To see the world in a grain of sand - William Blake

Lying in bed and hoping that the breeze from the fan in the window cools you down just enough to let you fall asleep in the late-summer, New England humidity. On most nights, the whir of the fan lulls you just into the territory of sleep, but not tonight. For some reason, just like your mom, you’ve never been able to sleep before the first day of school. Like the coming fall months, the start of the school year feels like a fresh start.

You wake up to the alarm even though you feel like you’ve been lying awake for hours. You brush your teeth using the 2-minute timer your parents put on the mirror when you were younger. The timer seems to tick especially fast on a day like today.

The clink of Frosted Mini Wheats in the bowl and the noise of ESPN on the TV. You’re reading the cereal box again. Somehow you always found an odd comfort in that.

Many years pass. The clink of cereal and the din of the TV are now distant memories, replaced by waking up so late that there is no time to eat anything. You miss the days when the toothbrushing timer felt fast because things now feel faster still.

It’s fall again, but not back to school. Not anymore. You’re working your first job out of college in Seattle. That restless night before the start of school has been replaced by many nights where you jolt awake for seemingly no reason. Here the seasons change without fanfare. Fall does not announce its arrival with a blaze of color but rather fades slowly into the winter gray.

For the first time, you’re not sitting in the classroom of the next grade, but watching as your LinkedIn ticks up from “11 mos” to 1 yr”. A strange new rhythm underpins the days, and you start to wonder, “Is this it?”

The days, once delineated by the school bells and changing seasons, now blend into one another, slipping by like grains of sand through an hourglass. Time seems to stretch continuously from work to having a family to retirement in an endless marathon from one anticipated milestone to the next.

Years later, on a quiet night, you realize that life isn’t about counting moments as they pass or the milestones that once seemed so crucial. By design or by chance, the grains of sand have accumulated into a bizarre sand castle. In its twisting corridors, you find the echoes of laughter, the faint imprint of dreams, and the darkness of doubts and pain.

You come to understand that each grain—whether set with intention or dropped by chance—has built something remarkable. The structure stands not as a monument to lost time but as a testament to lived life. With this realization, you finally see that the anxiety of ungrasped time fades into some recess of the sand castle, just as those childhood memories of the clink of cereal and the gentle hum of a window fan on a humid night.

Three people approached their car with all of their hiking gear in tow. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel in anticipation. Finally! We had found a spot on our 18th lap of the parking lot.

Something was wrong. One of the three people was empty-handed and standing off to the side. I rolled down the window to ask if they were about to leave.

“Yes”, the driver said before hesitating, “but this guy’s taking the spot.” He pointed to the empty-handed person.I looked around and didn’t see any other cars waiting. The car pulled out and the man stood in the spot with a smug grin.

There is no justice in this world. My injured childish sense of fairness threatened to boil over into a temper tantrum.

 Am I bad at parking? Should we just give up and go home? Should I too employ this morally gray tactic of reserving parking spots with my body?

Then, a spot opened up behind me. As I pulled in, a wave of relief hit me followed by the shame of getting so pessimistic.

Looking back now, I see that my emotional response was as useful as getting worked up over slot machines at a casino. Near misses are just an illusion and we shouldn’t expect a win based on the effort we’re putting in.

Sometimes the hardest thing of all is accepting that the only we can do is to stay the course and believe that good luck will eventually come our way.

Quote of the Week

From The Rock Warrior’s Way by Arno Ilgner:

“If you find yourself becoming frustrated, take it as a symptom that you are out of alignment with your goals. If you want an easy success, find an easier climb. If you want a real challenge, you’ve found it.”

Emotions can be fuzzy indications of some aspect of a situation that we can’t quite put into words. Take discomfort as a sign that there’s something off between your expectations of a situation and your experience of it.

Traits are not universally “good” or “bad”, but depend on the environment in which they are expressed. We learn to repeat traits that seem to work and stop the ones that don’t.

The default path from school to college to corporate job selects and reinforces certain traits.

In school, I learned to focus for hours straight on the chosen material, how to sit still in a classroom, and how to get along with classmates.

School also taught me to fear failure, especially the feeling of not knowing something, through exams and pop quizzes.

As an engineer working at a corporate job, I started to understand how the traits learned in school applied to my new environment. Traits such as getting along with a team and focusing for hours on a computer turned out to be quite useful. I also picked up some useful skills, such as questioning assumptions, clarifying requirements, and how to build software.

I also learned that traits that help to make me “good” in school and as a software engineer don’t always apply outside of those contexts. The learned behavior leaks into other contexts with negative consequences.

As a new engineer, I was overwhelmed by all of the things I didn’t know. While the fear of not knowing something was useful to motivate studying in school, I had to unlearn that fear and accept that there will always be an endless amount of things I don’t know.

I tried to adapt these learned traits to new environments without even realizing it.

As a software engineer, thinking through all the ways something can fail is critical to avoiding disastrous engineering decisions, but not needed in real life when brainstorming new ideas, such as finding an exciting place to travel to or picking a new hobby.

Spending so much time conversing with my computer in code doesn't mean I can inspect the source code of the people around me. I, like many software engineers, seem to hold this fallacy (fantasy) to some extent and try to understand real life problems in the same way I try to solve a technical problem at work.

Rather than classifying our skills as “good” or “bad”, we can instead see how well they’re adapted to the environment we’re in. Our membranes are permeable, and we’re always soaking in the world around us. 

Here are some lessons:

• To see your future, look at the people more experienced in your current environment. Would you be excited to behave and think as they do?

• We cannot realize all the ways we’ve adapted to the context we’re living in.

• Advice is environment specific. The outcome of a given behavior may vary from one context to another.

• Be aware of when your “software engineer” is leaking. Behaviors learned in one environment can be harmful in another.

• You may need to actively unlearn things picked up in a different environment.

Recommended Reading

Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds

A sci-fi novella set in the Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” universe. Imagine the far future where our bodies do not limit us in our pursuit of intellectual and physical goals. Technology exists to sculpt us in any way we desire.

As a rock climber, this story really appealed to me. Rock climbers do all sorts of crazy things to reshape their bodies to get better at climbing up a rock. Hanging off of tiny edges with increasing amounts of weight, climbing routes without using your feet, and dedicating hours or potentially weeks to a single route (project). Where does a climber stop in their pursuit of a climb and why?

Quote of the week

“Don’t allow your rituals to become ruts”

We shouldn’t lose sight of why we have our rituals in the first place. Rather than existing to fulfill our habits, they should serve us in some way.

What do Bill Nye the Science Guy, the founders of Microsoft and Apple, and Isaac Asimov all have in common?

They are all Swifties. Not the kind fighting Ticketmaster to see Taylor but fans of Tom Swift.

As children, they all read the same books about a genius inventor¹, whose creations save the world from evil.

I remember reading those same books with my dad.

Tom Swift builds a floating highway to unite a country in Africa. To explore the depths of the ocean, he creates an underwater super laboratory. When a planetoid threatens to wipe out North America, he combines various inventions to save the day.

As a kid, I wanted to be like that when I grew up, an inventor who could save our world from evil. Late nights playing with another Lego invention to save the dinosaurs from extinction. I remember sitting in math class daydreaming about the day I’d be able to use that knowledge to build something real.

I wanted Tom Swift’s story for myself.

I went to college to become an engineer and then to Recurse Center to become a better one. Like Tom Swift, I’m drawn to working on mission-driven technology and have focused my career on helping startups build apps that make a difference in people’s lives.

The stories that capture our imaginations make us who we are.

Blogging Myths

A post by Julia Evans

When I’m writing, there’s a nagging voice of doubt nitpicking at everything I’m doing. A part of my subconscious that’s picked up on various myths about writing, learned through years of schooling and reading things on the internet.

These myths stem from what we think our writing should be. They’re only valuable if our belief in them helps us achieve our writing goals.

Here are some of the blogging myths that Julia calls out and why I also think they aren’t true:

• “You need to be original” - valuable information can be presented in more digestible ways by someone you resonate with

• “Page views matter” - this depends on what your writing goals are; if you’re just trying to build an audience, this may be all you care about. Sometimes connecting with the right people matters more than how many.

• “More material is always better” - short posts are more compassionate for your reader and easier to digest

• “Everyone should blog” - don’t blog because you think you should, blog because you want to!

She concludes that writing is “fun for me and helps me organize my thoughts”. I feel similarly. I want to become a better writer. I like the way that writing helps me think. From that lens, these myths aren’t very helpful, and ignoring them will help me achieve my goals.

Random Thought

Writing is the crystallization of amorphous thought. Or as, Leslie Lamport says, “Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.”

“Come back with your shield or on it” my doctor advised before I moved across the country to work at Amazon.

I was on the retreat with my proverbial shield just 18 months later.

I envisioned Amazon as a stepping stone on the road to becoming an amazing programmer -- someone who could turn imagination into reality. Instead, I left feeling burnt out, stagnant, and like I had taken a step to nowhere.

Then, I had one of the most amazing experiences of my life at the Recurse Center (RC), a “writer’s retreat for programmers.” The kind when described that can only sound like I’m trying to convince you to join some cult.

I first encountered RC a couple of years earlier while visiting a friend in New York City. I met Rudi, whose passion for programming and wisdom left a deep impression on me. He had gone to RC and gave a glowing recount of his experience which sparked me to do further research. By the time I was feeling burnt out at Amazon, I was daydreaming about the amazing people I could meet at RC and the opportunity to explore my curiosity.

As for the actual RC experience, everything is self-directed. There isn’t a curriculum to work through or deadlines to meet. This raises the question, “What’s the difference between going to RC and taking a sabbatical to work on yourself?”

The answer lies in the vibrant RC community. Participants are incredibly diverse, a medley of game developers, machine learning Ph.D. students, industry veterans with 20+ years of experience, people who had dropped out of high school to work at Google, visual artists, musicians, and so much more.

People are also generous in sharing what they’re learning. I remember sitting down with a Video DJ from Montreal and working with him on upgrading his custom software for creating light shows in different venues. I spent time working with a graduate student from the UK on writing a compiler. I paired up with other Recursers to build a chess engine. Programming began to feel incredibly creative.

Some of my fondest memories are from the 30+ “coffee chat” 1:1s I had with other Recursers. Each conversation left me with a new perspective. I learned about growing up in India, what other large tech companies are like, grad school, pursuing passion vs. doing the work, working as a chemical engineer in rural Missouri, leaving high school to work at Google, and so much more.

I left RC feeling rejuvenated, like I’d regained my shield. While I had moved to work at Amazon alone, I now felt like I had the support of an entire community.

Here were some insights I had at the Recurse Center.

• The power of a strong community cannot be overstated

• Everyone has an incredible story to tell and learn from

• Working towards things out of joy and curiosity still requires hard work and intentional practice

• Sometimes radically changing your environment can radically change the way you think

• Seek out the places that make you feel the most alive

I’m regularly in touch with dozens of the Recursers I met during the retreat and still regularly attend online and in-person events. Looking back now, the Recurse Center feels like an experience I had waited for my whole life.

Selected Reading (from a Recurser)

Things unlearned, Jamie Brandon

This is one of the excellent posts Jamie wrote as part of Reflections on a decade of coding. The prompt for the post is: “what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?”

There were three particular points that resonated with me:

1. “Whenever I ran up against something that was ugly or difficult, I would start looking for a simpler solution” - There’s the temptation to try and find an “elegant” solution. This bit me as a novice programmer. Anytime I’d run into something ugly or difficult, I would spin my wheels trying to simplify the problem and solve the puzzle. Sometimes it's better to just get something working and move on.

2. “If you have a mountain of shit to move, how much time should you spend looking for a bigger shovel? There’s no obviously correct answer … The answer absolutely cannot be 100% of your time” - Part of the temptation here is avoiding tedious work. The best approach I’ve found is to try doing some shoveling and evaluate how that works before trying to upgrade your shovel.

3. “If I could go back and do it again, I would spend the majority of my time trying to solve hard/interesting problems, using whatever were the mainstream languages and tools in that domain.” - There’s a constant temptation to try out the shiny new tools that will make everything before them obsolete. I’d expand on this and say we should try to minimize the number of directions we’re expanding in and try to go deeper on fewer. I’ve failed to complete some personal projects because I tried to learn a new programming language, framework, and domain all at the same time.

Jamie strikes me as a pragmatist and someone whose reflections are coming from hard-earned experience rather than philosophical musing.

“That new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view … was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her dream” - Middlemarch

For me, entering adulthood felt like a series of disillusionments where the promise of each phase of life fell flat in comparison to my idealistic expectations. I believed strongly in the collective myths we tell ourselves about higher education and work. “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I daydreamed that each successive step would propel me to some amorphous dream life.

As a child, I spent a lot of time reading science fiction. Engineers were heroes. They were natural builders who made the lives of everyone better. They tinkered and built out of curiosity and the desire to make the world a better place. Their uncompromising vision could bring impossible things to life. I wanted to go to college to become an engineer of science fiction ability.

One of my many faults was (and still is) preferring my imagined world to the one we actually live in.

Fast forward to the end of college, I had spent weeks agonizing about finding a job that satisfied high-sounding constraints such as lucrative, prestigious, growth opportunities, making the world a better place, etc. I eventually ended up taking a software engineering job at Amazon. Maybe this wouldn’t be my dream job yet, but this would be, just like the many years of schooling prior, a stepping stone to get there.

After getting placed on a team, I remember that each morning I’d race up the stairs to our 6th-floor windowed office, eager to start the day and learn everything there was about software engineering. Somehow, just over a year later, I would use those same stairs to delay my arrival by a few precious minutes, lagging on floor landings and slowing down as the floor numbers increased.

The transition from an ambitious stair climber to a laggard came slowly.

While I felt that some of the lofty things I wanted out of a job had been compromised, I hoped to spend my time tackling tough and important problems. Instead, I struggled with basic tasks like setting up my development environment or getting our application to compile. Part of my disillusionment came from confronting my own limitations.

The team I was on was also unusual: we had something like 20+ engineers at the company famous for two-pizza teams (usually 6-10 people). As one of two new grads on this massive team, I struggled to advocate for myself. My manager skipped 1:1s for months. The big projects were reserved for veteran engineers clamoring for a promotion. This did not feel like a place where I could become a science fiction-level engineer.

And finally, working to increase the profits of the then-world’s largest market-cap company weighed on me. I didn’t feel committed to the work which may be a science fiction engineer’s most important trait.

The combination of these things left me with a growing feeling of unease. Then, one dark Seattle night, I went to sleep and awoke in a vast movie theater. My life stretched before me in a series of silent scenes. The scene of getting a promotion and then feeling completely empty after. The scene of graying hair and weary eyes looking at a computer screen in a cubicle. The scene of a marriage not taken for love but for escaping from loneliness. Real and unreal became indistinguishable. I woke up in a pool of sweat and found a scrap of paper to write down, “a life where you settle for everything.”

I left Amazon after 1 year, 1 month, and 28 days.

Disillusion comes from the recognition that the path we’re currently on does not hold up to our imagined one. Therefore, disillusionment is the signal that there’s some fundamental incompatibility between belief and current reality. Eventually, disillusionment resolves itself through discarding prior beliefs in favor of reality, holding fast to beliefs and discarding reality, or some combination of the two.

Having grasped some aspect of this reality, I sought a different one. I moved to New York City to attend the Recurse Center, a “writer’s retreat for programmers.” Looking back at my response to the application question “where do you see yourself in two years?” I see that my beliefs had not wavered:

In two years, I want to firmly believe that the only constraint separating imagination from reality is time. I want the freedom and capability to explore and to make. I believe the path to this point consists of growing as much as possible, becoming a better programmer, and relentlessly turning ideas into reality.

There’s the wild hunger and idealism of my youth. I must have been insufferable.

The Recurse Center ended up being one of the best experiences of my life, not another stepping stone to some promised future. I learned more of my limits in a more forgiving setting. I also began to understand that many of my beliefs had come about somewhat arbitrarily. Rather than feeling disillusioned, this time I let my beliefs update towards a more nuanced perspective.

These days, I do not measure myself against the abilities of science fiction engineers but try to do the best I can. Instead of taking inspiration from fictional characters, I seek out role models from the real world. I no longer believe that I need to sacrifice myself in some single-minded endeavor to save the “greater good.” My beliefs and reality have finally come together.

Recommended Reading

Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail by John Salvatier

A blog post about a profound idea that is captured in the title. In an effort to make our lives easier, our brain ignores details irrelevant to our day-to-day activity. We only appreciate the fiddliness of reality when we’re new to something. When was the last time you considered the incredible complexity of a computer, the internet, running water, or even something as seemingly simple as a kitchen fork? 

“It’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you.” Once we’re stuck in a frame, things around us become boring. We see things on their most surface level

John’s advice is to “seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.” There are so many things to notice wherever you’re sitting. When was the last time you thought about how your chair was constructed? Could you do it yourself?

The same energy which draws me to the city also insidiously affects me. A New York state of mind. Being constantly “on” leaves me feeling both drained and anxious. A low-grade, background anxiety that is almost entirely physical. A feeling of tightness and being on edge. These feelings are most noticeable when I’ve left the city for a few days or upon returning to it.

When leaving the city, I feel the slow release of that built-up tension and awareness of the anxiety held at all times. Upon returning, screws tighten in my chest.

We are all quite skilled at adapting to our current conditions. I can go months in the city without noticing this sensation until suddenly it overwhelms me, leaving me feeling breathless and claustrophobic. Keeping up with the relentless pace eventually gives way to a gritty jadedness that lets me get through each day with minimal conscious effort. I no longer feel like I’m living in the city, more that over time I’ve become so adapted to it that my instincts can carry me through almost on autopilot.

The heaping piles of trash and scurrying rats that once disturbed and amazed me, now blend into the background. My legs mindlessly carry me to the optimal spots on the subway platform. I have grown hard to the pleas of the desperate and downtrodden. I’ve adopted the New York attitude that nothing can phase me. A sort of voluntary dissociation that lets you cope with some of the everyday horrors but also means you miss out on fully living.

Then, a sharp pull back into reality.

A man I had never seen before crept up behind me in Chinatown. He punched me in the side of the head. My glasses flew off onto the sidewalk. I couldn’t see as he taunted me with incoherent words from a few yards away before slinkinginto the night.

Somehow I eventually came to terms with this incident, but it remains another moment woven into the unease I feel while living here.

I’m looking to reset and find a different kind of energy and to find some new places and people that will challenge the way I’ve been moving through the world. My first stops will likely be as different from New York as I can find though I’ll still be carrying some of that energy from New York with me through this journey.

3 Things I’m consuming

• Adaptation - A meta movie about the frustrations of adapting a book to film. Managing emotions are an underrated part of bringing new things in to the world. When the thing we’re creating does not match our perceived bar for quality, we give up. There’s skill in managing that frustration to create something anyway.

• Free Food for Millionaires - Min Jin Lee’s debut novel that feels like every character could have a novel written about them but the spotlight rests upon the Korean-American character, Casey. The main character’s pride, stemming from her culture and family, serves as a barrier between her and the other characters.

• Shoe Dog - Memoir by Phil Knight about the creation of Nike. A fun and entertaining story but one of my main takeaways has been (as it always is): right place, right time, and right person. Nike succeeded by entering the US market during a period of globalization in Asia through its fanatic and dedicated founder.

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