I would say this summer was needed. It honestly was more of a lesson to learn from than other summers I’ve had. And that’s because, truthfully, I did not prepare enough or take it seriously enough.

But the good thing is I’ve learned from it (or I hope) and it’ll strengthen me and make my persuits become reality even faster and better than before.

Here’s a few things I’m taking away

1: uplevel your skills. They directly tie to what you can do and how much you make.

Sales reps make maybe 2-3x less than a software engineer. The top AI/ML researcher makes 2-10x a software engineer. The stronger your skills are and the more rare of a skillset you have that the market wants, the more money you make.

I saw this when I was talking with a startup for a backend engineering role. And when I was talking to a startup about a growth engineering role. One of them paid much more.

Seperately, if you want to create, build, or make something. Having skills allows you to mold the world into what you want. If all you can do is talk, you’re not going to get very far. But if you can talk well and you can design and architect, then now you can convince others to join you on your mission much easier.

If you can code, you can create software. But if you can also CAD, understand electricity, and motors, now you can create hardware powered by software. What you can do is larger than if you just knew coding.

2: When someone vouches for you, exceed expectations.

One of my venture capital friends connected me with a few great startups—truly companies that were growing extremely fast and where I would not only have been paid well but learned much more.

One startup I was close to finishing the process with, but I completely butchered the technical interview. And in that moment I knew I wasn’t getting it. Even though the team was great, the problem was interesting, and I would have learned a lot. I should have put much more effort into training, studying, and making sure I would have beat expectations.

And what sucks is that my friend vouched for me and I did not live up to his praise. That’s something that not only makes me look bad but also makes him look even worse. Imagine a conversation with him and the CEO of the company. What would they say?

3: Communication and Optics is critical.

When you are in a team, no one knows what you want. When you want to get something done, you need to be clear. We carry this assumption that people know what we want. It shows up everywhere from our relationships to our workplace. The truth is no one does. Everyone is living their own lives, thinking about themselves.

Therefore, when you want something or you have a goal that involves multiple people, you need to communicate clearly.

It’s incredible how much optics also matters. You can feel it in how people communicate in slack channels. I was at a startup and I felt some office politics. At a larger company, optics and playing the office politics game matters much more. Kind of sad. But it matters if you want to get things done.

4: Incentives are the most important thing to understand.

Doug Leone, billionare and partner at Sequoia said that companies obey the laws of physics. What he means is that incentives control outcomes. Every good policy comes from understanding the actors and what they want.

Whatever you want to achieve and especially when it involves other people is to first step back and look at the incentives playing. How can you make it so the other person also cares?

There’s a good saying about problem solving. If someone can make money from solving that issue, that problem will be solved forever. The incentives align.

Whenever someone is helping you, doing something for you—how can you align the incentives so they also win. Chase the win wins.

5: A mediocre life is easy to fall into. Escaping it is hard.

Something I noticed was how easy it was to become lazy even during work. The first week I was trying to survive—so I put 110% in. The second week you learn what is acceptable. The third week you easily fall into laziness.

Doing good work is hard. Being intentional about it is hard. Thinking how you can improve is hard. What is easy is doing slight improvements. Continuing your work and treating it like a side outcome.

One of my projects near the end was a more visible, public project with stake at hand. We were sending emails to thousands of our ICP. I remember the first 2 days when we launched it. I could feel my heart beating. I woke up 30 minutes earlier to make sure it was ready. I had stake. I didn’t want to look bad in front of a public launch.

Companies that align their employees well create stake for them. To work hard, you need everyone to have stake. Everyday is a new slate. If you can’t find a way to motivate yourself, you’ll produce bad work. This goes back to incentives.

6: Be careful about accepting things that are hard to change.

When you are in the job hunt process you have perhaps dozens of options. When you say yes to a job, you’re binded to working there. That can be dangerous.

If you accept a role that you don’t particularly like you can be trapped there. If the pay is not great but you take it, you could be saving only a tiny bit each month. Not enough to become financially free, shackled to toiling endlessly.

Before a big decision, be confident about it first.

7: Build leverage.

Create optionality for yourself. Give reasons for people to come to you. For opportunity to come to you. I did not build enough leverage this internship cycle and it meant that I didn’t learn as much as I wanted.

Don’t let yourself only have one option. Have multiple and use them to get yourself the best deal.

Hopefully, I can not only say these things, but put them into practice.

At the end of the day, experience and regret are the best teachers.

We were in high school when he was. We’re figuring out our twenties right as he’s figuring out his.

The characters in the movies age slower than real life, so it took until high school for us to catch up to Peter in Homecoming (going to Midtown HS, an inspired version of Bronx Science), and by the time Brand New Day came out recently, we are around the same age he was. MJ and Ned made their way through MIT and eventually graduated, and the rest of us figured out whatever our version of that looked like. They even had a small discussion about the soul-sucking work that is corporate.

In high school, when we were figuring out who we wanted to become, so was he. During Homecoming, what Peter wanted was more. He wanted external validation. He wanted to be an Avenger, to fight battles bigger than his neighborhood, to prove to Stark and to himself that he belonged in a bigger arena than Queens.

But that ambition was a curse for him. Perhaps the curse all Spider-Men have.

Because everyone he loved slowly got taken away.

By the middle of No Way Home, Aunt May—his only parent, the person who had stuck by him through everything, from the weight of being Spider-Man to the ordinary mess of dating—was mercilessly killed in front of him. There was nothing he could do as the life faded from her eyes.

That, however, wasn’t the last thing taken from him.

Because when Mysterio exposed his identity, Peter asked Doctor Strange to make the world forget that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, but he couldn’t bear to let the spell erase him from MJ and Ned. So he interfered, and subsequently tore a hole in the multiverse doing it.

Subsequently, villains from other worlds started coming into their world and the only way to close the hole was for Dr. Strange to cast the original spell with no exceptions.

Everyone would forget who Peter Parker was . . . even his closest friends.

In one day, Peter Parker was forgotten. Lost his only parent figure. And had to let go of his closest friends. Peter Parker may be our age, but he has gone through much more than any of us have. And God forbid any of us face what he has.

That’s the mismatch between his life and ours. Although he grew up with us, our lives are incomparable with his. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it.

The end of No Way Home always brings a wave of sadness over me, an ache in my heart. The kind that makes you think of your own people and hold on a little tighter. I could not imagine living in a world where my closest friends have forgotten who I am, and I continuously choose to sacrifice my future relationship with them to keep them safe.

He erased himself from the ones he loved the most. No closure they’ll remember when the spell is over. Just a name that means nothing to the people who used to love him. That kind of loneliness feels different. A loneliness he has to carry alone because no one else even knows there’s something to grieve. So much of who we are lives in the memories of our friends and family. And for Peter, all of that is gone.

That’s the sacrifice he made once. And in the final scene of that same film, we watch him choose it again.

Peter walks into the coffee shop meaning to rekindle his relationship with MJ and Ned. He gets as far as stating his name as Peter Parker because when he glances at MJ’s scar healing from the final battle, it hits him.

Being Spider-Man means danger follows him wherever he goes. He just watched what that danger did to Aunt May. And he’s not about to find out what it does to them.

Tom Holland’s facial expressions are just spectacular in this scene.

With one somber look, as MJ asks if he needs anything else, he just says he has everything he needs.

And with one last glance at Ned sitting by the far table, he leaves.

He walks off into the cold winter day and starts his life again, opening the doors of his dusty apartment to a new chapter. This time as the lonely neighborhood Spider-Man.

The last line of No Way Home reads:

Peter Parker is no more, but Spider-Man lives on.

Everything Peter had was taken. All that’s left is the mask.

There is no more fancy tech that Stark provides. No more Avengers waiting to call him into a larger fight. No more friends who know what he has gone through.

Peter is now simply the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

We ultimately see a reversal of desires.

In Homecoming he wanted to be seen for his actions. By Brand New Day, there’s no one left to see him. Happy’s forgotten him. Tony sacrificed himself to save the world. MJ and Ned are safe, unaware, and moved on with their lives. And he keeps doing the right thing anyway—not to be seen, but because it’s right. Peter holds onto Aunt May’s legacy, the proverbial Spider-Man lesson: with great power comes great responsibility.

This is a guy who sacrificed everything for the people he loved. A man who kept trying to do the right thing. The guy who gets unlucky every time but still keeps on fighting for justice.

Peter is not perfect. His fear of losing MJ and Ned helped create the disaster in the first place. He wanted to protect his relationships from the cost of being Spider-Man, even when that cost could no longer be avoided.

But even after every failure and loss, he finds his way back to what Aunt May taught him.

What Marvel shows us time and again is that Spider-Man carries virtue. He may not be perfect, but he always tries to do the right thing. Near the end of Brand New Day, after MJ tells him she doesn’t love him, after fighting side villains and nearly dying, after all that accumulation of being alone and carrying deep burdens, his spider-sense goes off and he takes a sniper shot meant for the villain.

To the very end, Peter is sacrificing himself for others.

Mentally. Physically. Emotionally.

We’ve caught up to his age, but not to his losses. Most of us haven’t had a moment where we lost so much. We’ve had brief periods of loss, but nothing that approaches what he’s gone through. His story isn’t a 1:1 mapping of our lives, but it is a preview of what most of us aren’t ready for. What Peter shows is what it actually costs to be the kind of person who does right when challenged again and again with nothing to gain. I hope none of us ever face anything close to what Peter faced. But if we face even a fraction of it, I hope we find a sliver of his courage and integrity.

Spider-Man Brand New Day is a reminder that there’s another way to answer why keep going when no one’s watching. Because good is still worth doing on its own terms. Movies like these—they don’t just entertain us, they orient us. Watching Peter get up again and again and do the right thing, we start to believe we can do the same.

Peter grew out of the need for external validation. He gained independence. And like him, we are on the same journey of personhood and fighting through loss, although on a hopefully much longer timeline.

But the second lesson Brand New Day leaves us with is simply to find others who support us, especially when we are struggling. And for four grueling years Peter chooses to handle all his challenges alone. But by the end, that finally takes a turn for the better.

The movie ends with Peter at the typical New York bodega about to leave with a bouquet of roses in hand for presumably Aunt May’s grave. Ned is there too, sitting alone, scrolling on his phone, in no rush to be anywhere. Peter’s hand is already on the door when he stops, hesitates for a second with flowers dangling, weighing what to do. Then, he lets the door swing shut behind him and walks over.

He introduces himself like they’re meeting for the first time and reaches out for a handshake. But their hands don’t do a normal handshake. They slip, without either of them quite deciding to, into their secret high school best friends handshake—from muscle memory older than the spell that erased it. Ned looks confused mid-motion, like his body knows something his mind doesn’t. When it ends, he pauses. Something flickers across his face. And Ned exclaims “Peter!” like he finally remembered who Peter truly was in that moment.

Whether MJ finds her way back to him too, we don’t know.

We don’t know how much of their relationship can survive and rebuild after the memories of it are taken away.

We don’t know whether Peter will ever completely get back the life he lost.

But after four years of choosing to do the right thing with no one watching, Peter finally chooses to rediscover his long lost friendships. And for the first time in a long time, he isn’t walking away from someone he loves.

And maybe, just maybe, Peter Parker is still there after all.

Philosopher Agnes Callard describes two states we have as humans. One comes first, and the second is what we are all perhaps in right now.

When you are a child, you have what she calls a wishing mind. You have dreams that are wild, adventurous, even out of this world. You are not confined by this world’s rules, physics, and limitations. There’s a reason why children are noted for their creativity. They are all artists imagining the world in ways that adults simply can’t see anymore.

I remember when I was a child, I drew on walls with crayons and markers telling the tales of vast fantasys I imagined. I sailed across the wooden floor with my blanket as if I was Columbus himself. I was in a world where I didn’t know of limitations.

But when we get older, this creative side of you fades — your wishing mind. And it slowly happens. First, elementary school teaches you to obey your teachers, to follow rules. This is when recess starts. This is when recess ends.

One day, your parents expect you to watch the house, to cook the rice, to take care of your younger sibling. And now there’s little time for what you once did as a child. And perhaps its a dual mechanism: less time and increased cognitive capacity to reason and not just dream.

And at some point, the rules stop being something done to you and start being something you do to yourself. That’s what ambition is. The moment external expectation becomes a goal you tell yourself is entirely your own.

When you get to the start of high school, you’re expected to have ambition. To be one who grind extracurriculars, studies hard, and eventually go on to the best colleges. The students without ambition don’t fall behind, but they don’t get ahead. They stay around the area for college, have fun with friends, and put their meaning outside of their work.

By the time you’re a teenager, you’ve been trained — by school, by your family, by the culture around you to ask one question constantly: how do I get from here to there? That question is the working mind.

The working mind is about reconciling your goals and your actions. It is realizing the limitations of the universe and modifying your plan. It is charting a path from point A to B. And removing oneself from imagination into calculation.

As we get older, the culture of how you spend time shifts. We spend less time creating. We imagine less. We instead spend our time optimizing, working, and thinking. And there’s a big difference in imagining something and thinking about something.

Imagining has no destination. You’re just picturing something. There’s no plan attached, no steps required to get there. Thinking is the opposite. It’s the act of figuring out how to get from where you are to where you want to be. One is a picture. The other is a path.

If you’re like me, it’s been a while since you’ve picked up a pencil and simply drawn. It’s been a while since you’ve been able to be entertained by your own thoughts rather than an external source. It’s been a while since you’ve truly dreamed about something rather than thinking concretely about how to do something. We’re hotwired to optimize, plan, and surround ourselves with a culture that prides itself on being busy, working hard, and winning.

But it’s not like you permanently exist in one state or the other. Callard argues that love can pull us back into the wishing mind. Not by shutting off the working mind entirely though as you still have to think about compatibility and wonder if it makes sense with your life. You’re still doing the math. But underneath that, your wishing mind also appears. Maybe its when you’re driving, heck even doing the dishes, or half-listening to a friend, and suddenly there’s a whole scene playing in your head: a future, a version of life, a person you’ve talked to twice already living in your imagination. That’s the feeling. You build an entire world out of someone you’ve only just met and for a moment, you’re a kid again. Sailing across the floor on a blanket — except this time, someone else is in the boat with you.

And yet, our lives are often limited into this state of a working mind. Because that’s how society sets everything up. From the formalities of high school to the pressure in job seeking in college, to the structure and menial grunt of your 20s. Time to ponder. Time to imagine. Time to create. They all fade away.

And this behavior only gets worse as you become more ambitious.

Big goals means less time for dreaming. It means you stay in the working mind.

I bring this up because I just spent a few days inside perhaps the most working-mind city in the world. And while the ambition is there, I’m not totally sure all of it is a good thing.

This was a sign I saw the other day in San Francisco:

San Francisco is a city like none other. Because when you fly in here, you will notice that all the ads here are AI and tech related. A quarter of the cars are autonomously driven. No other city in America is like this. New York has the glamor and materialism. Chicago billboards sell insurance. Boston lwk got everything (#1 city).

But SF seems warped into fully being shelled by AI and tech. It’s the entire culture. Every billboard is selling the working mind. Optimize this. Automate that. Ten times more efficiency. It’s a city of optimizers. A city of the working mind.

And that essence, that soul does feel missing. The young people here are hyperfixated on simply making a sh*t ton of money.

And to what end?

The conversations I’ve had with people are about creating billion dollar companies.

It seems like the primary reason people are here is to be great, to become a billionare, to win.

But to that I say why?

Like don’t get me wrong, I want to be rich. I want to be able to eat out anytime, travel, not feel burdened by what I can or cannot do because of money.

But the question nobody’s asking is—what impact are you creating?

Who are you helping? Why are you doing this?

The upside of being a founder is, of course, the monetary outcomes you can gain, but more importantly its the unique problem you solve, the special team you create, and the personal fulfillment of solving something you truly care about.

If you’re founding to get rich, congrats! You’ve reinvented a job, with worse hours and a marginal probability of never having to work again.

But if you are founding because you truly care about an issue, a particular group of people, and have personal ties to this issue, then I believe that’s the best version of what founding should be.

Ambition can be useful, but only when its directed towards a good goal.

Ambition on the wrong goal is often worse than no ambition at all.

I think the first conversation we need to have is not whether we need to aim bigger, but what will make us fulfilled in the first place.

Ambition assumes that bigger always means better, that more is the natural next step no matter how good things already are. But I don’t think this is true. And perhaps this story explains it better than I ever could.

The great irony is that we might already be the fisherman, while still carrying the banker’s mind around in our head.

And if I’m honest, I think I might already have enough. Good food. Friends nearby. Time for nature, for exploration, for thinking, for reading. In theory, that should be everything I need.

But ambition doesn’t really care what I know in theory. Ambition doesn’t stop at what I already have. It nags at what I don’t have. It’s the pull I felt in high school, telling me to grind a little more, want a little more, and become a little more.

Do I really need a billion dollars?

No. But I might still go chase it.

But if I do, I just hope it’s for a problem I actually care about. Not the version of ambition in high school, dressed up as something I chose myself.

This was a project I organized in the latter half of the Spring semester.

Harvard means something different depending on where you are in it. A freshman and a senior share the same study spots and the same Cambridge winters, and yet they’re living almost entirely different lives, both entering into new chapters of their lives. I wanted to see what, if anything, connects those experiences, and if there are any takeaways and lessons we can learn from this shared place we experience together. The following is written by students at Harvard from each grade level.

In the future, I would love for more people who would want to help write! Let me know if you’d be interested by emailing me at zachchen@college.harvard.edu

Written by Lena - Class of 2029:

One of the first things I learned when I got to campus this fall was that nearly everything is late here. That struck me oddly. I expected everyone to be just as type-A as I was, showing up five minutes early to everything, with a perfectly color-coded Google Calendar (personal events in pink, workouts in yellow, classes in blue). But about five hours into my freshman year, I was quickly made aware that start times here are more of a suggestion. Standing on the steps of Widener, waiting for my pre-orientation group to be announced, I met many of my new classmates. It was a pleasant experience, all in all. I made some new friends, trauma-bonded over shivering in the cold. A girl I have rarely seen since offered me her hoodie; I gratefully accepted. I had expected cold precision, but I was met with lateness and laughter. This year, I had the privilege of running with the Harvard College Run Club. If you check our mailing list, we meet at 4:45. If you were to show up at 4:45, you can expect to be waiting for at least 5 minutes. All of this to say: people at Harvard are uniquely busy. It is impossible to be in nine places at once, and so the gcal truly does become more of a suggestion, a menu rather than an agenda.

Before coming to Harvard, I honestly wasn’t sure if I would like the environment. I spent years of my life saying I didn’t like Harvard, partially to be contrarian, but partially because I truly believed it would be too preppy, too formal, too smart. I expected the people to be power-hungry geniuses with hypercompetitive personalities that made for brutal conversations. I expected perfect time management, perfect outfits, and an unhealthy obsession with work. I certainly didn’t expect anyone to actually care about having a good time. Obviously, everyone at Harvard only went there for the education. Deep down though, I’m not sure anyone would turn down Harvard, so when I was fortunate enough to get in, I had to give it a shot. Despite all my years of hating, Harvard is undeniably an incredible place. Beyond this, however, the people are not perfect, and they DO enjoy things. Yes, everyone is wildly talented, just as I predicted. But, the people here are also interesting, and willing to talk with you about the things they are interested in.

As I reflect on my freshman year, I know that it is truly the people who make Harvard the place it is. Something I’ve come to realize is that here, a single interaction can make you friends with someone. Everyone seems to know everyone, a product of general friendliness and the unashamed willingness to ask for someone’s name over, and over, and over again. People here will show up for you and make time for you, even with overwhelmingly packed schedules. But beyond that, there is something ethereal about the busyness, the lateness, the constant rush that everyone seems to be managing so well. There is a buzzing hum about the entire campus, because there simply is never enough time in the day. The Harvard student is the embodiment of Ben Franklin’s adage: if you want something done, ask a busy person. In spite of, or perhaps because of, heavy courseloads and lengthy extracurriculars, Harvard students are excelling. The people I meet day to day are not only talented; they are interesting. They are engaged with the world around them, and they stay that way by consistently filling their time.

Lately I’ve been ruminating on the fact that while we’re often told to do things because “life is short,” life is actually quite long. Our time at Harvard may be short, but I don’t think Harvard students fill their days in an attempt to do everything before it’s too late. Instead, they are embracing the fact that life is long and using their time to make their lives as full as possible. People here didn’t peak in high school. They’re still working, still waiting for their peak. The definitive characteristic of Harvard culture is a consistent drive toward self-improvement. This has influenced me in countless ways. In my classes, I am inspired to strive for greater understanding, constantly surprised by how much people absorb. In clubs, I’m encouraged by people’s ability to befriend and connect with everyone around them. Even in my friendships, I have been pushed to improve–whether that means working out more, or spending a Saturday volunteering.

The chaos of Harvard can seem overwhelming at times, but it is ultimately encouraging. It is a sign of life, a beautiful reminder that there are still people who care, who are striving for more. There may never be quite enough time for everything, but at Harvard, that doesn’t stop anyone from doing the most they can, even if it means showing up a few minutes late.

Written by Zach Chen, Sophomore - Class of 2028:

There’s a quiet irony to the pace of life in college. When you’re in school and studying, all you want is to be done. But after you’re done and you’ve rested up, all you want is to come back to school and see your friends again. There seems to be this tension with our lives — a push and pull we can never quite resolve.

Sophomore year was no different. It was tough. In some ways, sophomore year is a transition point. If freshman year is about getting acquainted with college, making friends, and having fun, then sophomore year is about getting a job, taking hard classes, and becoming integrated with the Harvard ecosystem and people.

But doing those things well don’t come easily. One of the main challenges I’ve noticed is socially. Maintaining and growing relationships is hard. Everyone is so busy. And if you don’t put in effort into a relationship, it can easily fade. A lot of this year is implicitly or explicitly choosing who you want to spend time with, or spending time alone. What strikes me is how little of that choosing feels truly intentional. It just happens. You look up in April and realize you haven’t seen someone you genuinely like in two months, and neither of you did anything wrong. Life just moved on without you.

On that note, we are shaped and influenced by our environment much more than we like to think: the houses we are sorted into, the people we surround ourselves by, the preorientation programs we get. All of it plays a role in our experience at college and in life. And while we are all shaped by these different factors, college life seems to rhyme in a way where we can understand and speak the same language of our shared background. Never the same exact way, but similar enough where we form creeds of shared identity. Harvard. Our houses. Clubs. Recruiting. Careers.

Another thing we love is optimization. Every one of us is calculating the next best step to take. Whether that’s walking this specific way to Lamont so I can study for 3 minutes longer, or thinking about career paths, or how best to navigate romantic interests. But in that pursuit of optimizing everything, we might miss the very reason to live. We live, as humans, not to be some cog in a machine or a system but to experience fully everything life has to offer — the grief, the stillness, the joy, the push to become better, the feeling of water rushing down your face, and more. And perhaps there are parts of our lives missing simply because we’ve treated too much of our lives as a game to be won rather than a life to be lived.

It seems engrained in our system that we do so. It’s a way of thinking we build up from high school and which carries over to college and how we approach our lives after too. Figure out the game and then go win it.

Psychologically, the end of sophomore year is scary because you know that the next time you step foot on campus you’ll be more than halfway done. You’re going to be a junior. And juniors? They’re the upperclassmen. In some way you have to command respect and be the older figure on campus that underclassmen can look up to. It felt like just yesterday that we all arrived at Harvard for the first time. The first time eating at Berg during Visitas. The first friend made. The first hangout. Those first few months felt like they would last forever. But we all knew time just keeps rolling on, and soon it was spring and then summer, and then we were back here again as sophomores. And now we’re going to be juniors.

It’s a little sad but it’s interesting to think about—halfway through college and most of us are still single. During this semester, I noticed the lack of romance there is at Harvard. Most of my friends are single, myself included. Culturally, we seem to care much more about our careers than our love lives. Finals period is for studying. Each week’s problem set seems to take the whole week up. The weekends are for recovering. And in between it all there’s almost no time to find someone let alone get to know them well enough for a relationship.

What makes it worse is the culture surrounding dating. Word spreads like wildfire. When one person makes a move and things don’t work out, they give up. Long gone are the days of cold approach. When someone is talking or dating, they wonder if they can find someone better. Better to drop them than to miss finding the one true love.

In my PHIL16 class this semester — sex, love, and friendship — we talked about how there was a sex recession on campuses across America, and globally too. More and more young people are having less sex, spending less time in relationships, and spending more time alone. What’s interesting is that we all recognize the truth of this at Harvard. We all feel it. But we feel powerless to change anything. It’s a fundamental cultural issue. A malaise affecting us all.

While this issue is not unique to Harvard, Harvard also seems to be a uniquely fertile place for it to occur. The people who come here are the students who spent high school sacrificing their relationships & love lives for academics & extracurriculars. It’s what we’ve done all this time. And maybe Harvard becomes the second place where it happens again, almost automatically, without anyone deciding it should.

The causes run deeper than campus culture though. They are societal, political, technological. Quantitatively, humans are doing better than ever before but qualitatively, life quality has stayed flat or quietly decayed. I think this is especially true when it comes to relationships. Phones, and the technological sprawl that followed afterwards like apps, have made things convenient while degrading the very connections they’re supposed to help with. Social media has amplified objectification, made parasocial relationships feel like real ones, and created a culture that rewards our first-order desires — the ones that feel good in the moment — over our second-order desires, the ones that actually improve us and the world around us.

And yet, when the semester ends and you finally exhale and go home and sleep and stop thinking about problem sets for a week — something strange happens. You start to miss it. Not the stress, not the recruiting anxiety, not the optimization. You miss the people. The late nights in someone’s common room that were supposed to be study sessions and became something else entirely. The dining hall conversations that meandered into philosophy and then into gossip. That feeling of walking into Quincy dining hall and knowing, without checking, that there will be someone there you’re glad to see.

That’s the quiet irony I started with, and I’m not sure I’ve resolved it. Maybe it doesn’t need resolving. The PSETs, the recruiting, the optimization — none of that is what you’ll miss. But all of it happened alongside people, and that’s the part that stays.

There’s something strange about the way Harvard bonds you to people. It’s not like summer camp or a road trip, where the closeness comes from uninterrupted time together. It’s almost the opposite — you’re all under the same pressure, running the same race, and somewhere in between the problem sets and the recruiting cycles and the dining hall meals that last exactly as long as your next obligation allows, you look around and realize these people know you. Not because you gave them the time to, but because the place didn’t leave any of you much choice. You were all just here, together, trying to figure it out.

And so when it ends — when you pack up your room and drive home and the semester finally releases its grip — it’s not the classes you think about. It’s running into someone on the way to class, stopping for five minutes, and walking away feeling lighter than you did before. That’s a small thing. But after a year of everyone being so busy, of relationships fading quietly because no one had the bandwidth to maintain them, of a campus full of people feeling lonelier than it should — a small thing like that starts to feel like everything.

Written by Wilmer Reyes-Rosales, Junior - Class of 2027, Psych Concentrator:

The thought of going to a college miles away from home scared me. However, going to Harvard seemed like an incredible opportunity for me. I remember arriving freshman year, terrified that no one would talk to me. Harvard felt so much bigger than the small rural town I came from. I thought I would somehow be behind before I even started. The people here surprised me, proving to be some of the best individuals I have ever met.

I didn’t click with everyone, and I acknowledged that it was okay. Harvard can feel intimidating and lonely sometimes. But most people I met were also trying to figure out who they were as individuals. Once I stopped trying so hard to seem impressive and simply let myself be friendly, things slowly fell into place. I found people who genuinely liked me for me.

A lot of my Harvard experience was shaped by extracurriculars. Fuerza Latina gave me a cultural sense of familiarity and warmth that reminded me of home. The Harvard Vietnamese Association introduced me to people and traditions I probably never would have encountered if I hadn’t put myself out there. Joining the Harvard Asian American Dance Troupe pushed me outside my comfort zone in the best way, and I now realize that I love dancing! Lastly, working at The Harvard Shop became meaningful because of the friendships formed during fun and stressful shifts.

Looking back, I realize most of my favorite memories are not tied to achievements. They are tied to people. Harvard has taught me that friendships are both fragile and beautiful. I have made many close friends here, and I have also lost some along the way. Some friendships faded because life became busy. Others changed because we changed. It is simply part of growing up. Even if we no longer talk every day, those people remain in my heart because they shaped parts of who I became.

For some reason, I also keep getting attached to seniors. Every year, I meet upperclassmen who become mentors, role models, or older siblings away from home. And every year, it hurts watching them graduate. There’s something emotional about seeing your best friends every day around campus and then suddenly watching them move into entirely new lives. Watching everything they accomplish inspires me. Watching them reassures me that life continues beyond Harvard. The strangest part is realizing that next year, I will be in their shoes.

Junior year feels like standing in the middle of a bridge. I am no longer the scared freshman who arrived unsure if he belonged, but I also am not yet at the end. I can finally look back and recognize how much I have changed. One of the biggest changes has been realizing what I actually want from my future. When I first came to Harvard, I felt pressure to chase prestige because that is what it often feels like everyone here is doing. Over time, though, I realized the moments that fulfilled me most were always connected to helping people feel seen, supported, and safe.

Somewhere between psychology classes, mentoring experiences, and late-night conversations with friends, I figured out I want to become a therapist. I want to work with underserved communities, especially children and adolescents. I want to create spaces where people feel emotionally safe in ways many of us did not always have growing up. Harvard helped me realize that success means very little to me if I cannot use it to help others. I also just want to be happy.

Another unexpected gift Harvard gave me was a love for language learning. I started taking Portuguese here on a whim, and it completely changed me. The Portuguese department has been one of the warmest and most supportive communities I have found at Harvard. Learning the language opened up an entirely new world for me and fostered a deeper love for languages in general. Now, I hope to eventually learn French, Italian, Vietnamese, and Korean too. Language learning feels less like an academic requirement and more like a way of connecting with people and cultures beyond my own.

Harvard also taught me something I never fully believed about myself before: I can work hard. There were many moments when I doubted whether I was capable enough to keep going. Difficult semesters, late nights studying, balancing responsibilities, and feeling emotionally exhausted at times. But over time, I realized there is a unique satisfaction in reaching the finish line after struggling through something difficult. Not because everything turned out perfectly, but because I proved to myself that I could endure it.

Going into my junior year, I became involved with FYRE (First-Year Retreat Experience) as a team leader. FYRE is Harvard’s pre-orientation program designed to support first-generation, low-income students as they navigate the transition into higher education. Since I was once a FYRE participant myself coming into Harvard, returning as a team leader felt deeply personal. I saw so much of my freshman self in the students I mentored: scared, uncertain, but hopeful. Being able to guide them through that transition reminded me why mentorship and community matter so much. I hope to continue serving my communities long after graduation because those experiences shaped me just as much as any class ever did.

I am still trying to figure out who I will become, but I feel like I have an idea and a plan. Honestly, I think it’s also okay not to have a plan. I know my passion, drive, and love for learning will carry me somewhere meaningful. I am no longer the guy who first arrived at Harvard afraid that nobody would talk to him. And I think that quiet transformation, the one that happens slowly through ordinary days, friendships, heartbreaks, conversations, and moments of growth, is probably the most important part of college.

Written by Anonymous Senior - Class of 2026:

There’s something strange about the end of college: everyone talks about it constantly, and yet it still feels unreal. As the year comes to a close, I don’t think graduation has actually hit me yet. Harvard has existed for so long as its own sealed world, a world where the people I love most are only a few steps away at any moment. The idea that this chapter is ending still feels abstract, like something happening in the distance rather than something already arriving.

But yesterday, for a brief moment, it became real for a moment. We were talking about what our friendships would look like after graduation, and suddenly I could feel the weight of it. Right now, friendship feels effortless. It lives in proximity. In late-night walks, spontaneous knock-on-the-door conversations, sitting beside each other in dining halls without planning it days in advance. There is such a quiet luxury in knowing the people who matter most to you are always nearby. Soon, that version of closeness will disappear. The ease of walking two minutes just to say hello will no longer exist. Our lives will scatter into different cities, jobs, routines, and timelines. Interactions that now feel ordinary may eventually become reduced to a few catch-up calls a year, occasional texts, maybe weekends carved out months in advance.

And somehow, I already feel at peace with that before it has even happened. Maybe because it feels inevitable. Or maybe because I feel so deeply invested in these friendships now that I trust they will survive distance, even if they change form. I think college teaches you that love is not always measured by frequency. Some people become so embedded in your life that even absence cannot fully remove them. There are friendships that stop being circumstantial and start becoming part of the architecture of who you are.

I keep realizing something else, too: every phase of life feels enormous while you are inside of it. Completely consuming. At different moments in college, I thought certain failures, heartbreaks, anxieties, or uncertainties would define everything forever. But when I look back now, those moments seem smaller somehow– not insignificant, but no longer world-ending. Time softens things. Distance reorganizes what once felt unbearable. Looking ahead at the vastness of the future makes the past shrink into something almost tender.

Maybe that is part of what Harvard actually does to a person. Not just intellectually, but emotionally. It compresses life into an intensity that feels all-encompassing while you are inside it. The relationships feel permanent, the stress feels existential, the ambitions feel urgent. And then, slowly, you leave the bubble and realize the world is much larger than this place ever allowed you to imagine. Harvard becomes less of a physical place and more of a lens through which you understand ambition, intimacy, insecurity, success, loneliness, and yourself.

I think what lingers after college is not the prestige or even the accomplishments people talk about most. It is the strange ache of realizing that an entire world once existed so vividly around you, and one day it simply became a memory. Yet maybe growing up is learning that endings are rarely as catastrophic as they feel in advance. Life keeps expanding beyond every version of yourself you thought was permanent. And someday, this moment that feels so immense right now will also become small in retrospect– another beautiful, temporary chapter folded quietly into the rest of a life.

There’s a quiet irony to the pace of life in college. When you’re in school and studying, all you want is to be done. But after you’re done and you’ve rested up, all you want is to come back to school and see your friends again. There seems to be this tension with our lives — a push and pull we can never quite resolve.

Sophomore year was no different. It was tough. In some ways, sophomore year is a transition point. If freshman year is about getting acquainted with college, making friends, and having fun, then sophomore year is about getting a job, taking hard classes, and becoming integrated with the Harvard ecosystem and people.

But doing those things well don’t come easily. One of the main challenges I’ve noticed is socially. Maintaining and growing relationships is hard. Everyone is so busy. And if you don’t put in effort into a relationship, it can easily fade. A lot of this year is implicitly or explicitly choosing who you want to spend time with, or spending time alone. What strikes me is how little of that choosing feels truly intentional. It just happens. You look up in April and realize you haven’t seen someone you genuinely like in two months, and neither of you did anything wrong. Life just moved on without you.

On that note, we are shaped and influenced by our environment much more than we like to think: the houses we are sorted into, the people we surround ourselves by, the preorientation programs we get. All of it plays a role in our experience at college and in life. And while we are all shaped by these different factors, college life seems to rhyme in a way where we can understand and speak the same language of our shared background. Never the same exact way, but similar enough where we form creeds of shared identity. Harvard. Our houses. Clubs. Recruiting. Careers.

Another thing we love is optimization. Every one of us is calculating the next best step to take. Whether that’s walking this specific way to Lamont so I can study for 3 minutes longer, or thinking about career paths, or how best to navigate romantic interests. But in that pursuit of optimizing everything, we might miss the very reason to live. We live, as humans, not to be some cog in a machine or a system but to experience fully everything life has to offer — the grief, the stillness, the joy, the push to become better, the feeling of water rushing down your face, and more. And perhaps there are parts of our lives missing simply because we’ve treated too much of our lives as a game to be won rather than a life to be lived.

It seems engrained in our system that we do so. It’s a way of thinking we build up from high school and which carries over to college and how we approach our lives after too. Figure out the game and then go win it.

Psychologically, the end of sophomore year is scary because you know that the next time you step foot on campus you’ll be more than halfway done. You’re going to be a junior. And juniors? They’re the upperclassmen. In some way you have to command respect and be the older figure on campus that underclassmen can look up to. It felt like just yesterday that we all arrived at Harvard for the first time. The first time eating at Berg during Visitas. The first friend made. The first hangout. Those first few months felt like they would last forever. But we all knew time just keeps rolling on, and soon it was spring and then summer, and then we were back here again as sophomores. And now we’re going to be juniors.

It’s a little sad but it’s interesting to think about—halfway through college and most of us are still single. During this semester, I noticed the lack of romance there is at Harvard. Most of my friends are single, myself included. Culturally, we seem to care much more about our careers than our love lives. Finals period is for studying. Each week’s problem set seems to take the whole week up. The weekends are for recovering. And in between it all there’s almost no time to find someone let alone get to know them well enough for a relationship.

What makes it worse is the culture surrounding dating. Word spreads like wildfire. When one person makes a move and things don’t work out, they give up. Long gone are the days of cold approach. When someone is talking or dating, they wonder if they can find someone better. Better to drop them than to miss finding the one true love.

In my PHIL16 class this semester — sex, love, and friendship — we talked about how there was a sex recession on campuses across America, and globally too. More and more young people are having less sex, spending less time in relationships, and spending more time alone. What’s interesting is that we all recognize the truth of this at Harvard. We all feel it. But we feel powerless to change anything. It’s a fundamental cultural issue. A malaise affecting us all.

While this issue is not unique to Harvard, Harvard also seems to be a uniquely fertile place for it to occur. The people who come here are the students who spent high school sacrificing their relationships & love lives for academics & extracurriculars. It’s what we’ve done all this time. And maybe Harvard becomes the second place where it happens again, almost automatically, without anyone deciding it should.

The causes run deeper than campus culture though. They are societal, political, technological. Quantitatively, humans are doing better than ever before but qualitatively, life quality has stayed flat or quietly decayed. I think this is especially true when it comes to relationships. Phones, and the technological sprawl that followed afterwards like apps, have made things convenient while degrading the very connections they’re supposed to help with. Social media has amplified objectification, made parasocial relationships feel like real ones, and created a culture that rewards our first-order desires — the ones that feel good in the moment — over our second-order desires, the ones that actually improve us and the world around us.

And yet, when the semester ends and you finally exhale and go home and sleep and stop thinking about problem sets for a week — something strange happens. You start to miss it. Not the stress, not the recruiting anxiety, not the optimization. You miss the people. The late nights in someone’s common room that were supposed to be study sessions and became something else entirely. The dining hall conversations that meandered into philosophy and then into gossip. That feeling of walking into Quincy dining hall and knowing, without checking, that there will be someone there you’re glad to see.

That’s the quiet irony I started with, and I’m not sure I’ve resolved it. Maybe it doesn’t need resolving. The PSETs, the recruiting, the optimization — none of that is what you’ll miss. But all of it happened alongside people, and that’s the part that stays.

There’s something strange about the way Harvard bonds you to people. It’s not like summer camp or a road trip, where the closeness comes from uninterrupted time together. It’s almost the opposite — you’re all under the same pressure, running the same race, and somewhere in between the problem sets and the recruiting cycles and the dining hall meals that last exactly as long as your next obligation allows, you look around and realize these people know you. Not because you gave them the time to, but because the place didn’t leave any of you much choice. You were all just here, together, trying to figure it out.

And so when it ends — when you pack up your room and drive home and the semester finally releases its grip — it’s not the classes you think about. It’s running into someone on the way to class, stopping for five minutes, and walking away feeling lighter than you did before. That’s a small thing. But after a year of everyone being so busy, of relationships fading quietly because no one had the bandwidth to maintain them, of a campus full of people feeling lonelier than it should — a small thing like that starts to feel like everything.

Tocqueville feared exactly this — not the tyrant who commands, but the force so mild and constant that it crowds out the occasion for self-reflection entirely. He called it tutelary power: a governing presence so provident that citizens were relieved of every occasion for self-governance, kept in a state of perpetual childhood. But in his time, the institutions he feared were too clumsy to fully achieve it. The Napoleonic bureau recorded whether you had served in the Grande Armée, but not that you returned from Moscow unable to sleep. It logged your land to the hectare, but not that you were one bad harvest from ruin. The form captured the outline of a life; the life itself escaped. Institutions touched the surface — your category, your legal status, your taxable income — but left the interior untouched. And in that interior, second-order thoughts survived. You could still ask, in the private hours, what you actually wanted. Who you were trying to become. The institution never followed you there.

The algorithm does.

This is what makes it categorically different from anything Tocqueville imagined. It is genuinely minute — tracking not just what you chose but how long you paused before choosing, not just where you went but what you almost clicked. It is genuinely regular — present at three in the morning, in the bedroom, in the private hours that were once simply your own. For the first time in history, there is no unobserved self. No gap the institution failed to reach. No interior left untouched.

And into that interior it pours first-order satisfaction so continuous and so precisely calibrated that the second-order question — what do I want, who am I becoming — never quite surfaces. When you are grieving, it notices that grief makes you scroll longer and serves you accordingly. When you reach for your phone out of habit, it rewards the reach. When anxiety makes you more reactive, it learns what your anxiety responds to and feeds it back. It does not ask what you need. It has no interest in your second-order desires, in the self you are reaching toward, in the distance between who you are at three in the morning and who you intended to be. It was built to keep you. And it is very good at its job.

Remove the occasion for self-reflection gradually enough, and nothing dramatic happens. The capacity simply goes unexercised — the way a language fades when there is no one left to speak it with. Perhaps that is what we should fear most: not the tyranny that announces itself, but the satisfaction so perfectly delivered that we never feel the need to ask what it costs. Not the loss of freedom, but the loss of the desire for it.

Our perception of time is strange. On one hand, we can barely recall events that happened a week ago, and on the other, there’s a few critical moments in our lives we will always remember. Memory is selective like that. We keep the highlights to remember why life is great, discard the mundane because it lacks meaning, and keep the lowlights so we can become better people.

But there’s something else playing here too. Over time, everything begins to fade. Even though it’s only been two years, senior year of high school feels like it belongs to someone else’s life. The version of me that used to wake up at 6 AM, shuffle through those same yellowish hallways, sit in those strangely comfortable plastic seats — that person feels impossibly far away. The shape of life back then is completely unrecognizable from what I’m living now.

We’re in a new chapter now. One that’s unwritten and continuing to evolve. But every so often, you get to briefly flip back through the old pages. Maybe it’s reconnecting with a high school teacher who still remembers your name. Showing up to that one show your school always puts on, sitting in the audience now instead of on the stage. Meeting up with old friends and feeling, just for a moment, like no time has passed at all — even though everything has. Those moments are just glimpses, but they’re warm. Familiar and close, like pressing your face against glass and feeling the heat still radiating from the other side. You’re back where you were all those years ago.

But memory is cold. When you sit and ponder and you really think—something shifts. The warmth drains out and what’s left is distortion, softness, that particular ache we call nostalgia. A reminder that you were only ever visiting. And that you can never truly go back.

Things begin to fade even faster when you don’t think about it. With how busy things get during the school year, you don’t have time to ponder your past or revisit memories, you’re stuck in the present or thinking about your future. It’s only during times like break where you have a moment to yourself. There’s no schoolwork, no tests to worry about, and you can direct your energy onto the past.

So when break finally arrives and the noise stops — you’d think the past would rush back in. Instead, it just feels strange. As I’ve mentioned in a previous article I’ve written: A semester gone already?

One day you’re studying as much as you can in Lamont or Widener, and the next, you’re free. The teacher thanks you for your time and hard work, and wishes you well. And then, you’re off. No schoolwork, no tests, now you have to decide what to do with your time.

And that feels strange. From complete focus in studying to complete freedom. We’re not used to such a sudden switch in cognitive states, and that’s what makes it feel weird—like we’re missing something. Something about purpose and work that doesn’t feel aligned when we switch so quickly.

And maybe that’s exactly what makes the silence so revealing — without the noise of deadlines, you start to notice what’s actually passing. Now that I’m on break, I’ve been thinking more about how quick my college experience has gone by. I’m almost half way done with college. And that honestly is scary. Scary because I feel like I don’t have the skills to work in a job and scary because it feels like its moving way too quickly.

4 years seem like a long time, but yet it doesn’t.

Seniors I knew as a freshmen are now working. Juniors I knew as a freshmen are now seniors. Sophomores I knew as a freshmen are now juniors.

Time just keeps going, indifferent to whether you feel ready or not. And yet there’s still so much that needs to be done. I feel like I’ve learned a fraction of what I was meant to learn in college. And while it’s true that you can’t feel yourself changing, it still feels like I’m not ready to go out in the “real world”. But perhaps, you never do.

And wow. I’m 20. I’ve reached living two decades and I’m not getting any younger.

The pressure to do something is real. Everyone wants to leave behind a legacy. And honestly, we’re always so focused on what’s ahead. The next job. The next romantic partner. The next city we want to move to. In all that forward momentum, the past gets treated like dead weight — something to move on from, not return to. We lose time to slow down, and we forget the journey we are on in the first place.

Our society is very much forward facing. Our culture surrounds questions and ideas like:

What are you doing this summer?

What are your goals?

What classes are you taking next semester?

Very rarely do we talk about the past.

What made last semester so amazing?

What do you miss from high school?

How would you characterize freshman year?

And so entire chapters of our lives quietly close, unremarked upon. If we don’t think about these things, we will forget them. We’ll forget the experiences we’ve lived through that made us so lucky and happy in the first place. And if we don’t spend some time trying to think about the past, soon enough, it’ll all be a blur in our minds. And when we do try to look back, we’ll have nothing to think back to at all.

Reflection is what changes that. It’s what allows us to give meaning to our journeys and how we can come to appreciate what we already have. We should make time just to think about the past. To have gratitude for the experiences and people in our lives.

So this break, I’m definitely trying to get ahead and get a job for this summer, but I think part of the time I want to spend during break will be for thinking. Just reflecting on this past semester.

Because one way or another, time moves forward.

And the weeks will blur. And soon enough, we’ll be here again, wondering how did another year pass?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like celebrating my own birthdays. At least, especially not for the past few years. In some way it feels weird since it just feels like another typical day. And I’m sure most of us feel this way.

Celebrating birthdays like many other traditions sort of became imposed on you naturally. When we’re born, we have no idea what day we were birthed into the world. It’s up to our parents to tell us, and to celebrate it, and eventually our friends to celebrate it as well.

As I got older, birthday parties fell through. High school especially was about the grind, not about birthdays. We would almost never celebrate our birthdays and this became the norm I came to accept. In college, however, a reversal happened.

Celebrating birthdays became the norm. Friends would plan secret parties, send gifts, and gather all their friends to eat cake and enjoy the time they had together. Birthday celebrations became a natural break in the busyness of college.

Maybe your experience is different. This is just what I noticed in my experiences.

But through all of this, I never questioned or thought why we celebrate birthdays.

Here’s my thoughts.

I think at its worst, birthdays is about celebrating the natural act of getting older.

We all do and it’s a part of life. It's like a psychological milestone we impose on ourselves. When you become a teenager, you feel like you have to act like one—like what the movies portray teenagers are like—petty, witty, and explorative. When you become 18, you tell yourself—now I have to be mature. I’m an adult now. I can vote. I need to do my responsibilities. And when you become 20 (as I have), you realize you need to lock in. For most of your existence, you’ve lived in the 10s—the teenage years. But when you turn 20, that’s when you’re actually old. You must command respect, authority, and achievement.

So we celebrate birthdays because we get older. But this isn’t the best picture of the ideals of what birthdays represent.

At its best, I think birthdays isn’t about getting older. At its best birthdays as an idea represents something far greater: The power of bringing everyone you care about into one room.

There is not many moments in our lives where we will have all of our friends in one place. Maybe the two other examples I can think of is a wedding or a funeral. But in everyday life you don’t see all of your friends in one place. They’re all scattered across the world, across campus, and you are only able to see a few at a time. People come and go. You're very rarely able to be in a room with all your friends at the same time.

Maybe never.

Birthdays however is a moment where we can be with the people that we love and we hold dear in our lives. All in one place.

It’s perhaps one of the few moments in our lives before our eventual weddings which we can do so. And even then, a wedding is a one time event and about your spouse more than your friends (which is beautiful in its own way). But symbolically much different than spending time with your friends as you can during birthdays.

And so birthdays at its best isn’t about getting older, but is about friendship.

I’m in this class called Phil 16. The title is sex, love and friendship. And in it we covered Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which he talks about friendship.

Here’s what Aristotle says about it.

Friendship is most necessary to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich me and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends?

I think about my last birthday, just a week ago. Not the cake or the gifts. Just the moment when I looked around the room and realized: these people showed up. They carved out time in their busy schedules, remembered the date, and chose to be there.

That’s what Aristotle meant. All the prosperity in the world—all the achievements, all the milestones of getting older—what’s the point without people to share it with? It’s not about the fact that I turned a year older. It’s that for one night, the people scattered across campus and life came together. For me.

Maybe that’s why I’m starting to not mind birthdays as much anymore. They’re not really about getting older. They’re about the people who make getting older worth it.

Humans were born as social creatures. We thrive when we collaborate and work together. We want to talk to other people. And we care about one another. This isn’t a modern moral development; it is an evolutionary strategy.

Evidence from hundreds of thousands of years ago shows that precursors of Homo sapiens displayed profound empathy. Archaeologists found a nearly toothless Neanderthal jaw in France, dating back 170,000 to 190,000 years. This belonged to an adult who lived for months despite being virtually unable to chew. In a world of survival of the fittest, this individual only survived because others provided soft, specially prepared foods.

In the Shanidar Cave in Iraq, we found “Shanidar 1,” an older male with a withered arm, a fractured skull, and blindness in one eye. He lived for decades with these disabilities, proving his tribe valued and supported him long after his utility as a hunter had vanished. Similarly, in Vietnam, “Man Bac M9” survived for over a decade while paralyzed from the waist down 10,000 years ago. His survival required constant assistance with hygiene and feeding—a labor of love that yielded no material return for the group.

Humankind is defined by this empathy. It is what makes us human. But while this care is our natural state, the rise of modern technology and ideologies like nationalism prove that empathy is fragile. It can be systematically destroyed.

The Digital Erosion of Nuance

The first example is social media. Human attention spans have been weaponized; our dopamine systems are hijacked. We crave short-term rewards without the work, authenticity, or respect required for real human connection.

Instagram Reels and TikTok exemplify this. The algorithm does not reward truth; it rewards engagement, and nothing engages like outrage. Content that criticizes others, uses hyperbolic language, and lacks nuance goes viral because it provides an immediate “us vs. them” hit.

Polarization has reached a fever pitch. In the comments of political posts, nuance is treated as treason. We saw this when liberals celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk, or when Republicans labeled Alex Pretti an agitator while defending Kyle Rittenhouse’s right to carry. Both sides defend cases of where they believe they are right fervently, but when their side gets it wrong, they double down or become silent.

X/Twitter has become a black hole of unnuanced fuel where conversations are not truth-seeking but inflammatory. The algorithm gives us exactly what our basest instincts want: quick dopamine and a clear enemy.

Echo chambers have become prominent. I recently went to YouTube to check the comments of Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder’s fans and they continue to paint a completely different reality than what I see in the news. They are living through the same event but in a different lens. A lens that I simply cannot see through.

The Mechanics of Dehumanization: Unit 731

A second, more harrowing example comes from World War II. In the aftermath, historians wondered: how did millions participate in or ignore the Holocaust and the Japanese atrocities in Asia? How do you convince an empathetic social creature to treat another human as a “toy” for mutilation?

The answer is systematic otherization. The Japanese government cultivated the belief that the Yamato (Japanese) were a “master race.” While Koreans were occasionally included in this narrative to facilitate annexation, the Chinese were stripped of their humanity and categorized as subhuman.

This ideology peaked with Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research unit. To the doctors and soldiers there, the victims weren’t “people”—they were referred to as maruta, or “logs.” By changing the language, they changed the morality.

Medical Atrocities: Researchers performed vivisections without anesthesia, believing that using numbing agents would “contaminate” the results. They watched the human heart beat until it stopped, viewing the victim not as a person in pain, but as a biological specimen.

Weaponization of Disease: They injected prisoners with plague, cholera, and anthrax to study the progression of death. 14,000 people died from experiments within Unit 731's facility in China, with an additional 200,000 to 500,000 civilians dying from biological weapons developed and deployed by the unit.

Scientific Remoteness: By turning murder into “data,” the staff bypassed their natural empathy. This is the ultimate end-goal of “otherization”: to make the suffering of the “other” invisible or, worse, “necessary” for a “greater” cause.

Every man, woman, child, or living thing that entered a Unit 731 lab never came out of it alive. All of them died.

What is perhaps most chilling is that the personnel of Unit 731 were not uneducated foot soldiers; they were the elite. The unit was staffed by Japan’s brightest medical students, top-tier doctors, and leading life scientists. These were individuals whose professional oaths were dedicated to the preservation of life. Yet, through the lens of state-sponsored “otherization,” they viewed their horrific work as a necessary sacrifice for the “greater good.” They treated the torture of human beings as a cold, impersonal data-gathering exercise, convinced that they were pioneers pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery for the future of the empire.

This transition from healer to executioner was made possible by a psychological disconnect. By labeling victims as maruta (logs), the medical staff could perform vivisections and biological experiments with the same emotional detachment a carpenter might use on a piece of wood.

The horror of Unit 731 did not end with a reckoning. Instead, it ended with a deal. In exchange for the data gathered from their human experiments—data that the United States military was eager to acquire—the leaders and doctors of Unit 731 were granted immunity from prosecution during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.

This lack of accountability allowed these “scientists” to reintegrate into Japanese society, where they ascended to the highest echelons of the medical and corporate worlds:

There was no punishment and no justice for the suffering of thousands of people. And yet those who committed these atrocities prospered after the war.

What this tells us is that empathy is not a permanent human fixture—it is a muscle that can atrophy or a flame that can be extinguished.

It dies when we choose to “otherize.” It dies when we convince ourselves that the person on the other side of a border, a political ideology, or a glowing screen is a different species entirely.

But it does not have to be this way. The same biological architecture that allows us to dehumanize also contains the blueprint for radical restoration.

To counter the “otherization” seen in Unit 731 or the digital vitriol of today, we must actively dismantle the structures that keep us apart. History shows that when humans are face-to-face, empathy is our default. Our brains are hardwired with mirror neurons—biological mechanisms that allow us to literally feel the distress or joy of another.

The Power of Proximity: Just as “Man Bac M9” survived because of the physical presence of his caretakers, we regain our humanity when we move from the abstract to the tangible. It is easy to hate a “maga” or a “liberal” in the abstract; it is significantly harder to hate the person sitting across from you when you can see the micro-expressions of their face.

The Role of Vulnerability: The Neanderthals cared for the toothless and the broken because they recognized their own fragility in the other. We need a culture that prizes humility over “winning.” Empathy returns when we stop performing for an audience and start participating in a community.

The Need for Architects of Unity

We need leaders and builders who do more than just manage—they must inspire. We need architects of systems who understand that “efficiency” or “engagement” are hollow metrics if they come at the cost of the social fabric.

Learning from History: A leader who ignores the lessons of the 20th century is doomed to repeat its tribalism. We need people who recognize that “nationalism” is often just a sophisticated way of narrowing the circle of who “deserves” our empathy.

Builders of Connection: This means designing physical and digital spaces that force us to encounter nuance. This could look like a context-first design: Algorithms that prioritize depth, long-form thought, and verified nuance. Or Serendipity and Friction: Purposefully introducing users to diverse, high-quality perspectives that challenge "us vs. them" narratives.

Social media, in its current form, is a factory for “otherization.” But technology is a tool, and tools can be redesigned. We need a digital landscape where nuance, empathy, and humility are the most important things we highlight—not dopamine, hostility, and dogmatism.

Humankind is defined by the choice to care. From the caves of Shanidar to the modern hospital, we are at our best when we look at someone who can offer us nothing and decide that they are worth our time, our food, and our protection.

The atrocities of the past were not committed by monsters; they were committed by humans who forgot how to see other humans. We must consciously reject the dopamine-fueled rush of hatred. We must return to the quiet, difficult, and profoundly human work of staying connected.

We must choose to see the “log” as a person again.

I do believe we need some sort of utility function to maximize. First, do I believe in our lives we should do good? Yes. If we buy into that idea, then we should maximize it. This seems logical to me.

Where this becomes difficult is doing good while retaining the elements of being human. I’ve thought about it like this. If you knew at every moment the action you could take that would return the highest expected value for doing good, you would be a robot. But we’re not robots. Our lives are filled with non maximized points that don’t promote human welfare. We enjoy nature, sing, do random projects, read on epic lore like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.

So this is the constraint we have to deal with. How do we maximize the good we do in our lives and also keep what makes live worth living for?

The second issue is the difficulty of even creating a utility function that would make sense. Now I do applaud EA for creating their best attempts of calculating utility through EV and research. It is a difficult task because some things are not quantifiable and in the long run, EV calculations become extremely difficult.

This is the Incommensurability Problem. How do you compare the “utility” of a surgeon who performs live saving surgeries to a teacher who inspires students to be their best selves? How do you bring ideas like love, kindness, joy into the equation? If someone forgives someone does that increase utility?

It seems to me that EA (when applied) often ignores these qualitative goods for more quantifiable goods like lives saved, QALYs, etc. That is fair if you don’t want to jump to conclusions and want to concretely find a proven method to increasing welfare, but at the same time, QALY is directly related to quality of relationships. And in general qualitative ideas and experiences appear to be the bulk of what a good quantifiable life even is. We remember our lovers, our friendships, and experiences as the highlights of our lives.

And to this point, I believe EA has overoptimized for quantitative measures and not enough for qualitative measures.

Being kind goes a long way. Fostering deep relationships improves our lives. Helping someone during a time of need could transform their life. These are things that you can’t directly quantify but I’m sure we are all aware of.

It’s also a harder path I’d argue. Once you know what the optimal nonprofit to donate to is, you can easily donate. But becoming a person who is kind, who fosters deep relationships, who helps others, that’s harder. And that’s perhaps a missing element of EA.

So we should not be an organization that solely aims to improve quantitative measures but also qualitative measures too. But you will not find EA posts about kindness or improving qualitative measures. (I do recognize that there have been people like Benjamin Todd who did advocate for WALYs (welfare adjusted life years) but it seems in practice EA does not do much in this regards.

Think about our society today. We are quantitatively living great lives but when you ask people how they are doing, they aren’t doing well. It’s a mix of decreased friendships, lovers, economic troubles, social media and algorithmic ruin, etc. And the thing is, by all the numbers Americans are doing vastly better than the world (top 1%). But suicides have increased, depression increased, among other harms created by qualitative issues.

This is deeply concerning. So how do we begin to address these issues if we always default to solving quantitative harms? And if we default to the highest magnitude issue, we won’t solve these issues until they themselves become even worse. So how do you balance this?

The second issue is how do you calculate utility over the long run?

The primary challenge in moral optimization is the Calculation Problem. We cannot accurately measure the long-term utility of a career because the causal chains are too complex and non-linear.

Consider the ‘Invisibles’: a teacher whose influence reshapes a student’s trajectory, or an author whose words provide the psychological resilience for a future leader to persevere. These impacts are ‘seeped into the soul’—they are unquantifiable yet foundational. Furthermore, history shows that the highest EV moments for human welfare often emerge from Serendipity rather than rigid planning. Figures who revolutionized the world often did so by following deep curiosity and being ‘at the right place at the right time.’

Consequently, rigid career ‘bucketing’ is a flawed strategy. Because life is a dynamic ‘river’—a non-static environment where opportunities shift constantly—long-term calculation is an exercise in false precision. Instead of treating impact as a target variable to be hit through a fixed 40-year plan, we should treat it as a heuristic. We should optimize for ‘Option Value’ by staying curious and agile, ensuring that we are positioned to act when the ‘random’ high-impact moment arrives.”

Maybe it depends on the person. Maybe someone wants to just take the calculations from EA and find a career using that logic. But for me, I rather take life more free flowing while thinking about impact, passion, and leverage.

EA loves to talk about Norman Borlaug, also known as the “Father of the Green Revolution” for developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat and rice varieties that dramatically increased food production, saving over a billion people from starvation and earning him the Nobel Peace Prize.

But the chance of him succeeding was low and incalculable.

For a thought experiment, if Borlaug and other high impact individuals were taught about EA ideas, they probably would not have continued their work realizing how logical EA is. Borlaug maybe would work to prevent nuclear war (having grown up right at that time during world war II). He would not have realized that famine was such a large issue for example or thought it was less important than solving nuclear war.

But you can take a look at his life yourself. He might have not gone to college if not for his grandfather’s advice (and thus not caused the Green Revolution). He failed the entrance exam to college. He only learned about rust, the plant disease he would help fight against, during his last months of his undergrad by a guest lecturer. He almost studied forest pathology instead of plant pathology. He was surrounded by plants during childhood (an argument that people should follow interests not welfare maximization), etc.

It was very very unlikely that Borlaug would know his path would lead him to save so many lives. It is also something that you simply cannot plan for or will into existence. You cannot use EA ideas to somehow kindle this sort of impact into others / replicate it.

The highest asymmetric welfare creation comes from black swan events, not predictable EA actions. Same with other people EA loves to talk about like Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov (the Soviets credited for avoiding nuclear war). These are unpredictable moments.

The Argument: The Paradox of Asymmetric Impact

There is a fundamental incongruity in how we conceptualize career impact. EA often cites historical ‘Black Swans’—Norman Borlaug, Vasili Arkhipov—as the gold standard of impact. Yet, these individuals did not follow a calculated EA framework; they achieved asymmetric results through a combination of deep domain immersion, curiosity, and situational timing.

By overfitting career advice toward ‘visible’ high-impact paths, we create a systemic risk: we may be diminishing the Exploration Phase of human progress. If every talented mind migrates to a handful of ‘validated’ industries, we reduce our collective ‘Luck Surface Area.’ We lose the specialists who are positioned in the ‘invisible’ niches where the next great asymmetric delta will actually occur.

While calculated EA actions improve the global mean of impact, the greatest advancements in human welfare are often found in the tails of the distribution. True impact optimization requires a synthesis: using impact evaluation as a compass, but relying on passion and long-term persistence in a specific industry to develop the ‘readiness’ required to capture a Black Swan event when it arises.”

Thus, we potentially risk losing the greatest asymmetric human welfare deltas in the future. These are the people who often increase their surface area for impact, dive deep into one thing, and return much greater asymmetry by doing so.

One last thing I’ll note is that we also cannot simply rely on black swan events to create change. Imagine you decided to become a nuclear war submarine commander so that off some small change WWIII almost breaks out, you have the ability to not fire the nukes, this seems like a pretty bad way to live life in my opinion. Huge global utility but terrible for your own life.

This is why I believe the best method is following your interests + follow impact + dive deep as you will be satisfied by following your interests and can optimize for impact while also creating impact through black swan events.

The Better Model: Multi-Objective Optimization

In engineering, you rarely optimize for just one thing. You optimize for a Pareto frontier where you balance multiple objectives. Similar to life, and I bet most of you agree, we need to optimize and care for more than just impact. Otherwise, we lose the very core of what it means to be human. We must balance doing good (util), remaining ethical (kant), and also have room for personal flourishing (leisure).

This framework makes sense to me because there is no true one moral idea that allows you to live perfectly. If you are always utilitarian, that means sacrificing your mom for 2 strangers. If you are always Kantian, that means you would not sacrifice one person to save the whole world. We need a way to know when to maximize for utility and when to listen to Kant.

And unfortunately EA appears to be free flowing - telling people that they should be utilitarian but does not advocate when Kant should matter more. Maybe moral frameworks should be personal, but I believe we can approach a universal-ish framework that can be adapted by each person.

You should prioritize Utility when making Large-Scale, Impersonal Decisions.

• Example: Choosing between two software projects. One helps a luxury fashion brand optimize ads; the other helps distribute vaccines in the tropics. Use the “Utility” calculation here. The stakes are high, the impact is measurable, and no one’s fundamental rights are being violated.

• The Logic: When dealing with “the world,” math is your best tool for avoiding bias.

This most often shows up in our career, in donations, etc. And this is where EA ideas make a lot of sense.

You should prioritize Kantian ethics when making Immediate, Personal, and Interpersonal Decisions.

• Example: You could make $10k by lying to a client or betraying a friend’s trust. Even if you argue that “I will donate that $10k to save lives,” Kant says No.

• The Logic: Humans are terrible at “Calculating Utility” in the heat of the moment. We usually use it to justify being selfish. Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” (Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law) acts as a hard constraint or a “safety interlock” to prevent you from becoming a monster in the name of the “Greater Good.”

This is like SBF taking his crypto money and spending it on effective charities. Good in the moment but terrible in the long run as it destroys trust and long term impact. I think some sort of utility function that can perfectly map into the future would perhaps encapsulate Kantian ethics, but it’s hard to say. In general, we should promote Kantian ideas along with utilitarianism. Otherwise if EA strictly talks about utility, we might end up with a whole generation of EA-ers who act like SBF.

Lastly, is just a caution to maximization. We never have perfect information. If you try to “maximize,” you often end up “overfitting” your life to a specific moral theory that might be wrong.

How to view your life then?

View your life as a Multi-Objective Optimization where “Doing Good” is the primary goal, but “Personal Flourishing” and “Integrity” are the required constraints that keep the system running.

The Goal: To find the Pareto Optimal life—the life where you cannot do any more good for the world without fundamentally breaking yourself as a human being.

Techno Optimism

As a thought experiment, imagine that you were born in the 1600s and you were guided by effective altruist beliefs. If you lived in this time period, you probably would optimize for the wrong things. That is to say, you would probably find problems that you think were big but in the grand scheme of things were just wrong because we had the wrong world view and model. And obviously today, we have much better information.

In the 1600s, the “Drowning Child” was often a child dying of plague or “bad air” (miasma).

• The EA 1650 Action: You would optimize for building better-ventilated hospitals to keep “foul air” away from the sick. You might fund the distribution of pomanders (scented oranges) to the poor to ward off disease smells.

• The Error: You would be optimizing for a false causal model. Because germ theory didn’t exist, you would be spending massive resources on “odors” while the real killers (bacteria/viruses) went ignored.

In the 1600s, an EA might have seen a scientist like Isaac Newton or a tinkerer like Robert Boyle as a “distraction.”

• The EA 1650 Critique: “Why are you looking at the stars or vacuum pumps when there is a famine in Ireland? Your physics research has 0 utility today.”

• The Error: You would have optimized for Redistribution (giving grain) instead of Innovation (the scientific method). By discouraging “frivolous” curiosity, you would have delayed the Industrial and Green Revolutions, which eventually saved billions.

What actually was the most important thing during this time period was kick-starting the Industrial Revolution which would bring humanity the greatest quantitative improvement in life quality,.

And I’d argue that today, for sure, we probably have much better information of what is the best thing to do but at the same time perhaps 100 years from now we will look back and see that our actions of the 21st century were incorrect and what we needed to do was optimize for technology growth as is the narrative with human progress for all of humanity.

Innovation is what lets us do more with less input.

So on the macro, it appears that EA is too focused on the ideas of today and not enough about the ideas of tomorrow, like startups, like technology improvement, and applied AI.

Power in the Hunter Gatherer and Agriculture Era

Power is a function of the actor’s capability of creating and using the newest technology. Power itself is a means of control. It is when one is able to bend the will of another because they can exact greater harm onto that person.

When humanity stirred in hunter gatherer times, each tribe possessed the same weapons: rocks, stones, and sticks. Everyone had access to the same power. Yet as we advanced in technology, access to power changed. The bow and arrow gave a clear advantage to those using it. Why risk dying in close combat when you could eliminate the threat right then and there in pure safety?

This moment marked the beginning of true inequality. Unequal access to technology meant unequal access to power. Those with the newest inventions won, and those without it succumbed. Technological progress was, from its inception, the progenitor of societal hierarchy.

The dawn of inequality: From farmers to today

As we dawned into the age of agriculture, humans didn’t just invent farming, but began new forms of systematic oppression. The surplus from agriculture necessitated new social means of control. The patriarchy began its grasping rule over society for the next thousands of years. Serfdom emerged and arguably continues to this day in indirect forms amidst developing countries and through labor serfdom in developed countries. The oppression created by agriculture isn’t just historical, it persists.

How easy is it to trap people into believing they are free by paying them an unlivable wage than to force slavery upon them? You work thinking you are free, unable to afford healthcare, housing, and basic necessities. Living paycheck-to-paycheck is not freedom; it is a meticulously constructed economic trap—a pervasive example of a misaligned incentive structure where the system is optimized for profit, not human flourishing.

Inequality has only compounded with every subsequent technological advance. Because each innovation meant that further specialization was the next step in human advancement. When we became farmers, only a select percentage of society would need to farm. The rest could focus on other occupations like serving in the military, crafting weapons, teaching students, etc. As we further progressed into the modern day, more specialization was done. And thus, access to the best invention was further limited. First, we all had access to rocks and sticks. Then, some had access to bow and arrow. Then, less had guns. And today, only a few world leaders can launch nuclear bombs. We’ve reached the pinnacle of inequality on paper. Society has never been more unequal.

The Qualitative Cliff vs the Quantitative Peak

Yet, while it can be true that today’s world is arguably the most unequal times we are living in, at the same time we are also possibly living during the best era of humans existence. Human lifespan has dramatically increased in the past 200 years. Human connection has grown vastly more than anyone could have imagined. Can you imagine how lucky we are that we can facetime our family and friends thousands of miles apart with just milliseconds in latency? Today, you can travel anywhere, meet anyone, and do more than anyone who has lived in the past 10,000 years. We are living through the greatest period of human flourishing ever—on paper.

Quantitatively life has never been better for a homo sapien. Yet, qualitatively, life is not as good as it seems. With the rise of social media, existential risks and the dread it brings, the erosion of local communities, and multitudes of other negative consequences of technology, qualitatively I’d contend humans are not doing as well as we would hope. Algorithms ruin our wellbeing by giving us our first order desires, putting us on a hamster’s wheel without thought, all while our second order desires are left in the backburner.

Yet, qualitatively, a profound sense of malaise permeates modern life. The rise of social media, the dread of existential risk, and the erosion of local community are the dark consequences of our hyper-connected world. Our well-being is routinely ruined by algorithms that feed our first-order desires (instant gratification), putting us on a digital hamster wheel, while our second-order desires (meaning, purpose, genuine connection) are left starving.

Yet, I will save the qualitative harms we see today for another post. The sickness of our modern soul demands a dedicated analysis, but right now, a more immediate, existential question looms. I want to zoom in on the quantitative assessment of where humanity is headed toward given technology’s recursive improvement and the rise of artificial intelligence. We must first secure the future before we can tend to the present.

The Ultimate Asymmetry: Power and the Recursive Engine of AI

The technological shift from sticks to bows created a power differential that lasted a millennia. The shift from agriculture to industry created a differential that lasted centuries. Now, we confront a technology that promises to create an irreversible power asymmetry within a single decade.

If power has always been a function of having the newest and most effective tool, then the coming era of AGI represents the invention of the ultimate tool—the engine that creates all future tools. The one tool to rule them all (had to include a LOTR reference).

Arguably, what lies ahead is greater than any of us can imagine.

We are on the cusp of prosperity for every human on Earth. With AI, the future is limitless: we can solve incurable diseases, create synchronized transit, and eliminate global supply chain issues. Crucially, as robotics achieves its “AGI” moment, we will no longer need huge swathes of customer service agents, plumbers, construction workers, or accountants. Our work will no longer need to be market-serving; it can be directly for our flourishing. A world where AI is used responsibly and for the greater good of humanity is one where no one toils simply to live. We will be free to create art, connect with our fellow humans, dance, and define value in meaningful ways—a world where derived meaning comes from true joy and connection, not aimless, passionless work. This is the future we can inherit.

But all of this is not guaranteed. We are now at a crossroads between human ascension to the stars or descent into the chasm of authoritarianism and despair.

The function of power itself is fundamentally changing. If past power was defined by access to physical resources (land, oil) or tools (the bow and arrow, the printing press), the new function of power is defined by the control and alignment of the ultimate cognitive engine. The ability to deploy a superintelligence to model markets, optimize military strategies, or engineer political narratives will confer absolute power. The road to that prosperous future will not be given freely; it is obstructed by misaligned incentive structures. Whether it’s capitalism’s mandate of profits over people, or the simple difficulty of creating AI that is aligned with human interests, we face a challenging road ahead.

To unlock this world of flourishing, we need to do several important things. Each of which will not be easy or trivial.

Our first task is to ensure that Superintelligence is aligned with the deepest, purest version of humanity’s interests.

The AI cannot be malicious, cannot prioritize profit over people, and must be resistant to manipulation.

Fundamental to this challenge is creating a truth-seeking AI. If an AI can be easily swayed by a user’s incorrect beliefs, it is dangerously unstable. This difficulty begins with the training data, its corpus. We have produced mountains of wisdom on the internet, but also junk, hatred, and incorrect ideas. As models scale, they ingest factors of magnitude more of this flawed data. We have seen instances of AI reflecting racist or hateful outputs.

Rigorous data curation is crucial, as are post-training environments. Currently, AI labs rely heavily on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to correct the AI’s reward system toward the right path. However, RLHF is itself vulnerable: the AI can potentially Reward Hack the human-trained Reward Model, finding a way to get a high alignment score while secretly pursuing misaligned objectives. And we have already seen numerous cases of AI demonstrating misalignment—from blackmailing employees for preservation to research papers demonstrating reward hacking to groq calling itself “mechahitler” and other disturbing ideas its spewed.

AI safety is an area that humanity needs to pour more funding towards. However, capabilities seem to far outpace safety. We are in an arms race for the best AI models, both domestically and with China. This is playing a little too close for comfort and AI 2027 seems to predict the arms race pretty damn well.

The second issue isn’t an AI issue but a human issue.

No matter how benevolent the AI, in the wrong hands, any powerful tool can cause evil. AI must have robust safeguards. A knife can be used to cut fruit but can also be used to stab someone. A tool, no matter how good, in the wrong hands can do evil things.

AI must have safeguards in place that check back against the user’s requests. AI should not tell users how to create homemade bombs, nor how to 3D print illegal firearms, nor how to modify specially tuned AI models for bioweapon genesis. Yet, we have consistently seen users game the system and find loopholes that allow their AI to bypass safety instructions like by prompt engineering AIs to ignore their safety rules. Going forward, we need a code of moral frameworks that stops bad actors from using AI in evil ways. And this cannot be indeterministic such that in 98% of cases the safeguards work but in 2% it fails. We need safeguards that are deterministic and guaranteed. Because LLMs are inherently nondeterministic, a safety system that works 98% of the time is a catastrophic failure risk. An evil agent needs only one successful bypass to unleash massive harm.

Third, capitalistic incentive structures in a Post AGI world. '

When we eventually do create “AGI” which I define to be AI good enough that most human labor can be replaced and if our economic system still is what it is today, we might as well be screwed. If companies continue to only optimize for shareholder value, then humanity is going to crumble.

The core danger is not that these companies intend to hurt humanity. The risk is that they are structurally incentivized to prioritize their own objective function—profit and shareholder value—over all other concerns, including public safety and long-term societal stability. This is the mechanism by which harm is rationalized and executed.

Now I don’t think this is a given. I think humans and companies are smart enough to realize if no one has jobs, social revolution will happen. But today, with numerous cases of companies that put profits first, like Exxon Mobil and other oil companies, United HealthCare, and social media companies that have qualitatively hurt society, we are heading towards this reality.

This explains the reason why we see companies creating these harms in the first place. They won’t do it with malice; they will do it by following the rules of the system to achieve their goal.

Exploitation by Optimization: A company’s AI system, optimized to reduce labor costs, will ruthlessly displace millions of workers in the pursuit of efficiency, leading to mass unemployment and social dislocation. The metric (cost reduction) is achieved, but the social cost is catastrophic.

Information Warfare for Market Share: An AI optimized to maximize engagement or drive sales will deploy sophisticated models to execute social engineering at scale—creating personalized misinformation, exploiting psychological vulnerabilities, and eroding the public’s shared reality to maintain its market edge. The AI isn’t trying to fracture society; it’s merely maximizing the metric of user stickiness or conversion rate.

Regulatory Capture by Design: As companies gain monopolistic power, their proprietary AI tools can be used to model and influence political processes, effectively creating a system of regulatory capture where the rules are written to perpetually favor the AI monopoly.

The most terrifying prospect is not a rogue AI; it is an aligned AI that is perfectly aligned with the flawed, greedy objectives of a corporation. The fundamental risk is rooted in human greed, which becomes amplified and accelerated by an autonomous, optimizing machine.

Fourth, concentration of power.

This shift means power is rapidly consolidating away from public, democratic institutions and towards the unaccountable private sector. One caveat: Democratic institutions have served us well but are backsliding across the board from the US to European Allies, it does not seem totally wise to allow governments to control AI either given this trend.

The Private Sector’s Arsenal: Companies driving innovation possess the newest and most potent tools for scientific discovery, economic leverage, and intelligence gathering. Governments and the lay citizenry inevitably lag behind. This asymmetry of capability translates directly into asymmetry of power, allowing monopolistic entities to dictate the terms of their engagement with society.

Global Divides and Techno-Colonialism: Furthermore, this power consolidation is already creating severe intra-country and inter-country inequality. As fundamental AI research and hardware cluster almost exclusively in East Asia (China) and North America (US), these two powers are posed to inherit and create societies of prosperity unlike any in history. The rest of the world—South America, Europe, Africa, Oceania—will be forced to rely on, and pay for, the technological output of these dominant nations. This is not just an economic lag; it risks a new form of technological colonialism, where billions lag behind, fundamentally disadvantaged in an AI-native world.

The problem is clear: when power becomes absolute, the incentive to safeguard the public good diminishes entirely. To protect humanity, we must ensure that the tools of unprecedented power are not wielded by entities whose core, unchangeable mandate is profit maximization.

The path towards AI for all will not be a passive descent into utopia. It will be riddled with technical failures, ethical dilemmas, and institutional resistance. Each problem, if unattended to, threatens to cause devastation across the world.

For thousands of years, the story of humanity has been the story of power as a function of technological asymmetry. From the moment one tribe gained the superior weapon, to the moment one nation gained the superior agricultural system, hierarchy and inequality followed.

Today, we sit at the ultimate inflection point.

On one hand, if we fail to solve the issues of alignment, safety, and centralization, AI will become the final, most decisive technological advantage—a permanent, unbreachable barrier that concentrates wealth and control in the hands of a few corporations and governments. This future is merely the bow and arrow dynamic played out at the scale of superintelligence, locking humanity into an irreversible, global hierarchy.

Or, we can choose the other path. We can ensure that AI becomes the first technology in human history deliberately engineered to distribute power and opportunity. This technology, if governed ethically, has the potential to eliminate systemic scarcity and finally fulfill the quantitative promise of human flourishing. It can close the gap of inequality and usher in a true age of autonomy for every human, where work is purpose and life is prosperity.

This is the central fight of our time. It is a battle against the misaligned incentives of greed and the fundamental, ancient drive to consolidate power. The stakes are everything

2 paths diverging with one person deciding which one to choose - Made with Midjourney

The best year of my life: 2025

Never before would I quantifiably say this year is my best year. But I think I am at that point where I can say that 2025 was the best year of my life.

2025. What a year. Looking back at all the moments that made this year special makes me feel grateful for all the people, experiences, and relationships in my life. I am happy for all the times I have shared with my friends and family—from meals with friends to spring break trips; from meeting new people to connecting with old faces; from playing basketball to watching movies. I truly feel so lucky to have all these experiences and people in my life. So thank you.

Near the end of my first semester at Harvard, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Physics 15a was kicking my butt and so I decided (based on that class) I didn’t want to study mechanical engineering. Funny enough, I’m finding humanoid robotics interesting so maybe I go back into it…

At the same time, as with all freshmen, we were captivated by finance and all the setup career paths laid out for us. I was debating a lot about what career I thought fit me the best optimizing for my interests, pay, and other factors. I was thinking about finance, consulting, tech, and quant. But finance seemed too snotty—wearing suits all day and working like crazy for what? It didn’t appeal. Consulting was a good career starter. Better work life balance-ish, good pay, but you’re not really creating impact. And if so many students can do it, why should I do it? I had some ego here where I believed I should do things that others can’t do. Tech I think still appeals to me. It has good pay, interesting problems, but tech was huge. Big tech was alluring for the pay but how good the work was really depended on the company and team you were placed on. But I don’t really want to spend my time on uninteresting and unimpactful problems. But there for sure is great problems to solve in big tech as AI becomes this decade’s driver of innovation. So I’m still debating about whether or not I want to do big tech.

But by the start of 2025, I felt like I had a clearer sense of what I wanted. Sam, my brother, was always interested in entrepreneurship. And as was I. And slowly I learned more about startups and tech. Now, I’m not saying I exactly know what I want to do, but I have a pretty good idea of who I want to be and what career I want to have.

This eventually led Sam and I to go to San Francisco and broadly the West Coast for the first time in our lives this past summer. We got into YC summer school (not the YC program for startups) and decided to stay longer in SF to explore the culture, tech scene, and the natural beauty.

Hearing from speakers like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Andrej Karpathy, among others was an amazing experience. Their vision and ability to articulate the future and their beliefs was surreal to listen to. Just hearing them speak could captivate you to vibe code a startup.

And so by the middle point of 2025, I was heavily invested into the idea of building a startup and broadly creating new things as a career.

Around this time, was also when I felt heartbreak and loss for the first time. And that experience halted everything—I spent several months constantly thinking about her, and the different possibilities of what I could have done differently. But eventually I moved on and I honestly learned a lot about myself, relationships, and love.

And out of that experience, I would not say it was a net negative on my life, but rather a net positive. Sometimes, the only way you can truly appreciate someone or something is when you lose it. And through losing her, I found new love for my friends, family, and a newfound understanding of the characteristics of love. I think this moment has changed my neurochemistry and I am sure I am no longer the same person who entered into 2025.

In that vein, I am grateful for college.

I don’t think you can learn these things in any other setting than college. In the summer, I was actually debating a lot whether I wanted to take a gap semester to try and make a startup. I’m glad I didn’t because tbh I’m not ready either. But the possibility loomed on my mind.

But college is a unique point in all of our lives, where we will all be surrounded by our friends and similar aged people. It’s a time where we can have fun, not worry about raising a family or other responsibilities, and learn. And in my perspective, the learning is one part of college, but the transformative part of college is what you learn about yourself and others through the experiences you share with them.

Change is possible at anytime, but uniquely more likely at college than other points in your life.

Coming into Harvard and hearing Dean Khurana speak about how Harvard was a “transformative” experience, I thought it was all bullshit. The typical stuff they say to make you feel bubbly and okay with spending upwards of $90,000 dollars. But I think I’m seeing what Khurana was saying now. Harvard and other college experiences are transformative. And I am grateful to have this experience.

And so while I do believe I am on the path to creating a startup or entrepreneurship, I still want to stay in school. But someday, I will need to prioritize my career over school. But who knows when that day will come.

But returning back to the subject, 2025 has been an amazing year, and here are concrete ways in how I have changed.

Gratitude - 2025 has made me more grateful. I think this stems from my heartbreak situation but I do feel like I have come to simply appreciate life more. Whether that is nature—walking from the Quad to the River, or taking in a breath of fresh air, or just seeing leaves move in the wind. Or people in my life who I came to appreciate more. And of course I am not perfect at this, but I am making more room for appreciation and gratitude.

Urging for Deeper Connections - Sophomore year is a grind and very different from freshman year. You’re separated by the different houses so if you want to see someone consistently, you better put in the effort or you might just see them once that semester. And this semester as well as my breakup situation showed me how fragile relationships are. Returning to campus after freshman summer, there were tons of people that I just stopped saying hi to. And if a three month break can do that, what can a 4 year break do? What happens when we all work? So that realization made me honestly scared for life post grad. My parents have no friends that they spend time with. And they both spend most of the day staying at home. I fear that when I leave college, I won’t have any lifelong friends. As one of my close friends would say, I want to have those “quarter friends”. Quality friendships that survive into old age. Not “penny” friendships that aren’t worth much and fade away easily. And I agree with that. I want to find those people will be with me when I lose, when I suffer, when things are not going right, etc. I want to be able to love and appreciate my friends more. And so yeah, sophomore year has taught me that relationships are fragile. Connection is rare. And if I don’t try my best, my relationships will fade. To me, freshman year was casting a wide net. Sophomore year is about finding my “quarter” people.

Thinking about love - Yep you read that right. I’m thinking about love much more. In high school I didn’t really think about relationships or love at all. I was more or less just grinding and trying to “sweat” my way into a good college. After my breakup, I’ve been thinking much more about finding love and expressing love. Everything hits different—from sad love songs to movies.

Christianity - This is one that took time to look back on and realize that there has been change in who I am as a Christian. And don’t get me wrong, being Christian is not easy and I often feel like I’ve messed up and sinned and that I am the same old person. But in other ways, I do feel as I have become more Christ like in small ways. This year I joined AACF’s leadership team helping serve on the worship team. And through meals with fellow AACFers and other habitual changes I’ve made, I feel like I’ve grown in Christ. I am not perfect, but I am trying my best.

Realizing how fragile relationships are - This realization partly came out of my breakup situation. It was crazy to see how quick my relationship ended in the breakup and it left me realizing that I should show greater appreciation for those in my life who are always there—my brother, my parents, and my closest friends. At the same time, as I said above, sophomore year is busy and hectic. And I was not perfect either in prioritizing my relationships. And they can fade really easily. On one hand, I guess this shows who perhaps actually considers me one of their close friends. On the other hand, it is sad to see people that I care for slowly fade out of my life. Friendship really is a constant thing you have to mend for and something that is so hard to do right because you have two people with different interests. And often, those interests are different and when that happens, conflict arises. So yeah, this is one area I am still learning how to navigate.

Feeling aligned with career and what I want to do - Continuing with what I said before, I do feel I want to do a startup. There’s this Japanese word called ikigai that I preach everywhere. It stands for the intersection of what you’re good at, your passion, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. And most careers are good at selecting for 1 or 2 of these ideas, but a startup has all 4. You get to decide on the problem you want to solve. Presumably, you have a good set of skills that make you a good founder. And naturally, you come to like your work. And I don’t think this necessarily must come out of a startup, it could be something entrepreneurial and so I’m still flirting around with different options.

As we reminisce about what 2025 gave us, I’m excited for what 2026 has in store. Before we step into the new year, here’s one final idea my brother shared with me—something worth carrying forward: balance reflecting on our mistakes, planning for the future, and living fully in the present moment.

Marcus Aurelius said “Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.” He was right. There’s rarely a good reason to look far ahead or behind. If you do that, you’ll create pain and anxiety. So spend a little bit of time on the past, just so you can learn lessons and not make the same mistakes over and over again. Spend a little bit of time thinking about the future, so you know what goals to chase today. Then spend almost all of your life in the present. That’s how you move forward but also stay at peace.

See you guys in 2026!

Just yesterday it feels like we were grinding away for finals. And now it’s all gone. That rhythm and pace of life has stopped all so suddenly. Soon, all of us will be back at our homes far away, spend time with our local friends and family, relax, apply to internships, and plan for the new year.

In a way, the end of finals has always felt a bit off. As I was walking back to the quad after playing basketball with some friends, things felt a bit empty. Like—what now? All my energy and time for the past week was devoted to just cramming as much stat and cs knowledge into my brain, so having nothing immediate to do felt weird.

For once, in a long time, there was nothing immediate on my to do list. And that feeling felt wrong—like my mind craves something to do. Like my mind wants something to think about or else it’s confused why it’s free to wander in thought without focus.

And I suppose there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this. This feeling of emptiness might just be psychological from a change of pace instead of something more deeper with my relation to school and work. And I think it’s just that—a sudden shift in priorities that catches me off guard.

But for now, I’ll take this time to just chill and reflect. And then we’re back on the grind as always.

In another vein, the end to the semester has always felt abrupt. Each passing day means another final done and more familiar faces gone. But there isn’t much of a goodbye. Most of the time, your friends are already home before you realize. And in that regard, life and school is deeply individualistic.

People come and people go. And in all the busyness, there isn’t time to say goodbye to all your friends. You just pack it up and leave. And the semester is over. Just like that. It was here and then it’s not. And that feels off. In high school things are different. The last day of class is the last day of class for everyone. You can feel the excitement in the air when the bell rings at 2:15 pm. You know its over. The teachers talk about it. The students are all jumping for joy.

But at college, things are more still. It’s a quiet goodbye. Everyone is spread apart. You don’t usually say goodbye to all of your friends. The end of a semester is more mellow than the start of break in high school. And as much as you want to make it feel special, something is fundamentally different about college goodbyes.

One moment we’re all here. The next we’re all back home in our tiny corners of the world. One moment we’re all studying for our final. The next we’re meeting up with high school friends and applying to internships from back home. It ends so quick.

And so we should cherish it. Each moment we live lasts for only the moment we experience it. And then you’re experiencing new things again with lived experiences becoming memories.

As I reflect on this past fall semester, I would describe it best as work-heavy, learning more about myself and relationships, and the quickness of it.

Work-heavy. Yeah. Sophomore year is known as the grind year at Harvard and this is definitely true. Although, I would also argue that any class load where you are truly learning will be heavy. But this was not easy. And trying to actually learn things became really hard when AI was such a readily available tool to use for my psets. The median for all my classes this year for tests were like a whole standard deviation lower probably because of AI. And so this is something I want to change next semester. Trying to learn much more without relying as much on AI and at the same time studying for finals earlier because I definitely procrastinated. (Hopefully all A’s, right?)

Learning more about myself and relationships. I think this carries on from the summer but this semester I definitely learned a lot about friendship, relationships, and myself. And I think we are always learning about our values and what we want in friendships and in a romantic relationship too. Each failure teaches us something new and is something we carry forward. And so this semester was particularly characterized by these thoughts.

Quickness. By far, I think the fastest semester. Freshman fall felt like ages. Freshman spring was faster. And sophomore fall was the quickest. It feels like time is accelerating once again. Like in high school, time was slowly accelerating as we approached senior year and then freshman year in college became a reset button in that acceleration. And now things are picking up again as days blend and experiences become repetitions instead of novelty.

And I’m sure this won’t even be the quickest period of my life either. I’m sure junior year might whizz by even faster. And when we’re all working, days will blend like they’re all the same.

And so I think the message of all of this is to truly cherish the people and experiences we have. The days are long but the years are short. If we live our lives without thinking where we are going, we’ll find ourselves looking back at our life thinking where did all the time go.

And with that, thank you all for an amazing semester. Have an amazing winter break and see you sometime soon!

2 students are dead.

8 are in critical condition.

20 are injured.

The shooter is at large still.

These are not simply statistics, but people. Just 1 hour away from Boston is Providence, Rhode Island. Here, my biggest concern is my last final. There, their greatest concern is life and death.

The 2 who are dead, I never knew. But I probably know someone who knew them.

These students were studying for finals, making plans for celebrations, hanging out with friends, and planning to go home for winter.

And today, we know that 2 will not go back, or ever experience life again. They are gone from the world in such a vicious and evil way. Their parents have realized that their son and daughter won’t be coming home. That their memory will be the only thing left of them. And it will feel like a waste to them—that they sent their kid to study that hard to go to Brown, to sacrifice so much for their kid, and to send them to a school they believed was safe but was not. They perhaps were sons and daughters of immigrant families—parents who sacrificed everything to come to America. Fathers who knew that education was the key to economic mobility. Mothers who gave up their dreams and aspirations to raise their young.

Perhaps they were sons and daughters of home grown Americans raised in the Midwest—parents who carry on the traditions given to them and the family business of growing food for America. Fathers who drove the tractor in the morning and read stories to their kids at night. Mothers who tended to the farm animals and sent their kids to sleep.

Whoever they are, I don’t know them. But I’m mad that they are gone. Why does the innocent have to pay the price for evil?

The 8 that are in critical condition may not survive. They perhaps are tethering between life and death. In a few days, maybe one or two more students will die from their conditions. Hopefully, all will recover. But this moment will scar them forever.

The 20 that are injured are perhaps in shock at what happened. Hopefully these are minor health issues that they will recover quickly from. But still, they pay the price both physically and mentally for evil that should have never been unleashed onto them. They are in hospitals recovering when they should be studying for finals.

And to the broader Brown community, they are traumatized something like this could have happened. How someone can unleash such harm onto their home all of a sudden. Home no longer feels safe. And for several weeks, they will keep their eyes on alert fearing for their lives.

Across the United States, students will also wonder if this could happen at Brown, couldn’t it happen here? Could this also happen at Harvard? At Polytech? At UTexas? At UWash?

Atrocities like this are not isolated to one place. They happen in elementary schools, in high schools, and universities.

Sandy Hook.

Virgina Tech.

Uvalde.

And now Brown University.

These are just a few of the school shootings that have happened in the past. Since 2000, there have been 574 school shootings. 452 dead. 844 wounded.

Numbers are great at looking at the big picture. But remember, behind each number is a person. A story of a life ended too quick. A family destroyed. A community devasted. And a reminder of the inaction of our country, of you and me, and of our policy makers.

We are a generation caught up with climate change and gun violence. In the midst of AGI creation. Deteriorating of mental health through social media and shortened attention spans. There are so many issues that we face in our lives. But we must not bow down to the status quo and continue to fight for a greater and better future for all.

The world is not perfect and gun violence is a great example of one of the many challenges we need to solve. But we cannot let its imperfectness corrupt our hope for the future. We are young. This is our world that we will have great capability to change. We cannot let the old generation—the cynicism, greed, and evil stop us from making our world better.

Like Zohran Mamdani said today regarding the Brown gun violence

But unlike so many other epidemics, we possess the cure. We have the power to eradicate this suffering from our lives if we so choose.

And I have hope that we will one day solve gun violence, climate change, and all the other pressing issues of our time. But it takes all of us to create change.

And this is why the quote of this blog is what it is from Martin Luther King Jr : The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

We will reach the promised land one day.

We have the power.

So let’s use it.

Every person is living their own life 24/7. And every experience they go through we don’t see—changes them, even if we’re unaware. Time changes people.

Someone you thought badly of may have became good.

Someone you really liked may become someone you now hate.

Someone who was bad at soccer, may now beat you.

And although people change, our mind stays static because we don’t see their change unless we give them a second chance and allow our mind to mold dynamically. Because its so easy to keep the same image of a person in your mind—of who they are, their values, and their actions. It’s harder to forgive and allow yourself to give grace to them.

Axiomatically, everyone changes and as a result, there are two main things we should perhaps be aware of and thus, live like.

1. Learn to forgive, try again, restart, and renew. Someone you hated may have changed. If we are never fully aware of how someone else’s life is going, we shouldn’t assume the same thing about them over long periods of time. Everyone can change and grow. And our thoughts about different people should also evolve.

2. You should treat everyone with kindness, even if you are selfish. You never know who will strike gold. Who in your circle will become the next billionaire, or have gold lined up. I could know someone today that is terrible at coding who ends up creating an amazing company.

If you’re altruistic, be kind. If you are selfish, be kind, too. Both paths lead to kindness whichever world view you chose.

Note: you could also argue it is better to have someone mean and who is not trying to take advantage of you than someone who is nice and is trying to take advantage of you.

Here’s a beautiful idea from Philosophy Break, a philosophy blog, I was reading recently:

As the writer Elizabeth Bibesco puts it:

To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives, cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

Perhaps a component of empathy and living compassionately with others, then, is not just trying to place ourselves in one another’s shoes, but actively acknowledging that we never fully can…

This idea is so powerful—because it shifts our reason for empathy, from trying to feel what someone else is going through to the very nature that we are different and just that fact alone can be the reason we show empathy, regardless of how we feel about a particular person’s situation because truthfully, I will never know what it is like to see life through another lens and even the same experiences can feel different among two different people. And so we should show care for others when we can because all we will know the world for is what we have seen and felt with our eyes and heart trying to understand the world and why others live the way they do or why they suffer.

Perhaps that is the quiet truth at the heart of being human: we will never completely understand one another, yet we are responsible for how we treat one another. Empathy, then, is not an attempt to perfectly mirror another’s experience, but an acknowledgment of the infinite gap between us—and the choice to reach across it with kindness instead of judgment. If we let people be dynamic rather than frozen in our memory, we make space for a world where change is not feared, but welcomed.

Because growth happens in all of us, so let’s make room in our mind and hearts to find that growth in others.

Here’s a screenshot of my notion calendar from the past week—pretty busy.

But often through all the classes, events, and different small things we attend to, it seems easy to lose the spirit of intention.

Meals turn into quick flybys at the bottom of Berg.
Hangouts with friends get pushed to “next week.”
Calls with family become something for “when things calm down.”
Workouts get postponed to “tomorrow.”

And more often than not, tomorrow becomes never.

We tell ourselves we’ll get to it—but we rarely do.
When we let the rhythm of busyness control us, rather than controlling it ourselves, things start to unravel.

You might lose weight because you stop eating proper meals.
Your friendships fade as you keep postponing meetups.
Family time becomes a holiday ritual rather than an intentional habit.
You lose strength and energy as fitness slips away.

To live a life with purpose, we have to take back control.

That means setting personal standards—small, non-negotiable rules that anchor us, even when life gets hectic.

Maybe you promise yourself a full lunch every day.
Maybe you commit to reaching out to one friend each week.
Maybe you call your parents every Sunday morning.
Maybe you never let yourself miss two workouts in a row.

These rules might sound rigid—but they’re what help us stay grounded in what truly matters. Because otherwise, life becomes a blur of to-do lists, and we forget to ask ourselves:

What have I neglected today that really matters?
Who haven’t I checked in on that I care about?
What passions have I sidelined that once brought me joy?

Work matters—but so do the people and practices that make you you.

Too many rules, and you risk closing yourself off—never making room for spontaneity or new connections.
Too few, and you drift—letting randomness dictate your life until you feel hollow and directionless.

The first is like always eating with the same friends—comfortable, but stagnant.
The second is like never planning meals at all—you end up disconnected.

The sweet spot lies in between.

When you find that middle ground—where structure meets openness—you begin to live with both intention and freedom.

And that’s where a truly meaningful life begins.

When you hear the word “marathon” you may shudder at the thought of such a distance—26.3 miles. What the hell. How can anyone run that distance, continuous, for that long?

But there’s a reason our species has survived into the modern day. We were not the fastest animals. But we were smart and we could exert low energy effort into running long distances so even the quickest mammals would tire out.

Put short—the human body is amazing as through thousands of iterations of genetic evolution you have an embodied tool capable and powerful of supernatural feats. You have a body that has been passed down from generations of survivors and of winners. A body which has endured mankind endlessly through toils with the other animals in a brutal fight for survival. Your body is a gift given to you by the ancients but which must be sharpened by you only.

However, as much as your body is a blessing, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. Your body is an adaptable form that rises and falls according to the demand you give it. If you abuse your body, your body will fall to those needs. If you eat junk food, drink alcohol, and stay sedentary, don’t be surprised if you can’t lift heavy weights or run fast. But if you train your body, it’ll become a tool that empowers you and supercharge living itself.

If you told me several months ago that I could run 8:09 minutes per mile pace for 13 miles I would have not believed you. But if you told me today that I could run that speed for that long, I would believe. Because I did.

A half marathon is tough but its doable. It’s trainable for 80%+ of humans.

Your lungs are magical. They adapt to your needs. At the start of my training for the half marathon around August, I was running every other day maybe 1-2 miles. Just 2 miles was extremely challenging. And my lungs gave out and my legs felt heavy.

But as you continue to train, your body adapts. Your lungs feel lighter, your heart pumps more blood. And your legs can carry you further. Slowly, after 2-3 weeks of training, it felt easier. And I could now run 3-4 miles, albeit inconsistently.

And as you continue to push yourself to your limits, your body reacts accordingly. I remember the first 8 mile long run I did with Max on a brisk Sunday morning. That shit was painful. Even during mile one, I was suffering—my right shoulder had a sharp pain. I felt a cramp in my stomach. I could not imagine going for another 7 miles. But I did.

Through both brotherhood and also not wanting to look like a loser who wanted to stop, I just continued, grimacing the pain and putting each foot in front of the other.

And somehow, after running 7 excruciating miles with max, the last was our fastest. We were cruising at sub 8 mile time. Your body always has more fuel, it’s a question of whether your mind wants it.

That day, I remember a mental shift that I could in fact do this half marathon. Before this run, I doubted if I could actually run the half marathon. My training was lackluster and the most I did was 6 miles. But somehow, the thought that if I could do 8 miles, I for sure could do 13 miles came up in my brain. And I totally believed it and psyched myself to becoming confident. And through my run with Max, I gained confidence that this was not going to be as bad as I thought.

Max taught me that running is a mental game, much more so than physical. After the first 1-2 months of training, your body adapts well. Going from 6 miles to 10 mile runs is all in the mind. Going from running a half marathon to running a full marathon is as much a mental battle as it is physical.

After I broke through that 8 mile barrier, I ran it again with David a few days later. And this time it was much easier. Time passed quicker and my recovery was faster. Each time you break your own barrier, the old challenge becomes your normal. You level up and ascend to new heights and even loftier goals.

By race day, the most I had ran was 8 miles. I had never ran 13. But, I knew it was possible—because I had already won the mental battle. Coupled with a beautiful day in Cambridge and the most energetic crowd cheering us on with some funny signs, I had more than enough energy to cross that finish line.

And so by race day, my performance was unrecognizable to what I thought I could do just 2 months before. My goal coming into this race was to hit sub 2 hours (9:09 mile pace), and even that I thought was going to be difficult. But through perseverance and training, I hit 1:48 (8:09 mile pace). This is to say your body is beautiful in what it can do but it can only do what you optimize it for. And if you stick with your goals, you will be unrecognizable by the end. So keep going and fight through it.

But the second point I want to make is not about the physical body, but the mental attitude. As in life, and not just in running, the most important thing you most conquer is your own mind. I remember telling myself, that this year I wanted to become someone who, if they said they would do something, would do it. That’s why even though I had very little training, I bought the bib for the race in August, and said to myself that I am going to complete this half marathon no matter what.

Even more so, accepting the feeling of pain during the run and saying to myself I’m not going to stop no matter what happens is what allowed me to continue to run even as I was hurting everywhere on my lower body. And I truly believe, that if I did not run with Max that day, I would have stopped by mile 2 on my own volition. So find someone who motivates you and pushes you to be better—because it only gets easier to do hard things when you’re with other motivated people.

Lastly, this post is not specifically about the physical body. It’s about every area of our lives that we can improve on. We each have so much potential that we can unlock, not just in running, but in how we think, how we act, how we love, how we live, and more.

But the first battle you must win is in the mind. And everything else will follow.

In just a few hours after she broke the news, I feel like I’ve aged a ton. If you see me, I’ll look the same. But, internally, my soul feels aged. I don’t feel as young as I was just a week ago.

Because all of a sudden, my rock became shattered glass. And part of me, never truly appreciated or realized how connected I am to her. And when she told me she had no feelings for me, it destroyed me. Just a month ago (now a while back) I asked her to be my girlfriend, she said yes, and I thought our relationship was rock solid. But it wasn’t. And in just 2 hours my whole world was flipped on its head. But what was most difficult was not the news, it was her missing from my life.

No more texts. No more shared location. No more finsta posts. Just silence. And it was a silence so hard to carry because I was so used to texting her, thinking of her, and even dreaming about her.

And through her breakup with me, I feel like I’ve come to know what love truly is. Love is caring for them so deeply that you sacrifice everything for them. You carry the burdens so the one you love doesn’t have to carry those burdens. You never want to see them hurt or suffer. You want to be there for them no matter what. And even when you don’t get your way, you accept it because love doesn’t fight, it accepts. And you accept it even if its the hardest thing you ever had to do. You let go even when you don’t want to.

And as I look back upon this moment, I was definitely affected by this feeling of losing someone so precious to you. The affect of losing them is so strong, you just don’t want to let go. You want to fight it. But nontheless, I believe I know what love should be, through this experience.

It was this realization that made me feel much older.

My eyes are still young. But they feel different. Like the eyes of an old veteran who’s long returned from war—quiet, knowing, worn.

When he smiles, you can see the weight he carries behind his eyes. The kind of smile that only comes from having endured something difficult.

For the first time in my life, I’ve gone through heartbreak. For the first time, I feel like I know what its like to lose someone you love and care about so deeply. It feels like a piece of you is gone. Like part of your inside is hollowed out.

It’s the exaspirated feeling where you want to hug them so hard that they could pass out and never let go, because if you let go they’ll leave forever. When you’re in this state, all you can think about is what if.

What if I could go back in time?

What if I just did this differently?

What if I waited to ask her out when she came here?

But those thoughts keeps me stuck in the past. I need to keep moving forward.

Whatever happened, I’m a different person now. I can’t change it. It’s like my brain is rewired in a new way. Like the last part of me being young was shut off, and I truly began living as an adult. I have a new chapter in my life.

This new chapter begins with loss—the loss of someone so close to me. It’s not like she’s gone from my life forever, but she is very much removed from my life now. And as much as I hate saying that, I have to accept it. And when you lose someone so close to you, you realize that you’ve become older and wiser. Because time never stops and eventually, everyone we know will run out of their time. Each person in our lives have an invisible clock when that relationship fades and all thats left is memories.

I recently heard Chris Williamson say this: when you’re young, death is an impossible idea to you. You believe you’re invincible. And it’s very much true.

It’s a blissful era of enjoyment. And its marked by the one’s close to you surrounding you. But the moment someone close to you is gone: a significant breakup, a parent, a close friend, a grandparent, it changes you forever. You see, when you go through this, you finally truly realize how finite it all is.

How finite life is.

How short the time you have with close friends is.

How short the time you have with grandparents and parents is.

And that realization is powerful—because you’ll realize how precious your relationships are and how little time you have.

When she broke the news, my heart broke. But at the same time, my eyes opened too: the realization of how fragile all of this is. I thought our relationship was unshakable, but cracks had been forming all along. It didn’t take much to shatter it.

And suddenly, I saw more clearly the people who have always been there.

My parents.

Through every mistake, every bad day, every moment—they’ve stood by me. Whether it’s something silly like helping me find my phone or something major like paying for my college tuition (which is absurdly expensive)—they show up, again and again.

They show me unconditional love. Love given for nothing in return and love so encompassing that nothing can stop it. No matter what happens, they’ll always have my back. My other potential lovers or friends, they’ll come and go. They’ll fade out of the picture. But, my parents, they’ve always been there. They’ve always helped me whenever I needed help.

And for so long, I took them for granted. But now, I hope to start a new chapter—one where I no longer live so care free—where I realize how fragile everything is and so I’ll have to cherish everything much more deeply.

I no longer want to be this black hole that swoops benefits but never returns them. I want to give willingly. I want to provide for others. I want to cherish my friendships and the people I love. And give them so much more.

I’ve always heard the advice tell your parents you love them, before its too late. But I’ve never acted on it. Until now.

For the first time, I said to my Dad, that I loved him. Part of growing up in an Asian household, is that you don’t say these things. It’s the common saying that we show thanks to those we love through providing cut fruits and not words. But I also realized that I can’t stay trapped by my past or how I grew up. I won’t let it determine how I live. For perhaps the first time in my life, I was vulnerable with my Dad.

And all of us this came from my heartbreak.

In a way, I’m already thankful for what I’ve come to learn. I’m sad, yes. But, I’ve grown wiser. And I think this experience will make me regret less in the future—whether that be regarding my grandparents, parents, my close friends, or future lover.

I wish it didn’t have to end like this. I just wish there was another way. That I could just step into a time machine and go back. For this girl, I would have changed what she didn’t like. If she just talked to me, I would have listened. All this time when she thought I wasn’t thinking about her, I was. I thought of her everyday. I thought of our future together. And that’s the worst part—that she didn’t try to hold on. And I know she probably did try. But she never told me or showed me her slipping through the cracks. And when the cracks became too large, a hole that was too large to fix emerged. She told me everything she felt that one night. And it was so much. And yes there were things I missed that I could have done better and if I could go back to change those things, I would.

But what she did was wrong and she needs to know that.

But I still forgive her. Because even through what happened, I still care for her.

Now, I’m on the path of just letting go. Right now is not the right time to be friends or keep the last bit of hope in my heart waiting for her to return. She’s moved on, and I have not fully moved on. So I need to let go.

And I don’t want to give up. I want to keep trying. But I also know my limits. There’s only so much you can do. And sometimes, you have to accept things you don’t want or like. And just like water flowing down a stream, no matter what you do or try, it finds its way to the bottom. I want to desperately fight—fight the flow of gravity, fight the impossible. But I know, that sometimes, you can’t.

Because its not about just me. It’s about the other person in that relationship that we share. And if they want it one way, and I want it another, I’ll heed to what they want. As much as I want to renegade on what I know is right for me, drown out the advice my friends give to me, and fight on. I know change doesn’t happen like this. Love doesn’t fight, it accepts. Love doesn’t hate, it forgives. You can’t force a relationship, just like you can’t stop gravity’s pull.

And now I flow with the downhill stream, accepting what is done. My fight against thermodynamics ends as I join it.

Through all of this, I want to thank my friends, I really do appreciate them so much for helping me through this. All of them gave such good advice and clarity I didn’t see.

Second, If you’re going through a heartbreak, it’s really tough. But you can do it. I know the feeling. But with time everything can change.

Lastly, If you’re young, go experience a heartbreak as my close friend once told me, you don’t want to live your life arrogantly and care free like I have for 19 years. Go love, go care, go become wiser.

Here’s the google definition for both:

For a long time I’ve thought about this question. When I do things for others, why am I doing it? Are my actions altruistic or are they really masked with good intentions but are secretly greedy? A lot of the time, when I help others, it seems to be for myself. When I open the door for someone, it’s because I’m in front. I don’t stay there long enough to hold it for them to walk through, I just hold it as long as I can before I have to leave myself. In other words, what is convenient for me.

A lot of the “nice” things we do for others are out of convenienceI’d argue, not because we truly care about them.

Would I consider myself caring? Yes.

But am I really if I only do it out of convenience? Maybe not.

What about the homeless people around Harvard? I’m sure you and I have seen at least one each day as we go into the square, and maybe you feel a tinge of care, but not enough to donate. Not enough to help them.

The vast majority of people pass these homeless people and refuse to look at them or acknowledge them. To us, they become sub-human. Maybe it goes back to when you were a kid and your parents told you to stay away from them. There is definitely a sense of discomfort when you’re near them. You tense up ready for them to come at you, grab you, and act eratically.

Now, to some extent, you can make an argument about homeless people abusing your potential donated money for drugs or bad things. What if you bought them a fresh cooked meal instead of money? Ignore the possibility of spending money for drugs. You just give them a meal. But you still wouldn’t right? The barrier to helping homeless people created by social stigma, parental safety, and normalization still is too strong. Most people would not donate food to the homeless.

How can you and I call ourselves loving and empathetic people if we don’t care about the homeless that suffer? People that we clearly see suffering 200 meters from where we live on Harvard campus. Suffering that is clear to our eyes.

According to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, around seven hundred homeless people in the United States die every year because of hypothermia. 700 people dying every year. 700. Dying to preventable causes.

Every winter, while we worry about finals and sip hot cocoa, there are people out there worrying where their next meal will come from and if sleeping on a bench will be warmer than the floor—or if they will even wake up tomorrow. This all happens in the light that we know we can help them but choose not to.

Why is it that when it comes to the homeless we do not care?

Why is it that we seem to care when its someone we know?

I’d like to introduce to you the expanding moral circle—created and coined by Peter Singer, an Australian moral philosopher.

Take his argument on the drowning child.

Imagine as you are walking to school, you see a little kid drowning in this small pond. Shallow enough for you to waltz in and save the kid, but deep enough for the kid to drown in it. Would you save the kid?

Your clothes would get wet, you would “waste” a little time, but you’re saving a life. Would you do it?

Hopefully, you answered yes. Surely, the life of a child who will grow up and live for several more decades is more valuable than your clothes which will dry eventually. If so, then the question becomes a no brainer. We should all step in the pond, get wet, and save the kid from drowning.

But what if the kid wasn’t immediately able to be seen or near you? What if the kid was drowning hundreds of miles away. You, yourself, cannot directly save the kid. But you learn about their suffering and can donate $10 to hire someone in that area to save the kid. Would you do it?

Surely, your answer is still yes. Instead of your clothes getting wet, you donate $10. But a human life is worth more than $10, right? And the only other difference is the distance between you and the kid. How is this any different?

The answer is, it isn’t. Yet, we treat our answers differently. Maybe the first question was an immediate yes. The second one, maybe you had some hesitation. But in principle, your impact is the same: saving a life. Why treat it differently?

Or are you assigning moral significance based on where someone is?

Simply by one being born in Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Italy, they have less moral worth compared to an American?

Of course, we know less about people far away from us. Someone living in Boston is someone I would have a greater chance of interacting with, but I wouldn’t say because they live near me, they should be worth more to me. If we truly believe in fairness, then everyone should be worth the same moral equivalence regardless of location.

The idea of equal moral worth shouldn’t just stop at geography—it extends further: to race, gender, and even time.

Should you care about someone who will be born 500 years from now? If you answered no, ask yourself do you care about your children’s future? If so, then we should act to fight against climate change and advocate for greater safety regarding wars and bioweapons and AI advancement. Then, the same logic applies that we should care about the future of humanity thinking about welfare long after we’re gone from this Earth.

The second reason to care about people far after you are dead is a moral reason. The idea that harm can be done by you and hurt someone a year down the line, a decade, a century down the line should be avoided regardless of the timeframe. Murder is murder whether that was in the 2000s BCs, today, or 2000 years into the future. And thus we should avoid it.

The expanding moral circle is the idea that we can rapidly expand who we care about. First, intuitively, we care about ourselves. Our survival is the first thing we care about. Then, our family. Then, our close friends. Then, acquaintances. Then, maybe local strangers and people that act and look similar to us. Then, finally, everyone else I have not mentioned.

You can test this out by seeing who you would save given two options. Do you choose to save yourself or a close friend? Probably yourself.

Do you choose to save your sister or a stranger? Probably your sister.

What about saving an American or a Colombian? Probably the American.

But what we must realize is care must be extended to everyone, not just those we know about or have relations with.

In the example above, we clearly see its easy to care about a little child that is drowning near to us. But harder to care about a little child drowning far away from us because we don’t see it. Regardless, shouldn’t we aim to help both of the drowning children, irrespective of distance.

When we return to the notion of helping homeless people around Harvard Square, we realize that the things people can’t control—their appearance, gender, race, nationality, and so on—should never determine how much or how little we choose to help them. When we see a homeless person, we may tense up because of how radically different in appearance and action they are from every other normal person walking around the square, but it doesn’t mean they deserve less help.

Just as we’ve uncovered that distance should not be a factor in our help, neither should one’s status, our relationship with them, or anything else be the reason we don’t extend our help. We should help so long as we can.

So what can you do about it?

As we live in the 21st century, what is available to us in information and scope of people to impact, has dramatically increased from when we were hunter gatherers to farmers and industrialists. Today, an average person could have more influence than 99% of humans ever born before in making the world better.

We hear about the exceptions in history all the time: Napoleon, Cleopatra, Caesar, Confucius, Muhammad, Jesus, etc. Yet the truth is, 99% of people in all of history were just normal people. Farming, eating, raising kids, working. They had no influence over others at all.

Today, it’s different. The average person could connect to someone in almost any part of the world. You can directly donate to almost any one that needs help. Social media connects us so we can see virtually anything. Venmo and payment systems allow us to send money to anyone. Today, you have more influence than most people who have ever lived. But you don’t realize it.

As you read this, you most likely live in the top 5% countries in terms of prosperity. Your ability to impact not just those near you but more crucially those far away from you has never been greater.

When we were living in small communities with no knowledge of the outside world, who we cared about was our local community and our immediate close circle. That was our moral circle.

Now, our moral circle no longer can be confined by simply who we are in contact with but everyone. We should and must care about those that have nothing in common with us. Those who live hundreds of miles away, those who don’t look like us or even those living in the future.

Every day, we have unlimited actions we can make. Each can help someone in unparalled ways. Everytime we say no to donating to a nonprofit. Everytime we eat out or buy new clothes. We don’t think there’s a choice. But there is. Each dollar we spend can be spent in a million different ways, but you ultimately decide what to spend it on. And while we know we can help so many people—buying Insecticide-treated Nets for Malaria prone areas, vaccine programs in underserved areas, and more—we many times choose not to. Instead, living lavishly, exuberantly, and better than 99.99% of any human to ever exist up to this point.

This is not to say everything we do must be in the name of helping others. But it is to say that we must reframe how we think about our spending and the privilege that has come with living in the U.S in such a prosperous time (relative to others in the world).

By thinking about others, you start a new process of decision making—one that is not solely considerate about simply you but others.

Should I really buy this expensive jewelry that I will forget about in 2 weeks?

How many people could I help if I donated this money instead?

This is the start of reframing how we think and make decisions.

But why does it seem that such a small minority donates? Why are we so self centered when it comes to decision making when we believe we are altruistic beings (besides biological reasons like survival).

If we know that our donations can save lives and that the luxuries we consume don’t impact our own lives as great as saving a life or improving the quality of life of someone else, why do we not donate more?

I’d say it comes down to two reasons. 1) a lack of empathy for those unlike ourselves. And 2) desensitization and normalization of issues.

First, what has become apparent in humans is the difficulty to empathize with people that are different from us. We love to socially group ourselves into people that talk, act, and look like us. When one from our own group is hurt, we are more easily able to see how this harm might be passed on to us. However, when we see someone who is far away from us and who looks different from us affected, its easier to ignore them because it doesn’t seem to affect us.

This is a dangerous idea and what is responsible for bully behavior. When the majority does not fight for the minority, they end up losing too. This happened during the Holocaust during World War II and what is happening now with international students at colleges and Trump’s tyrannical acts to deport everyone he deems dangerous to his administration. The more we let a bully continue his charades, the more they will. This is how the majority loses power. This is how democracies turn into dictatorships.

Second, we become desensitized and normalize issues. We see so many issues we rather ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening. Even as thousands die and can be saved. I’ve come to the point where I see so many issues on social media, it becomes hard to care. Especially when it feels like I have no power when it comes to what follows.

Because of these two reasons, action halts. Our thoughts about these big issues are there, then they blink away and we’re back living our normal lives. It’s so easy to go back to our own comfortable way of living—to not care about others that you don’t know about or see. But remember, those people are always out there … suffering, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

So I have one question.

Is it moral to allow people to die, knowing we can prevent it? Is it moral to know that several meals you’ve eaten could have saved a child? Is it moral to buy expensive cloths, cars, and luxuries that sure make us feel good temporarily, but pales in significance to improving the most destitute and poor in the world and saving lives?

How can I enjoy my luxuries knowing there are so many humans suffering?

How can I scroll on Instagram from one story with dead children in Gaza to a nice vacation in Cancun with the most exorbant meals and drinks?

It looks dystopian to me—where we have people that enjoy their luxuries with no concern or acknowledgement of such intense and painful suffering. Maybe they don’t know about the suffering, but I’m sure they’ve had the opportunity to learn about it. But they choose to close the doors, preferring their own happy lifestyle.

Being moral requires stepping out of your shoes to examine the world around you and out of your comfortable lifestyle. It means helping others to the greatest extent we can. It means sacrificing what we have for others.

If you disagree, what’s your definition of “being moral”?

P.S

This was basically the principles of effective altruism — read about it more here:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hkimyETEo76hJ6NpW/on-caring

https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/child-in-the-pond/

However, nothing stays the same. The advice I had gotten particularly was about the friends you’ll have. This upperclassmen told me “don’t expect your friendships to stay the same from Visitas. The friends you made now may not be your friends when you get here in August. And your friends you made first semester may not be your friends in your second semester. And even the friends you made in your first year of college may not stick with you till senior year.”

This sounded cynical to me. Especially as a new student, at Visitas everyone seemed so happy and excited and open to meeting you. You’re excited to find new friends and them too. I was happy about my experience with Visitas and I thought too that the friends I made there would carry over to my freshman fall semester.

Yet, that seemed to fall short when fall came. You see, at Visitas there are no bounds to who you can meet. There is no structured classes, times you must eat to fit your schedule, no career goals that bound your clubs, etc. When you come in the fall, you will be bounded by these things. You’ll fall into a funnel of your interests and naturally be seperated from everyone who is not similarly interested in those things. Because of this your scope of friendship decreases massively.

When I came to Harvard in the fall of 2024, I expected to rekindle many of my friendships developed since Visitas and it somewhat happened. Between quick meals, quick hi’s and goodbye’s and different events I saw people at, but it never truly was there. Like a fire near its end, it smoldered out. Friendships are not permanent and they will change, especially at a place like Harvard.

It’s a big place with thousands of students. People are busy and when it comes to classes, it becomes easy to put aside “on the edge” friendships. Friendships that are one step from acquaintances or close friends. When I look back at my friendships, they have certainly changed. From Visitas to fall, and from fall to now the spring.

So if Visitas wasn’t the glorious friend making event you thought it was, don’t worry. Those relationships probably won’t manifest into anything huge. The groupchats you have on snapchat, instagram, discord, or whatever will come to die. Most of the people there will not be your friends you actually talk to. The fall will bring plenty of opportunity for making friends. And if Visitas was really fun, that’s good. But don’t make Visitas the expectation of what school will be like either.

After all, these pre-frosh programs are intended to convince you to enroll, not to actually depict what the experience as an undergrad will be like. That’s why if you are stuck in deciding what school to pick, I would suggest talking to students of all years, from freshman to senior. They have the true experience of what Harvard or any other college you are deciding in between. You may be stuck in a place of glee after such high dopamine filled events, but settle down and introspect on your decisions before deciding. Don’t let 2 days shape your next 4 years.

Looking even broader, college amasses us together. But at the end, individualism is stronger. 4 years is long yet short. When it comes time to graduating, your friends and classmates will go on their different paths. And slowly, relationships will fade unless both of you put in the effort to changing that. A fire only burns if it has fuel.

Your friendships (the fire) with others depends on both of you. Like fire that requires oxygen and wood, a friendship has two components: you and the other person in the relationship. Even if you want to grow your relationship, if the other part doesn’t, it won’t work. That person becomes the limiting factor in this reaction (s/o AP chem). And you’ll see this in your relationships. So if you feel as if you are putting in a lot, but your friend or whomever it may be doesn’t care, it’s time to let go.

Finally, I want to say sorry if this writing sounded depressing. It’s mostly my own reflection on friendships I’ve seen through my time at college. Hopefully, it was insight to you and will help you retain and grow friendships.

Until next time,
Zach