Had to stop chillin' with the villains so I could start dreamin' with the demons

what it feels like to care about things again

A lot of my life has been spent in “analysis paralysis”. As someone who thinks a lot, I can often convince myself I’m thinking rationally even when I’m not. Whereas most often it’s the feeling that comes first and the rationale after, I can pretty reliably fool myself into thinking it’s the other way around.

In my brain it looks like this:

“Oh yeah it makes perfect sense to move to San Francisco. The weather’s good, my friends are there and it’s great for my career.”

I really just did that on a whim ‘cause it felt right.

“Oh yeah, it’s actually ideal that I got fired. I was thinking about quitting and this way I get severance and avoid an awkward conversation and it’s the push I needed to get started on my dreams.”

That really was just a decision made for me before I was ready. I felt crushed by it at the time.

On one hand, I can convince myself into thinking any decision is good, which is great for mental clarity since I avoid the pain of indecisiveness. On the other hand, the decision to not do anything differently is also a decision. I rationalize this by saying:

“Well, you’ve been through a lot for your age so far. You deserve some time to rest and be comfortable. Life is long and you’re already ahead of most people in a career sense. Everyone feels like this at your age. You need to take care of your health and avoid stress and and and and…”

It goes on like that.

This has been a recurring theme in my life, since I think about and plan for the future a lot, often to my benefit. But that also ends up having me think about the far future a bit, and can sometimes take a nihilistic turn. Whether I do or don’t, it’s all the same, so why try¹? It’s also tough in the sense that my most enjoyable periods in life weren’t preplanned but rather made off an intuitive decision to pursue what felt good at the time. By planning, I’m often actively planning against myself. I’m implicitly giving my current self more decision making power than my future self who’s older and likely wiser.

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I’ve recently been reminded of why I feel better actively trying. Why caring about things is cool, why having dreams and hope is better than not. Not caring about life outlooks or trajectories, but just doing cool stuff with great people. I spent the last 3 days in the middle of nowhere Canada with some of the best friends and strangers I’ve ever met, and came out with a renewed sense of “Damn I wanna make things again”.

I rented an Airbnb with some friends and spent 3 days in Waterloo. Day 1 was coming in to watch and help with running a massive 3000 attendee demo day for cool projects people we’re working on for the year. I got there early to help out and all was mostly calm. Then around T-2 hours ‘til showtime, a bit of urgency sets in as we realize we have to check in and seat 3000 people. My job was firefighter - fix whatever goes wrong, make it work. I don’t even go to this school yet they trusted me to run the main registration and lead a team of 10.

I was super impressed at how everyone was so willing and excited to make this thing go well even though no one was being paid or “getting something” out of it. A team of 100 volunteers went out of their way to help each other and make the event successful, with almost an entirely flat org structure. No egos— just straight “doing good work is its own reward”.

I got handed a walkie talkie at some point and decided to head backstage and even though registration was technically over. I helped out last year with the same job, and just anticipated an extra pair of hands and a cool head might be helpful there. It was easier to do that as an outsider because sometimes when tensions are high and you’ve been working on something so hard the entire year, little mistakes can create a lot of stress, and it’s hard to have great judgement when stressed out.

Backstage was insane. An AV team made of some professionals flown out from the US, side-by-side with some brilliant Waterloo students, crowded by a million monitors and boxes with knobs. Controlled chaos when swapping off mics after getting on and off stage. Wrangling demoers and hyping them up before speaking to thousands about their passions. Things went wrong and you could feel tension in the air as everyone came up with fixes on the fly.

While backstage, I honestly thought the show was going terribly. It was a little surprising hearing everyone raving about it after seeing all the mistakes made behind the scenes. A good reminder that van Gogh looks at his paintings and sees everything he could do better — but the world just sees Starry Night.

The average caliber of the people demoing and running the show was probably equivalent to some of the smartest people I know in SF, but their egos were 10x smaller. No one there made me feel any less than them for not doing the incredible things they were. They made me feel like I could do it too. They just love the game — how anyone else feels about what they’re up to is secondary.

That became super obvious to me watching the whole operation supported by countless people that Twitter will never see, but the show couldn’t have run without. Alex and Pav on AV, Donald behind the camera, Wenhao setting up the stage/AV equipment, Zhi Ling checking people in, Rachel and Aava running the volunteer team, Eesha managing socials, and many others putting in work. Everyone stayed til midnight to clean up and weeks after the event my friends are still combing through invoices. No one makes documentaries about janitors or accountants, but that’s what it takes to run something this impactful and grand. No one complained once — just an air of “I can make it happen”.

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Doing things for the love of the game was made even more apparent watching a high school robotics competition the last day I was there. It was about as fun as watching a basketball game for me — ESPN should pick this up soon it’s insane. They have $10000 robots driven by Valorant players in gold shooting dodgeballs, climbing chains and sorting tubes, all color commentated and refereed. Talking to the kids building these robots and seeing how much they cared reminded me of myself. It reignited a feeling I’d maybe lost for a bit in the past year staying so stable and comfy. And my friend said that the average kid in this competition probably knew as much about robotics as someone in 3rd year Mechatronics. In high school.

What I’ll miss the most about that week was the fact that every night I was there, somehow people ended up at our house til 2 am. That rarely happens in my life anymore for a few reasons. When it does it’s often the highlight of my week. People in SF sleep early, have lives and jobs, their own friends and relationships, and don’t really rally around some central cause outside of work.

It makes sense that we have higher reported rates of loneliness in the world now — the intimacy of college relationships fades as we settle into routines. It feels like there’s just not enough time in a day as an adult — 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, 1 hour of commute, 1 hour for exercise, 1 hour for cooking, 10 hours for rotting to recover from all that, a million other misc. chores and you find yourself with barely any time for the homies while trying to achieve “balance”. Routines set up a solid base, but life happens at the fringes.

I think there’s a world in which taking care of my mind and body go hand in hand with making things with cool people prolifically. I don’t think that’s crazy to say even though I don’t see it very often in the world, and haven’t been able to do it myself yet either². I’m not talking about maniacal obsession, but trying to make progress on something everyday that I care about and seeing where I end up in a year.

some hopes and dreams

For a while, I thought feeling content with what I have meant never wanting more. After all, wanting more inherently implies not being fully satisfied with what you have. I now realize that life is a book that’s constantly being written, and you can like the chapters you’ve written while still wanting to make the chapters that come after it better. You can still want the book to be great in the end instead of just good with the chapters you’ve had.

Without a setup, the climax just isn’t as good. Without world-building, the main character won’t seem as interesting. Not all of the book has to be a climax, but all of it can be interesting. But no good book was ever written about staying at home typing all day.

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Some days when I feel nice and comfy, I get a little panicked that everything’s going too well. In my head, I rationalize this by thinking:

Surely something must be wrong? Nothing’s ever gone this well before. You probably have some problems you’re not realizing. And if you have problems, you should solve them. Problems bad, solutions good. Go look for some problems and solve them.

This comes from the same part of my brain that gets analysis paralysis. By planning for the future, I stop taking action in the now. By obsessing about problems, I forget to build towards things I actually want. Months ago, I made a long list of all my problems at the time. Once that was out, I felt much better, and thought about how to solve them. After that day I actually forgot I made that list and yet, while rereading my notes 3 months later, I realized most of them were solved as a byproduct of living my life. And the rest didn’t feel that problematic.

It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes focusing on your problems makes them feel bigger. And diverts you from addressing the root causes by focusing on symptoms. I could feel sad, and the root cause of that could be loneliness. I could try fixing that by doing things that make me happy: eating ice cream, playing guitar, exercising. But even though that’d make me feel better for a bit, I’d miss the lifelong satisfaction of finding people I belong with and enjoying my own company.

I feel like my ideal self is someone who looks for early signs of joy rather than problems to solve. The quick hit of satisfaction from solving a problem is a high like no other. But the sustained joy from creating something sparks more of a warm glow inside.

I’m now on the hunt for that glow. After seeing it in so many others, and being reminded of what it feels like in myself through them, I know I can get it again.

It’ll be painful along the way. But the quick hot burn of being bad at something hurts much less than the slow burn of realizing your brain is atrophying since you haven’t challenged it in a while.

I’ve been hibernating in the cold too long. I’m ready to be burned again.

1. My answer is here:

(TL;DR: Why not try? It’s more fun)

2. I’ve always found the demon hours of 12-4 am to be most productive for working on passion projects, but Bryan Johnson has convinced me I do need to sleep, eat well and exercise everyday.