When I first landed in San Francisco, I had no idea what I was looking for. I came here about a month ago—unemployed, newly single, and, for the first time in a while, unanchored in any serious way. So I adopted a policy of “aggressive openness,” which sounds like a weird therapeutic intervention but is just a convoluted way of saying: I’ve been saying yes to everything.

In most cities, you can sense some kind of dominant social gravity. New York has ambition. LA has image and influence. Berlin has irony. San Francisco has…what?

At first, I thought it was optimism. People here say things like “it’s early days” or “this could be the unlock for consciousness research.” It sounded like a Silicon Valley cliche, until I realized they were seriously stating their intentions, the way medieval cathedral builders might’ve discussed projects they’d never see completed.

But optimism didn’t feel exactly right. It’s too emotional, too forward-looking. San Francisco doesn’t always believe things will get better. It believes things can get better–and the way to find out is to try out something that’s completely insane to see if it might work.

The central principle, as far as I can tell, is acceleration.

The native motion is the pivot. Everyone is always mid-experiment: on themselves, their companies, their bodies, their relationships, even their ethics. I’ve heard someone describe their personality as “in beta.” Everyone seems to be A/B testing their metaphysics.

In a place like Minneapolis, the great sin is being a narcissist. In San Francisco, the great sin is being unscalable.

I met a guy at a party about 96 hrs ago who said, “I’m working on sadness.” I asked him what this meant. He said, “I mean globally…like trying to reduce net sadness in the world…using software.” This didn’t feel cynical to me. It felt like someone who had learnt to think of themselves as an edge case in their own life.

This is maybe the defining feature of the city: the conversion of inwardness into infrastructure. It’s not uncommon to meet someone who raised a few million dollars to fix a problem they first encountered on a bad mushroom trip in 2017.

I can feel it in conversations. People don’t ask each other what they believe or where they’re from. They ask what they’re currently exploring. Belief is too static, too pre-committed. But exploration—that’s safe. That can be changed tomorrow…better yet, improved.

And yet, beneath this flexibility, I sense something remarkably stable. A structure to the city’s inner life. Everyone is looking for the same thing, though they wouldn’t phrase it this way. They’re looking for a way to be undefended.

There’s this lovely idea from Chris Olah; his take on micromorts: micro-marriages. (ACX take on it also good) Tiny probabilities that any given interaction might evolve into something amazing and meaningful i.e. love, collaboration, best friendship, world-altering education. Individually unlikely, but collectively inevitable if you show up enough.

Often, people think about this incorrectly. They focus on the individual probabilities, which are, in fact, tiny. The magic again isn’t in any one interaction, but the compounding effects of many interactions over time.

Cities work the same way, except instead of micro-marriages with other people, they offer you micro-marriages with possible versions of yourself.

Every conversation becomes a tiny probability that you’ll discover you’re the kind of person who could start a great company, write a book, organize a movement, or just think about things you didn’t know you were capable of. I mean this place is ruthlessly efficient at surfacing these in you.

In some video games, you get zone-specific stat boosts. +20 Charisma in the Elf Forest. +15 Strength near Volcano Forge. This definitely exists. I’ve never seen a good real-world theory of this, but I’ve definitely seen real-world versions. San Francisco is one. Not for everyone, and not forever. But if you happen to be a particular kind of slightly-too-online, overeducated, intellectually restless, socially experimental person? SF seems to offer a +25 to “What’s Possible” for your character. But that +25 boost doesn’t come cheap…literally or psychologically. The city filters. Aggressively.

Which raises the real question: what kind of sorting mechanism is a $4,500/month studio apartment?

It’s not just selecting for income. In fact, plenty of high earners bail the moment they realize they’re sharing a hallway with six polycules and a guy livestreaming his ketamine microdosing protocol. No, it’s selecting for something weirder. People who either:

(a) has such extreme time preference that future wealth justifies present material deprivation, or

(b) derives utility from proximity to information flows that most people literally cannot perceive.

I'm increasingly convinced it's mostly (b).

Walk through SoMa and you’ll overhear conversations about fine-tuning LLMs, vector embeddings, parameter slippage, quantization strategies. It’s not just that this would be incomprehensible at a dinner party in 99% of America. It’s that here, someone might interrupt with a disagreement about sampling temperature.

There’s an unusually high density of people thinking about genuinely important problems…not just “disrupting” laundry or meal prep. (Although yes, you will still hear someone arguing that their B2B SaaS dashboard for CFOs is going to revolutionize human flourishing. You learn to filter.)

And the people here? They're all odd in a very specific way. It’s easy to find people who:

• won’t let you get away with a lazy explanation

• take joy seriously

• refer to their last five years of life as a “side quest”

• ask what you’re building and what you’re healing from, in the same breath

The ecosystem reinforces itself. In most places, weird ideas have to pass through a filter of social proof before they reach you. Someone says they want to build a brain-computer interface to reduce global sadness, tells their normie friends, gets discouraged by silence and a raised eyebrow. Here, they mention it in a coffee shop and the person next to them says, “Oh, that’s like what my housemate tried…but she pivoted to neuroaesthetics. Want an intro?”

And so the idea survives long enough to become real.

Some interesting things I’ve seen/done that I attribute to SF:

• Watched a friend pilot an actual flying car

• Participated in taking over Angel Island for an island-wide zombie tag game

• Tried to recruit Gwern to my house for a party game night after a 2 hr conversation about cat urine and the failure to predict scaling laws

• Maintained a straight face at a dinner where someone casually said “I did MDMA with my therapist and now I can talk to my dad” and everyone nodded with academic seriousness

  ---

Preliminary Conclusions (Subject to Update)

Right now, I'm charmed by the earnestness. The way people say "changing the world" without detectable irony. The founder who told me, with tears in his eyes, about his mission to "democratize joy."

I suspect in 6 months I might find it tiring…the relentless optimism, the inability to have a conversation about weather without someone turning it into a startup idea. But right now, it's like watching children play with the concept of future, so serious about their games that they make them real.

I haven’t formulated my final assessment yet. I don’t know what kind of person I’m becoming. But I’m more curious than afraid right now. I've started ending conversations with "let's build something together," and yesterday I caught myself explaining to someone why their idea for edible packaging wasn't ambitious enough.

The city is teaching me its language. Whether that's inspiration or infection remains to be seen.

Somewhere in this city, someone is about to have an idea that will change everything.

Somewhere else, someone is realizing their everything-changing idea won't work.

Both feel equally sacred here.

This seems to be the most useful thing I’ve learned so far.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

A few minutes ago, at Frankfurt Airport, a toddler darted towards me, giggling wildly as he tried to block my path. His joy was infectious, and he briefly pulled me into his world.

Then I glanced up to find his family and saw what could have been a museum exhibit about the 2020s: his entire family - parents and two siblings - locked in that distinctive forward-tilt of people absorbed in their phones.

This probably sounds like the setup for a bad tweet about the death of human connection, but bear with me.

Before smartphones, airport gates were a peculiar kind of social experiment. Not necessarily better, just… unique. They combined enforced idleness with enforced proximity—a recipe you don’t encounter much elsewhere.

Think about it: churches gather believers, schools sort by age and geography, trains let you escape to another car. But an airport gate? It traps lawyers next to farmers next to students, sometimes for hours. No filters. No exits. Just time and shared space.

When the corporate executive and the college student struck up a conversation in the 1980s, they weren’t just sharing space. They were engaging in a moment engineered by circumstance. The stakes were low; the expected return on breaking social norms was just high enough. With nowhere else to be, curiosity got its chance.

I’ve felt this phenomenon before—most vividly in my boarding school dorm. Night after night, the same twenty faces. Not because I chose them, but because I had no choice.

With zero optionality, you push through the friction of initial awkwardness. You find rhythms, inside jokes, shared habits. Later, in college, surrounded by limitless options, I struggled to recreate that same depth. Too much choice dilutes investment. Constraints, it turns out, do a lot of the heavy lifting in connection.

But let’s be clear: the dorm or the gate wasn’t some natural Eden of human connection. These were highly artificial environments, constructed by necessity. People didn’t connect because it was “innate.” They connected because they were stuck.

And that’s the thing. When we mourn the “loss” of connection, we’re not actually yearning for a return to some fundamental human truth. We’re reacting to the breakdown of one artificial environment and struggling to imagine the next one. There’s no “natural” state of human connection to reclaim.

What we call human nature is really our capacity to build environments that shape who we are—and then outgrow them.

The toddler at the airport isn’t the last vestige of pre-technological humanity. He’s just figuring out the rules of his particular ecosystem—one where screens dominate, but joy still sneaks through.

The common instinct is to romanticize the old constraints, to say, “If only we could bring them back.” But that misses the point. The dormitory friendship machine worked because it was real. The constraints weren’t engineered for connection; they just happened to produce it.

So the real question isn’t, “How do we get back to what we had?” It’s, “What do we build next?”

What kind of constraints do we need to design, not to imitate the past, but to create environments where connection isn’t just possible, but inevitable?

How do we make spaces where people don’t just coexist, but collide meaningfully?

Being human isn’t about returning to nature. It’s about reshaping it, over and over again.

Travel Is Supposed to Change You—But Does It?

Travel is supposed to change you—or at least, that’s the pitch. New places, new perspectives, new you. But here’s the thing: some people hop through a dozen countries and come back as the exact same person, while others visit one unfamiliar town and return like their brain’s been completely reupholstered. What’s the difference?

I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of information theory—a field that’s basically about how much “surprise” data can hold. The key, I think, is entropy. Specifically, the entropy of your brain’s predictive models: the invisible set of rules you use to autopilot through life.

What Even Is Entropy? (Don’t Worry, This Part’s Fun)

In information theory, entropy is a measure of uncertainty—a.k.a. surprise. High entropy means chaos, unpredictability, the kind of stuff that makes your brain sit up and say, Wait, what just happened? Low entropy is the opposite: everything makes sense, the patterns are clear, no alarms go off.

Most of the time, our brains work hard to keep entropy low. It’s not conscious; it’s just how we operate. Shops close at this hour. People queue like this. Say X, get Y response. The world hums along like a well-oiled machine, built just for you.

Then you travel.

When Copenhagen Breaks Your Brain

You’re in Copenhagen, wandering through a square, and there it is: a stroller. Baby inside. No adult in sight. Your instincts kick in. Guard the stroller. Call for help. Something is clearly wrong.

Except it’s..kinda not. Someone casually mentions, Oh, the parents are around the corner grabbing lunch. Totally normal. Crime’s low here. And sure, you accept the explanation. But deep down, your hands are still clammy. Your brain refuses to let it go: wouldn’t it still be better—safer—to bring the baby inside?

Here’s what’s happening: your predictive model for how the world works just crashed. The rule that babies should never be left alone in public—a rule you’ve internalized—is suddenly revealed as exactly that: a rule, not a universal truth. For the first time, you’re seeing the scaffolding that holds your worldview together.

The Problem With Tourist Travel

Here’s why most travel doesn’t do this: it’s designed to protect your predictive models. Big hotels, curated tours, Instagram-ready photo ops—they smooth the edges, ensuring nothing glitches. The world looks different, but it works exactly the same.

Real travel—the kind that changes you—isn’t about comfort. It’s about encountering recoverable prediction errors.

• Recoverable because if something is too unfamiliar, your brain just files it away as “weird foreign stuff” and moves on.

• Prediction errors because these are what force your brain to rewrite the rules.

The best travel isn’t about how many places you see; it’s about how many of your assumptions get challenged in a way that makes you rebuild your mental models.

Three Things I’ve Noticed About Travel

1. Travel in your twenties feels bigger.

It’s not just the newness of the places—it’s the newness of you. Your twenties are when your brain is still eagerly breaking itself apart and putting itself back together. A trip at this stage isn’t just about where you go—it’s about who you let it make you. Later in life, the renovations slow. Same trip, less scaffolding to shake.

2. Living somewhere beats visiting ten places.

Visiting ten countries in two weeks is like scrolling headlines: you get the gist, maybe a few highlights, but the story slips past you. Living somewhere forces you into the quiet parts—the way people argue, how time feels slower or faster, the small rituals you only catch if you stay long enough for them to feel obvious. It’s not the postcard moments that change you—it’s the ones you almost don’t notice.

3. Kids are the ultimate entropy machines.

A Thai mother handing her toddler a knife. A six-year-old in Tokyo, calmly navigating the subway alone. Merely surprising feels insufficient—it’s destabilizing. Kids and their vulnerability have this way of exposing the scaffolding of your beliefs, showing you how much of what you think is “safe” or “normal” is just a set of rules you’ve absorbed without asking. Watching them is like seeing your worldview glitch in real time.

Counterintuitive Advice for Better Travel

1. Stop chasing passport stamps.

Instead of racking up countries, look for experiences that force your brain to glitch. The best travel isn’t about exoticness; it’s about differences you can understand. The Eiffel Tower isn’t going to change you. But the small town 50 kilometers outside Paris, where the shopkeeper glares at you because you don’t know how to ask for bread properly—that might.

2. Start with small tweaks.

Sometimes the most surprising lessons come from slightly unfamiliar places: a nearby town with different norms than you’re used to, a campus club devoted to a hobby or culture that feels entirely outside your orbit.

3. Travel doesn’t end when you get home.

Pay attention to how your assumptions shift once you’re back. How many “truths” start feeling more like choices?

Travel Isn’t About Answers

At its best, travel doesn’t give you answers—it teaches you better questions…and the questions start small: "Why do they leave babies outside cafes here?"

But they lead somewhere bigger.

If you’re anything like me, your first instinct is to recoil, to judge the Danes as crazy. But unattended babies aren’t quirks of Danish parenting—they’re the visible tip of massive, complicated systems: healthcare that reshapes risk calculation, urban design that alters the meanings of safety, public policies that contribute to the normalization of this.

And the interesting part isn’t really the differences themselves.

It’s how these differences reveal how your society operates. You start to see your culture’s practices and norms not as ‘normal’ per se, but as specific implementation attempts at solving general problems every society has to deal with.

You go back home and your society’s solutions look less like universal truths, and more like a very specific set of trade-offs.

It’s also why I’d argue travel changes you in ways that opening up a book can’t.

You can read thousands of papers, but it’s a very different experience, seeing another society’s source code running in production. You come back with a new kind of awareness—not just of other possibilities, but of the nature of possibility itself.

So to answer the initial question: most people agree travel broadens your horizons, but that’s not quite right.

What it does is show you that your horizons were never fixed in the first place, they were just one config among many.

That’s the gift of travel: not answers, but the ability to see your own life as provisional, unfinished, and ripe for reinvention. The world isn’t just bigger; it’s softer, more malleable than you thought.

And so are you.

Share

Leave a comment

the choice space

i'm currently wrestling with an interesting fork that feels like meaningful inflection point. meaningful fork in the road: choosing between your run-of-the-mill policy work in NYC or DC vs the freedom to pursue independent AI governance research, and seriously upskilling to work in that. the institutional path ticks all the "sensible career move" boxes- good policy experience ✔, valuable network effects ✔, career capital accumulation ✔. The latter is exploratory learning under uncertainty, that I’m unclear if I’m pursuing the right way.

our legal frameworks evolved to handle human behavior at human speeds, but ai systems operate at digital speeds. traditional policy tools -i.e. disclosure requirements and periodic reviews - assume stable systems that change predictably. what happens when governance needs to adapt as quickly as the systems it oversees? institutional policy development is deliberately slow, which has historically prevented harmful knee-jerk regulation. this same methodical pace creates friction when trying to reason about rapid technological change that won’t wait. this adds complexity to my expected value calculations.

there’s something quasi-religious about DC that worries me. seems to have a peculiar orthodoxy that spreads pretty effectively. though all cities probably have their own monocultures, dc’s seems uniquely incompatible with me. working within established orgs would resources and legitimacy, but seem to subtly shape thought via:

• incentive alignment with organizational goals

• implicit boundaries of acceptable discourse

• path dependence in research directions

• social pressure toward consensus views

the counter-argument is that these constraints represent accumulated wisdom about what works. but also, i spend enough time around technical ppl to be acutely aware and reminded of how little i know. my understanding barely scratches the surface. and yet... watching east coast think tanks discuss ai risk is like sitting on a medieval council and watching scholars debate whether bad weather is caused by witches stealing the moon's tears. i'm not talking about sophisticated concepts - i mean truly basic stuff that you'd learn in the first 12 minutes of any intro to ai safety conversation.

and yes - i’m definitely oversampling egregious examples, and im biased towards remembering the instances that confirm my priors..there are places like RAND and USAISI doing great stuff. but still, if those 2 are the only exemplars, what does that imply about the base rate. and I wasn’t going to work at either so how should this affect my decision calculus? do i want my formative years spent in an environment optimized for conventional policy wisdom, or for proximity to those who understand the fundamental mechanics of the systems they seek to govern? the answer feels increasingly non-neutral.

key considerations

the variables in rough order of importance to me

learning rate

• where will i learn fastest?

• quality of feedback loops (especially from mentors)

• exposure to challenging problems

network quality

• future collaborator potential

• access to novel information flows

• cross-pollination between different circles

• network diversity (not just size)

optionality

• keeping paths open

• building rare and valuable skills

• potential for serendipity

recent reads

• "why we're polarized" by ezra klein (standout)

• "titus andronicus" and "othello" by shakespeare

• "the gene" by siddhartha mukherjee

• just started reading julian jaynes on consciousness origins. also the dario x lex interview which I am classifying as an audiobook. first 36 hr lex interview when??

  other updates

  • i also had a catch up with EF who got a paper i worked on with him accepted for publication at apsr which is really exciting… also says he and his fiance are getting married soon (exciting!)

  • three wedding invitations for 2025.. congrats to DN and IO

  • Had an amusing chat with a professor I have a lot of respect for that was being wildly encouraging about pursuing a PhD, saying faculty in his dept were curious about my career outcomes. my takeaway: competent mentorship & positive reinforcement drive outsized success vs. raw talent/effort alone. unfortunately, I have little interest in a traditional econ or poli-sci path as of rn.

  credentialing

  still wrestling with trade-off between building credentialed influence vs. direct work on x-risk. this actually came about from a conversation with my dad in response to me informing him about the plan to spend the next few years doing safety/gov work and he was pretty insistent that credentials remain vital gatekeepers in policy/government, unlike S.V's demonstrated-capability model. while "show your work" hiring will likely spread beyond tech, the diffusion timeline is uncertain. betting my career entirely on this transition happening within my relevant career window could limit my optionality in spaces where credentials still function as hard gates.

  looking ahead

  i've been writing about reciprocal causation between technological and social systems, research methodology, the election, and relationships. these pieces will find a home on my personal website.

  final thoughts

  right now after a couple conversations and thought-iterations, i've concluded that going to work in dc for a year seems like the optimal exploration-exploitation balance. long enough to build key relationships and understand institutional dynamics, short enough to avoid lock-in or identity capture. the base rate for successfully pivoting from policy positions to research seems low probability given conversations and linkedin trajectories, but i estimate my odds being higher given pre-existing connection social pressure and clear exit criteria. the key will be maintaining learning and research over the course of the year, even if slower.

Leave a comment

I’ve been working through Hammertime, and—no surprise—some hammers are more useful than others. I’ve been slacking off the past couple of weeks but I’m reaping the benefits of things I set in motion earlier. Goal is to get back in to it this week.

Touch Typing

For most of my life, I typed in a way that was objectively terrible—right index and middle fingers, left index, about 45 WPM. I knew it was slow, and was wasting time, and something I should fix. The ROI of fixing it was obvious, but there was always something more urgent, more pressing to handle. I’m sure it’d pay off in theory, just not today.

Hammertime was a great catalyst and it’s been coming along well. I expected it to be slow at first—11 WPM, humbling—but being a beginner again felt good, felt like progress. The point isn’t how fast you start; it’s how quickly you improve.

I'm at 35 WPM now—closer to 50 if I drop caps and punctuation. It's coming together, bit by bit. There’s something satisfying about the process—feeling each keystroke get just a little smoother, watching as my thoughts translate faster, more directly. It’s not about the speed itself, though. It’s the quiet joy of removing friction, of noticing how tasks that once felt clunky are starting to flow. I can tell this will pay off long-term, but for now, I’m just enjoying the learning curve, watching the numbers tick up as the muscle memory builds. Feels very similar to the joy I used to get from (learning) ballroom dancing.

Bonus Level: I’ve started using keyboard shortcuts more efficiently, inspired by CF. These shortcuts feel like cheats, and g my workflow has been faster and oddly satisfying. Wish I’d picked this up years ago.

Systematic Overhaul

Now, onto health. I’d been running on autopilot for a while—only seeing a doctor when something went wrong, with no real sense of how things were ticking along under the hood. I was bad at keeping track of this during college I was pretty much the opposite of a model for self-maintenance. If there was a spectrum, I’d be the data point skewing the average. I also had peripheral worries lurking in the background. Family history of high cholesterol, blood pressure, combined with some less-than-ideal food habits :(

So, I decided to go all in: scheduled a full physical, insisted on blood work to check everything out. But then I thought, why stop there? Turned it into a fun experiment and scheduled appointments with basically everyone—physical therapy, nutritionist, therapist, pulmonologist, optometrist. Figured I might as well get a full system check-up, see what I’ve been ignoring.

Results

Physical

• Baseline Health: Blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar were all within healthy ranges, which was reassuring given family history.

• Asthma Management: Flare-ups were manageable, albuterol prescription renewed. Clarified proper use of maintenance vs. rescue inhaler

• Test Results: No diabetes. Cholesterol levels "excellent": total cholesterol 166 mg/dL, HDL 62 mg/dL, LDL 92 mg/dL.

1. Nutrition: Suboptimal Inputs

• Current diet: Sporadic, low-calorie meals—cereal, Chipotle, sandwiches. Skipping breakfast or lunch due to poor planning.

  Plan:

  • Increase calorie intake with more frequent, larger meals.

  • Prioritize high-calorie, nutrient-dense foods: nuts, oils, starchy vegetables, whole grains.

  • Reintroduce protein powders.

  Outcome: Slowly transitioning, but consistency remains the main challenge.

2. Physical Therapy: Weak Links

• Neglected areas: weak hip abductors, core strength deficits, and shoulder instability. The physical therapist gave me exercises to target these weak points.

  Plan:

  • Focus on exercises for hip, core, and shoulder stability.

  • Address posture issues from long hours of study—neck and back strengthening.

  Outcome: Necessary maintenance. Fixing this now prevents future problems, basic upkeep but crucial for long-term stability.

3. Optometry:

• Diagnosed with mild astigmatism, which was almost amusing.

  Plan:

  • Glasses are on the way.

  Outcome: Soon, I'll have literal clarity—expect a post about how I can now notice plot holes in real life

Therapist: TBD

Pulmonologist: TBD

• Both had no openings this or last week. Will update.

Clarity on My Macro Path:

I think AI safety is where I’ll want to focus. I’ve been firmly skeptical for a few months, and now—well, what a shame. Full credit to SH for pushing me in the right direction.

Current Steps:

• AI Safety Fundamentals: I’m working through this course and and slowly piecing together my own understanding of alignment. I feel almost credulous right now, and so the challenge isn’t just to grasp argumentation or heuristics that seem persuasive. I’m trying to build a model in my head that doesn’t just sound convincing but also feels right to me.

• Tried explaining alignment to a friend (ES) for the first time—results were mixed. I thought it made perfect sense, but not sure I made a very compelling case. Seems like this is worth expanding into a structured set of common arguments and rebuttals for future discussions.

• Mentorship: Met with Professor BG this week, and it was more productive than expected. He gave solid advice on crafting cold emails and proposals to reach out to potential mentors for the projects I’ve been thinking about. Time to get the wheels in motion.

What I’ve Been Reading

• The Gene: An Intimate History- Siddhartha Mukherjee.

• Henry V- Shakespeare.

Goals for Next Week

• Apply to 80,000 Hours for career coaching.

• Publish my AISF notes, assuming I can make them coherent enough to share.

• Flesh out a clearer idea for an independent AI governance project and stress test it

• Email 10 potential mentors

i. quiet arrivals

October unravels gently. The air cools, the light shifts- changes you don’t track until they’re already here. Leaves don’t drift so much as drop. Deliberate, unhurried, final.

Life moves like that: slow cycles of holding on and releasing. I’ve been thinking about this as I prepare to leave Minneapolis. Departures force a certain introspection. How should one think about endings? We imagine we’ll know, graduations, one last hug at the airport, but most endings are sunsets. One minute, the world is golden; the next, you’re standing in the dark, wondering how it happened so quickly.

Yesterday, I watched a leaf fall—slow, certain. I wondered if it knew that morning would be its last connected to its tree. There’s something unsettling in how many goodbyes slip by in the most ordinary of moments. How often do we stand at the precipice of an ending, unaware? The last time you opened up to each other, the last shared laugh, the final quiet drive, the last photo together. Moments rarely register as important until you're looking back, searching for the precise second it all changed.

There’s no perfect English word for it, but 物の哀れ mono no aware—the pathos of things, captures something close. It’s the awareness of fragility, not with despair but reverence. Understanding that their impermanence is what imbues them with meaning. It sits with you like an old friend, reminding you to stay present, not because you can hold the moment, but because you can’t.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with people. There are people whom I’ve already seen for the last time, and I didn’t know it. I think about that a lot. Their faces, voices, little quirks that I loved about them, all now just memory. It’s on my mind as I approach these last ten weeks. Time isn’t distant anymore; it’s compressing, running out. I want to be intentional, to make each hour fuller, more deliberate, as if that might help them last longer.

But I know how this works: soon enough, it’ll be October 2026, and I’ll be looking back at this, wondering if I did enough, or if they blurred past me in the usual way.

Maybe I should freeze this moment. I’ll take a photo, a small token for my future self, sitting here, thinking about this.

As I was saying, I want to do better. Make time for people, not just in passing, but something deliberate. I want to look back and think, Glad we did that. I didn’t let things slip by. I want them to know I love them. Capture these days, photos, writing, not as if it could stop time, but as a way to hold it, even briefly.

There is a strange physics to goodbyes. You imagine they will create distance, a clean severance, but what actually happens is the opposite—a sudden intensification of gravity around certain objects. The album they made you listen to on that drive. The book they pressed into your hands.

I used to think of gift-giving as transactional. You give me a book, I say thank you, I read it or I don’t.

What’s actually happening is closer to what programmers call “dependency injection”… a pointer to their interiority. The book is an interface. A way of saying: if you want to understand how I process the world, how I feel about beauty and time and loss, start here. Run this program. Watch what it does to your thoughts.

The book sits there. Months pass. You don’t touch it.

Then one day, often much later, after they’re gone or the friendship has dissolved into annual texts, you pick it up. And you realize: this was encoding. They were trying to transmit something they had no direct language for.

Because here’s the thing about the most important parts of yourself: they don’t compress well into conversation. You can’t just tell someone why Sebald restructured your relationship to memory, or why that specific Bill Evans recording makes you understand something about restraint that you can’t articulate. The explanation flattens it. Kills it.

So instead you do this: you hand over the artifact itself. You create conditions for someone else to have the experience. You say, implicitly: meet me here, in this third space, and maybe you’ll understand what I mean when I go quiet at dinner.

This is what’s happening with this sort of transmission, planting seeds that might bloom years later into sudden recognition.

The book on your shelf waits, it knows that one day soon, you’ll pull it down and think, oh. OH. This is what they were trying to tell me.

And in that moment they’re briefly alive again in your nervous system. You’re running their code. Seeing through their eyes. The goodbye wasn’t final after all…they embedded themselves in objects that would ambush you with meaning later.

This is as close to time travel as I’ve managed to get.

So what do I mean when I talk about living on?

The fact that you haven’t listened to that playlist yet, or opened that book they gave you, doesn’t mean they’ve slipped away. Each of those are dormant nodes in a network of memory that pulses with potential. And when you finally reach for them, by curiosity or by need, they’ll unfold like a door opening to a room you haven’t been in for years, but somehow recognize instantly, it’s like time itself bends, pulling that person back into your world for a moment.

The more nodes you create, the more objects you encode with meaning, the more memories you anchor in other people’s experience, the more conversational patterns you establish, the higher the probability that some version of you gets pulled into the future. And it won’t be a total reconstruction, it’ll be small fragments of you, that get called up whenever needed. Invoked. Referenced.

You exist as a living thought, still altering trajectories, nudging decisions in directions they wouldn’t have gone without you.

You’re being used, which I think is better than being remembered.

ii: objects in motion

I spent most of my childhood moving between Australia, Africa, Europe, and North America. For a while, I thought the transit was just physical, airports, boarding schools, new houses, new streets. Each relocation forced a different version of myself, and I obliged without questioning whether this was sustainable.

The adaptation felt effortless. I learned to read social contexts quickly, to mirror speech patterns, to understand unstated rules. This seemed like a superpower. Look at me, I thought. I can thrive anywhere. How free from the constraints that bind others to a single place, a single identity. Reinvention felt like magic.

That adaptability bonded me with other kids who had lived through the same pattern. We recognized each other instinctively…the international school kids, the other children with stories too long for icebreakers. There was a quiet pride in that rootlessness. When adults asked, And where are you from? we’d glance at each other, half-smiling, eyebrows raised, like conspirators in a shared secret. We knew the question was too small for the answer.

We had options: the short version, or the long one. I always liked the times I felt comfortable sharing the long one. I liked how their curiosity stretched out, how they watched me assemble my past in pieces, city by city, as if trying to solve a puzzle. It felt warm, that attention. But now I wonder if that warmth was just the brief comfort of being legible…if only for a moment.

But later, cracks appeared in the story. The adaptability I had treated as strength began to feel like something else entirely. The ability to leave isn’t a skill; it’s a reflex. And like any reflex, it can become destructive, automatic. What if all that supposed resilience wasn’t really resilience at all? What if it was just a more polished form of detachment? A clever way of never staying long enough to belong, or worse, to lose something.

And that raises a harder question: how much of my adaptability is just a way of avoiding attachment? The knowing glance, the easy answer, it was a trick, but also a shield. Maybe we weren’t being clever when we left our answers unfinished. Maybe we didn’t know anymore. Maybe the real answer was something like, I’m from wherever I’m not standing.

Every move left something behind. People, yes, but also entire versions of myself, selves that only existed in those contexts, with those people. It’s strange to think about. Not just that I’ve left others behind, but that I’ve left behind fragments of who I was. Versions that were never quite portable.

For years, I believed home was something I could rebuild every time I landed somewhere new. But now I wonder if home isn’t a place at all. Maybe home is just the rare, fleeting moment when the scattered pieces of you feel like they fit together again. When all those selves align…if only for a second.

The question I’m left with isn’t whether this kind of life is good or bad. It’s simpler: What does it cost to become good at leaving?

iii: folding and unfolding

"Movement is nothing more than the endless process of folding and unfolding."

— M.O., February 16, 2023

There will be a last goodbye. This is mathematically certain. But it won’t announce itself. No soundtrack, no slow-motion cinematography. It will arrive disguised as an ordinary moment—Tuesday afternoon, distracted by email, running late for something forgettable. Only later will you realize something ended.

We expect life to mark its important moments clearly, like chapters in a book. But life has no narrator. It just unfolds, indifferent to whether we’re paying attention.

For years this seemed tragic. We’re constantly losing things without noticing. The last time you carried your child before they became too heavy. The last conversation with someone who used to be essential. These moments dissolve into the ordinary precisely because they don’t know they’re endings.

Tragedy isn’t the right frame here.

In The Order of Time, the physicist Carlo Rovelli dismantles our intuitive picture of how time works. Time, he shows, isn’t a universal river carrying everyone forward at the same rate. It’s local, variable, dependent on where you stand and how fast you’re moving. Near a massive object, time slows. At high velocity, it dilates. Two events that appear simultaneous from one vantage point occur in sequence from another.

What makes Rovelli’s account interesting for understanding goodbyes is what it suggests about persistence. In classical physics, objects endure through time like beads on a string—the same thing, moment after moment, moving forward. But in Rovelli’s picture, what we call an object is really a process: a pattern of interactions, continuously exchanging energy and information with everything around it. Nothing is isolated. Nothing stays the same.

Time moves forward without asking for permission, indifferent to whether we’re ready to follow. It doesn’t just take from us; it spreads us outward, distributes us into the future in ways we’ll never fully understand. Every conversation, every decision becomes a ripple—a pulse of causality that keeps unfolding long after we’re gone.

The thought is strangely comforting. What I am…what we are, continues in fragments, scattered across the lives of others. Nothing is truly lost; it’s simply transformed. The moments we shared break apart and reassemble into something new, appearing in places we’ll never see.

Impermanence holds its own beauty. We don’t need much to feel whole—just a bit of awareness, a little presence. There’s a kind of holiness in small things. The crisp air of an early morning. The way sunlight pools on your kitchen floor. Or the lift in your chest when an old favorite song fills a café, and you realize the person next to you is humming along. You wonder what memory the song stirs in them, but maybe that’s the beauty: it doesn’t matter. For a fleeting moment, you share something—an invisible thread of recognition. A reminder that we are here, and we are alive.

Goodbyes are misunderstood. We like to frame them as endings, sharp delineations between one chapter and the next. As if the self can be cut cleanly from its context and stored away, like old photographs in a box. But time doesn’t work like that, and neither do we. There is no sharp edge, no clean break. The story continues without us. The people we love will move on, but that’s not a sad thing. That’s what life does—it moves. It carries everything forward, reshaping what we thought we’d left behind.,

That’s the real work of saying goodbye: trusting in what’s already been shared. Trusting that it’s enough. Trusting that the threads will hold, even if you never see where they go. What you gave to each other will unfold slowly, quietly, in ways you’ll never fully understand. The people you love will remain with you—not as memories filed neatly away, but as something woven into the fabric of who you are, who you’ll become.

And maybe that’s the only kind of closure we ever get. An unfolding: a slow, subtle recursion of everything we’ve ever been into everything we’ll ever be.

Nothing is truly lost. It just changes form, like an Echo, fainter each time, but still there, still part of us.

And that, I think, is enough.

Thank you for reading. Writing them was less about arriving at answers and more about marking where I’ve been. If something here found you, even briefly, then it did its job.

And finally to you, who taught me the most meaningful things often return quietly, long after we think they’ve disappeared: this whole piece is really just an elaborate way of saying thank you.

See you out there.

-K.

I’ll leave you with a song that’s been living in my head lately. It feels like everything this piece tried to say but couldn’t quite find the words for. I’m hesitant to prescribe listening experiences…music works through association, and yours will be different from mine.

Maybe it will mean something to you too, or maybe it will just keep you company for a few minutes. Either way, thank you for walking with me through these thoughts.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been chasing an elusive ideal: perfectionism. I’m the kind of person who spends five hours on an email only to not send it. This post? It’s gone through multiple iterations, each abandoned for one of a million reasons I could find. Here’s the pattern I’ve noticed in myself:

1. Come up with a super cool, exciting idea.

2. Map out the plan of execution.

3. See it for what it really is.

4. Come up with more plans.

5. Let it fizzle out.

This cycle repeats endlessly, leaving behind a bunch of lists, docs, and notebooks full of ideas that never get realized.

But why does this happen? If it’s not already clear, the answer is perfectionism. I think it’s unfortunate that we often speak of perfectionism almost as if it’s a virtue—something that bears fruit for those who have it. It’s a cliché go-to in job interviews when asked, “What’s your greatest weakness?” If you still answer with perfectionism, you’d be better off finding a new answer. People are beginning to see it for what it is: cheap signaling disguised as vulnerability.

Even in writing this, I’m not sure I would’ve managed purely on willpower alone without the encouragement of friends and good examples to emulate. More than likely, I would have gone through the same cycle, abandoned it, and concluded that I’m just not the type of person who is driven or talented enough to follow through. Hopefully, some future version of me would be.

I think what’s really behind it is fear. Perfectionism is a mechanism to protect myself from feelings of inadequacy. An anecdote: I’ve wanted to start this for a while and proudly announced in a group chat with friends that I would complete it as a form of social accountability. Spoiler: I didn’t. They’re all people I admire, and I’ve noticed that we often do things—intentionally or not—so people will draw particular conclusions about us. What did I want them to think when I made the announcement? Probably that I was smart, interesting, and agentic—all the things I admire in them. But actually writing it—actually creating something—was different from what I expected, even though I’d been through the cycle before.

In preparation, I opened dozens of articles from writers I enjoy, calling it "research." But it wasn’t really preparation—it was perfectionism manifesting itself, protecting me from fears: that my ideas weren’t valuable or original, and that I wasn’t as good a writer as I thought. If you’ve struggled with perfectionism, maybe you relate to this. Maybe you don’t. But it feels good to finally let my thoughts flow onto this document, to examine how it manifests in my life.

The tricky part is that preparation often feels like progress, even though it’s just waiting. As long as I’m waiting, I don’t have to confront the reality.

And I wish I could say realizing all this has freed me from the cycle. If you’re anything like me, you probably fixate on how great things could have been if only you’d started earlier. I’ve recently managed to establish a fairly consistent gym routine, going 4-5 days a week. It’s a significant improvement in my life, yet I can’t help but feel disappointed. Last year, I had a similar streak for about three months before giving up for the entire academic year. Maybe you can relate to this in other areas of your life. It doesn’t matter much that I’ve made real progress—I still compare it to what could have been if only I had started earlier. That comparison is relentless.

The problem isn’t just the wasted time; it’s the invisible, unreachable bar we set for ourselves. A mixture of guilt, fear, dishonesty with ourselves, and the impossible standards we think we should meet but never do. And here lies the paralysis of perfectionism: it’s far more comfortable to live in the liminal space before production, where all you have is potential. “He reads a lot, so of course he’d be a great writer.” “She’s a 4.0 student, so of course she’s brilliant.” But we never put these assumptions to the test.

It’s theoretically more comfortable, at least for perfectionists, to live in that space of unrealized potential than to confront something more frightening. That behind all the markers and external symbols, my perception of myself might be wrong. Maybe I’m not as smart or capable as I thought. And maybe, deep down, I already believe that. It’s often easier to live in a place where you don’t have to confront that fear than to face it and realize you’re not who you thought you were. And in that place, all the things you once liked about yourself—your curiosity, creativity, and love for learning—are things you stop engaging with.

This is why I think I’m especially sensitive to naysayers—people who put down the goals and aspirations of others. I can’t imagine having to fight both your own inner critic and the opinions of those around you.

A good quote for this is, “Stop waiting for the perfect conditions to start. Starting is the perfect condition.” The belief that there’s such a thing as a perfect moment or perfect execution is pervasive. We spend years preparing for college acceptance. We talk about failed relationships as stepping stones to “the one.” But the perfect moment never comes.

I have other, probably more important things to do right now, and I could easily talk myself out of doing this, but... as Nike says, you just do it. What I know, and what anyone reading this probably knows, is that it’s better to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, fail quickly, iterate, and build momentum. Looking back, my proudest moments came from this approach—not from static perfection.

Even now, I wouldn’t have been able to write this on willpower alone if it weren’t for friends and role models. Without them, I would have abandoned this, concluded I wasn’t driven or talented enough, and hoped a future version of me would be.

In wrapping this up, I don’t know where the solution is. I’ve been lucky not to deal with naysayers, and I’ve been surrounded by amazing, encouraging people. I hope the same for you. I don’t have a neat solution to offer. Just gratitude for the support I’ve had, and I wish the same for you. If I had to though, #thinklessdomore."