went to China and heard a black cat saying Mao we're gonna make Rush Hour 4 together

What to do when you don't know what to do

The first thing I can remember actively trying to be good at was League of Legends. I remember losing my first few games and thinking “Damn. I could get obsessed with this.”

I was addicted to that game for 4 years. I played at least a couple hours a day, and watched all the pro players and YouTube guides on how to get better. Obsession. Eventually I found other interests, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever reached the same amount of obsession for anything other than that game.

I’m often jealous of people who found their passion early. People who’ve been dancing since they were 3, who’ve been training for the olympics since they could walk, who have a special connection with music because of their grandma, who started taking apart computers and their parents handed them a Java textbook one day thinking their kid could be ‘good at computers’.

People often say that to find your passion, you should think back to what you did as a kid when you were blindly following your curiosity, unaffected by the world. I honestly can’t remember doing anything other than school and watching TV. I read a lot of books and ate a lot of food. Does that mean my destiny is to become a writer or a chef? Those things kind of just happened— I didn’t choose them. Nor did I put an inordinate amount of effort into either to the point of becoming top 10% in the world.

The second thing I remember devoting a lot of effort to was coding. I started 10 years ago, taught myself Python, learned about AI before it was cool, then worked as a software engineer for a few years before realizing that I probably have a lower skill ceiling than most other software engineers since I’m pretty reluctant to stare at a screen all day. I like talking to people and going outside, but programming inherently rewards those who are more introverted than me.

With that realization, I tried some other stuff. I watched a lot of YouTube so I tried making videos for a while. It was fun but super hard, and after a while, I gave it up because I missed living in San Francisco and having money. Then, backed by the experience of running an e-commerce business in high school, I landed a job at a GPU cloud startup as a growth engineer. After about a year of doing that, I had to opportunity to switch to tech sales. After 2 quarters of doing well at that by most metrics, I got laid off.

From everything I’ve done, professionally and for fun, nothing has screamed out at me as “the thing”. The elusive “thing” that I’m supposed to do with my life. My god-given purpose on this earth.

I have no idea what it is.

---

I’ve been thinking about the Japanese concept ‘Ikigai’ recently:

It describes so much of what I’m looking for. My last job felt like what I was good at, and what I could be paid for. But my Ikigai will likely come as a marriage of the skills I have and the values instilled in me early in life. I grew up religious, and doing good for the world was a huge part of my upbringing. I feel like I’ve ignored that in my career so far since it felt like the smartest people to learn from or the companies paying the most money are working on cutting edge tech for mostly capitalistic incentives. Even today, I have friends that say what problem you work on doesn’t really matter early in your career. Just optimize for optionality, learning, and money.

I also find it hard to care about large scale problems. Of course I know climate change is terrible, yet I just don’t feel it emotionally. I find it hard to work on something so massive I can’t hold it in my brain. I love working with people where I can directly see their day get better after they interact with me or something I’ve made. Especially if it ties to a broader goal that’s good for the world. Earlier in my career, mission wasn’t as important because I could just convince myself that whatever I was working on was important for the world in some way. Now I just can’t force myself to believe in distributed database software making the world a better place.

I’m not sure about my relationship with art. I really like making things, and believe I’m a creative person, but I’ve never really been amazing at making things look or sound good. I really love being around other creative people but I likely wouldn’t fit in with a group of people who call themselves artists. I’m more like a maker of things, doer of shenanigans, committer to bits. Making a career out of that was what I attempted when I made funny Youtube videos for a summer, and that desire is still in me. To do stuff that barely anyone does and document it so anyone watching feels like they can do more than they thought they could.

That’s one of my favourite feelings in general— to make someone feel like they can do more than they think they can. It’s something I’ve been lucky enough to have from multiple friends and mentor figures in the past, and I want to instil it in others. Which is why I think part of what I do next needs to have me in a role with a lot of ownership, and the eventual ability to teach others. I’d love to lead a team and think I’d be good at it, after getting over the initial learning curve of coordinating people. I just know much more is possible with others than alone. So learning to be a force multiplier on a group of people is really important to me.

I also think the most effective leaders are those who, if it came down to it, could do any of their team’s individual roles better than them. It’s near impossible to command respect as a general if people feel like you’re just a figurehead rather than an expert soldier. Which is why the best engineering managers are former engineers, yet not all top engineers are good managers. So whatever I do next, it’ll involve me spending lots of time in the trenches doing work that actually drives output to develop tangible skills. And therefore needs to have a high baseline difficulty so I can add some nice grooves to my brain. I want to actually do stuff, not just live vicariously through “enabling” the people doing the stuff.

---

Now that I’m unemployed, the most common question I get is “What are you going to do next?” For a week, the answer was: “Nothing.” I wanted so badly to jump into solving all the problems that came up when my job ended, but I promised myself I’d defer any decisions to at least next week. I spent that week trying to get my head right, taking long walks and spending lots of time in saunas and hot tubs.

The conclusion I came to was that I love America. I feel like there’s something here for me, and so I should get a job ASAP so I can have a work visa that lets me stay here long term. I interviewed with 20 or so companies, did a 2-week unofficial trial with one I really liked, and kept a bunch of promising options on the back-burner in case the trial didn’t work out.

Everything was going well until 1 week into the trial I had a full day where I just froze. I couldn’t get any work done, and I was also so mentally stuck that I didn’t give my boss a heads up. We talked about it after and 2 days later I told him I couldn’t do it. I really liked the job, my coworkers were awesome, and the mission was something I’d always wanted to work on. The timing just wasn’t right. I put a lot of mental and emotional effort into my work, and at the time, I wasn’t in the place to put 100% of my energy into something. My entire body was telling me that this wasn’t it, even though my brain said it was.

I shoehorned it into Ikigai, thinking that it fit all 4 criteria, but the feeling in my bones said otherwise. Considering the alternative, that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I want, was too terrifying. I wanted the answer so badly that I convinced myself and everyone around me that this was “the thing”. It had to be.

Maybe the other part unmentioned part of Ikigai is timing. Something could be put in front of me that fits all 4 criteria, but if I’m not ready to receive, it’ll never feel like a fit.

---

Thinking back to League of Legends, whenever I felt stuck in the game, I started “smurfing” — I made a new account on the side where I could play against easier competition and not take the game too seriously.

I ended up getting a higher rank on my smurf than my main.

I have this habit of getting into something far past the point of being a beginner, but then getting way too in my head when I start feeling legitimately challenged.

I spent 2 years writing on Substack to an audience of pretty much no one. Now that I’ve gotten recognized a couple times for my writing, it feels like no piece I write is good enough to publish. I have more drafts than posts at this point, and so to get out of my own head, I made a private blog where I write about whatever comes to mind to a few close friends every week. My private now has more posts than my main (and I think they’re pretty good too!)

I tweet less now that I have an audience. I said I’d make videos but get self-conscious when people tell me they watched them, even though the feedback is always positive. Some part of me is just more comfortable hidden away in the quiet of my childhood bedroom tinkering away at my desk in obscurity than being observed by anyone. Yet at the same time, making things and telling people on the internet about them has given me more than I ever dreamt of. It’s something I will happily continue doing, I just need to get out of my own head.

I need to start smurfing again.

So like Steve Jobs, it seems like every cool person in western history did 2 things:

1. Die young

2. Go on a journey to find themself in Asia

Who am I to argue with the greats? That’s why I booked a one-way flight to Shenzhen yesterday. I leave in 2 weeks, and have no idea when or how I’m coming back to San Francisco. I’m just going to be away for as long as I want, going wherever I want, until I’m ready to come back, or until I run out of money.

The plan is to see what I naturally end up doing when I have none of my existing influences pushing me in any direction. I love SF to death, but it’s a terrible place to be if you don’t know what you’re doing. The culture I’m a part of here seems to march in 1 direction only and promises to carry those who indulge it to power, wealth and influence I’m 90% sure I’ll find my way back here since some part of me wants those things, but more so because I love the friends I have here.

So if I’m meant to be a lazy bum for some time, or to write sappy love letters and blog posts all day, or to start importing Japanese shoes and Chinese electronics to the West, I’d like the find out. I’m not going away to look for something. I’m going away to open up the possibility of something finding me, and this trip is just widening my search space. I’m ready for active exploration — the point is to do something each day, but I have no preconceived ideas about what each day should look like. I’m not going to explicitly work or play or relax or anything — I’m just going to try out a new way of being and see if it’s for me.

In the back of my mind, I’m thinking about making videos again talking about whatever I want, unburdened by what I’ve put out before and my existing audience, just to get into the rhythm of making stuff and telling people about it again. But again, this is a soft plan. Not sure if I’ll follow through.

It may seem like I’m doing this to run away from my problems. It may seem like I’m searching for something. The truth is, it’s probably a little bit of both but also I’m really also just doing this because I genuinely don’t know what to do.

I feel like a reason for being is something you almost can’t search for. Borrowing from ideas in Daoism, it’s something you know when you have it but have no idea what it looks or feels like until you do. And I think what’s meant for me is coming for me no matter where I go, I can’t outrun it. Borrowing from Steve Jobs, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

I’m just praying this all connects at some point.

I’m a big fan of the phrase “do it scared”. And I am pretty terrified here, even though I know rationally there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m scared all get lazy, become broke and unattractive, or all my friends will forget me while I’m gone. I’m scared of getting irrationally arrested in China, or dying in a Tsunami in Japan. I’m scared of being unemployable, or never being able to come back.

But more than all of that, I’m scared of what’ll happen if I stay. I can feel my mind slowly slipping, slowly atrophying as I spend more time in the same place without leaning into the potential inflection point granted to me. I’m afraid if I don’t chase something right now, I’ll lose the ability to. If I settle into another job that’s not quite right for me, into one city for the rest of my 20s without really experiencing any other culture, into a domestic lifestyle without really wanting it because that’s what all my friends are doing — I’ll never really know what I want.

The way I see it, there’s pain on both sides. Might as well get hurt trying something new.

---

Thank you to Kasra, Grace, Jacky and Brinlee for reviewing this. And to all my aforementioned wonderful friends who’ve listened to me talk about all the crazy shit in my head through this transition period. Hope you know that I’m probably going to keep going through ups and downs like this, and that I appreciate you a lot for bearing with me.

I’m at a weird place with this Substack where I started out writing on it for an audience of my mom and a couple of friends, and now there’s hundreds of you reading this that I don’t even know. It’s been part journal, part newsletter, part blog and part captain’s log.

I want to get even more personal on here, and write more than I ever have before. I don’t want to give advice, just talk about what I’m doing and going through in the hopes that someone out there might benefit from it. I want to be known well by

But I want everyone reading this to feel less like an audience. I kind of hate that term for stuff like this — I want to write the same way I do for my mom and a couple friends as I do for you all reading this that I don’t know, the friends I haven’t met yet. So if you made it all the way here, I need 2 favours from you.

1. Introduce yourself! Say hi to me either here over email: aadillpickle@gmail.com or twitter @aadillpickle. Bonus if you tell me what I should write more about.

2. Send this to 1 friend you think could learn from what I’m talking about here, or someone going through something similar to make them feel less alone. No pressure, but I write for people like me, and I know there’s gotta be a lot out there, so I’d like to meet them, even if its just virtually and parasocially. Better than being just another of the 8 billion strangers out there.

Thank you so much for reading. 🫵🙏✌️