly familiar, albeit bizarre to have come so far in the world only to be in a vaguely similar kind of place. on my last evening, i went to a bar and spent hours chatting with several americans, three from los angeles who worked in film and graphic design and one from brooklyn who turned out to be a recently departed snl cast member. the americans at the next table recognized him. it was like we had imported a representative sample of coastal millennials to a listening bar in tokyo.

the space opened up by the slower pace led me to most of my favorite places in tokyo. magic happens when you leave room to wander.

liquid ruby: a little third-floor bar tucked into an unassuming building just across the street from our hotel. we passed it every single day without noticing, and then one day after dinner i was browsing google maps for somewhere that looked interesting and decided on a whim to try this place. after going up the stairs, there was an unmarked door that didn’t look like anything, and i opened it tentatively into what looked like a pitch-black room. i nearly backed out, sure i had intruded on some private space, but as my eyesight adjusted, i saw some people sitting, and the bartender waved me into the bar. as i took a seat, i realized everyone else was a man, most of them in suits, all of them smoking. it felt like i was transgressing on some deeply male space, and i was instantly uncomfortable but also intrigued. i ordered a paper plane. the decor was decadent, in the darkness, and there was some kind of choral music playing that gave it a monastic feel. the owner later told me it was bach’s cantatas. he did everything with such flourish—every movement, from making each cocktail to writing the check, was a performance of artful precision. i loved the intentionality of it, the specificity of the aesthetic and how wholeheartedly he had crafted it.

r-za dokusho kan: a cozy silent reading cafe crowded with big plants and aquariums. we were in kōenji to thrift but swiftly found ourselves tired of it and looking for a place to sit. i spotted this cafe on the map, and we went, not realizing what sort of place it was. when we opened the door, it was silent but for the trickles of water flowing into the fish tanks. i asked rachel if she wanted to leave, since it wasn’t exactly what we’d had in mind. but she was willing to stay a while, so we sat at a little desk, and i pulled out my kindle. i ordered a pot of pu’er tea, and they brought a yixing teapot, a carafe for serving, and a barely thimble-sized cup, with a thermos of boiling water. the ritual of it—pouring, then pouring, then pouring again—formed a rhythm to the time, and hours passed as we read.

bar rpm: the quintessential listening bar in tokyo, according to me. there are a lot of listening bars in the city; none of the other ones i visited came close to this one. the interior was crafted with a discerning eye, all smooth dark wood paneling and muted lighting. there was a substantiality to everything that spoke of quality. the bar bites were delicious, the cocktails perfectly balanced, the music tastefully selected and played in crystal-clear fidelity. when we were just about to leave, the proprietor, an impeccably dressed older gentleman, asked how we had heard about it. we talked to him for a while about why he opened this beautiful little bar, twelve years ago. it wasn’t complicated; he just really, really loves music.

it made me think of whether these kinds of places would be possible in new york. the thread that ran through all of them was this quality of wish fulfillment, a purity of vision uncompromised by commercial need and even alienating, probably, to many. back home, every particularity becomes a gimmick, and every halfway-decent spot is tiktoked into the ground before it even opens. places like nudibranch are the rare exception. but tokyo has such a sheer volume of these guys (not that they have to be guys, but also they were really all such Guys), and they are so wholly disinterested in making themselves legible—the specificity and the authenticity is the point. they made the place they wanted to exist.

now i’m in chengdu, renowned for its slow culture, a place where locals really know how to relish the quieter pleasures in life. slow mornings sipping pu’er at tea houses, leisurely afternoon strolls through the park, games of mahjong in the evenings. perhaps relative to other cities in china that’s true. for me, though, it’s been an instant culture shock, overwhelming and overstimulating in ways i wasn’t expecting.

the last time i was in chengdu was in 2019, so not so long ago, but six years might as well be decades in china time. on the didi ride from the airport, i gazed out the window, taking in all the skyscrapers, the obviously newly built roads lined with plants, the massive construction sites framed with cranes lit for nighttime work. the subway network doubled in that time period alone, adding roughly 180 miles of service. that’s nearly three-quarters of the length of the entire new york city subway, built in just six years.

if japan is deeply concerned with explaining the process of how to conduct yourself in every space, china is the opposite. since i arrived two days ago, i have never known what i was supposed to do, anywhere. few places have had a real protocol for how they “work.” every process has been ad hoc, infinitely adaptable to edge cases, but also wildly chaotic as a result. in the u.s., bureaucracy and tech have had a flattening effect—streamlining everything into predictable, efficient processes. there’s a degree of systemization that, somehow, china continues to resist, even operating at this scale (or, more likely, because of that).

my first taste of that came instantly, with that airport car ride. i had connected my credit card to didi weeks ago in preparation for coming to china, but it was my first time using the chinese version of the app, and i didn’t realize it wouldn’t autocharge me upon completion of the ride. as i moved to get out of the car, the driver asked for payment on wechat, which i hadn’t finished setting up. i explained that i was paying through the app, but he wouldn’t let me leave until i sent him payment. he requested an unexpectedly low amount (68 yuan, for what didi was saying was a 223-yuan ride), and i paid him with alipay. was it a tip? wouldn’t i still get charged in the app later? baffled, i confirmed with him again that it was my payment for the ride, and he left.

but it was the equivalent of an uber driver asking for payment over venmo; the app continued to say that the trip was unpaid, obviously, and i had just paid him 68 yuan for no apparent reason. i reached out to didi support to explain what had happened, which opened up a multi-day ordeal of chats and calls in which i explained to different people, over and over again, what had happened, so that my account would be unlocked. i got another call from didi support just now, as i’m writing.

at the same time, as i had been waiting for my didi to arrive at the airport, i thought of an incident from my childhood, maybe the first time i came to china. it’s one of the more vivid memories from that trip. we had landed at the airport and gotten a cab, back when cab drivers were just guys hanging out at the entryways of airports and soliciting people for rides. as we were moving, though, the energy started to shift; we weren’t going in the right direction, and when my dad flagged it to the driver, he became stonefaced, refusing to stop or explain. it was a time before didi, long before uber, even. there was no sos button to press or location to track. my parents grew increasingly anxious, and, after some escalation, my dad eventually got the driver to let us out of the car, where we were left with our bags on the side of the road. he remains convinced that that evening would have ended quite differently if he hadn’t. set against that experience, china’s come a long way.

the defining experience of my time in chengdu thus far has been internalizing the word 抢 (qiǎng). tellingly, there isn’t a particularly precise translation in english; it’s along the lines of “seize,” or “grab,” but essentially it conveys vying competitively against others to take your part of a scarce resource. i hadn’t thought about that so deeply until today, but this concept is foundational in a lot of ways to modern chinese culture. population density strikes again. ordering noodles for breakfast? you’d better be willing to elbow others out of the way to ask for what you want. waiting in a line? make sure to not leave any space for others cut in front of you. japanese culture felt anxious and accommodating; chinese culture is unabashed and pushy by comparison. my western politeness and adherence to “rules” has felt exceedingly timid and quaint in this context. it’s good, i think—an exercise in learning to take up more space, become more comfortable having demands.

a lot of these little interactions have made me think a lot about trust. recently i read an essay by robert wu on the role of technology in moving china toward becoming a higher-trust society—specifically, surveillance in creating more accountability in interpersonal disputes and crimes. he talked about an incident where he got in a car accident where the offending party attempted to shift the blame to them, only to be curbed by the nearby surveillance cameras. it felt apropos of my own (much more trivial) experiences so far. it can be jarring to engage with a culture where there is much less trust in fairness or order, where everyone needs to fend for themselves.

younger people in china don’t have this mentality so much. wu writes about that, and i had a similar conversation with my chinese tutor this morning. she went to the hospital yesterday with her mom, where you have to get a number to wait in line. but the older people at the hospital either didn’t know or didn’t care, and without taking a number, they all queued at the door to wave down the doctors, so she felt obligated to go stand by the door, too, out of fear that she’d lose her spot to these people circumventing the system that was in place. she remarked that she wouldn’t expect that from people closer to her age unless they had a serious reason.

i’ve often wondered if any country in history has ever experienced a transformation like china’s these past few decades. it’s insane. i’ve never been able to wrap my head around it. my parents’ generation grew up in extreme, near-subsistence poverty, where eating meat at all was a major occasion, rare to experience more than once or twice a year. today’s china is overwhelmingly middle-class, speedrunning the manufacture of its own flavor of capitalist desires—escape rooms, indoor skiing, domestic luxury clothing brands, wellness retreats, pet exercise classes, whatever—to keep the wheels of the economy churning.

it’s produced a cultural whiplash, with an older generation that universally experienced severe hardship throughout their formative years and a younger generation that’s never known anything but an ascendant china where new luxuries are normalized every year. in other words, young people don’t feel the need to 抢, at least not to the same degree, because they don’t feel the same baseline level of scarcity. times have changed, but culture lags behind the economy.

to be back after so long is surreal. i thought the imprint of globalization would be a lot more pronounced this trip, and while in some ways it is, it’s been much less than i expected. so many places in the world are airspace now, homogenized with smoothed-over edges, that it’s refreshing to come to a place that is so unapologetically distinct. i’m still adjusting to the discomfort of somewhere truly foreign, and maybe that’s the whole point.

it’s 5 a.m. in tokyo, and i’ve been awake for two hours already. i’m sitting in the lobby of our hotel, alone except for a guy who works at the hotel cleaning the kitchen area ahead of breakfast service. the sun is supposed to rise in half an hour.

jetlag is funny. i’ve slept vanishingly little since i left new york, but my body is still resisting the time shift. yesterday, rachel and i woke at 3 a.m., and she had the (clever) idea to just go to toyosu market to sushi dai, apparently a tiktok-famous sushi restaurant where you have to line up at 5 a.m. to get a morning seating. which was perfect because i had already written off that place weeks ago; i was never going to wake that early to go, but since i was already up, why not?

we took the train and then a bus to toyosu market, which is located on a little island connected to the main city by a series of bridges. at 4 a.m., the train was shockingly full. every seat was taken. there were even people standing.

toyosu market, tokyo’s largest wholesale food market, is a really, really strange place. i don’t know what i was expecting. i think i had seen clips of the fish market from, like, jiro dreams of sushi and similar documentaries and shows about food in japan, so i was expecting density, chaos, grunge. but tsukiji market in its original form closed back in 2018, and most of the wholesale business moved to toyosu, which feels much more like a convention center than anything else. it’s huge, with long walkways and nothing in between them. it feels surprisingly corporate. there are little observation windows above the market proper, where you can see slivers of the trade happening below, but all the spaces where anything “real” is happening are cordoned off for authorized personnel only. it felt unmistakably modern, optimized for efficiency and professionalism, in a way i hadn’t anticipated.

we showed up at sushi dai, located in an odd little block in the giant toyosu market complex, at 5:30 a.m. i thought all the hype had been oversold because there was no one there. “glad we didn’t get here much earlier,” i remarked. but no, it turns out that it was empty because all the 6 a.m. seatings were already gone. a guy popped out of the closed storefront to take our names for 7:20, so we had two hours to kill.

these two hours felt like purgatory. not even in a strictly negative sense—it was fun, in a strange way, to be wandering through this bizarre sprawling venue at dawn. we went pretty much everywhere we possibly could there. we wandered through the wholesale market observation area to peer at the vendors beneath us. we walked through the maze of the goods market open to the public, where the stalls were just starting to get organized for the day. we peeked through the windows of the outdoor night market area where everything was closed. there was a roof promenade, a long stretch of walkway that looked nearly abandoned, hedges choked with weeds and half-dead. we followed it to the “rooftop garden,” which turned out to be much the same. there had clearly been a vision, at one point, for what the space could be, but the execution had left a lot to be desired. but there was this energy to exploring it that felt exciting. i was really into the idea (not so much the reality) of urban exploring, as a teenager. this wait time felt like that.

the restaurant, when we were finally seated, was great. i don’t know if i’d do it again, but what a perfect way to use the jetlag in our favor.

coming to asia, i’m always struck by the sheer number of people in cities. i kept having this thought after we landed. coming out of shinjuku station, we were surrounded by throngs and throngs of people. it felt like some kind of alice in borderland scene, but daily life in these parts of tokyo is really just like that. the pedestrian crossings are comically wide and yet still not wide enough to not get jostled by people constantly. living in new york does not compare. i mean, virtually every third-tier city in china has a bigger population than the biggest city in the u.s.

i keep thinking about all the small but crucial ways in which the population density informs east asian culture. there’s a fixation on health and cleanliness—in particular, of course, a strong fear of transmissible disease, but also a constant fight against entropy and the lived impact of tens of millions of people occupying the same space. there are a lot of rules and a strong emphasis on following rules. when there are this many people, it becomes much less acceptable for some to go rogue. and so on.

japanese culture, though, has a unique texture to it as well. there is, for lack of better phrasing, a pervasive strain of anxiety that feels deeply unfamiliar to me compared to chinese culture. it’s fascinating. the emphasis on politeness (and deep aversion to rudeness), the apologetic tentativeness, the fear of inconveniencing others. the flip side of that is that there is a layer of thoughtfulness that permeates every interaction and space. tenji blocks to guide the visually impaired line every sidewalk. the gyukatsu place we tried on our first evening had little illustrated guides on how to enjoy your meal. there is a lot of attention to comfort, both psychological and physical.

tokyo is overstimulating in a way that chinese cities are not. billboards are shouting at you, there are flashing lights and blaring sounds everywhere, public transit is more packed. china has, to be sure, a lot of people, but it’s not quite so deep in this cyberpunk future, at least not yet.

one of my intentions for this first week of my travels was to have a long conversation with a stranger. why? i’m so used to making snap judgments about people, a pattern i realized largely stems from wanting to protect myself. from what? rejection, perhaps, if we were to put it strongly, but even at a more basic level: discomfort in even the mildest forms. risk of vulnerability. so, whatever, we’re doing some kind of rejection therapy.

unfortunately it’s not working so well. or, put differently, it’s been so easy that i feel guilty that i’m not even having to try.

even before i landed in tokyo, i spent several hours chatting with the couple from asheville seated in my row on the plane. i had prejudged them; the woman had brought gifts for all the flight attendants, which was, of course, a sweet gesture but felt like the kind of move you make when you want something. like the kid who brings gifts for all the teachers on the first day of school. i want to say that, throughout the fourteen hours we were on this flight, every single flight attendant came by our row to thank them and ask if they wanted anything.

but we got to talking, and of course the story was more complex than that. the woman was, in fact, a flight attendant—the vp of her union, even. and so she brings small gifts on every flight because she gets what it’s like. her partner was a software developer at an edtech company. the conversation went in all kinds of directions. she told me about her upbringing in a fanatically religious family in florida, where she was homeschooled and disallowed from wearing pants and taught she would go to hell if she wasn’t saved in the rapture. i talked about my recent breakup, ending a nine-year relationship and suddenly finding myself revisiting every part of my life. her partner told me about searching for a native species of animal on every trip; he had spent their time in croatia searching for a particular kind of hedgehog, and this time he would be looking for tanuki in japan. they told me about going a month without power or running water after the hurricane hit asheville last year—how traumatizing it was to be so fully cut off from the outside world but also perversely fun to be thrown into an alternate universe for how life could be for a while. we talked about how we used ai (she, shockingly, has been a die-hard chatgpt user since it launched three years ago and has been using it heavily to navigate her union work) and whether we wanted kids and what kinds of movies and podcasts and games we liked.

it reminded me of why i love talking to strangers, even though i typically find myself too socially inhibited to do it. these kinds of conversations have been some of the most meaningful of my life. people are interesting. like, i genuinely believe that every single person is interesting. but it can be easier, more efficient, to forget that fact most of the time. it saves you the hassle of having to navigate a person with a foreign worldview, who might react in unexpected ways to your own.

after we landed, we were desperate to not succumb to sleep too early and sore and uncomfortable from the long flight, so we decided to go get massages at a place with five stars and nine thousand reviews on google. it turned out to be surprisingly... chinese? they eagerly defaulted to chinese with me, and i ended up chatting for a lot of the hour with my masseuse, a taiwanese guy. the owner of the business was taiwanese, he explained, and most of the employees were chinese, taiwanese, or vietnamese.

i remarked that there were a lot more chinese people in tokyo than i had expected; walking around the streets of shinjuku, i could have sworn i heard more chinese than japanese, though that’s likely cultural as much as anything else (chinese people are loud and often in groups as tourists, whereas japanese people are much more reserved and tend to be power-walking to work or home). rachel looked it up later, and apparently there are an estimated one million chinese people living in japan, a number that’s risen dramatically in more recent years. i assume the real number at any given point in time including tourism is significantly higher.

we talked for a while about my upcoming travels through china and his time in japan. he was puzzled at a lot—why i spoke chinese in the first place, how i was able to take a few months to travel through asia, what we were doing in japan if we didn’t have much of a plan to do a lot of tourism, like going to disneyland. there was something about explaining my life and my decisions, in a language with which i’m less fluent, to someone with such a different life experience, that simultaneously created distance and closeness.

the third conversation came last night, when rachel and i went to golden gai after a yakitori dinner. we’d been anticipating this experience a lot—there’s a village at burning man called golden guy that’s a loose recreation of this area of tokyo, a chain of narrow alleyways packed with tiny bars, just a few seats each. i’ve always loved golden guy; two of our friends, alexis and paul, ran a y2k cyber cafe bar there for a few years, and the attention to detail and commitment to their bit was absolute. so i was excited for the real deal, and, in fact, coming to golden gai felt eerily familiar. the burning man incarnation does an exceptional job of capturing the feel of this place, down to the obnoxious tourists who are drawn to it.

we ended up at a little bar called bay window, staffed by two young women. i ordered a paper plane, and rachel got a yuzu gin sour. there was a loud group of americans by the window, and at one point, we overheard them say the word “pedophilia,” and rachel and i both looked at each other, and this guy next to us raised an eyebrow and smiled, clearly having heard it as well. we started talking. he was from ottawa, and he was on his second day of a two-month trip as well. there was an odd symmetry to it. he was spending the whole time in japan; he had done the same in the philippines last year, and he was planning to do a similar trip to china next year. i asked him what he did that he was able to spend two months of every year traveling through asia.

it turned out he’s an environmental engineer; he works on remediation for the largest open-pit lead-zinc mine in the world, now leaching heavy metals into the water and land in the yukon. it is, supposedly, a twenty-year project, an absolutely unimaginable concept to me as a person in tech used to thinking in weeklong sprint cycles. he spends cycles of three weeks working and then three weeks off, and so if he lines it up right, he’s able to take a long vacation. he spends half his life in a normal canadian city and half his life in a town of four hundred people in the yukon where the nearest grocery store requires a four-hour drive.

we talked about his travels. even from the first day, he’d already made friends with some irish guy, and they’d been hitting the bars together since then. he always travels places on his own, since most of his friends are married and (he implied) boring. there is a solo traveler’s mindset i’ve always found really interesting, among people who travel often alone—a receptiveness to experience, an ease with spending time. a comfort with letting your time unfold however it may, your attention be drawn wherever feels natural. i am, of course, working to cultivate it in myself, but it’s the kind of domain where you can’t try too hard. effortful trying just makes it more elusive; if anything, you have to try less.

we talked about burning man (explaining golden guy) and alone and rachel’s tiktok parties. he told us about his one visit to new york (driving, all the way from canada, with his “boys” back when they were all eighteen or nineteen). he’s twenty-nine, turning thirty soon. he figures he’ll start to “settle down” in the next year or so. i thought about how much my life has changed since i turned thirty, in many ways the opposite direction. life is long and strange and remarkably dense with experience. the world is a big place, and there are a lot of people in it, and all of them have interesting stories, and many of them want to hear yours.

it’s daytime now. i should stay awake. wish me luck.

it doesn’t feel quite as i anticipated. i’ve been too busy with life and work and everything else to have much of an existential crisis, i suppose, and so the main emotions i found arising were a detached surprise (here, already?) and a vague anxiety, nothing so destabilizing as i might have expected.

back in college, i had a long meandering conversation one evening with friends about the age we felt we were, or should be. one said she was spiritually five years old. one said she thought that she would probably feel like she was in her mid-twenties forever. i said early thirties. so maybe that’s part of it, that it’s more a convergence of my internal and external realities than a fracturing of them.

still, as you might expect, i find myself needing to pause for a moment to make sense of it all. in passing this arbitrary milestone, what can i make of the past decade?

meaning-making is an act of faith.

i spent most of my twenties searching for meaning, expecting to find it and then hold it fast forever once it was in hand. i found that it’s much more elusive than that. meaning is slippery. an endeavor that feels vitally important one day can appear pale and foolish the next. meaning is as much about faith as anything else; it is generated by and persisted through the self, rather than intrinsic to any object of it.

for years, i sought objective measures of meaning, ways to orient my decisions. i was drawn toward tech because it promised scale of impact; when it became clearer that that scale was an amplifier without any moral valence, i adopted a new framework for deriving meaning, then another. there was a fear of wasting my life on efforts that didn’t matter and a distrust in my own judgment about what did matter.

really, though, everything that could matter to you looks stupid and pointless when you examine it with derision. your work is meaningless, your hobbies are childish, all of your little joys and fears are small and insignificant. virtually nothing stands up to the scrutiny of holding it against the grand scheme of the universe.

but it turns out that, by the flip side of the same coin, you can also just choose to make meaning out of anything. you can just take yourself and your efforts seriously, even if they don’t matter to anyone else, even if they don’t become anything. you can just find beauty in the tender vulnerability of trying, and, once in a while, your attempts won’t be in vain. as a famous poet once said, everything is romantic.

let go of the self that isn’t you anymore.

as is wont to happen, i left my twenties in a drastically different place from where i started it. almost exactly a decade ago (which feels inconceivable to say), i started learning to code. a year later, i moved to san francisco to work at a startup. i had been watching the tech industry from afar for years, as a kid in texas and then new york, and suddenly i was in the thick of it. it felt like catching on fire, gloriously incandescent. that was a year of pure synchronicity: the right time, place, people. the access and status and validation i had craved for so long was all at once available to me in seemingly infinite supply.

unsurprisingly, it was, for a twenty-one-year-old, a potent and intoxicating environment. i threw myself into it with abandon. i was drawn to hype and good at status games, and it was easy to optimize for that while simultaneously operating at a skeptical remove. it paid off, in obvious and compounding ways.

but years into it, i could feel myself changing, or, to be more precise, the parts of myself that i had left unattended to make the most of where i was and what i was doing made themselves known again. tech was changing, too. playing the game that had been so liberating to join began to feel stifling, limiting, like standing in the middle of a maze where i was no longer sure if i wanted to reach the other side.

even knowing that you’re changing doesn’t keep you from wanting to hold onto the form of yourself that’s dissipating, the one you know, that’s served you. i resisted it. i stayed the course on paths that no longer mattered to me because i was afraid to lose what i thought i needed to remain myself: raw ambition and a fundamental will to remake the world.

funnily enough, though, these fears were unfounded, because you don’t lose yourself by letting yourself fall into who you’re becoming. the true danger is calcification. otherwise, the pieces just recompose themselves in new and unexpected ways; giving into the annihilation is what allows you to become more yourself than you knew to be possible.

the world as you know it is temporary.

growing up is strange. you spend a decade or two mapping the territory that is your known reality, only to find that the the features and boundaries you thought to be fixed have begun to change or shift. sometimes it’s so gradual that it’s nearly imperceptible; sometimes it happens all at once.

it’s people and places, yes, but it’s also the very laws that govern your universe. as you experience more time, it becomes clearer that the world as you know it isn’t the end of history. the currents of technology, culture, and society keep moving, faster than you think. power realigns in different places.

maybe that’s all too abstract; let’s be more concrete, shall we? as a young person in tech in the 2010s, i thought that that landscape—economic, political, cultural, so on—was permanent. or, at least, even if i knew intellectually that it wasn’t, it felt like it would be. tech was the infinite money glitch that also happened to have the power to make the world a better place. the logic of the zirp era just looks like how the world works when it’s all you’ve ever seen. in retrospect, of course, that’s unimaginably naive. it was a scene, made possible by a specific set of conditions at a particular moment in time.

the corollary there, perhaps, is simply: make the most of it. spend time with your parents. take lots of pictures. meet lots of people from twitter while it’s still good (and still twitter). found the startup while there’s funding. go to your favorite wine bar while it still exists. go to the stupid fucking bay to breakers party at justin kan’s house and drink jungle juice out of a red solo cup because someday it’ll make you laugh that you did it. go to burning man. stay up late talking to people. watch the sun rise from many vantage points. drive a convertible down the pacific coast highway. be embarrassingly earnest. find the lenses on the world that fit and spend a lot of time looking through them. once in a while, close your eyes and savor how it feels to be alive in this instant.

to the san francisco of 2016, you were an absurd, magical, and profoundly stupid place, and i will always, always, love you.

you can only ever see into the next room you’re entering.

just before my twenty-sixth birthday, i was deep in the trenches of a crisis of meaning after quitting my job at square. it was peak covid, and i didn’t know what to do with my life anymore. i had spent a few months exploring different ideas for startups and toying with leaving tech entirely to... write? open a winery? who knows.

the wonderful robin sloan had replied to an essay i had written at the time, and in my return email, i asked for advice: how had he navigated his decidedly nonlinear (and interesting!) life trajectory from working in tech to writing to making olive oil?

his answer was, essentially, that it was random and unplanned, and that mine would likely be, too:

I will predict that an important fraction of the work/project/undertaking that's going to be most meaningful for you over the next ~five years is currently unknown and unknowable, which means (1) don't stress and (2) be on the lookout for interesting randomness.

it stuck with me. i had wanted to chart my path from start to finish, an impossibly daunting task with an incomplete map. instead, with his advice, i reoriented toward a kind of wayfinding—moving toward what looked interesting and what felt right, just a step or two at a time, and trusting that that would get me to somewhere i wanted to be, even if i didn’t know where that was.

i guess it would be a good time to say for the first time: i work in crypto now. a week or two from today will mark two years at zora, four years since i crash-landed into working on my own crypto project full-time. there’s a lot i hate about this space (really, don’t get me started), but the promise of what it could be, and what it’s concretely been for me, has made it unambiguously worth it. i am much happier and more fulfilled now than i was working on tech that didn’t inspire me or intersect with domains that mattered to me.

i could not possibly have predicted these life coordinates even five years ago; it was a point on the map that i didn’t even know existed. but just months after that 2021 exchange with robin, i found myself at the convergence point of threads that i had been following for, well, most of my life. it allowed me to do some of the most personally meaningful work i’ve ever done, and it only happened because i had wandered my way into the (metaphorical) right room, one i never would have entered if you’d asked me a few rooms before i got there.

become a regular somewhere.

this last point might sound trivial, or oddly specific, but i don’t think it is; in a way, it’s where these prior learnings culminate and take concrete form.

life is short. find a place that you really, really like, a place so good that you can’t quite believe that it’s even possible, and go often. be a reason they can continue to exist. it’s one small act that gives your daily life an added dimension of purpose and becomes a vehicle for the practice of everything else: meaning-making, evolution of the self, presence, openness to serendipity.

that place for me in san francisco was high treason, which i will maintain until proven otherwise is the single best wine bar in the world. opened in the inner richmond by world-class sommeliers john vuong (ame and gary danko) and michael ireland (the french laundry, quince, benu), high treason is the platonic ideal of a wine bar. it was designed to be an unpretentious and accessible approach to wine, and it succeeds enormously. it has an unusually wide selection of wines by the glass because they want you to be able to try many different wines, even if it means that they have to open more bottles that may or may not be finished. every wine they offer manages to hit the trifecta: high-quality, interesting, and affordably priced. you can go and have a $13 glass that’s the best wine you’ve tasted all year and also changes your understanding of what that varietal can be.

their sommeliers are deeply knowledgeable about anything you might ask—but they’re also preternaturally chill and good-natured. they play vinyl records all day. they chat with you. tip: if you go somewhere specifically to try new wines, always sit at the bar. high treason has a long bar that is central, not auxiliary, to the space. it’s a place you can go by yourself, with a date, with a friend, with a group. you can while away an afternoon or an evening, and no one will be rushing you out the door. it’s special. it feels good.

today in new york, this place for me is nudibranch. ostensibly, it is a restaurant in east village that serves elevated contemporary cuisine with heavy korean and spanish influences, opened by chefs jeff kim (atoboy, eleven madison park, el celler de can roca) and matthew lee (jungsik, momofuku ko, jua). but that description misses nearly everything that makes it what it is.

i wandered into it one evening, thinking it was a wine bar, as i was running out the clock between dinner plans down the block and a late-evening party. it was a quiet night. i sat alone at the bar and ordered a glass of wine with the bartender. we chatted as i waited for friends to arrive. the wine was excellent; they brought an amuse-bouche. it was an elegantly designed space but with character: a lava lamp on the bar, a rubber chicken perched on a liquor shelf, a funny poster in korean, a plastic gold lucky cat waving its arm. there was a subtle aliveness to it. the bartender, jin, was funny, and not just in the practiced, professionalized way that bartenders can be because it’s their job. he was chaotic, and i liked him immediately—uncomplicated vibe alignment.

eventually my friends came, and we had a few drinks before we left for the party. but this place stayed with me, with its steady confidence to be itself, unaffected. it was curated but not overproduced, technically exacting but not fussy. i have been to more restaurants and bars than i can count; exceedingly few are memorable. i resolved to go back.

and so i did, again and again. what i had sensed in that first encounter took clearer shape over time. nudibranch puts a name and a face to every single person who works there. there’s an understated authenticity that permeates the environment; the social layer mediated by service is thin enough to reach underneath it, without sacrificing professionalism or refinement. by even my third visit, jeff recognized me and came out to say hello nearly every time i returned. it’s a rare place capable of transcending pure transactionality by treating people as more than just their roles in an interaction.

maybe the best way i can describe nudibranch is the porrón. a porrón is a catalonian drinking vessel for wine, a party trick. i can’t remember where i first heard about it, years ago, but i was instantly drawn to what it represented: laughter-filled evenings with friends and too much wine, a hazy, warm togetherness. i had never seen one in the wild until nudibranch. there are several, scattered around the bar and the back shelf of the restaurant, that make appearances on livelier nights. it doesn’t make sense, necessarily—it’s not a signal most people would understand or even notice—but i immediately perceived it as a kind of kinship. i got it.

a porrón is an invitation to raw unfiltered communal experience. drinking from one requires its own leap of faith. it’s intimate in that everyone is drinking from the same vessel and vulnerable in that it is hard and embarrassing to get wrong. you have to commit decisively, risk spilling wine on yourself in order to not spill wine on yourself (i am bad at this part). but you do it because it’s fun and festive, a gesture of openness to everyone else willing to put themselves out there.

i celebrated this birthday at nudibranch, and, true to form, jeff brought out the porrón. it was fitting to find myself in this place at thirty, somewhere that embodies much of what i’ve spent my twenties learning to recognize: that meaning comes from the accumulated weight of small choices, that sureness of self is what lets you meet with others, that not every contradiction or complexity needs to be resolved. i carry much less certainty, now, than when i started, but in its place there’s conviction.

vignettes

waking up the day the brat remix album drops to listen to it with my morning cup of tea. the caroline polachek remix of “everything is romantic” makes me feel like i’m levitating. there’s a quiet, surreal quality to the autumn sunrise, like the space between breaths drawn out into a standstill. the air is clear, the trees just starting to tinge orange. i’m home alone, and all the walls are dappled with soft light. time expands, dilates. i’m struck with this deep knowledge of rightness, that i’m exactly where i’m supposed to be. i think: remember this feeling.

driving down the taconic state parkway in march after a night of freezing rain. every single tree, down to the leaf, is encased in a glossy film of ice. the whole world has been recast as crystal overnight—a gleaming landscape that sparkles from infinite points all catching the sun at once. it feels like we’re on another planet. we don’t even speak; there are no words. we just take in the wonder.

taking a week off from work to stay by myself and write. it is hard, much harder than i expect—in part to be on my own for so long and in part to have no obligations or chores or, really, excuses to do anything besides focus on what i think. the writing is a slog, not because i don’t know what to say but because there’s too much i want to say. every thread leads into another, and another, and another, until it’s all one tangled mess. i resolve to never neglect this need for this long again. and so i throw myself into research trusting that clarity will eventually emerge, after pushing into the discomfort, i start to feel it: activation. it feels right to expend this energy somewhere, instead of hoarding it until it turns to restlessness and discontent.

dancing all night at the brat party at market hotel. clubbing has always been more of an aspirational ideal, theoretically fun but usually disappointing. but tonight brat is a portal into clubbing as i imagined it to be, not just as it’s been in reality. i go by myself because everyone else is busy (sad) or not having a brat summer (tragic). it’s the first time i’ve ever done that, and it’s strangely liberating. the club is dense with fog and shafts of green light. i’m in all white, a halter top and a miniskirt with strappy heels and a silver choker that i can already tell will give me a rash, because that’s brat, i guess. it’s early in the night, my favorite time, before too many people have arrived—when the whole evening is just latent possibility.

wading into a lake on one of the first days of summer. the water is still bracing, a wintry chill lingering in the undercurrents. we’re surrounded by children and their parents, but i don’t care. rachel is hesitant but finally edges her way into the water with me; she keeps shouting “acclimatize,” referencing some tiktok i’ve never seen, and i don’t understand at all, but we can’t stop laughing. we swim to the floating dock in the middle of the lake and just lay there for a while. back on shore, i’m suddenly eager for an adventure. no one else wants to explore, so i wander off to the opposing shore alone. there’s a surprisingly long winding path that, it turns out, circles the whole lake. it takes me past all these scenes: a sweet family playing mexican folk music from a handheld radio, a father and son fishing, a small raised wooden stage in a forest clearing, an idyllic little bridge, a series of basketball courts, a skate park, some picnic tables. i don’t even like the woods, but, on this lazy afternoon, these woods are enchanting.

showing up at alice’s birthday party with the most catastrophic hangover of my life. i am not remotely equipped to be socializing with new people; in retrospect, it’s a miracle i even managed to get there. i start to spiral, first slowly, then all at once—in that state of mind, even people i’ve known for many years feel strange and unfamiliar. but friends take turns sitting with me, and despite the disorientation there’s a deep comfort in it. as it gets late, i find that i’m irrationally scared to go home by myself. kiera and luna and taha all offer to come with me; alice and sid say i can stay with them. in the end, luna stays with me for the night, even though she has a flight in the morning. in this vulnerability, i feel carried by a community a way i haven’t felt in a long time.

hearing the first few notes of “soulbreaker” at a.g. cook’s show at fest and feeling my breath catch. i’ve never heard this song before, but it feels like i should have, like this kind of spiritual resonance should have needed many listens and a long time to build. it pierces a deeply buried part of me, underneath the weary cynicism, the part that will probably always see the world through the eyes of a teenage girl who desperately believes that art can be transformative, that music can be what makes you believe in something again. it’s been a whirlwind weekend with coworkers and friends in idyllwild, a little mountain town full of whimsy. it reminds me that i do, in fact, love california, that the work i do matters, and that the people with whom i do it matter most.

books of 2024

my reading dipped last year, in part because i’ve been so occupied with work and other focuses. maybe it was an unlucky year, maybe my bar is getting higher, but, in particular, most of the nonfiction books that i read weren’t worthy of note, and my rate of abandonment rose precipitously. still, i finished fifty-six books, so here are the standouts.

if there are any other books you think i’d like, reply with them! i’d greatly welcome your warm recommendations.

fiction

hierarchy (trilogy) by james islington

“They ask something small of you. A thing you would prefer not to do, but is not so terrible. You think you are working your way up, but in fact they are changing you. Moulding you into what they think you should be, one compromise at a time.” He says it simply, but there’s rock-hard belief beneath the words. “I am not suggesting you should have ignored what Scitus said. I am just saying that in this place… each man has to find his line. Has to find it ahead of time, and be resolved never to cross it.”

this book was the most compelling fantasy i’ve read recently, with deep examinations of the workings of power and a system of magic that literalizes that power in a novel way that makes for thought-provoking sociopolitical commentary. only the first book is out, so i can’t speak for the series as a whole just yet, but i have high hopes.

dune (series) by frank herbert

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

i first read the first book of dune eight years ago, the first year i lived in san francisco. it was revelatory in the clarity of the vision: a world so richly rendered and unburdened by exposition that it’s easy to immerse yourself. this year, like many, i reread it and then read further into the series, all the way to heretics of dune (which i abandoned). like a few of the other books on this list, it has its flaws, especially in the later books, but herbert clearly had his own experience with a kind of prescience in writing it, and that creates a compelling thread that carries it through otherwise weaker sections.

foundation (series) by isaac asimov

The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

i’ve often kept some distance from foundational (no pun intended) sci-fi works because they can feel clumsy in terms of technical execution, and usually the concepts that made them revolutionary have been copy-pasted across pop culture to the point of making the originals feel like imitations. but after revisiting herbert, i was feeling more receptive to asimov and read most of the series (the trilogy and both sequels). much more than herbert, though, i think asimov struggles significantly with writing as an art form, which turns several of the foundation books into a slog in some ways. but the kernels of the ideas and asimov’s thinking on how different interplays of forces (political, economic, cultural, etc.) shape societies in sweeping and indelible ways held it together for me.

do you remember being born? by sean michaels

Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person’s field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte—not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.

a quietly thoughtful and humanistic exploration of art and artificial intelligence released in a time where that feels obviously salient. michaels takes a deeply skeptical and yet earnest stance toward ai, using one of the earlier gpt models to help pen the voice of his fictional ai charlotte.

vita nostra (trilogy) by marina and sergey dyachenko

There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity, and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process—the spellbinding process of creation—is infinite: this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.

another incomplete trilogy—my relationship to this series is complicated because i think it’s deeply flawed in many ways as a work and actively would not recommend the second book, which drags and adds little of value, but the first book is so shatteringly original that it borders on alien. it forces the reader into a kind of altered mental state that’s required to access the world the dyachenkos have constructed, and just for that i think it deserves significant credit. i don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that reading this book expanded what i thought was possible with fiction.

forbidden notebook by alba de céspedes

Now, under everything I do and say, there’s the presence of this notebook. I never would have believed that everything that happens to me in the course of a day would be worth writing down. My life always appeared rather insignificant, without remarkable events, apart from my marriage and the birth of the children. Instead, ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important. If we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing, I’m afraid not.

unlike every other book on this list this year, this novel wasn’t a grand exploration of philosophical ideas—it’s a remarkably intimate portrait into the life of a middle-aged wife and mother in post-war italy and how the practice of keeping a secret diary unravels her conception of herself and her place in her world by developing an inconvenient new consciousness. it’s filled with subtle complexities of emotions and understandings and a welcome contrast to the sci-fi/fantasy that otherwise dominated my reading.

nonfiction

liquid modernity by zygmunt bauman

The liquidizing powers have moved from the 'sys­tem' to 'society', from politics' to 'life-policies' - or have descended from the 'macro' to the 'micro' level of social cohabitation. Ours is, as a result, an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsi­bility for failure falling primarily on the individual's shoulders. It is the patterns of dependency and interaction whose turn to be liquefied has now come. They are now malleable to an extent unexperienced by, and unimaginable for, past generations; but like all fluids they do not keep their shape for long. Shaping them is easier than keeping them in shape. Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort - and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion.

this book was probably the book of my year. the aforementioned robin sloan (thank you again, robin) recommended it a few years ago, and i finally got to it. it just hits. bauman sees it, really sees it, with a poetic lucidity that’s uncanny at times, snapping the world into focus. i spent much of the year thinking back to his ideas, and i’ll probably keep referencing back to them in coming years.

the image by daniel j. boorstin

Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals. The domination of campaigning by television simply dramatizes this fact. An effective President must be every year more concerned with projecting images of himself. We suffer more every day from the blurriness and the rigidity of our image-thinking.

it was shocking to read this book and learn that it was originally published in 1962 because it feels so current. boorstin has a deft grasp on the trendlines of his time and extrapolates them into our present in a way that’s deeply impressive and pairs well with the work of contemporaries like marshall mcluhan and guy debord. there’s less of a clear conceptual framework, perhaps, than a set of sociological observations, but this lens produces its own valuable insights.

cobalt red by siddharth kara

“All the men must stay calm. We know the tunnel might collapse. We are not stupid. We pray before we go down. We focus on our work. It is in God’s hands if we live.” Ikolo estimated that a tunnel collapsed every month in Kasulo. He said everyone knew when it happened: “We hear the news the same day. We console the families as we hope they will console ours.”

a sobering read that traces the supply chain of cobalt across the congo, from the mines worked by children to tech companies like apple and the many parties in between the two that serve to obscure the cobalt’s origins. it’s a stark but necessary reminder of the brutal material realities that underpin the technologies that sustain modern life in countries like the u.s.

ametora by w. david marx

United Arrows’ Hirofumi Kurino says, “When it’s your own culture, you tend to stop learning mid-way through. But we kept studying until we got to the very edge of knowledge.” As Kurino explains, an American looked at a button-down collar and thought, “I have to attach these buttons,” but the Japanese in the 1960s thought instead, “Why does this collar have buttons?” One question led to another for over fifty years, resulting in a nation with an unprecedented collective understanding of American fashion.

as longtime readers will know, i really love a fun deep dive into a specific topic by a person who clearly has an intense interest in said topic and can narrate it engagingly. marx delivers with ametora, a pretty fascinating origin story of how japanese denim (for one) came into existence and became such a core fashion staple across the globe.

took a detour to write a decade-in-review for this occasion, but planning to get back to thinking through “what comes next” soon.

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

the climate clock is ticking. ai is putting the first of many people out of work. israel keeps killing children in gaza. it’s the close of yet another election year where morale is low and expectations are lower. the social platforms of yore are slowly collapsing inwards, stagnating into cesspools of toxic waste. culture is out of new ideas, cannibalizing more and more recent past just to keep the content flowing. kids can’t read. everyone is filled with microplastics. no one can afford a house. no one can afford children. no one can afford anything that isn’t cheaply made and dropshipped from china. except the rich, who just keep getting richer.

all of that is scary, yes, but what’s even scarier is that so few people are pointing the way toward anything better. even if they are, who believes them? belief in such claims these days comes riddled with questions: what are they peddling, or how are they scamming you? and so dystopias loom everywhere. in this cultural environment, utopias are, at best, the wishful thinking of the naïve—and, at worst, the willful manipulation of people’s hopes for a better future toward selfish ends.

when antonio gramsci was imprisoned under mussolini, he wrote:

the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

or, as slavoj žižek paraphrased (into what’s since become a kind of political meme): “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

we’ve inhabited our current interregnum for some time now, and we’ve observed and diagnosed many symptoms of morbidity. so many, in fact, that a predominant view among young people now is that we live in a dying empire led by bad people.

but the funny part about narratives is that: the more widespread they are, the more ripe they become for interruption. people are contrarian. every cycle involves a dominant narrative, backlashes to the narrative that becomes competing counternarratives, and then the slow rise of a successful counternarrative entering dominance. rinse and repeat.

even as monsters surround us, we’re seeing the glimmers of a new world—and its new narratives—struggling to be born. so, in a deeply cynical moment, what better world could come next, and how do we get there faster?

i’ve been considering this question for a long time (arguably, on and off my whole life), rarely with satisfying answers. but for the first time in years, there are fractures in the status quo large enough to see what’s coming after it. it looks bad out there—really grim—but i think some possible antidotes are evolving out of the ills of our current era.

back in july, i sequestered myself upstate for a week with a singular focus: to write. i thought i knew what i wanted to write, but, as the week progressed, the subject morphed and expanded into something else entirely, becoming unwieldy enough that i had to set it aside until now. here is the output of that intention: the first in a series of essays, each exploring a bold assertion (or, at minimum, aspiration) for the future as a site of promise and potential rather than catastrophe.

what comes next?

the rebirth of agency

much of the past decade or two, the culture moved toward systems thinking—grappling with the workings and effects of systemic issues. we were emerging out of an era of euphoric individualism in the 1990s, where the broad sentiment was that anything was possible; anything could be yours if you were just willing to step up and take it. it was a highly effective belief in that it was simple and made people feel powerful. the flip side of a narrative of individual agency, of course, was the implicit conclusion that any successes or failures were wholly earned.

the counternarrative? a far more complex reality of differential opportunity and the webs of power that enmeshed that state of the world. we live in this culture now, an information-dense environment where we’re constantly bombarded with data and other heuristics to understand systems too vast and intricate to otherwise grasp. it’s a narrative that speaks to a bird’s-eye view of modern life, with each individual or institution as a component in an infinitely large machine. this worldview doesn’t make us feel powerful—the opposite, really—but it makes us feel smart.

this systems-centered culture laid a lot of groundwork; for instance, it’s hard to imagine how major shifts in public opinion on social issues or the climate crisis would have been possible without it. but i think we’ve reached the limits of this paradigm. more and more, we’re starting to see people push against the perception that they’re trapped within these systems and their rules, focusing instead toward what they can do in spite of them.

take identity. there’s the seemingly neverending “anti-woke” backlash on the right, but what’s much more interesting to me is the picture on the left—a parallel desire to transcend identity flattened into labels like gender and race, turning from a more defensive self-consciousness of difference and toward a matter-of-fact ease. the settings where these dynamics are possible are still fewer in number than they should be, but they’ve grown quickly and steadily.

the evolution of diversity and inclusion in tech is one case study: the d&i efforts of the 2010s tech industry slowly became passé as people moved out of the margins. there’s a tenet in reggie james’ manifesto for “the new technologist,” where he argues against “filtering one’s work through identity labels”—not because identity is unimportant, but because it often becomes the container for the work rather than letting it stand on its own. implicit in that is the assumption that the work will be taken on its own now, at least by most.

there’s a lot to be said about the diminishing of dedicated spaces for identity-based communities, but it’s easy to miss that: what we’re seeing is what it looks like when these ideas are winning. which isn’t to say that the ground has been ceded, or that it can’t be lost again (and, in fact, it looks likelier than ever that some will be in the coming years), but i think it’s important to recognize ideological victories where they exist.

in this process, the politics of progress has matured. olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò makes the argument for a “constructive politics” rather than “a politics of deference” in his book elite capture, with the rationale that focusing on purity and symbolism detracts from concrete meaningful progress.

A constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process—the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.

the cultural shift from identification and correction toward integration and action moves us once again toward agency and frees us to think more about what we want to do, rather than who we are and how that positions us within a system. and, as zygmunt bauman notes in liquid modernity, an increase in agency is what widens the potential for progress:

To people confident of their power to change things, 'progress' is an axiom. To people who feel that things fall out of their hands, the idea of progress would not occur and would be laughable if heard.

defeatism is an unstable state; people can remain paralyzed for long periods of time, but the urge to break free slowly becomes irrepressible. we’re seeing it happen with the resurgence of the simple but effective meme that’s bounced around silicon valley for many years and taken hold again: “you can just do things.” this refrain is so obvious on its face that it only really makes sense as a counter to an implied dominant narrative: that you can’t just do things. few would describe the culture of this era this way, and yet the resonance of the counternarrative points to a truth to it.

this same strain of defeatism has also become ingrained in modern progressive politics. perhaps the defining trait of progressivism in the hostile environment of social media is bias toward inaction, born out of fear of complicity. i saw it in myself as a pathological aversion to wielding power that could even hypothetically cause others harm. but there was a constant tension there: to work toward a better world, you have to act. to act, you have to build and exert power. to exert power, you have to be able to accept some negative consequences with the positive ones. nothing comes for free, and navigating the landscape of possible actions and their consequences is the work, not opting out by staying still. an ideology that avoids complicity at all costs, at its most extreme, eliminates any possibility of creating a better world.

i’ve written about inventing the future by nick srnicek and alex williams before, but as time has passed, i’ve become more and more confident that it’s one of the most important books of the past decade (a bold claim, i know). its basic thesis rings truer than ever: that the key project of the left is to build global hegemonic power around an ambitious technologically and socially progressive vision of the future where everyone is free to act.

If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons.

a culture of agency accelerates change, for better and for worse. luigi mangione’s shooting of the unitedhealthcare ceo captures both ends of this spectrum—the undeniable potency of one person’s power to create a shock to an unjust system, but also the dangerous volatility of agency taken to its logical extreme. crucially, though, in contrast to the resigned stagnancy of the era we’re leaving, a renewed belief in agency widens the possibility horizon. the path forward lies in navigating this tension: exercising our capacity to act while critically weighing the systemic consequences of these actions. what comes next isn’t predestined; it’ll be shaped by what we do, and whether it serves the few or the many depends on us.

it’s been a while! this end-of-year window around the holidays is consistently one of the rare occasions life slows enough for me to write, a luxury i treasure, but hoping to be in your inbox again soon.

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

later essays in this series:

i can't explain it, but that blew my mind. as someone who had luxuriated in the occasional bath, perhaps two or three times a year, i was struck by the revelation that there was nothing stopping me from taking baths anytime i pleased. i, too, could take a bath every single day of my life, if that was what i wanted.

the bathtub became my sanctuary. plumes of steam and smoke and mist, hazy candlelight illuminating shiny white tile, the din of water crashing out of the faucet. a quiet would wash over me, cleansing me, asking nothing and demanding nothing. slowly my thoughts would grow loud and expand to fill the void.

it doesn't feel like a coincidence that this newfound ritual of logging off started in 2020. as devices became our windows to the outside world (even more so than they were before), the urgency around staying online hit a fever pitch. the internet swallowed our relationships, work, school, the news, dating, shopping, entertainment. to me, it started to feel like consuming content was all there was. scroll to be informed, scroll to stay in touch, scroll to stave off boredom. there was content about everything; there was content about how there was too much content.

it became impossible to think and, consequently, to write. the thoughts that did come were so fragmented and disjointed that i might as well have not had them. forming them into a cohesive whole felt like taping a shredded document back together. the inability to think clearly, much less communicate what i was thinking to others, grew agonizing.

reading books helped. it forced me to process information more slowly and more deeply, to train my attention beyond the length of a tiktok or a tweet. but when chapters inevitably started to drag, i would feel the pull toward my phone, that softly glowing portal to infinite worlds. it would be there, waiting, a sure release from the visceral discomfort of a momentary lack of stimulation. it felt strange to feel that and not immediately quell it by giving it what it wanted. but when the twitchiness passed, i noticed—not always, but sometimes—something beyond it.

and so, late that year, i went even further by working through the artist's way, a self-help book (with some questionably woo-woo ideology but also lots of excellent advice) by julia cameron to help people to recover their creativity. cameron dictates a week of media deprivation as part of the twelve-week program. no reading, no social media, no tv.

the prospect would have been inconceivable just a few months ago. a coworker once told me that i was "the most voracious consumer of media" they'd ever met, a label that didn't feel inaccurate. i had made small attempts at spending less time online, an evening here and a day there, but the benefits of the internet had always been so clear to me that, frankly, it felt silly to forego that by choice even briefly.

but i guess, for the first time, i could see how this kind of exercise might have some value; for the first time, i was realizing that the absence of media wasn't just a loss. it was the regaining of space, free and open space, uncluttered by all the words and images from other people that usually occupied my mind. cameron writes about why we seek out all this noise, calling all the words we read "tiny tranquilizers":

Reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.

this book was written in 1992, so she wasn't even talking about twitter, just books and newspapers! today, it is a virtue to possess the attention span necessary to read a book—then, books were as much a part of this landscape, the noise of other people's thoughts, as anything else. and yet even then, she touched on this theme that around this time became a meme among self-aware gen z kids, with viral tiktoks and tweets like "i have to consume like 8 forms of media at once to prevent myself from ever having a thought."

this tendency feels most apparent with tiktok. in recent years, a phenomenon has emerged there, what i've called in my head the chaotic duet: an omnibus style of tiktok that pairs unrelated videos together with the duet feature, ostensibly to offer multiple contrasting forms of visual and auditory stimuli at once. the lack of external input—of content to consume—is terrifying to people, to the extent that singular artifacts of media aren't sufficient. you need multiple inputs at once, to hedge against the possibility that one of them will fail to hold your attention and force you to sit in the quiet of your own mind.

perhaps this function of media was obvious to you; perhaps you, like my friend alice, explicitly use it for this purpose. but it wasn't obvious to me. i had convinced myself that i needed to be an engaged citizen, and i needed to interact with people in the tech industry for my career, and i needed to relax and unwind after a long day—that social media and media as a whole served these purposes. which they often do. but i could never isolate just what i needed from the feeds at that moment, leaving aside the rest of it until it was needed, too. it was all or nothing, and who would pick nothing? and, anyway, none of that was sufficient to explain my usage, a screen time that encroached on every waking hour of the day.

richard seymour raises this same point in the twittering machine (which i've quoted in this newsletter in the past), that it's not an unfortunate accident that consuming content absorbs so much of our attention that our own thoughts are suppressed. he proposes that that is what we really want:

What sounds like a problem may be the yield. The opportunity to waste attention, or to dispose of spare attention, may be what we seek.... If we didn’t have somewhere to put excess attention, who knows what dreams would come?

maybe that's the crux of it. bread and circuses, except often now there’s no bread, and we create our own circuses, weary of wanting more for ourselves and each other. easier to crowd out our thoughts and throw away our time than leave room for hopes that can only be disappointed. or maybe that's too pessimistic—but sometimes that feels like where it arises for myself.

either way, i think there is a real drive (whether it's internal or external) toward distraction, even as we want to pay attention. and using social media is undeniably an effort to pay attention; how else would we have built the entire attention economy around it? every post on the feed is vying for a cut—buy this product, like this page, donate to this fund, retweet this joke, spread awareness about this issue. we try in vain to pay out fractional amounts of our attention and find that the whole is, somehow, less than the sum of its parts. in wanting to pay attention to everything, we often fail to pay attention to anything at all.

the costs of that constant state of distraction can be steep. in her quietly radical manifesto disguised as self-help book, how to do nothing, jenny odell writes about how the diminishing capacity to pay attention on an individual level affects us societally:

It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention,” then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.

if it feels like i'm rehashing earlier writings, i am—a big question that's plagued me for years now is, what do we do with all this conflicting information, all seemingly dire and immediate? it can feel like a civic responsibility to be aware of everything happening everywhere, but maybe it's worth calling into question the value of that heightened awareness, especially if we find that it makes it harder for us to act on it. faced with a hundred pressing issues all demanding our attention, we start to lose our sense of perspective, along with the sustained focus that changemaking requires.

and while i've talked a lot about space, the dimension that interacts most with attention is time. i spend a lot of time thinking about time—how we conceptualize it, how we experience it, how it expands and contracts beneath different lenses. focus is about the ability to direct attention for a duration of time. boredom is about the discomfort that comes from a perceived slowness of time. having less mental space might be the outcome of consuming all this content, but wanting less time is the more explicit reason we do it. that was the most disorienting part of our media deprivation week—i'm so used to thinking i'm busy, that i don't have enough time to do everything i say i want to do, but after i stopped consuming so much, i realized that that was entirely untrue. i have so much time. and having all that time is deeply uncomfortable for me, so i find ways to "spend" it or "pass" it, like it's some kind of irritatingly infinite waste product of which i can't wait to be rid. i have to actively remind myself that that is not, in fact, true.

oliver burkeman wrote in his thought-provoking book on this subject, four thousand weeks, about the historical shift in people's relationship with time:

Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.

i can recall specific points in my life when time just felt like existence. every summer before college. meandering days with friends that unwinded in unexpectedly fruitful ways purely by chance. burning man. the few vacations that were able to pull me into a different timestream. but they are rare, much rarer than i ever would have thought they'd be. more often, time feels like a resource to be divvied up into usable pieces. an hour or two to read, half an hour to run an errand, an hour to cook, fifteen minutes to eat, a few hours to work for money, a few hours to work toward some kind of fulfillment outside of work, several hours for sleep. i'm constantly budgeting my time, and i'm constantly conscious of its passage, vacillating between fear of its disappearance and fear of its abundance. in either instance, i'm hyperaware of its separateness from the experience of existing.

the addiction metaphor for social media is, at this point, so terribly overwrought that it feels banal to mention it, but this line from the twittering machine has rattled around my brain nonstop since i read it:

Schüll calls it the ‘machine zone’ where ordinary reality is ‘suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’. For many addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing. Marc Lewis describes how even after kicking junk he couldn’t face ‘a day without a change of state’.

i realized at some point that i don't like baths or massages or workouts just because they feel good, physically (although they do). i like them because they're time without my phone, time to properly and intentionally inhabit my body, time to experience time. i spend so much of my life immersed in information, carried by it like river rapids, that it's a novelty to be brought back, if only for an hour, to a passage of time measurable by breaths.

one excerpt from "the new year train" by the chinese sci-fi writer hao jingfang (translated by ken liu in broken stars) has stayed with me:

Li: ...if the starting point and the destination are already set, and if no matter how many days it takes to get there, you’ll arrive on time, then wouldn’t you want to prolong the trip as much as possible to enjoy it?

Reporter: I guess so. It’s like free time.

Li: It’s simple when you put it like that, right? What doesn’t make sense to me is this: lots of times, when the starting point and the destination are fixed—say, birth and death—why do most people rush toward the end?

i've often wondered what it means for so many of us to be living life in hyperreality, at hyperspeed. if we think of media as a kind of time travel, a fast-forward button for life, what's the point of it all? where are we rushing to go? life isn't somewhere else, ahead of us on the horizon. we're already here.

snippets

i wrote the start of this post all the way back in 2020, which feels like an eternity ago now. i picked it up again briefly in 2021, but it was such a large topic, and one that i wanted to articulate sufficiently, that i grew discouraged and left it in the drafts. perfectionism: it’s a plague! one problem was that i had collected too many quotes and excerpts that i wanted to weave into the post and couldn’t find good spots for them, so here they are anyway.

first, on time—mary retta once wrote about her experience of time, in one of the most poetic and striking pieces i've ever read on the subject, "on vibing":

This notion of time as an “economic resource” is exactly what vibing aims to break away from. It is not a coincidence that the last year has brought both the collapse of capitalism and an upending of time. This year of stillness and retreat has made it plain that time is not an empty thing we have to fill but a living thing that we must shape. Time changes. Because the world changes, and we change with it. To vibe is to shape time into pleasure, to mold it into something that feels soft and tastes sweet. It is to take a pause that bleeds into another. “Until finally,” writes Githere, “the space between the dream and the memory collapses into being your reality—now.”

bonnie tsui had a lovely opinion piece in the new york times called "you are doing something important when you aren't doing anything," an argument for what she calls "fallow time":

Protecting and practicing fallow time is an act of resistance; it can make us feel out of step with what the prevailing culture tells us. The 24/7 hamster wheel of work, the constant accessibility and the impatient press of social media all hasten the anxiety over someone else’s judgment. If you aren’t visibly producing, you aren’t worthy. In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels greedy, even wasteful.

in the new republic, "in the defense of nothing" by apoorva tadepalli reclaimed the idea of the slacker, embracing idleness:

The slacker embodies their own powerful virtue: that of “unreal hopes, ill-considered plans,” of wanting “the whole world or nothing,” as Chinaski declares. The slacker loves the world as it is and not simply as it’s best presented. In our mad rush for empty busywork that can be dressed as productivity, we seem to prefer the world in its “perfect” state, as Taylor points out. It seems, then, that we do not love the world at all.

and then, related to consumption and media as a response to this dilemma of time—i'm currently reading neal gabler's life: the movie, on the rise of entertainment as an industry and how it came to subsume all other facets of life, too:

Art was said to provide ekstasis, which in Greek means “letting us stand outside ourselves,” presumably to lend us perspective. But everyone knows from personal experience that entertainment usually provides just the opposite: inter tenere, pulling us into ourselves to deny us perspective.

designer aaron lewis wrote "inside the digital sensorium", another longtime favorite:

Every day, thousands of strangers upload little slices of their consciousness directly into my mind. My concern is that I'm prone to mistake their thoughts for my own — that some part of me believes I'm only hearing myself think. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I'll scroll through my old posts just to remind myself of myself. It feels like looking in the mirror. I'm swallowing my (digital) self so that I'm me instead of someone else.

kyle chayka wrote about the culture of negation that's emerged out of the specifically modern need to cope with reality by paring back in "how nothingness became everything we wanted":

This obsession with absence, the intentional erasure of self and surroundings, is the apotheosis of what I’ve come to think of as a culture of negation: a body of cultural output, from material goods to entertainment franchises to lifestyle fads, that evinces a desire to reject the overstimulation that defines contemporary existence.

and, finally, the postscript on each newsletter from product lost by reggie james has always stuck in my mind:

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

the dream machine is designed to be read with music, but the fifteen-second clips that play with the spotify embeds have never been quite what i envisioned for the experience, so i finally made a proper playlist. here’s the soundtrack if you’d like to listen as you read!

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

this phase of my twenties has been a strange time. the glittering novelty of working life faded into disillusionment and drudgery, and i was left adrift. i felt—not for the first time, but perhaps the first time that it really sank into my bones—the many ways in which our world fell short of the one in which i wanted to live, and it became difficult to operate in any mode but cynicism. i wrote of one manifestation of this feeling back in 2021:

surely, i thought, the pandemic will force some fundamental shift in our way of life, how our society is organized. then, surely, millions of people taking to the streets for weeks must change some part of this system that devalues black life, that places policing rather than care at its heart. we seemingly reached the cusp of real change, meaningful change—and then what? what happened?

the seemingly inexorable march of capitalism never stopped, and i had started to lose hope that it ever would.

there's a running joke (is joke the word?) on twitter that we're all still stuck in 2020, or that we're about to begin year eight of 2016. in my own life, at least, that has felt true. 2016 is the last year i can recall feeling deeply optimistic about what the new year would bring, for me and for the world at large. since then, the fragile hopes i bore for each new year have been flattened again and again into the formless sameness of a world where time means nothing and yet somehow everything manages to keep getting worse. the future began to feel less like an unbounded space of potentiality and more like a precious resource that kept diminishing, untouched. eight years is a long time. where did it all go? how did i get here? it's hard, living in such persistently unprecedented times, to know what is the natural process of aging and what's the specific peculiarity of aging in this time.

much of the existential struggle i developed across this period of time came to a head this past year. 2022 was a year of high highs and low lows. i learned more about who i am and what i believe, the sort of hard-won knowledge that you can only gain about yourself when you are tested. i learned, or maybe relearned, just how much i'm really capable of doing when i'm not constrained. i learned that part of growing up is unlearning the truths you've come to know as an adult.

unexpectedly, i relearned what it was like to care about work. labor had come to be synonymous with exploitation for me, and severing my emotional attachment to it and disentangling it from my identity had been my own rebellion against capitalism. perhaps that's too romantic a turn of phrase, when it felt like the only way i could keep surviving.

i thought, or hoped, that not caring would protect me, keep me invulnerable. but after a few years of studiously not caring, i was drained. i had believed that indifference would be easy. but caring is what gives color to life, and spending most of my waking hours performing labor that didn't matter to me trapped me in a persistent grayness.

all that changed in the past year. once in a while, you're in the right place, at the right time. and once in a while, all of the pieces just... fall into place. when that happens, it feels startlingly close to fate. when it happened to me, i was struck by it, even as it was still coalescing around me. everything in my life has been leading up to this moment, right now.

suddenly, all of my dreams, so long abandoned that they had withered with neglect, started to come true. i was doing work that mattered to me, with people i liked and respected deeply, outside of the traditional confines of the corporate world, and we were making enough money to support ourselves—and then some.

there are few triumphs in life like truly loving what you do. to wake every day and want to wring out every drop of yourself you can give, to be creating work that feels like a total culmination of yourself and everything you represent, out in the world. working for myself made me feel alive in a way i had not felt since my first job, back when i was still confusing the wants and needs of others for my own. it offered a concreteness and a simplicity that had been obscured and abstracted through the normal workings of employment under capitalism. i did what i did each day because i wanted to do it, and because there was no one else to do it if i didn't, and because the output of my work belonged to me.

of course, it couldn't last forever. stars don't stay for long in perfect alignment. for months, i struggled to come to terms with what i felt had slipped through my fingers. but life rarely deals in absolutes, all or nothing, and even what had constituted perfection for me had not, even at its peak, been perfect. that which you love is also that which binds you. i had come to know the dualities of feeling in my core that i was meant to do the work i was doing. i pushed my body to its limits, resentful of its need to sleep a few scant hours each night. i passed weeks without stepping through my front door and feeling the sun on my face. i spent precious time, time with people i loved, largely absent, the inner workings of my mind churning furiously through ideas and problems instead of immersing myself in the happenings of our lives.

i turn twenty-eight next week. yesterday, i came across this tweet, an excerpt from joan didion's seminal essay "goodbye to all that," a work that is forever inscribed into my mind:

i'm not twenty or twenty-one or twenty-three anymore. i am no longer convinced "that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before." and i find that i no longer believe that nothing is irrevocable and everything is within reach, that none of the mistakes count. when you’re (almost) twenty-eight, you’ve begun to accumulate enough choices, successes and missteps, that you can start to see the chain reaction, dots forming a trajectory of your life.

sometimes, looking back at an accounting of it all, i’m disappointed that it doesn’t add up to quite as much as i thought it would by now. it’s not a clean narrative. i had always believed that i was a certain kind of person: decisive, confident, brilliant, glamorous, empathetic. these days, battered by the reality of going up against the world, i’m more tired and less sure.

heather havrilesky, who writes the advice column “ask polly,” once wrote:

Shame is the opposite of art. When you live inside of your shame, everything you see is inadequate and embarrassing. A lifetime of traveling and having adventures and not being tethered to long-term commitments looks empty and pathetic and foolish, through the lens of shame. You haven’t found a partner. Your face is aging. Your body will only grow weaker. Your mind is less elastic. Your time is running out. Shame turns every emotion into the manifestation of some personality flaw, every casual choice into a giant mistake, every small blunder into a moral failure. Shame means that you’re damned and you’ve accomplished nothing and it’s all downhill from here.

…

I’ve had to step into the light myself lately. I’ve had to admit that I was building a new haunted house out of my imagination. But my mistakes and experiences and choices brought me to this moment. They might make me sad or embarrassed or regretful, but they’re precious because they give this day its unique mood. When I drag them into the light, I feel better. This is where I can begin. Today, I have countless chances to reinvent and rework and reorder myself and my experience. You do, too. I can figure out some way to make one true connection, to do one hard thing, to savor one moment. So can you.

when you’re no longer invincible and infinite, it all starts to matter. the cost—the iron law that there is a price to pay, for everything—is what imbues it with meaning. choices have meaning. it all counts, and there are no redos, and every day that we're alive is a gift, and a curse, and a privilege.

this year, i hope to come to trust myself more. i hope to know when i need to love my work deeply, and when i need to be able to set myself free. i hope to find more balance and more quiet—in the world around me, yes, but especially in the recesses of my mind. i hope to love people for exactly who they are, knowing that a person's strengths and their flaws are often two sides of the same coin. i hope to want more for myself—and not the kind of wants manufactured for me by brands on instagram or thought leaders on twitter or microtrendsetters on tiktok, but the ones for which my soul hungers, the ones that replenish and renew me. little wants and big wants, but my own wants. i hope to think less and do more. i hope to grow stranger. i hope to get better at hoping against hope.

there's so much more i want to say, but done is better than perfect, and i promised myself that i would let more unformed thoughts and ideas into the world this year, so here they are. may you get everything you need from your 2023.

vignettes

staying up late drinking wine and watching bts music videos with friends at our hotel in new orleans. i decide that my bias is v. i've never stayed somewhere this nice before, never let myself indulge this way. it feels laden with significance. everything we want feels possible, within our grasp. every day of this trip has felt like a fantasy rendered into real life—one long sleepover with caviar and ball gowns and vampire stories and speakeasies and dreams of the future. we've been working together from a distance for so long, interactions mediated through screens, and to be able to pass time this way, sprawled across beds in silk pajamas with chips and champagne, carelessly tossing ideas back and forth, feels like an impossible indulgence. the world is an oyster nestled in our palm.

tilting my head up at a sky flooding with pink at the tycho sunrise set. somehow it makes me feel new all over again, no matter how many times i do it. this year of burning man has been a strange one, and for nearly everyone else, it's been unambiguously terrible. dust storms, fucked-up roads, blistering heat, rude strangers, water pump issues. i, on the other hand, feel more at peace there than ever before. which is funny, because i didn't even want to come this year. when burning man was first canceled in 2020, it felt like a life raft. when it was canceled again the next year, i was relieved. part of me—the part of me that still hasn't fully processed the emotional trauma from the last burn—hoped, irrationally, that this year would go the same way. but i'm here. i'm back right where i was four years ago when i first stumbled across two guys in the desert with a wok and some tupperware, the magical, serendipitous experience that led me down the path of starting my own camp. i close my eyes and inhale for a moment to savor it. next to me, out of nowhere, a woman has set up a camp griddle, where she's making breakfast sandwiches. she hands one to my friend, who offers it to me. i take a bite. right now, it's the best fucking sandwich i've ever had.

talking all night with alice in ireland. we're both jetlagged, and we've failed miserably at resetting our internal clocks by immediately crashing that afternoon upon arriving at the hotel in dublin. so now it's night, and we can't sleep, and we start talking. intertwined in bed, we talk about everything. friendships, relationships, our childhoods, our parents, our dreams, our fears. it's getting late now, or, rather, early—i think it's four or five a.m., now? and we have a train to catch in the morning. i feel my mind wandering as i drift dangerously close to sleep, my lids falling. i miss having conversations like this one, i think.

blasting bangers from the rooftop pool of the house where we're staying in cartagena. it's been a fraught trip so far. my friends are frustrated with me because i've been stressed about work and unable to log off. they’re not wrong, and i don’t know how to stop. but cartagena is sunny and warm, and it's hard to stay so tightly wound. most of our trip is packed, with each day parceled out into activities to do and places to see, but this afternoon is wide open. i slip into the warm water and feel myself start to relax as mark sets up the speaker by the pool. juan pops open a bottle of sparkling wine, pours it into our glasses. it's, quite frankly, awful, but it doesn't matter—we all toast, and we all drink. warmed under the sun, kissed by the breeze, the afternoon slows to a crawl, starts to feel infinite. sometimes a vacation can be a little pocket universe outside of time.

tossing and turning in bed the night that catastrophe hits. i find myself cycling through the same thoughts again and again and again. what if, what if, what if. i can't stop restlessly turning over everything i could have done differently in my mind. if i'm honest, i've never experienced failure—have i ever even made a real mistake before, one that mattered?—and i don't know how to handle it. i know it must be late, and i should sleep, but my mind won't let me. then the first light of dawn starts to seep through our bedroom window, and i realize that it’s already morning. i get up to wash my face and brush my teeth, and looking into the mirror, i start to feel an eerie kind of calm. time to pick up the pieces and figure out what to do next.

kicking a soccer ball in the snow. i excel in so many areas—playing sports is not one. i'm not dressed for it at all, and the snow is piling up outside the brewery, but we all trudge to the parking lot and start kicking around the ball. hesitancy begins to transmute into excitement. diana throws herself into it with so much enthusiasm, and it's infectious. when a ball comes your way, you can't not feel a rush of adrenaline. it's so basic, the simplest equation, and, snow floating around us, i feel young.

spotting a stray black cat from our neighborhood curled up in the rose bush in our backyard, a few short hours after coming back from ada's euthanization. it's been a surreal morning. mark is broken, and i am more affected than i thought i'd be. leaving home that morning with our own little black cat, so much thinner and weaker and quieter than i've ever seen her, and then coming back without her is—devastating. we've seen the stray cat in that rose bush just once before, the prior day, after we realized that ada wouldn't be making a miraculous recovery, that we would have to say goodbye. i mention seeing him to a friend when i tell her about ada, choking on the words. she says, "maybe he's a cat spirit, like a guardian angel. maybe he came to watch over you for her."

watching the world cup final at pig beach in gowanus. it's closing its doors permanently in a few weeks, and the world cup is ending, and all my friends are about to leave for the holidays, and the year is nearly over, and it feels like maybe this phase of my life is drawing to a close, too. but the sun is shining, and it's brisk and beautiful, my favorite weather because it makes me feel electric. i've never watched a game of soccer before this month, but today all that matters is that argentina wins. and then a man kicks a ball into a goal one last time, and for a brief moment, everything is perfect. and i think, maybe time passes, and everything we love comes and goes, and still, in spite of that, we find joy. mythology is a kind of magic-making, too.

books of 2022

i read a lot this year! eighty-eight books, to be precise. largely in an attempt to calm my feverish mind before bed, and often failing at this goal, but, you know, i'll take it.

this year was a much less aspirational year of reading—reading for comfort, rather than reading for growth. i reread several of my all-time favorite series (which i highly recommend for absorbing more of the artistry of a book when you're not hungrily turning pages for the plot to unfold), and i ran through stacks and stacks of romance novels. here are some of my favorites.

i must be honest: the first two fiction series i have to recommend are books i have already recommended. but the final books of both series released this past year, and, with the knowledge that they concluded as stunningly as i could have possibly hoped, i am back once again to beseech you to read these books.

fiction

the green bone saga (trilogy) by fonda lee

Now, however, he felt no great relief or happiness—only the sort of heaviness that comes from wanting something for so long that the final achievement of it is a loss—because the waiting is over and the waiting has become too much a part of oneself to let go of easily.

i don't have anything more to say about this trilogy except that every single moment that you have not read it is a moment that your life is more impoverished than it could otherwise be.

the dandelion dynasty (quartet) by ken liu

This was the mortal condition, she realized. She would never know with certainty the right path; she would never experience enough to act with absolute conviction; she would never be able to eliminate all suffering. All she could do was to act in the here and now, to live and die for love, to fight and battle for friendship, to trust in a conscience that was never perfect but capable of being perfected, to scintillate in the bright light of winter on the frozen beach suspended between the eternal ocean and the inconstant land for the brief instant allotted to us all.

i can now report that ken liu (as i expected) did not fail me! he absolutely stuck the landing on this series, and it's easily one of my all-time favorites. his particular skill has always been conveying the ineffable—the indescribable feelings and experiences that make up the tapestry of life, society, family, and so on. please, please read this series.

tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

i read this book in the last few days of 2022, and it rose right to the top of this list. it stirred me, deeply, and left me with a kind of soft-edged sadness about the transience of life, mono no aware. at the most surface level, it's a story about friends who make games together, but it's also a story about storytelling, disability, ambition, love, and creating art with friends, which hit in a new way this year. it took me a long time to pick up this book because i had no idea what to expect, and now i understand why—i don't know how to put the experience of reading it into words. but it's just beautifully, brilliantly done, and i can't remember the last time i read a book that felt this vivid and real.

the founders trilogy (trilogy) by robert jackson bennett

what i've always loved most about the founders trilogy is that it defies genres. it's a deeply satisfyingly fresh blend of fantasy and sci-fi, with cyberpunk aesthetics and philosophies woven into a world of industrialized magic. it’s a story about power and how that can be abused, innovation and what tradeoffs that produces, and much more. the series wrapped nicely this past year with one last heist, one last (and biggest) mission against all odds.

the overstory by richard powers

for a long time, i postponed reading the overstory because, frankly, i expected a book about trees to be boring. i'm grateful i finally gave it a pass because it's an ambitious novel, structurally (the story takes the format of the life cycle of a tree) and topically (nine people from starkly different backgrounds cross unlikely paths under environmental activism), and i think it succeeds.

the atlas (trilogy) by olivie blake

the last book isn't out yet, but i had a lot of fun with the first two! it's yet another series about young magicians in an academic setting, but this one captured my interest in large part because what makes the books interesting isn't the magic or the plot at all. in fact, the crux of the plot is probably one of the more convoluted parts of the first novel, but it also creates rich character studies and interesting thought experiments.

a league of extraordinary women (series) by evie dunmore

okay, so the whole premise of this series is suffragists in 1800s england meeting men of varying noble titles and falling in love. each book follows a different suffragist/nobleman romance. is it an earth-shattering manifesto on feminism? no. is it fun and funny and fluffy? absolutely.

the flatshare by beth o'leary

one of the better romance novels i read this past year. i didn't expect to like this one—the premise is deeply contrived (a love story that emerges out of two people who have to share a bed, just at different times!), but it was both sweet and somber.

lessons in chemistry by bonnie garmus

i didn't always like this book, and it's not perfect, particularly as a work of historical fiction that feels notably ahistorical. but it was original, with a complex woman in science at the heart of the story and an unconventional route for her life story.

nonfiction

the big oyster by mark kurlansky

Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that a people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there? New Yorkers have lost their oyster, their taste of the sea.

weirdly, the best nonfiction book i read this year. i can't explain it, but this book was gripping. i think i randomly saw someone on twitter mention it and decided to check it out, and it was nothing short of fascinating. it had the specific energy of randomly chatting with a stranger in new york city who you realize happens to know everything about oysters and clearly finds the backstory so interesting that you can’t help but find it interesting, too. local histories are the best histories.

games by c. thi nguyen

Fiction is the crystallization of telling people about what happened; visual arts are the crystallization of looking around and seeing; music is the crystallization of listening. Games, I claim, are the crystallization of practicality. Aesthetic experiences of action are natural and occur outside of games all the time. Fixing a broken car engine, figuring out a math proof, managing a corporation, even getting into a bar fight—each can have its own particular interest and beauty. These include the satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an administrative problem, of dodging perfectly around an unexpected obstacle. These experiences are wonderful—but in the wild, they are far too rare. Games can concentrate those experiences. When we design games, we can sculpt the shape of the activity to make beautiful action more likely. And games can intensify and refine those aesthetic qualities, just as a painting can intensify and refine the aesthetic qualities we find in the natural sights and sounds of the world.

this book shaped how i understand and conceptualize games on a theoretical level. nguyen makes a series of compelling arguments about exactly what a game is and what makes it uniquely compelling as an art form, and i was fully sold.

everything i need i get from you by kaitlyn tiffany

Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection. The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.

i spent much of 2021 falling into one specific fandom (see: mdzs, which i discuss later) and developing a fascination with fandoms as a whole. this book is a well-done deep dive into fandom as cultural phenomenon, through the lens of the much-maligned fangirl. plus, i live for niche internet lore, and i learned a lot about the intricacies of the 1d fandom, of which tiffany is a member.

what’s in, what’s out

okay, here's one more indulgence for this already unreasonably lengthy missive because making these lists is fun. granted, i have many more opinions about what's "in" for me this year than "out" (out: basing your personality on what you don't like?).

in for 2023

• kitschy retro glam

• road trips with no itinerary

• reading nonfiction before bed

• amari and aperitifs

• idiosyncrasies

• crispy-skinned fish on the bone

• essential oils

• indie games on steam

• matching sets

• traveling by train to small towns within the country

• uninstagrammable dinner parties

• silk

• making art with friends for fun

• dollar oyster happy hour

• getting nine hours of sleep

• going to a friend's unplanned to drink wine and gossip

• peppermint schnapps

• late nights at jazz clubs

• over-the-top birthday celebrations

• silver jewelry

• public libraries

• cooking through cookbooks

• perfume samples

• sharing works in progress

• doing without thinking

out for 2023

• twitter

• saving for retirement

• hangovers

• big-budget blockbuster media

• perfectionism

bonus round: books of 2021

looking back on my drafts, i discovered that i had in fact written a list of books for 2021 and never completed it. so in the interest of sharing works in progress, why not let it see the light of day now?

it's unedited from when i first drafted it last january. i didn't write blurbs for any of the nonfiction books, and i don't feel like doing it now, but thanks to my habitual information-sorting, i have highlights for each one, so i've included those excerpts only for them.

fiction

the grandmaster of demonic cultivation (魔道祖师) by mo xiang tong xiu (墨香铜臭)

unpredictably, this chinese web novel, more than any other book, defined 2021 for me. a friend recommended it nearly a year prior to when i started reading it, and i resisted getting into it because i didn't think i would like it. i was extremely wrong! on top of that, i had been spending a lot of time learning about and exploring how fandoms across the internet had evolved in the past decade, and there is no fandom quite like mdzs (the abbreviation for mo dao zu shi, the chinese title of the book).

the novel is a multi-decade fantasy epic that could be described as a supernatural murder-mystery meets a classic tale of wuxia-style politics meets a uniquely captivating love story. it could also be described this way. mo xiang tong xiu (mxtx) covers themes like the perils of concentrated power, the moral complexities in finding justice, the cost of not conforming to societal norms, and the many different paths that love (romantic, platonic, and familial) can take. mdzs has now been adapted to a manhua, a donghua, an audio drama, and a wildly popular live-action show called the untamed, which recently crossed 10 billion views on tencent alone. 

it's perhaps the most visible indicator of how popular danmei (the chinese equivalent of yaoi, or a genre that depicts romantic relationships between male characters) has become in china. danmei as a whole is a complicated, fraught topic for many reasons, and i have a lot of thoughts about it, but that might have to wait for a future newsletter—suffice to say, i was pulled into this story four months ago, finished it in two days, and have yet to extricate myself from it.

the dispossessed by ursula le guin

it's difficult to believe that this book was written in 1974; it still feels so timely and so relevant. le guin explores the idea of an "ambiguous utopia" with an anarcho-syndicalist colony on the moon, and she does a beautiful job of imagining and illustrating what a radically different society might look like without shying away from the more complex implications. progress is often nonlinear, and all choices have tradeoffs, and this novel captures that feeling without diluting its ideological stances.

vagabonds by hao jingfang

i read this book not long after the dispossessed, and the similarities really struck me. like the dispossessed, vagabonds is a story of contrasts between two kinds of states, one hypercapitalist and one collectivist, with an interplanetary bent (in this case, earth and mars, respectively). but despite many surface-level similarities in plot, the story feels texturally distinct in that way that chinese sci-fi often does to me—it's ultimately a slow, thoughtful, carefully deliberated exploration of different political ideas, how they develop and morph and collide with each other when they take root in people's minds, and what kinds of interpersonal and societal dynamics emerge from that.

the poppy war (trilogy) by r.f. kuang

this military fantasy epic based loosely on twentieth-century china was both easy and hard to read; i flew through the trilogy, but it was pretty brutal at times, as any book that draws from the history of the second sino-japanese war tends to be. still, i really enjoyed the richness of the worldbuilding, the creativity of the system of magic, and the complexity of many of the characters—the genre of "war is grim" can get pretty tired, but kuang weaves a fresh narrative out of it.

the ministry for the future by kim stanley robinson

many, many people recommended this novel, a near-future hypothetical on navigating toward a global response to the climate crisis, told from many different perspectives. i really enjoyed it, particularly the first half—that part is mostly a painful slog toward a consensus that will seemingly never be reached, but that really rang true to me. it painted a vivid picture of what the next few decades will likely be like, and the constantly stalling plot was both plausible and well-written. the later chapters, for me, start to spiral as robinson writes toward a solution that's clearly intended to leave us on a hopeful, optimistic note—but just doesn't feel realistic, either to the real world or the earlier parts of the story. despite all of that, i liked the book! near-future sci-fi is a hard setting to sell, and i think robinson did a pretty admirable job.

patternist (series) by octavia butler

octavia butler is so, so good. i've read most of her better-known works at this point, and the patternist series is still a standout in a lot of ways. the story stretches over generations but centers around a cruel and ultimately successful struggle to create (by force) a new race of networked telepaths. it unwinds in creative and unpredictable ways; so much of the storytelling and the plot feels so fresh even now. as usual, butler delves into a lot of complex themes around power, agency, and freedom, and it is gut-wrenching to read.

heaven official's blessing (天官赐福) by mo xiang tong xiu (墨香铜臭)

the first mxtx book i read! it happens to be her most recent as well, and it is sprawling, with a word count of over a million. like mdzs, it's a danmei xianxia novel, though this one is even more high-fantasy—the protagonist is xie lian, a forgotten god with terrible luck and an unwaveringly good nature, and the story follows him through earth, heaven, and the ghost realm, as he accidentally uncovers scandals and lost histories on his path to work his way back up the ranks of the gods. though some of the characters were much more richly written than others, the story as a whole is really cleverly done, with countless plot twists interspersed with humor and tragedy and fluff. i don't think i've ever both laughed and cried in the course of reading a book before this one.

free food for millionaires by min jin lee

lee made my list last year with pachinko, and she made it again this year with her much earlier work, free food for millionaires. of all the authors i've read, she stands out in her ability to capture flawed characters and, in particular, flawed families. this book, like pachinko, elicited many familiar pangs of sorrow for that which can't be helped in life—irreparable breaks and misunderstandings between people who love each other, the inexorable pull of power and wealth (juxtaposed against the struggle to stay afloat), proximity to whiteness and what that brings, and so on. there are some weaker moments in this book compared to pachinko, but her touch is still unmissable.

the expanse (series) by james s.a. corey

i watched a few episodes of the tv show adaptation and never got into it, but then i came across this series, and i flew through it. it's fun! i always love a sprawling space opera, and this one had some really interesting twists (body horror!) that made it feel novel. though there are a lot of big, serious issues in this universe, the protagonists are so optimistic (and so lucky—that plot armor...) that the tone of the series tends more toward hopeful and reassuring than dark. this series might be my top rec if you're looking to go deep into a long-running, easy-to-read sci-fi adventure.

xenogenesis (trilogy) by octavia butler

another spectacular, brilliant series, this time about an alien civilization that arrives on post-apocalyptic earth to merge genetically with humans. butler is so skilled at creating settings and scenarios that feel so new and teasing apart the dynamics within them in ways that are disturbing and uncomfortable and so, so thought-provoking. what's right? what's wrong? she renders many of these kinds of questions meaningless, or at least incomprehensible.

the song of achilles by madeline miller

miller is a great writer, and the song of achilles is a heartrending take on greek hero achilles. from pretty much the beginning, the story prophesies doom for achilles, and so that becomes a constant undercurrent pulsing through the novel. unexpectedly, more than just a story of war and glory, it's a story of love, with some thoughtful explorations of masculinity and heroism as concepts.

beach read by emily henry

this book is exactly what it claims to be, a perfect beach read, and it was great. two authors (one fluffy romance novelist and one grimly serious writer of literary fiction) with a long-running grudge find themselves staying at neighboring houses in a small town for the summer, they start out at odds with each other, and... you know the drill, they fall in love. it's an ideal feel-good rom-com book, and sometimes—especially these past few years—that's exactly what you need.

nonfiction

debt by david graeber

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency.

seeing like a state by james c. scott

How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.

bullshit jobs by david graeber

We need to ask ourselves, not just how did such a large proportion of our workforce find themselves laboring at tasks that they themselves consider pointless, but also why do so many people believe this state of affairs to be normal, inevitable—even desirable? More oddly still, why, despite the fact that they hold these opinions in the abstract, and even believe that it is entirely appropriate that those who labor at pointless jobs should be paid more and receive more honor and recognition than those who do something they consider to be useful, do they nonetheless find themselves depressed and miserable if they themselves end up in positions where they are being paid to do nothing, or nothing that they feel benefits others in any way?

the culture of narcissism by christopher lasch

Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the “psychological man” of the twentieth century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.

all about love by bell hooks

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our “feelings.” Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.

braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

the society of the spectacle by guy dubord

The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all effective “having” must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d’être from appearances.

the assassination of fred hampton by jeffrey haas

Looking back on history, it’s not so clear that you can’t kill a revolution or a movement if you assassinate its leaders. It’s unlikely the Chinese Revolution would have succeeded with Mao dead, or that the Vietnamese would have obtained their independence without Ho Chi Minh. The latter continued successfully after Ho died, but only after he had put in forty-six years of organizing and fighting.

the utopia of rules by david graeber

Yet the fact remains the United States is—and for a well over a century has been—a profoundly bureaucratic society. The reason it is so easy to overlook is because most American bureaucratic habits and sensibilities—from the clothing to the language to the design of forms and offices—emerged from the private sector.

press reset by jason schreier

“But the reality of the games business is, there are four endgames: You go public, which nobody does. You survive for decades like Valve. You get acquired. Or you go out of business.”

thank you, truly, for reading. i don’t take your time for granted.

my intent is to pick up a few of the projects that i’ve neglected the last few years, like writing and hosting events. which is to say: the dream machine (this newsletter) and irl society (the event series i ran back in san francisco) are coming out of hiatus, and you should subscribe if you’d like to stay posted!

as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

she cooks painstakingly crafted traditional dishes. she plants and harvests fruits and vegetables. she shears sheep and rides horses. she forages for mushrooms in the woods with handmade baskets woven out of leaves. she sings and plays instruments. she does construction projects—a bamboo wall for growing cucumbers, or a rock pathway for the garden.

her name is li ziqi, and she's the most popular chinese youtuber in the world, with tens of millions of followers across platforms. i first encountered her years ago on facebook when a video of her making a wood-fired oven out of mud crossed my feed. i was immediately transfixed.

the only way i can describe her videos is that watching them is what i'd imagine swallowing a xanax would be like. they sedate you on a physical level. it's like slipping into a pool perfectly calibrated to your body temperature and just floating, eyes closed. many times in the past year, i would soothe myself by watching her tend to her little garden, the fears and stresses of the pandemic temporarily allayed.

to watch these vignettes of life in the chinese countryside is to be pulled into the fantasy of a simpler time and place, the beauty of a life grounded in the earth and in centuries-old traditions. there's a deep tranquility that permeates every moment. each frame is vivid and tangible; you can just feel what it's like to be there, what it might be like for your life to be like her life. li is infinitely resourceful and seemingly capable of making anything from scratch, and yet what she does is presented so simply that you feel certain that you could do it, too.

but one persistent thought has lingered at the back of my mind with every video i've watched, starting from that very first one. if she lives this way, how am i watching her?

the sheer amount of time that goes into production is obvious as you see watermelons bloom from seeds, seasons passing, constantly shifting angles seamlessly stitched together. her apparent solitude, removed from the modern world, is contradicted by the existence of a cameraperson and, well, us—the viewers. much of her life must happen in front of a computer, but there's rarely a trace of even basic electronics inside the home of her videos. months of work vanish with everything we don't see, everything that went into producing this digital artifact that works to erase any evidence that it had to be produced at all.

if the observer effect states that observing a system changes it, we should consider its inverse: any subject inviting observation is necessarily constructing what is observed. that's not unique to li ziqi's videos, of course, or unique to online content at all. for instance, most of us are aware of that we're seeing a manufactured reality when we watch reality tv, with meta-commentary increasingly built into shows like love island. there is no perceived trickery because we understand that the point isn't to witness how people would interact in ordinary settings; it's to be entertained.

but we've seen an aesthetic shift in online content in recent years, from obviously posed and produced to seemingly unaffected and naturalistic. facing the mounting pressures of a social media universe where we all have to be brands, more people have called for a reversal, a return to "casual posting," where it's not so much work to be online, where the minutiae of everyday life can be worthwhile content. that's perhaps most apparent in the rise of livestreaming, where content is uncut and unscripted. on twitch, you can watch streams of people playing games, drawing, doing chores, often set to lo-fi beats. it offers the illusion of perfect fidelity to real life by capturing everything in real time.

on the other end, tiktok's "for you" page is a revolving door into people's daily lives, with glimpses at someone's morning ritual or an inside joke between friends. these brief snippets represent the opposite of the totality that streams convey, and yet they're able to capture that same essence of unfiltered life. tiktoks that invited viewers to simply "hang out with us for a while" exploded last summer, turning ten-second, one-way videos into simulations of communal spaces, temporary realities where everyone could feel safe and accepted. the magic of brevity is that a tiktok can just allude to a feeling, a vibe, and our mind fills in the blanks. we can extrapolate entire lives—universes, even—from a few captured moments.

it's for that reason that i daydream sometimes about what it might be like to make tiktoks for a living. i know, though, that when i'm wistfully thinking of making tiktoks, i'm not thinking of making tiktoks. i'm thinking of doing what i see as a viewer (dancing in a parking lot with my friends, stirring cocktails against the manhattan skyline, scoring intricate patterns into a loaf of bread) without ever worrying about "making a living" again. i don't want to edit videos or grow an audience or sell merch. i want to inhabit the world i see, the world inside the tiktok. but that isn't the reality of the tiktoker; it's a reality they construct, for all of us.

maybe the big difference between reality tv and the latest wave of "reality" content—li ziqi's idyllic videos of rural life, "a day in my life" tiktoks, "study with me" videos, and so on—is that the latter is new. we're still witnessing it undergo the process of value extraction, and so there's still an air of plausibility, that it could be "real."

because it's dispensed with the need for narrative or structure, it can distill content to its fundamentals—the ambience, how it makes us feel. it's harder to identify that as a product, entertainment. part of the allure of this genre is that we need to believe that it's possible to exist this way, that a calm, focused life, without anxiety or fear or loneliness, is within reach if we just choose it. we hold onto the worlds we see on youtube or twitch or tiktok as proof.

but perhaps we should be cautious about investing too much in the reality of the content we consume. terrace house, the japanese reality show, walked the line between these two worlds. it became a hit specifically because it was focused on the quiet moments, the trivial happenings that mark the lives of ordinary young people in japan. it bore little resemblance to the over-the-top drama usually associated with reality tv; instead, it depicted the everyday and the mundane. i loved terrace house for the reason so many others did—it portrayed life in a way that felt honest and real.

but after whispers throughout the years that, counter to popular belief, the show wasn't as "real" as it appeared, it all fell to pieces last year. house member hana kimura was targeted on social media by angry viewers, furious with her for behavior she said the producers had directed, and she killed herself. her death swiftly led to a reckoning as cast members spoke out about how they were coerced by the production staff to create a more interesting reality for viewers, and the show best known for its sincerity was canceled.

it's easy to feel like we've been deceived when we learn that the reality we took to exist somewhere in this world, somewhere outside of the media we consume, was crafted for our viewing. and yet we don't stop fantasizing, imagining, dreaming. we say we want what's real, but maybe what we really want is the texture of realism applied to idealized representations of the world—the conceivably real, rather than the genuinely real.

do tens of millions of people really want to know the lived reality of the average rural farmer in china? or do they want to escape from their own complicated, messy lives laboring under capitalism in a technology-mediated world? the reality that li ziqi constructs is an impressionist painting; with some distance, you can appreciate its beauty and (for just a moment) forget where you are. but look too closely, and the illusion collapses. you realize that you're yearning for a life—a china—that doesn't exist and never did.

i want to get into the practice of writing fewer words at a time but more often, and it is hard. the past few months, i’ve been going through the artist’s way with a few friends in an effort to write more regularly (rather than in sudden dramatic spurts), but mostly that’s just produced a lot of agonizing and many unfinished drafts. got advice on creating? i want to know what works for you!

responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

whatever you want to call it, trump loyalists stormed the capitol in an effort to disrupt congressional proceedings to certify joe biden as the next president. they took selfies and livestreamed themselves rifling through senators' desks. they were escorted out by the police. many people were injured, and four died. it was, at once, terrifying and absurd.

many people were shocked that we got to this place. the part that surprises me most is how long it took. i expected it the day after election day; instead, it took two months. but could anything have been more predictable? if a large number of people, including the sitting president, repeatedly asserted that the election was stolen, why wouldn't they do anything about it?

back in high school, i did policy debate. the high school debate circuit is a fascinating place, and it's probably not what you'd expect if you don't have any experience with it. the idea is that there's a national topic every year, and teams debate it, gathering mountains of research over the course of the year to support their arguments. one team offers a policy proposal, and the other team rebuts it. that all sounds pretty standard. but as it evolved over time, the strategy for winning became clear. there is a path from every single policy (whether it's about creating a national railway or increasing funding for space exploration) to some variation on nuclear war, apocalypse, and the extinction of the human race.

yes! i know how stupid that sounds! and yes, after entering the debate scene as a bright-eyed kid who thought that debate meant using rhetoric to make solid, reasoned arguments about the relative merits about an idea, then got a crash course on how high school debate really works, i ran these kinds of arguments, too.

why? because they're effective. there are two steps to making this kind of argument. first, you overwhelm the other team with information, making as many points as you possibly can in the time you're allotted. high school debaters do that by spreading (speed-reading), speaking at hundreds of words per minute to pack in arguments the opposing team has to rebut. this onslaught is the logical equivalent of a ddos attack. if an argument isn't rebutted, it's considered conceded to the team that made it.

second, you raise the stakes. every debate is about impact, and every question of impact ultimately becomes a question about scale. what is the absolute worst-case scenario for the policy proposal? if you can compellingly make the case that that the other team's argument leads to the end of the world, of course you win. even if you can only convince a judge that there's a slim chance, the weight of that possibility (for instance, a one-percent chance of extinction) is difficult to counter with, say, the benefits of high-speed rail.

i didn't stay in policy debate for long. as much as it satisfied the part of my brain that gets a high from scoring points, i realized that it fostered a kind of informational nihilism. for all the arguments we constructed, all the research we did, we were no closer to making any real point. as richard seymour writes in the twittering machine, we generate more information than we have at any point in history, and yet we move further and further from producing meaning.

A coin toss could be said to contain two ‘bits’ of information, whereas a random card selection has fifty-two ‘bits’. The more uncertainty, the more information. The same principle, applied to sentences, means that statements with less sense actually have more informational capacity. An increase in information could be proportionate to a reduction in meaning.

it's hard not to be reminded now of high school debate when i observe the problems facing us on a societal level today. the stakes of every issue keep getting higher. the climate crisis, the pandemic (and future pandemics), steeply increasing inequality—as someone on the left, all of these issues feel like existential threats. and i'm not saying they aren't; i think they are. maybe not on the level of extinction, at least in many cases, but certainly on the level of millions of people's lives.

but on the right, we have that as well. people who believe—with the same degree of conviction that i believe that corporations will render our planet uninhabitable in the unending pursuit of profit, unless we stop them—that a powerful and growing contingent of people is systematically working to destroy the country, either out of malice or naïveté. they want to plunge them into a totalitarian state that will kill millions of people, or they want to weaken the country's military until it's vulnerable to the many dangerous threats across the globe, or they want to run the nation into financial ruin by increasing the federal deficit until rampant hyperinflation makes the u.s. dollar as worthless as the bolivar. and these fears are some of the more grounded arguments on the right; i'm not even touching 5g or vaccine microchips or qanon.

the problem is, what happens when everything is always at stake, for everyone, in every argument, in every issue? what does that mean for consensus, or even coexistence? and, in turn, what does that mean for democracy?

one obvious case study is twitter. we are one week (that's right, seven days) into 2021, and it's already impossible to keep track of the sheer number of offhanded comments made by random people that have exploded across the platform and morphed into heated debates, virtually always rising to the point of, "people will die because of this tweet." it's not always so explicit (although sometimes it is), but it's a short trip from "this dad wouldn't let his daughter eat until she figured out how to open a can of beans" to "bean dad is harming his child by withholding food" to "bean dad normalizes behaviors that kill thousands of children every year through abuse and neglect." (if none of what i just wrote means anything to you, good, and i would encourage you to promptly forget it.)

and i want to be clear that this escalation isn't unreasonable. on one level, systemic issues are, by definition, all around us, and pointing out instances of them is what allows us to see them in our daily lives. often that's good and necessary. increasingly, though, i think we lose our sense of perspective, distorting how we perceive events until a carelessly worded thought from some one direction fan account run by a fourteen-year-old with a hundred followers becomes the exemplification of most of the ills in our world.

on another level, this process of escalation is how discourse on twitter is designed to function. each person talks about what just happened, hoping to make a new point, contribute some fresh angle that hadn't been considered yet. this constant churn of information—of thought-provoking perspectives you hadn't considered, of infuriatingly bad takes from the worst people of all time, of hilarious self-referential memes that you have to share with your group chat—that's what keeps us all on the app. getting us to lurch from one extreme to another is how twitter maintains its momentum; it's how it can always have an answer to the question of "what's happening?"

and so, after all that's said and done, you're left with takes that are nearly unrecognizable when you look back to the tweet that inspired them. all paths lead to extinction. and it becomes increasingly hard to understand how we all got there, or why we did it. in the aftermath of bean dad, a lot of people grappled with what had happened. ryan broderick wrote:

The whole affair makes me deeply sad and depressed in ways I’m having issues fully articulating. Perhaps my main question is why did we do this? He wasn’t famous or particularly important. He’s just some guy from Seattle.... It is good that racists and extremists and hypocrites are exposed, but I also think we need to be careful about how much control we relinquish over the scale and size of the audience we communicate with. I think it is worth considering what mechanisms are guiding us and what financial incentives they adhere to. Essentially, why is any of this happening? And, to perhaps ask a larger question, what does it say about the architecture of Twitter that this was so fun and entertaining for so many of us? These are questions without easy answers that go far beyond Bean Dad.

i think there are a lot of answers to the question of why any of it happens. the platforms have capitalist incentives, and controversy, real or manufactured, keeps us posting and consuming posts. our lives aren't going that well right now, so we're deriving some comfort in the ways that we can. as my friend morgane wrote, "if you can't be happy, at least you can be 'correct.'" the problems that have been laid bare in our society, especially this past year, feel pervasive and insurmountable, so we're addressing them where it's easiest, where it feels visible and relevant but also doesn't require much of us—by identifying them on social media and hoping that social pressure or awareness effects some kind of change.

all of these factors have an outsize impact on how politics in the u.s. functions today. combine the vast scale and profit motives of social media platforms with a mode of discourse that relies on the proliferation of competing information and a race to heighten the stakes, elevated to the level of national politics, and you get what we saw yesterday at the capitol.

leaving aside the fact that participating in policy debate as a teenager often correlates with working in politics later, it's not a coincidence that our politics have come to resemble high school debate. this outcome feels like an inevitability of the gamified two-party system revolving around capital that we have. the effect is a split into what jean baudrillard (screened out, 2002) calls the real and the virtual:

Traditional theorists of war must be equally at a loss before the explosion of their object of study. For, paradoxically, it isn’t the bomb which has exploded, but the war-object, which has exploded into two separate parts – a total, virtual war in orbit and multiple real wars on the ground. The two have neither the same dimensions nor the same rules, just as the virtual economy and the real economy do not have the same dimensions or the same rules.... We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility (the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game.

i don't think baudrillard is correct in saying that the virtual no longer affects the real in any meaningful way, but he captures a kind of dislocation that i think many of us have felt these past few years, between the world we know firsthand and the world we experience through screens, as it's told through "current events." occasionally, the two universes intersect, but inevitably they diverge again, leaving us feeling alienated and wondering which we should understand to be the truth.

we can look at the coup through this lens. it's easy to dismiss it as irrational, and of course in many ways it is. but if you believed that democracy in your country faced an existential threat, why wouldn't you go to those lengths to stop it? many of us wouldn't—in large part because it feels pointless to try, but also partly because on some deeper level we don't fully believe it. we don't let ourselves.

and maybe that was their error, to mistake the virtual for the real. because even as so much changes, so much stays the same. democracy dies in darkness, except when it keeps limping on its way in broad daylight. at what point does that change? does it ever? these days, this disconnect becomes more and more apparent.

a new book, how to blow up a pipeline by andreas malm (which i haven't read, so don't consider what i'm about to say any kind of evaluation of it), poses this same question. if we really believe that the planet is dying, and we know who's killing it, why aren't we doing more? verso books shared this excerpt of the book:

After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; they can do nothing but burn their way to the end. And so we are still here. We erect our camps of sustainable solutions. We march, we block, we stage theatres, we hand over lists of demands to ministers, we chain ourselves, we march the next day too. And still business continues very much as usual. At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different?

i think these questions are all fair ones to be asking, though this premise makes me uncomfortable. why? morally, i don't really care if anyone blows up a pipeline. intellectually, i understand that violence is a reality of this world and the state the primary enactor of it. if i tease out the feeling of discomfort, it comes down to the same problem of high school debate: all paths lead to extinction. it isn't that i don't believe in objective reality, or that i don't think that this argument represents objective reality. it's that we all think that about what we believe, and we can all raise the stakes enough to justify nearly any behavior. and i don't have any answers about what we're supposed to do with that. in theory, we just have to decide for ourselves what's right and then act on it. but with all this information, all of these data points, often conflicting representations of the current state of the world, it becomes an impossible calculus.

are we supposed to be behaving as if we are living through a series of existential threats? or are we supposed to be behaving as if everything is mostly normal? we're caught between disjointed and incompatible realities—the panicked reality of what's happening in the media and the often mundane reality of our everyday lives.

an object in motion stays in motion. the wheels of capitalism keep spinning, even as we watch the events around us grow increasingly extreme. there's a surreal, dreamlike quality to going through the motions of daily life as we're bombarded with information, always starker and more urgent than the last.

it's no wonder, then, that people begin to lose their grasp of what is real. there's a distorted kind of rationality to it, a need to resolve the cognitive dissonance. because, really, if there were a deadly virus killing millions of people around the world, why wouldn't the people in charge be taking more drastic action? if climate change were really set to render our cities unlivable in the next fifty years, our governing bodies would be doing more, right? but instead of mobilizing all of our resources toward addressing these problems, our leaders gesture at them, telling people that they are extremely serious (in the same vein as "we've received your concerns and they have been duly noted"), reminding people to wear a mask and recycle, and then... continuing as we were. there's a senselessness to it that's nearly impossible to comprehend without understanding that that's how capitalism functions.

sometimes it feels like sitting in a car, full of people, driving straight toward a wall, with no one else acting as if anything is out of the ordinary. i felt that a lot last year. surely, i thought, the pandemic will force some fundamental shift in our way of life, how our society is organized. then, surely, millions of people taking to the streets for weeks must change some part of this system that devalues black life, that places policing rather than care at its heart. we seemingly reached the cusp of real change, meaningful change—and then what? what happened?

today there's a lot of debate. was it a coup, or wasn't it? and i think the reality of our current state is that the answer now, and always, is: both. everything is always simultaneously urgent and unprecedented—so extreme that it has to be a turning point this time, just imagine how we would view it if it happened in another country, it must shake people out of their complacency—and also not a big deal, just another wednesday, as it recedes, growing smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.

i hope this essay captured what i intended.

responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.

everyone is talking about liminal spaces these days.

we're in the final throes of a dying year, in the middle of a pandemic that's put so many people's lives in limbo. everything has changed and keeps changing, and yet every day to the next feels the same. nothing is sure. it's hard to know what next week will be like, much less next year. sometimes it feels like we're collectively holding a breath, our lungs burning for release.

before this year, i never quite realized how much of my life was set—if not in reality, at least in my mind. some of the details might have changed, here and there, but the bedrock of how my life would look and feel never really did. there was a deep-seated comfort in that, a comfort i didn't realize existed until i no longer had it. this year, though, that bedrock collapsed, in more ways than i could have possibly imagined.

when so much is in flux, most of it outside of your control, the natural impulse is to wait, to see where the pieces fall. many of us found ourselves in this place in 2020, suddenly contemplating moving back home (or at least somewhere cheaper) or taking a fellowship or switching to freelance work for a while or (for some reason, nearly ubiquitously) maybe going to grad school. ways to buy time, to figure it out or at least postpone figuring it out, in a socially acceptable or financially practical way.

on this subject, yuan wang writes:

A liminal space is a time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, a season of waiting, and not knowing. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer.

it's romantic—on paper. in practice? agonizing. it's the feeling of sitting in gridlocked traffic and knowing your destination is just a few blocks out of reach. it's waiting on an answer to a question before you can start on a task you need to complete. it's opening the door to leave the house, getting a text to meet half an hour later than previously planned, and then having to pass that time, poised to go but unable, anxiously scrolling through twitter because there's not quite enough time to do anything else. it's hovering impatiently by the microwave as the seconds slowly tick down to zero. it's knowing that something is coming, something is about to happen, because it must be, and it's feeling powerless to do anything about it.

i wish that i could write about this feeling in retrospect. i wish i could draw a straightforward arc of struggle and triumph, even just for myself. i first wrote the words "liminal space" back in july, when i was on the cusp of major life change, and i think i believed that all the other pieces would fall into place after that. but all i have now is a knotted mess of hypotheticals, plausible lives i could assume, none of which feel quite right yet. there were many times this year that making big decisions felt like entering a recursive loop, with so many factors weighing on each other that i reached stack overflow.

still, as messy and uncomfortable as liminal spaces can be, they're places of potential. they're doors that you thought were closed, slowly cracking open. the possibilities that had long dissipated in the process of shedding your childish wants begin to re-form. we aren't static; what we do, what we think, what we want, are always evolving, whether we realize it or not. and eventually we have to reckon with those changes in ourselves, what they mean for us. am i still the person who should be working toward these goals? or is holding onto them preventing me from growing into the person i'm becoming, the person i've become?

there's no right answer—there's never a right answer, i'm finding—there's only the day that you decide, one way or another. and then maybe you change your mind again, or you don't. growth happens in fits and starts, but it happens nonetheless. and then suddenly, the future, that place across the threshold, feels tantalizingly close.

here are some words on liminal spaces that coincidentally (or not, given that everyone is having the same thoughts at this time of this year) landed in my inbox as i was writing this essay, from one of my favorite writers, helena fitzgerald:

Liminal spaces cannot be inhabited. We push ourselves or are pushed through to the next active thing, propelled by loss or desire, by pride and need, climbing up the ladder into the story. Maybe I want to linger here, where nothing achieves anything, where nothing links up, where nothing leads to the next thing. Maybe I want to spin my wheels, a lost day like a hangover, a doorway like the kitchen at a house party, where everyone gathers and nobody accomplishes anything, bunching up in a small space to gossip and bother each other and take off our sweaters in the overheated room, sitting on counters, knocking over somebody else’s salt and olive oil. Maybe this is the party I miss the most, the empty end of the year without a desperation to get out the other side of it, the unmarked time and the useless paragraphs, something left over, time to waste. What we want from things versus what we think we want are rarely the same. Sometimes what I want from a party is the uselessness, how it has no point beyond itself. The spaces on each side of the doorway are narrative; they are goals, plotlines, successes and failures. The space in the doorway is a party and a party is sometimes a long day of doing nothing at all, without preparations, without resolutions, blank as the light through a door.

books of 2020

i can't bring myself to write a retrospective of this year; i'm sure the sheer volume of reflections on 2020 have encompassed everything there is to say. BUT my biggest flex of this year is that i not only finished my goodreads reading challenge—i hit an unprecedented 360% (!) of my goal, reading seventy-two books.

i read much more this year than any other year after high school. staying home so much was undoubtedly a contributing factor, but more than that: i got a kindle a year ago, and i downloaded libby (thank you, freia), which allows you to borrow e-books from your library. what might sound like a minor improvement in ease of access was transformational: i no longer had to think about justifying the cost of each book (libraries! they're magical), or the inconvenience of getting a book, or the bulkiness of carrying physical copies everywhere. i usually read multiple books simultaneously—typically, at least one fast-paced fiction book and one denser nonfiction book—to lower the burden of pushing through a book when i might not be in the mood for it. i carved out time intended specifically for reading (this year, the bath was my sanctuary). i slowly built up my attention span from its lowest point in june. and finally, i got back into goodreads in earnest, which helped me find new books and got me engaging with friends about the books we were reading. so, if anyone wants to read more next year, that's the advice i've got.

and i do believe, more than ever, that most of us should read more. contrary to what i thought when my pocket usage was at its peak, a thousand articles and thinkpieces and op-eds don't quite add up to a single good book. there is so much intellectual and cultural wealth all around us, ready for us to access. books open new worlds—sometimes imaginary ones, yes, but also sometimes ones that were always right in front of us, hidden in plain sight. and the more worlds you open, the more still you discover waiting.

so, out of the books i finished this year, here are some of the best. many of these books changed me, in ways i don't yet fully understand, and if even one of them changes you, too, well, the time i spent making this list will have been worth it.

nonfiction

inventing the future by nick srnicek and alex williams

If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons.

this book, more than any other book i read this year, energized me and gave me hope. it made me realize how little we allow ourselves to want, that the notion of a post-work society is nearly unfathomable and doesn't even emerge on the horizon of the future for most of us. it reminded me partly why i fell in love with technology in the first place—because of this promise and potential. this dream of a radically better world that i had forgotten after years of working in tech to incrementally improve people's lives while ossifying the overall structure and shape of our society. maybe most importantly, it pushed me to think more critically about how to build the future i want.

capitalist realism by mark fisher

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.

short, accessible, and to the point: this book does a really good job of turning a lot of common-sense ideas about capitalism on their heads. the title refers to the pervasiveness of capitalism and the impossibility of imagining any alternative, and once i learned this concept, it was impossible to unsee the ways in which it has shaped our culture, individually and societally.

the revolutionary ideas of karl marx by alex callinicos

This is the real Marx, for whom socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class—not something to be imposed on the mass of people, but something that they can only achieve by and for themselves, through their own struggles and organizations.

this year was supposed to be the year i read capital. i did not. but with so much chatter about cultural marxism and marxists taking over the democratic party (which is extremely funny to me), there remains little collective understanding of what marx really wrote and believed, on both the right and much of the left. i read this book to get a clearer idea of the ideology, and it was easy to understand, short, and specific. what always strikes me most about reading marx is how timely it feels—it's been hundreds of years, and yet it reads like it could have been written today—and how uncontroversial most of the points are. if you're unfamiliar with these ideas but want to be able to engage with them, rather than vague, muddled notions of them, i don't think you'll be disappointed with this read, even if you leave unconvinced.

the origin of capitalism by ellen meiksins wood

Almost without exception, accounts of the origin of capitalism have been fundamentally circular: they have assumed the prior existence of capitalism in order to explain its coming into being. In order to explain capitalism’s distinctive drive to maximize profit, they have presupposed the existence of a universal profit-maximizing rationality. In order to explain capitalism’s drive to improve labour-productivity by technical means, they have also presupposed a continuous, almost natural, progress of technological improvement in the productivity of labour.

obviously, from this list, i spent much of this year trying to better understand capitalism: what it is, how it affects us, and what might come next. the present and future part can be self-evident, but what's really not obvious is the past—we typically think of capitalism as a natural, inevitable consequence of historical events, or as the obvious continuation of the trade practices that have existed for millennia. the origin of capitalism goes back in history to explain why that's resolutely not the case, detailing the specificity of how capitalism came to be, in a particular place at a particular time under particular conditions.

manufacturing consent by edward s. herman and noam chomsky

We do not use any kind of “conspiracy” hypothesis to explain mass-media performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a “free market” analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces. Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.

herman and chomsky do maybe the best journalistic work i've ever seen—ironically, while dismantling "real" journalism—by highlighting certain notable cases (the vietnam war, the 1984 nicaraguan elections, etc.) and systematically going through the media coverage to illustrate, overwhelmingly, how our mass media functions as propaganda. none of these ideas are especially novel now, especially after the last few years in political media, but even so, this book blew my mind again and again, and i learned for the first time about parts of history i had never known. the last quarter or so became a slog, but even if you don't finish, the first several chapters are worth the read. alternatively, i've heard that inventing reality by michael parenti covers much of the same subject matter but was written two years earlier and much more concisely.

communal luxury by kristin ross

Finding criteria for wealth that was distinct from the quantitative race toward growth and overproduction was the key to imagining and bringing about social transformation. We can see that understanding already manifest in the strategy governing Pottier’s choice of the words “communal luxury” in his text. At the moment in mid-April when the manifesto was composed, the phrase served to expressly counteract and defy the abject “misérabilisme” of Versaillais depictions of Parisian life under the Commune. Versaillais propaganda, directed against those whom they called the “partageux” who had seized Paris, and projected out onto provincial France, was mobilized to convince peasants in the countryside that the Commune, were it not defeated, would seize their land and divide it up among themselves. But it also had a second, no less important, goal: that of creating, more generally, the certainty that sharing could only mean the sharing of misery.... “Communal luxury” countered any notion of the sharing of misery with a distinctly different kind of world: one where everyone, instead, would have his or her share of the best.

i knew next to nothing about the paris commune before reading this book, and i hadn't had any particular interest in learning about it. but i was drawn to this concept of communal luxury, and i'm so glad that got me to read about it. ross considers the modern legacy of the paris commune in the years after occupy wall street, painting a vision of shared abundance, a dream of wealth that goes beyond individual capitalistic accumulation. if you're like me and have a soft spot for versailles-style decadence, communal luxury reframes that desire for art and beauty and, well, luxury into one that serves the people.

screened out by jean baudrillard

You put out an item of information. So long as it has not been denied, it is plausible. And, barring some happy accident, it will never be denied in real time and so will always remain credible. Even if denied, it will no longer ever be absolutely false, since it has once been credible. Unlike truth, credibility has no limits; it cannot be refuted, because it is virtual. We are in a kind of fractal truth: just as a fractal object no longer has one, two or three dimensions (in whole numbers), but 1.2 or 2.3 dimensions, so an event is no longer necessarily true or false, but hovers between 1.2 or 2.3 octaves of truth. The space between the true and the false is no longer a relational space, but a space of random distribution.

okay, a disclaimer: i think that much of baudrillard's writing is nonsense, but i also earnestly love it even when it is. in this collection of writings, there are astonishingly astute essays that transformed the way i think about a subject, and then there are passages that sound like they're pointing to ideas and connecting concepts but... never quite getting there. even so, the incisive parts (of which there are many) are entirely worth your while.

the longing for less by kyle chayka

ostensibly about the mainstreaming of decluttering, the longing for less is in reality a much more abstract exploration of minimalism in art, music, and architecture and what it has to offer beyond the commodified trends we have today. kyle chayka is one of my favorite cultural critics (he coined "airspace"), and this book was a nice way to step back into thinking about aesthetics and what they mean.

blockchain chicken farm by xiaowei wang

this book might be the best book i've read about china, delving into the rural countryside and how technologies have shaped those communities (and, in turn, been shaped by them). it's grounded deeply in personal anecdotes—you get an evocative picture of the people in these villages and what their lives look like.

how to do nothing by jenny odell

posing as a popular self-help book, this work turns out to be much, much more. odell thinks critically about technology but even more about nature, our locations in space and time, and our relationships with each other. bioregionalism, colonialism, and platform capitalism all come into play. if you, like me, expected it to be yet another book about putting down your phone, i think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

fiction

the dandelion dynasty (quartet) by ken liu

i have read everything ken liu has ever written or translated, but for some reason i waited to read this series—why, i can't say. it's really one of the best fantasy series i've ever read, with a rich, vividly rendered world and complex, nuanced characters. there's a sprawling grandiosity to it that has some of the texture of game of thrones (but hopefully the last book, which turned into two books set to release next year, will be much better than that was). also, these books made me hungry for more silkpunk (the name for this genre, coined by liu), so if you have any recs, i want to know!

exhalation by ted chiang

ted chiang is perhaps best known for stories of your life and others, the book of short stories that inspired the movie arrival. it was a really wonderful collection of short stories—thought-provoking, heartbreaking, achingly beautiful. somehow i think exhalation is much better. it's gorgeously crafted, a more mature incarnation of the same flavor of speculative fiction.

the green bone saga (trilogy) by fonda lee

i really loved this series, a fantasy trilogy the author describes as "the godfather with magic and kungfu." it has the feel of a wuxia epic (if you didn't know, i love wuxia) crossed with gangster films, and it works shockingly well—i devoured all of it. again, the third book isn't out yet, but it's due for release next year.

earthseed (duology) by octavia e. butler

this series was never finished, but the two books that exist are a gripping story of the 2020s, when the united states has largely collapsed because of climate change and wealth inequality. there are moments that are eerily prophetic, like a demagogue who becomes the president with the slogan "make america great again," propelled into office by the christian right and appeals to american power and prestige (that book was written in 1998!). what's maybe most compelling about this take on sci-fi is how much of the future is really just more of the past.

pachinko by min jin lee

i know that everyone who plans to ever read this book has done it at this point, but i read it at the start of the year and cried, a lot. east of eden by john steinbeck is one of my all-time favorite books, and pachinko is written in a similar style, but... better? it's an intergenerational historical epic centering on a family, and it's about racism and power and love and duty and grief, told in a way that cuts deep.

wayfarers (series) by becky chambers

it's a space epic but earnest and fun and profoundly human (well, not literally because a lot of the characters are not, in fact, humans, but what's another word for that personal quality we call "human"?). i raced through it. a lot of care went into building this world and the interpersonal dynamics within it—what might differ between alien cultures, and how might that affect how people interact and understand each other? and the effect is a universe that feels as socially interesting as it is technically. the first two books are really good (and really different!). the third was underwhelming, but you can't have it all. fun fact, this series was crowdfunded on kickstarter.

this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone

i don't even know what to call this genre. it's a story of two agents in a time war—possible futures, warring against each other to determine the fate of the world—written in the form of letters to each other. they begin as enemies and fall in love. it's hard to keep track of all the strands of the story with the constantly changing narrators, especially since you're never sure what's real or imagined, truth or a lie, but even so, it's a pleasure to read.

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid and city of girls by elizabeth gilbert

these two books are not at all related to each other, but they are inextricably fused in my mind because i read them both at pretty much the same time, in the same place (the bathtub), and the plots are... similar. they're both stories of older women recounting their glamorous, wild pasts as young women, featuring many male conquests and show business (the seven husbands of evelyn hugo features a hollywood starlet in the 1950s, city of girls features a new york city theater girl in the 1940s). they're lush in the way that stories of fabulously beautiful women in those times can be.

thanks for the memories, 2020. goodbye, good riddance, and good luck.

have recommendations for books? stuck in your own liminal space? just like one of these songs? as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.