One perk of having a daughter is seeing certain tendencies in her that make it easier to forgive them in myself. Like me, my daughter is cautious and perfectionistic. She didn't even try to take her first steps until she was almost eighteen months old, several months after most of her friends were walking on their own. She just sat and watched and waited, and then one day she nearly nailed it on her first attempt. There's something very cool about that, and many of my favorite heroes have had that quality of effortless performance. But I also know that it's not the best way to be. You learn much faster if you aren't afraid of failure. Over a lifetime, people who are willing to fail have an almost insurmountable advantage over people who aren't. I have to wonder what I could have been without that fear.

But the point is that she was born that way, and that means that I was probably born that way too. For years I've known about this flaw in myself and wondered what had made me that way. Did I have too much pride? Was it that my parents praised me for being smart instead of trying hard? Or was something else wrong with my identity formation? But now I know that it wasn't any of that. Eighteen months old is not old enough for those things to take hold. Given that her environment and upbringing were as good as I could make them, my daughter was just born like that, and I was too.

There's a sense of relief for me in this realization, which is kind of revealing in itself. You could imagine someone having the opposite reaction: I was born with this personality flaw, what a tragedy, that means it will be even harder to overcome. But for me, it means that it wasn't anyone's fault. Maybe it doesn't have to be fixed. If it had to be fixed, it would be another burden, another item on the endless and staggering list of things to do. The delta between what I could've been and how I actually turned out would be that little bit wider.

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This obsession with control. My wife tells me that she didn't know how neurotic I could be for many years after we first got together, because I was quite relaxed most of the time. I really just felt like I had everything under control. The illusion shattered the first time she watched me plan a guest list for a party, obsessing over gender ratio, who would bring partners or friends, which subgroups would mix and who would mix them, who were the big risks for getting into arguments. The thing is that you actually really can control those things, or at least influence them. It's just that it makes you crazy to try.

It seems like everything is like that. Six weeks before my daughter was due, we were in the doctor's office monitoring my wife's preeclampsia. The doctor wrapped up the ultrasound and said that things were probably okay and we just should just monitor at home and got up to leave. What exactly should we monitor, I pressed. The doctor rattled off a half-dozen symptoms, sounding annoyed: headache, dizziness, loss of vision, blood pressure. I interrupted again, what was that threshold for blood pressure? I pointed out that the nurse had just measured it and we were already over the threshold. Suddenly the doctor sat up and seemed to actually see me for the first time. She called to the nurse to confirm. Ten minutes later we were admitted to the hospital for an emergency delivery.

What if I hadn't noticed and we had gone home instead? Or conversely, what if I had been able to notice earlier that the measuring cuff we had at home was miscalibrated? What if I had insisted that my wife needed to take things easier during the pregnancy instead of fielding every stupid phone call? Could things have gone so much better, or so much worse?

Everything is like this. My friend Noah says that neuroticism is the universal substitute for any other virtue. If you aren't good enough naturally, you can just worry about it more instead. And if you're capable of doing that and you don't step up, and then things go wrong, doesn't that make it your fault?

I said that having a daughter has made it easier to forgive myself. It's a strange way to react, because the stakes have never been higher. There's nothing more important to me than her turning out well: happy, healthy, kind, able to care for herself and others. But at the same time, she makes me realize how impossible it would be to foresee and control those ends.

Every decision has a dozen butterfly effects. I learned every trick for how to feed and burp her after she was born early so that she'd make up for her lacking weight, but then she developed a bottle aversion because I'd forced it too hard and then she didn't eat for three days. Chastened by the over-intervention, we put off her sleep training for far too long and then she screamed almost continuously for a week when we finally had to do it. We needed extra help in the early months because we hadn't planned for such a tough early birth, and the woman who stepped up only spoke Mandarin, so now our baby is bilingual (something that we'd never even hoped for, given the sorry state of our own Chinese).

A short trip to see her cousins led to the whole family getting four respiratory infections in a row and the worst sleep regression she's ever had, and I was waking up with her every night again for a month. I worried about how moving to New York for work would affect our family, but instead it opened up a whole new world of playgrounds and music classes and nanny circles for her, and made her a hundred times more sociable and excited than she'd ever been in LA. Her best friend now is the daughter of a girl I met at a party many years ago, a woman I was blind-matched with based on the scent of our shirts. How could I know any of those things would happen?

I used to think that I could see into the future a little, or at least anticipate its forks well enough to navigate them. I got into the best colleges, married the right girl, worked at the right companies, threaded the narrow window to enter and exit the startup lottery just as it peaked. Controlling my future felt hard but possible. These days I feel like Herbert's lost messiah: His mind cowered, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities. His lost vision became like the wind, blowing where it willed.

But it could be a gift, I think. It's a hard way to live, grasping everything so tightly. What could I be without that fear? What could she?

Last year you asked me for my best reason why you should have a kid. I gave you the answer that was true for me at the time, even though I knew it would be unpersuasive. I said that it was the right thing to do for the continued flourishing of humanity. A way of passing the torch as our ancestors did for us, in an line unbroken from some unknown Adam and mitochondrial Eve.

But my daughter is turning two and I have a new answer for you: there is nothing in the world that feels like this. I am so proud of her for no reason at all. She’s not a exceptional child in any way, at least not yet. She’s a little slow in learning to speak. She’s on the tall side, not breaking any records or anything, but if I ever walk her down the aisle she’ll probably be taller than me. She loves fidgeting, especially with buckles. She’s absurdly shy, so there are only maybe six or seven people in the world who have seen her toddling at full speed, smiling, laughing. She clams up around anyone else and gives them this suspicious side-eye. Her laugh would melt your heart though. There’s nothing in the world like it.

That’s not quite right, of course. Her laugh melts my heart, but it only works on me. That’s the way it works — your kids, your heart. I knew that my first argument would leave you unmoved because you see life as a collection of experiences to be sampled, not as an obligation to be discharged. I want to tell you now, this truly cannot be missed. There is nothing in the world like your own children, and I think there is no other way to experience this. I’m not an exceptionally happy person, but I feel so good every morning when she runs into our room and every evening when I put her to bed. I make some faces at her and do a little peekaboo behind the bed and she screams and runs over as fast as she can. I hug my wife and I think, look at this wonderful creature we get to raise. I can’t stop smiling. Every morning, every evening. For now.

Only for now, because nothing has made me so aware of the passage of time as having a baby. Last year was less enjoyable, caring for our weird little alien, who had all the reciprocity of a meatloaf and the communication skills (as it's been said before) of an alarm clock. Year one was just a sacrifice for me basically, and I got emotionally invested in our baby pretty much just through the sheer amount of work we put into keeping her alive. But here we are, suddenly – she's almost up to my hip, and she can open cabinets and climb onto chairs, drag us around by our fingers or escape out the front door if we forgot to lock it. She was just a tiny bundle of instincts before, but the full light of consciousness is really truly dawning in her now, her eyes bright like my wife's and her lashes long and black like mine, her giggle and smile all her own. Soon this year will be past too and it will never return. By next year I'll have a completely different answer to your question again.

Yes, there are tough moments between morning and evening (and even worse ones between evening and morning, though they’re now thankfully rare). She seems to become less reasonable as she gets older. She cried for oranges yesterday but won’t look at them today, wanted oatmeal every morning last year but wouldn’t take even a bite of it this week. Your kids get direct hardwired access to your brain stem, the part that instantly spikes your heart rate and crunches your shoulders up to your ears, and they aren’t shy about using it. But that’s what you’ve been training for all this time, right? To manage your own emotions and subjectivity, so that you can help them handle theirs. 

Those are the stressful moments, and in between there are many boring ones too. You do a few things over and over again: change diaper, feed, read the same book, pat her to sleep. You learn what each different type of high-pitched crying means. You wipe poop and milk out of bodily crevices that you never really knew existed before. But there is so much else in each of those repetitions if you can just bring it into focus, relax into it a little. You’d be good at that, I think.

You know that thing that David Foster Wallace said, how when you’re stuck in traffic or in line at the supermarket, you can choose to be bored and pissed off, or you can choose the other thing? “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” 

It's kind of a stretch in the checkout aisle, right? But it is not any kind of stretch at all when you are rocking your baby to sleep in the middle of the night, or reading her the same book for the fifth time in a row. There is boredom and tiredness and stress on the surface, but the mystical oneness of all things is not deep down. It is barely a centimeter underneath. It is right behind your baby’s eyes, right on the top of her absurdly soft skin. It is overwhelming and aching and beautiful. There is nothing else like it. If you don’t try you will never know.

I know there’s so much that you want to do. But I really hope you get to do this too.

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Thanks to my friends Val and Emmy for their feedback on this post.

A long time ago, I was an intern at the Mozilla Corporation. Does anyone recognize that name anymore? At the time we were the shining hope of the new internet, cracking open Microsoft’s grip on computing one browser tab at a time. We even got badges that let us into the Google cafeterias for free meals, like guerrillas with the quiet backing of another rising power. (Perhaps more importantly, they were also funneling millions of dollars into our coffers through a search sponsorship deal.) 

We were a ragtag group befitting our insurgent status — purple-haired hackers from San Francisco mashed up with hardcore Christian evangelicals from New Zealand, high school volunteers side by side with vets of the dotcom bust. And we were winning. When I was an intern in 2007, Mozilla’s firefox browser had been continuously taking share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for half a decade. At all-hands meetings they’d say: you could all be making more money somewhere else, but you’re here because you believe in the mission. I ate it up. In retrospect, I think the money part was true for about half of the people in the room, and the other half were hypertalented but delinquent misfits who might not have made it through the door anywhere else. Still, I think the rest was right: we all really believed in what we were doing.

I did a brief stint as a Google intern the next summer. As chance would have it, that was the summer that Google released Chrome, their own homegrown browser, built by engineers that they’d hired away from Mozilla years earlier. It was sleek and fast and very non-Microsoft. I remember being confused though. Weren’t we all in this together? Why was Google doing this?

When I returned to Mozilla full-time the next year, our CEO John had the party line down pat. Google still supports us. We are still the champions of the open web. They’re still sending us millions of dollars a year, our usage is still growing and theirs is tiny. They just need a hedge in case we go under, and any other company in their place would do the same thing.

A year later, John stepped down to join a venture capital firm. He still believed in us, he said, it was just an opportunity that he couldn’t turn down.

You might not know all of the details of what happened next, but you already know how the story ends. Mozilla bled off both users and contributors, slowly at first and then very quickly, as Chrome gained faster and faster. That Silicon Valley maxim “growth papers over a multitude of sins” runs in reverse too: when you stop growing, everything else comes to the surface all at once. An internal culture war between the evangelical and progressive factions boiled over into a fractious CEO succession, while many of the best developers fled for greener pastures. You’re probably reading this in a tab in Chrome, and you haven’t thought about Firefox in years.

One weird footnote is that a bunch of my coworkers wound up at Facebook, which represented pretty much the opposite of what I thought we'd been building at Mozilla — a walled garden instead of the open web, a hyperefficient data collector where Mozilla had been privacy-conscious to a fault. (To be clear, I landed at Google Adwords, so I’m not claiming any moral high ground here.)

I saw John on a panel a few years later. What happened? I asked him. It’s one thing to fail, but did we even believe any of it at all? As I asked the question I felt my ears start to burn. I’m sure his answer was reasonable and well-polished, but I was too embarrassed for myself to even hear it. What kind of question was that? I knew the answer before I even asked. Yes, we had a mission and a set of beliefs, but they were conditional, as everything always was in business. When conditions changed, so did we. Isn’t that what I had done myself?

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When is it time to change? Or alternatively, when are you obliged to go down with the ship?

I first started thinking about this when I was leading Christian groups in high school. As a small group leader your job is to guide your peers through a Bible study or a discussion of the sermon or some other boring spiritual topic. Basically everyone at youth group was some level of committed Christian (there were far better ways to spend your Friday night if you weren’t), but also everyone there was a teenager, with the attendant teenage desires to goof off, flirt, gossip, and maintain a reasonable ironic distance from any serious subject. Leaders were chosen for a combination of their religious devotion and natural charisma, so they were subjected to the strongest tug in both directions. At one retreat a few years before I became a leader, about half of them got busted for a game of strip poker.

The job of a small group leader is to manage the tension between these two poles. Sometimes there’s a shared moment where the worship music is especially moving or the sermon particularly inspiring, and everyone is automatically bought in, or on the other hand sometimes the joker in your group does something really distracting and funny and there’s no chance of keeping anyone focused. But most of the time the group sentiment is in the middle where you might be able to sway it, if you try.

The ultimate goal is to guide your group members into a deeper commitment of faith and bring their lives more fully in line with your (nominally) shared mission. You want occasional attendees to become regulars, regulars to become true believers, true believers to begin evangelizing to others. Belief induces action, and action reinforces belief.

Going through this experience gave me a kind of fingertip-feel for group belief. I’d say about 10% of the kids in my church had a highly literal and independent relationship with their faith. An action is sinful or not, righteous or not, acceptable before God or not, based on the principles in the Bible and a few logical inferences made directly from them. These kids were very earnest and frequently kind of annoying. They’d narc on you for not properly respecting your elders or start weird debates about whether women should cover their heads in church. But they were also always the first ones to really engage with me, regardless of the social consequences. In internet slang, they were the religious autists.

The other 90% were normies. They believed in what we were doing, but only sort of. they’d engage, but only when it felt like everyone else would too. They were easy to get along with, but they’d never be the first ones to take a social risk. So my job was to bridge the gap between the two groups, to use a spark from the annoying true believers to ignite some kind of common feeling in the indifferent cool kids. I was good at it.

So maybe the real question on my mind was: what is a leader's obligation to their group, when that leader starts to lose faith themselves? Sometimes I didn't feel like being earnestly engaged either, like there was some girl I wanted to flirt with or some unsanctioned outing I wanted to join. I wonder now if it was my obligations to my group members that bound me, more than any commitment to my actual religious beliefs. Having talked someone else into going out on a limb for their faith, I couldn't just leave them there to be laughed at by the rest of the group. 

Ironically, the advice that I think about most from those years has nothing to do with Christianity at all, about as far from it as you could get. It's the "campsite rule" coined by a gay sex advice columnist that I used to read: you can leave people behind, but you have to leave them better than you found them.

Despite losing my faith, I maintain a deep affection for the true believers. You have to have some people who can really believe in an idea and its implications, and not just read the social currents. You can’t get anything good going without them. I still love big causes too. I joke that I prefer startups over megacorps because you get the company kool-aid as one of the perks. 

On the other hand, I have to wonder if there’s some deep wisdom in the sociable indifference of the normies. I do think it's good to be part of something bigger than yourself, but I’ve seen so many things that I believed in rise and fall by now. I don't want my friends to sacrifice too much of themselves for these things. There’s a quote from CS Lewis that I still love: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

I regret that I don’t much believe in the immortality of the human soul these days. Where would it go, when body and mind are gone? But more than ever I believe in the primacy of people above mission. Missions seem so much more fleeting to me now. If yours isn't working for you anymore, it’s okay to let it die.

Thanks to sympatheticopposition for feedback on this post.

Her arms were already wrapped around me, but she held on tighter as the drugs started to wear off. Can we make this last a little longer, she asked. Is this how it feels to be normal? We were huddled together in a small room away from all of the people that she'd alienated on the trip.

She called herself a sociopath, by which she meant that she never felt empathy, except on molly. She’d broken up with her boyfriend a week before our trip but it was too late to disinvite either of them, so they both showed up. She’d gone on to pick fights with half of the people traveling with us and didn’t seem to mind.

I was an outsider who’d come along on a lark and probably uniquely happy to have her company. There’s nothing that can’t be improved through an interesting conversation with a beautiful woman, especially when I’d been struggling to make friends too. Still, even I was finding her hard edges uncomfortable, and she was full of hard edges.

As she came up we'd talked about our childhoods, her job, my family, all of the things that either of us cared about as far as I could tell. Everything she said about herself came with an affect somewhere between matter-of-fact and proud: her several millionaire boyfriends, her estranged relationship with her Yale dropout father, her career as a lawyer. Eventually we gave up on conversation, and I turned up the boom box and stroked her hair and back as she dozed off.

Hours passed, the playlist ended and looped. I fiddled with the volume as she puffed on her vape. Can we make this last a little longer, she asked. This is why this is my favorite drug, she said, and I don’t want it to end. I didn’t know what to say. You can take more but it fries your brain. If you burn out the circuits you can’t get high anymore, not the same way. A little later, the rest of my drugs disappeared, and she made fun of me for expecting to find them again. A few months later she told me that she didn’t think she wanted to do molly anymore, that it made her too depressed afterwards. It was years before I figured out that she’d stolen my supply.

We tried for awhile to be friends. During that time I thought a lot about how it would feel to live with a brain without empathy circuitry. Other than that one time, she never let on that it bothered her at all. She claimed that if anything, her wiring was better. You can just pretend, she said, and eventually you get better at acting it out than most people are at doing it for real. You can actually be more ethical this way, more helpful, because you think more clearly.

The more I thought about it, the tighter the metaphor seemed to me. She was running some kind of empath program in emulation. That meant that she could reflect on it and modify it, and she probably understood the program better than everyone who came with it wired in. On the other hand, it would always run a little slower than someone running it on native hardware. The stutters would always give her away.

So how would it feel for that kind of brain to be suddenly flooded by the strongest of empathogens, just for a few hours? I was reminded of that children’s story about the bewitched prince in the silver chair, waking up to his true self for only an hour each night, begging for release. It was too sad to think that maybe that girl was still there somewhere inside of her, looking out.

We tried for awhile to be friends, but after that summer ended I never saw her again.

As February approached, it became clear that at the very least, that piece of Asia was going to include the parts that we were visiting, as the Diamond Princess cruise became one of the earliest outbreak sites and was quarantined just off of Tokyo, where we were planning to stay. We swiped a box of masks from a hospital room in New York, where they were still plentiful and freely accessible, and planned to use them on our trip and then leave them with our friends in Japan, who were already finding them hard to purchase. Thus armed, we nervously proceeded with our trip.

Throughout our visit, I was checking Twitter for more updates. We gaped at the extensive lockdowns rolling through China and the extensive precautions their doctors were taking. People theorized about how to disinfect medical masks for reuse by steaming them, how to split up a ventilator so that it could be used by two or three patients at once. My wife Amy was an internal medicine resident in Manhattan at the time, and she laughed at me, saying there was no way they would ever do any of that. A month later they were doing all of it.

Our trip passed mostly without incident, other than getting used to wearing the masks everywhere we went. One local friend had made a reservation for the three of us at a highly-recommended sushi restaurant, then had to cancel as she suddenly developed a fever. We went anyways and had one of the best meals of our lives. It turned out later that we had actually gone to the wrong place, just wandering into another random restaurant that happened to be located in the same highrise. Such is the quality of Tokyo sushi.

We cut our trip short to depart from Narita the afternoon before the local authorities planned to release the Diamond Princess passengers from their quarantine. I remember arriving home and closing our apartment door behind me, taking off my mask, disinfecting our luggage with a bleach wipe, and breathing a sigh of relief to have put all that behind us.

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As February turned to March, it became obvious that we had not put anything behind us. We saw more and more reports from San Francisco and from Seattle, where an enterprising flu researcher continued reporting a growing number of COVID cases, despite being ordered by the FDA to shut down their investigation.

Looking back now, it’s hard to believe how different the institutional stances were on COVID back then. The FDA prohibited the use of most tests, delaying them while the government developed its own, which then turned out to be unusable. The CDC recommended against wearing masks, especially medical-grade masks, claiming that laypeople could not use them correctly. Republicans called for a shutdown of travel from China in the face of the frightening foreign disease, while Democrats downplayed the risks. Silicon Valley firms were mocked for asking their employees to avoid handshakes. The New York Times published editorials about how worrying about a possible pandemic was racist, and local representatives made a show of attending Chinese New Year celebrations. I remember a blogger’s summary of the two schools of thought, at least among people who bothered to think about it at all: those who thought that things typically go on as they had before, vs those who looked at a simplistic exponential spreadsheet model and found the output plausible. Baseliners vs modelers, empiricists vs theorists.

Even as a lifelong baseliner/empiricist, it seemed obvious to me that there was no reason that COVID would spread any slower here. I tried to prepare as best I could, but how? I bought frozen food and disinfectants from local stores, a blood-oxygen monitor from Amazon. I asked my parents to stock up on several months’ supply of their medications and to stop attending church services. The preparations felt pathetic, inadequate. I built a little spreadsheet model of my own, which suggested that all of New York would be infected within a few months, at which point herd immunity would prevail and the pandemic would end. I hoped that it would be over by the end of spring and we'd have a month or two left to enjoy the city before our planned move in the summer.

At work, we were getting more and more nervous watching the case numbers rise. One coworker had sniffles that he said were just allergies, another one fretted about getting coughed on on the subway. We kept the windows open despite the cold weather and wore coats indoors. One Thursday in March, late after hours, I wrote a long email to our executives saying that the team was not doing well and we needed to consider closing the office. The point was already moot by later that evening, when a famous actor and an NBA player both tested positive, and New York City issued an order closing schools, bars, and restaurants. Lockdown had arrived.

By then, Amy had already been drafted into the COVID service at her hospital, along with all of her fellow trainees. They were given very little training or equipment. Alone in our apartment, I watched videos of Chinese doctors covered head to toe in white plastic suits, clean air pumped in through sealed tubes, while Amy came home at night with a flimsy surgical mask which I carefully saved to disinfect in case we needed to reuse it. Her director estimated that 70% of her fellow residents would contract the disease within the next few months. We shamefacedly wrote to our friends in Japan asking them to return the box of masks we had delivered, to which they graciously agreed.

No one seemed to know what to do. Refrigerated trucks loitered outside of the hospitals to take away the bodies of the dead. A hospital ship was dispatched to New York City with much fanfare, only to depart after treating a few dozen patients. At sunset, New Yorkers banged pots and pans to show support for their healthcare workers. I saw Amy for a few hours a week, and no one else for months. The governor of New York appeared on television to announce that he was ordering nursing homes to accept more discharges from the overcrowded hospitals. Later on it turned out that this killed thousands of nursing home residents, but at the time it seemed to burnish his image. Our friends set up group houses outside the city, or threw private parties at home, which they wisely did not invite us to.

I made friends with our next-door neighbor, who happened to be a doctor at a different hospital. From time to time I saw her in our building’s laundry room. I offered her a few masks that we had saved up, which she accepted gratefully. Several weeks later, I heard her coughing loudly through the walls. It sounded really bad, and I wondered about the shared vents that ran between our bathrooms and bedrooms. We set up an air filter to run continuously in the apartment. She moved out quietly sometime later, and I never saw her again.

That summer we moved to Los Angeles, where my wife had committed to a fellowship. Two weeks before we left, a Black man was killed by a white police officer in Minnesota, and our city exploded. The streets, eerily empty for months, suddenly swelled with protestors. At night we watched rioters smash in each of the shop windows across the street from us, and watched videos of policemen kettling and beating others on the Manhattan Bridge just a few miles away. Our last memory of New York was from the taxi to the airport, passing street after street of boarded-up storefronts.

In LA, I was possessed by a sudden urge for self-sufficiency. I bought books on homesteading. I borrowed woodworking tools and built planters, and grew vegetables on our tiny apartment balcony. I watered those tomatoes and peas twice a day for months, fertilized them, put up fencing to deter the squirrels. What was I thinking? All in all, I probably grew about a thousand calories worth of vegetables in total, maybe enough to keep us alive for one extra day at most. The best thing that came from them was a little hummingbird that came by a few times a week to sip from the white pea flowers.

Other than the gardening, I did two unusual things during COVID. The first was very prosocial: in the first few months of the pandemic, I arranged for, personally purchased, and facilitated the delivery of thousands of medical-grade masks to the hospital where Amy was working, where they had run completely dry. I was briefly immersed in a world where brokers and speculators were trading pallets of medical equipment through docks and warehouses across the country, tens of thousands of pieces at a time, making incredible profits by cornering this suddenly scarce and lucrative resource. I couldn’t pull together enough money to divert any of these orders, but I eventually found a more direct avenue through a friend’s textiles business, which had relationships with Chinese manufacturers.

Thus, for a period of a few weeks, I was more effective at sourcing and supplying protective equipment than the entire purchasing department of a multi-billion-dollar healthcare enterprise. We also donated hundreds of masks to other institutions and to the staff of our apartment building, at a time when people were trying to cut them out of t-shirts.

My second unusual action was purely selfish. About a year after my mask purchases, I spent weeks researching ways to cut the line to get a vaccine. I read about pharmacists being forced to discard extra doses, about which geographical areas were prioritized for delivery despite their residents' reluctance to take the shots. I learned about the shifting classifications of essential workers, a huge system of favors bought and traded between various influential groups that had almost nothing to do with risk or exposure. Through one loophole I was able to get an appointment slot for myself, and I found a different one in a different state for two of my friends. I was shaking as I drove an hour and a half to get my shot.

Amy and I had a huge argument about it. You don’t need this shot yet, she said. There’s a line for a reason. I didn’t want to hear it. I was tired of being failed, tired of shots expiring because of idiotic and esoteric restrictions, of the double-shot regime when all evidence pointed to distributing first doses far more widely first, of staying indoors all year while the less conscientious kept the pandemic rolling. You dragged me out here to this city where I have no friends and can’t make any new ones, I said, you’ve left me alone all day every day for a year. You’re supposed to be in my corner. You aren’t going to stop me. In one last gasp of idealism, I delayed my own second shot for months. 

Up until that point, I'd always been an very cooperative, very agreeable person. So this was out of character, but that was the point. "If the rule you follow brought you here, then what was the point of the rule?” I wanted to change my character. I wanted to shed my naivety and my helplessness, and I did. I became worse.

I can't remember anything about getting into Stanford a few months later. Isn't that funny? Six years of my life devoted to that sole pursuit, getting into an elite college, and I can't remember a thing about the moment I achieved it. I have a vague recollection that the large envelope sat on my desk for days before I even remembered to open it, though I don't see how that could possibly have happened. The only thing I know for sure is that I never, ever wanted to do anything like that ever again.

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The story started and ended with math team, although a lot of other things happened in the middle. We'd heard of a magnet high school called Bergen County Academies, which had a competitive application process to get in. The math team coach there kept an eye out for new talent and had a lot of pull with the admissions committee. His favored mathletes had an amazing track record of getting into the best schools – not just the Ivies, but the biggest names, like Harvard, Princeton, and MIT.

A quick aside on terms here. A mathematician seeks the patterns that unify all things, that allow systems of dizzying complexity to grow from just a few elegant formulas. For example, consider the exponential function f(x) = ae^x. It's the function that equals its own derivative – that is, the rate of change of the function is the same as the function itself. In this compact equation we can see the skyrocketing population of rabbits on a fresh island or the beams of radiation spitting out from a plutonium core. Architecture, biology, economics, music theory, astrophysics, a dozen other fields all bottom out somewhere in math. A mathematician's motivation might be just as selfish as anyone else's – fame, curiosity, just knocking a chip off their shoulder – but their goal is almost definitionally pure. I was not a mathematician.

A mathlete is someone who participates in math competitions. He (almost always he) uses the elegant axioms of mathematics, the underlying structure of creation, in the same way that a drunken barfly uses a grip of darts, flinging them against a wall to impress friends or strangers. The patterns they leave mean nothing at all, except that sometimes they land in this curvy bucket instead of that one, scoring five points, or a hundred. The only point is to win. On math team, we were mathletes.

My first outing as a mathlete was Mathcounts, a middle-school tournament that progresses from regionals to states to a final country-level competition. It was okay. I didn't like doing it, but I didn't hate it either, not yet. I liked being good at it. I thought being good at it would get me into BCA, which would get me into a good college.

At regionals I was an unexpected breakout. The point leader going into the final rounds was a scrawny kid named Brian, and I was in second behind him. "I don't like you very much," he confided (jokingly? nervously?) as I dispatched the guy in third and prepared to match up against him. In the end he took me out to hold onto first. 

The next competition was at the state level. I choked, humiliatingly. Brian advanced to the national level, as did the third-place mathlete from our locals, a Korean boy named Hyun. Still, my results caught the eye of Mr. Oatnook, the BCA math team coach, and he leaned on the admissions committee, and I was accepted to the Bergen County Academies class of 2005.

At Mr. Oatnook's suggestion, I was immediately placed into a math class called Analysis II, a high-track course for sophomores. Taking a sophomore-level class as a freshman would surely be great for my college application. I knew what I'd come here for, and I was getting it. That was very good.

On the other hand, it was also very bad because I'd never taken Analysis I, and I had no idea what was meant to be covered in it. Not infrequently, I'd look up at the whiteboard and realize that I had no idea what these new symbols meant, no foundation on which to build the new material. Was this something I'd missed while I was daydreaming the last five minutes, that I could fix by looking back a few pages in the textbook? Or something that my classmates had spent weeks or months learning in the first-level class that I skipped? Was it going to be on the test?

It was the first time that I started to feel this gap open up between what I was and what I was supposed to be. There was a panicky feeling when I got my first ever C on a math test, but at least it felt connected to some ground truth. Subsequently completing the class with an A-minus and no further understanding of the material was a relief on the surface, but unsettling on a more fundamental level. 

Math team practice was, unfortunately, even worse. The problem with doing something pointless for accolades is that you have to do so much of it, for so much longer than you expect. Time flattens out like a square stretched in both dimensions. First it feels like it's taking forever subjectively, because it's so damn boring, then it also drags out objectively because you are doing it so ineffectively, because it's so damn boring. 

Practice went for three hours every Saturday. I'd get dropped off at school, where all of the classrooms are dark and locked, except for Mr. Oatnook's room. His classroom was stocked with fresh boxes of doughnuts and stale plastic containers of cheese puffs, and the walls were lined with competition problems and answer keys from previous years. There was no real guidance or coaching, so I'd just pick a competition at random and try to get started.

To give you the flavor of these things, here's an example I took from a recent competition: ​​

Let S be the set of all rational numbers that can be expressed as a repeating decimal in the form 0.abcdabcd… where at least one of the digits a,b,c,d is nonzero. Let N be the number of distinct numerators obtained when numbers in S are written as fractions in lowest terms. Find the remainder when N is divided by 1000.

This is not something you learn to solve in the regular course of your life, not even in advanced math classes. That's because the set of numbers that can be represented with four repeating digits is not actually a set that has interesting or useful properties. The purpose of this problem is separating out people who know the specific tricks to solve it from the ones who don't. The way to solve it is by grinding out similar problems for hours and hours until they begin to form patterns in your mind. (In this case, you would need to know that the decimal 0.abcd repeating is equal to abcd / 9999, and the Euler's totient function, which you can use to count the relative primes of 9999. As it happens, I knew the first formula but not the second, so I wasn't able to solve this problem.)

In the end what you are left with is not really an understanding of anything but rather a bag of tricks, and I could not pick these up to save my life. When I tried, all kinds of other things rushed into my mind instead. A sugar coma from the donuts and the bassline of whichever songs I was listening to to pass the time. The sunlight slowly fading outside. And the quietly insistent question of why I would possibly want to spend my Saturday afternoons this way.

I guess that was the root of the problem. This is no way for teenagers to spend their time, not even for nerdy boys like us. It was so, so boring. We were jockeying for the top spots so we could list the achievement on our college applications, and so that Oatnook would write us the glowing recommendation letters to go along with them. Of the dozen serious competitors in my grade, I think only two had any specific interest in math. One of them was actually so interested in math that he became useless at competitions and eventually stopped showing up to practice. Harry wanted to learn new theorems and theories, not spend his time combining old ones in arbitrary and nonsensical ways. He was a mathematician, not a mathlete.

The rest of us were in it for the college application process. The mathlete par excellence in this category was Hyun, formerly my third-place Mathcounts rival. I think Hyun, like me, had little specific interest in math. Unlike me, Hyun had grit. In his free time, he liked to see how long he could stay awake or how many times he could punch a locker before his knuckles started to bleed. I asked him once why we were doing any of this. "When you know you have to do something, it's better not to ask questions like that," he told me. "Just do what you need to do."

I wasn't like that. In my free time I liked to read fantasy novels and tried to write poetry. Sometimes I snuck out at night to hang out with girls. I was smart, and occasionally I had flashes of brilliance which could be mistaken for competitive math potential. Once I was the only one on the team to solve a competition problem involving the internal angles of a polygon – I worked out that you could subdivide the shape into triangles, and each triangle had 180⁰ of internal angles, and that was enough to get traction on the rest. But it wasn't enough. I didn't have much grit to begin with, and what I had was slowly worn down by self-doubt and the fundamental emptiness of the pursuit.

It's terrible to contemplate, even now. Competitive math was just one piece of it. We started school at 8 and went until 4:30. Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our applications. I did debate team and jazz piano, student journalism and improv, extra science and math classes on weekends. None of it meant anything. Each activity was like the last, one box ticked after the next, each school day starting when it was still dark out and only ending when it was dark again, every hour blended together into some kind of gray resume goo. 

The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds before moving onto the next perfectly interchangeable application from some other straight-A tryhard. They wouldn't care, like I didn't care. I hated them dully, like I hated the other applicants that I had to outpace, like I hated myself for being unable to put it all down and find some other way.

The problem got worse as the years went on. I kept getting put into advanced mathematics classes while missing core concepts from previous years. This wasn't just honors track, but actually skipping full years; eventually I was in classes with no standard curriculum at all, classes that had names like Discrete Mathematics and Advanced Topics II. To this day I have no idea what level of math they were meant to correspond to. I kept accepting these placements, of course, because the high-track math would look good on my college applications.

I started to crack. I skipped practice to go to the nearby mall or to the Boston Market across the parking lot. I could get a quarter roast chicken, cornbread, and a side of mashed potatoes for five dollars, and no one bothered me as I doodled in my notebook and waited for the hours to pass. I completed an application for the National Honors Society, yet another horrible bullshit college app contrivance, with essay and community service hours and all, then ripped it up hours before it was due. When we traveled to math competitions, I stayed up until 5 AM the night beforehand, then fell asleep in the competition hall.

Oatnook continued to cover for me, writing me permission slips when I showed up late to school or skipped class, keeping me on the B-teams long after I should've lost my spot. At first he hoped I was in a slump, and later I thought it was just out of habit. Eventually I realized there was something else too: he was stuck in the same game as me. His math team funding relied on the school, and the school's funding relied on showing the district that it could keep placing students into the top colleges. I was a great student, well-rounded with As in the humanities as well as math and sciences, and I looked even better on paper; all of that extracurricular application padding had had an effect. So he needed me to get into a great school as much as I needed him to keep up his side of the bargain.

In the end, I made it. I don't know what he wrote in his letter, but together with everything else it was enough. I got rejected from Harvard and Princeton and even MIT where I had legacy priority through my father. (The MIT interviewer had asked me frankly whether I even wanted to go there, and in a rare moment of straightforward honesty I'd told him that I really wasn't sure.) But I got into Stanford.

Was it worth it? It's hard to say it wasn't. My best friends are still the ones I met in high school and college. I met my wife in my first year at Stanford. The Stanford name gets me in front of venture capitalists and hiring managers, just like Oatnook's name got me in front of the admissions committee before that. I'm now 15 years into a tech career that I'd never even known was possible as a kid, a career that has been comfortable and lucrative in equal parts. 

But I also entered college deeply burned out and suspicious. Would it be like this forever, jumping through stupid hoops to prove myself to people who would consider my achievements for a few minutes before throwing me into one heap or another? Once there, I declined to participate in any student clubs, skipped half of my classes, did the bare minimum to keep my grades in order. I was depressed (subclinically, probably), and I was most of the way through my twenties before I recovered.

I ran into Harry at a party a few years ago. He studies as much math as he can, taking programming jobs when funds start to run low. I couldn't really follow the work that he tried to explain to me, something about counting the paths in a changing topology. What would that be like, I wondered, as his words floated gently through the space above my head, to just be interested in something, not as a stepping stone or as a resume line, but just to sit down and count the paths, just because you wanted to know how many there were?

Correction: Thank you to the readers who pointed out that an object falling is described by a quadratic function, not an exponential.

Our daughter Gloria has been really fussy lately. It starts with a whine, but escalates quickly to a full body tantrum, her arms flailing and back arching, and her voice rising to a scream. It happens so fast that I almost drop her, as her torso morphs from cuddly curl to hard column and her heels accelerate towards my crotch.

It’s hard to admit, but I guess it really is a tantrum. She’s just over a year old now, and in her first year all of her cries meant something very specific — she was hungry, or tired, or needed her diaper changed. We just had to figure out what it was, and the quicker we did the happier we all were. Giving her what she wanted would not just resolve the short-term issue, but also build the long-term bond between us.

Now it’s more complicated: sometimes she’s just frustrated, or she wants to eat blueberries instead of meatballs, or she wants to lick a power outlet and we’re not letting her. The worst part is knowing that giving in will make future tantrums worse. We would be rewarding her for being angry, reinforcing that emotional pathway, and ultimately building habits that would make us all miserable.

What should we do instead? There’s no real consensus. Some parents say that we should ignore her while she’s throwing a tantrum, so she learns that they don’t work. I just find that too sad, though. It seems to me like she is spiraling out and needs help regulating her emotions. I like to think that by staying calm and present instead, I can sort of link our nervous systems together, my still reservoir damping and absorbing her small violent waves.

Before I became a father, I liked asking parents about their parenting philosophies. Although they would eventually come up with something interesting to say, most of the time they seemed a bit confused about what I was asking. Now I understand why. The hard thing about parenting isn’t picking one philosophy and sticking with it. It’s that different situations and phases require different approaches, and you’re constantly thrust into a situation that requires something new just as you’re starting to get comfortable with the old way.

In my head I can hear my boss telling me that I’m being reactive instead of proactive. In proactive mode, you are making plans and executing on them. In reactive mode, there’s no plan, you’re just trying to roll with whatever gets thrown at you. Being reactive is not always a bad thing. You can do it on less sleep, and you don’t need as much conviction. But you can’t control where you’re going.

It’s interesting to combine this with the idea that kids learn from what you do, not what you say. You can plan out what you want to tell them, but you can’t plan how you’ll react. The way you are proactively is your ambition, but the way you are reactively is your character: parenting as Greek tragedy. There could be something comforting about that, I suppose. I haven’t always been happy with how my plans have turned out, but I’m basically happy with who I am. If one day my daughter feels the same way, I’ll be happy with that too.

In New York it feels like all the parks are smaller cutouts of Central Park: paved plazas with concrete fountains, lawns crisscrossed by asphalt walking paths, flowerbeds and deciduous trees cordoned off by thin green fencing, incongruous merry-go-rounds.

Parks in New York are what people bring to them. You can play chess, or watch the skateboarders practice their ollies and the Hare Krishnas their chants, or listen to a busker play a beautiful tune on his violin. You can slip a tab of acid under your tongue and spend the day with the flowers and trees, with the magnificent ducks. Have you ever noticed how iridescent the green-black patches on their heads are, and the two distinct and intricate patterns in their feathers going from wing to tail?

Other days I remember in the New York parks: snowflakes melting onto my phone as I crossed Union Square, droplets glittering like tiny jewels in the refracted light. It doesn’t have to be over, I’d texted my friend, it’s beautiful out here. Have fun, she texted back. I’m already naked in bed with my cat. Or a different trip with a different girl, watching her slowly curate her collection of fallen branches, trundling them around for hours, only to toss them all away suddenly to climb the rocky side of a hill. How red her hair was against the green lawn.

The most psychedelic experience I ever had in a New York City park was sitting stone sober in a tiny courtyard after weeks of isolation in my apartment, just before we moved out. It was the middle of May, three months into COVID, and I felt suddenly like I’d never seen a flower before, not really — how bright the purple and yellows were and how sharply the color of the petal changed from one to the other, and how delicately the little pistils waved in the breeze. I don’t think I even liked flowers before, but I’ve loved them ever since.

When we moved to Los Angeles shortly afterwards, I found a variety of parks that I never knew was possible. COVID was raging towards its first peak when we arrived, and we tried to spend a lot of time outside. I joined a yoga class in Long Beach on a thin strip of lawn overlooking the wide beach below, watching the seagulls circle around long lines of cargo ships waiting to unload. I climbed dusty switchbacks and back roads up to Griffith Park’s observatory, feeling worn down by the sun and the months of sitting at home. Somewhere in Malibu we found a trail that took us past a huge mansion abandoned in the forest, trees now growing through the fireplaces and doorframes.

There are parks for every niche here: skate parks, and parks filled with gym equipment and nothing else, parks in the canyons and in the hills and around the canals. There are suburban parks where Jewish-Asian couples push their kids on the swingsets and huge Hispanic families gather for cookouts, and artsy parks with abstract sculptures nestled in the plants.

In New York, it felt like the parks differed mainly because I was different each time. Here they seem to exist and differentiate all by themselves, substances and subjectivity strictly optional. I feel flattened, somehow — the landscapes less demanding and myself less responsive, although it’s hard to know whether to blame the scenery or the intervening isolation since we’ve come. It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years already since we moved here, three years since the world changed.

I’ve spent my life selecting into bubbles that are filtered for ultra-effective people, but I think my mother is still the most broadly capable person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen her bully a classroom of inner city kids into behaving (as a 5-foot-nothing ESL Asian woman), comfort a murderer, find a way to mail a letter on a federal holiday, counsel countless depressed high schoolers, and reproduce several restaurant dishes just based on taste. Professionally, she was a highly sought-after software engineer who was paid more than I’ve ever made (and so bored by it that she urged me not to pursue the same career). Unlike practically all of the other super-capable people I know, she consistently chose to use her gifts to help people who would never be able to repay her. I learned an immense amount from her growing up, and I’ve started to wonder why I never wanted to be more like her.

Recently I heard an economist speculate that schools and government services ran so well in the 50s due to an inadvertent misallocation of resources. Due to sexist societal norms, many highly competent women were denied access to high-level corporate jobs and ended up becoming extremely capable schoolteachers instead. Similarly, the then-nascent pipeline that sucks promising high schoolers out of their local communities and places them into Ivies and then onto executive-suite tracks was nowhere near as effective as it is today. The result was pockets of highly effective people in low-level bureaucratic and teaching positions, which made life much more pleasant for the people they served, albeit at a considerable opportunity cost to those capable men and especially women themselves.

I think things started that way for my mom. I spent so much of my childhood listening to her explain things to people who were clearly less competent or intelligent than her: stubborn church elders, beleaguered school administrators, confused recent immigrants, manic or depressive friends. She did this graciously and patiently, to the immense benefit of the people around her, though not always without some private frustration on her part. To some extent she was just playing the hand she was dealt as a single woman immigrating to the US in the 70s, but eventually a lot of it was voluntary as well. As I said, she was well-regarded professionally, and her boss was desperate to keep her, offering frequent raises and promotions. Instead she cut her hours back more and more to focus on church and family. Later in life she ran a successful college admissions consultancy, but I noticed that she spent much of her energy on the most marginal students, often the ones who paid the least.

In short, my mother has a soft spot for underdogs. She was born as the youngest of four daughters in a very patriarchal society and was told that she only existed because they were still trying for a son. When her younger brother was born, she was told to put aside her interests to take care of him. The churches she attended throughout my childhood were the same way. Men would ask for her advice in private but expected her to be deferential in public, and she usually complied. Disadvantaged people are her people, in some ways. They are overlooked like she was.

My mother has a soft spot for underdogs, and this is probably at the root of our differences. I like underdogs too, but mostly in the sense of “diamonds in the rough”, people who are presently underestimated, who can be polished up and made to shine, who will remember me kindly and help me out in turn as their own lives take off. I’m not proud of this, but it’s just who I am. I want to be in a tribe of helpful, competent, creative people, who can lift each other up and help each other get ahead. My mom isn’t like that. She likes the real underdogs, people who were dealt a truly terrible hand and might never fully make good, who really need the help but will probably never be able to pay it back.

It’s interesting to compare how this has affected our lives. My mother has the immense satisfaction of knowing that she has changed many lives for the better: teenagers recovering from depression, prisoners reconnecting with their families, children attending colleges as the first ones from their families to get a higher education. She is surrounded by people who love her and are eager to try to repay her in some way, any way. She never lacks for friends to help fetch groceries if she isn’t well, or to take my dad to an appointment, or to pick them up from the airport. But I’ve noticed that if she needs advice or a difficult favor herself, she rarely turns to this community. Instead, it’s to the various well-connected elites that she still has in her life — a VC brother-in-law, my dad’s friends from MIT, my MD-PhD wife.

I think my mother is also often pretty lonely. She sympathizes with underdogs, but she is not like them, not really. Although she has many friends, I think few of them really understand the way that she thinks or feels. She always used to question why I liked going to parties or seeing my friends so often. Aren’t you bored, she’d ask me. Don’t you notice that people just talk about the same things, over and over? She treasures each one of the handful of like-minded people who have stumbled across her path over the years, precisely because of how few of them there are.

I don’t get bored of my friends, because I selected them differently. My life has been a series of highly-filtered bubbles: a magnet high school, computer science at Stanford, then various groups of bohemian yuppies in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. Not all of my friends are successful, but they are basically all interesting and well-connected. If I need an intro to a hot startup or an invite to some weird party, it’s rare that my friends come up short. If I want to figure out an unfamiliar concept or collaborate on some new creative idea, my social graph pretty much has me covered.

On the other hand, my friends are much more transient than I would like. I don’t just mean geographically, although I do find that I need to refresh my friend group every few years as half of them move out to chase various career opportunities elsewhere. I also mean that I’ve lost friends when they became too successful for me have anything to offer them. You never really know for sure, but it stings just to suspect. I’ve probably done the same to other friends in turn. Although it’s never a conscious evaluation, after a lifetime of climbing various ladders it becomes hard not to see everything through that lens. What can I offer you, what can you offer me? If one of us loses that reason for the friendship, it tends to fade away.

I also find myself embarrassed to ask for help on small things. Outside of roommates or girlfriends, I don’t think anyone has ever cooked a meal for me when I was sick, or helped me move. My friends probably would help if I asked, but they’d also wonder why I didn’t just use GrubHub or Taskrabbit.

Transactionality seems to infect everything. Human interactions become divided sharply between charity and relationships, and both are evaluated through this lens. Charity becomes a numbers game — the recipients are faceless and all that matters is “effectiveness”, “utility per dollar spent”, and helping someone I’ll never even know is just as good as helping my neighbor. And in turn, our relationships become speculations on what we will get back from them in the future (cf the now-ubiquitous phrase, “investing in a relationship”). I think there’s a deep sadness behind all of this.

I don’t know what the answer is. I fantasize about putting down roots somewhere where I help my neighbors just because they’re my neighbors, and our kids can grow up as friends, but then I remember how stifled I felt in the tight-knit community that I grew up in. My mom calls me every week with a week’s worth of thoughts and ideas that she hasn’t been able to share with anyone around her, but then we are both grateful for her friends who dropped off food when neither of my parents could drive. I guess it’s like everything else in life; no perfect solutions, you just make your choices, and then you live with them.

I really enjoy William Gibson's stories, but over time I have noticed that they all end the same way. There’s a consistent inevitability to the back half of his books, and even though it detracts from the narrative tension and makes his books less compelling, I personally find it very resonant with my own worldview. 

It’s like this: the protagonist alters the course of the novel to some extent, but most of the heavy lifting is always actually done by some larger unknowable force. For example, in Neuromancer, once Case and Molly free the Wintermute AI it immediately fixes the rest of our heroes' problems: modifies the police database to pull them off the most-wanted list, pays for their societal reintegration, even hooks into Case's endocrine system and induces it to generate a cure for a biological bomb that had been implanted into his body. Different entities fill this role in different books: a faceless yakuza countercoup in Mona Lisa Overdrive, ex-governmental groups and a media empire in Spook Country, an AI assistant from an alternate future in (the ironically named) Agency. These behemoths are sometimes composed of humans and often act through them, but are not really directed by them, with the exception of occasional super-rich CEOs who appear to comprise an entirely distinct species. 

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Consistent throughout Gibson’s worldview is this sense that the world is primarily shaped by these superscale behemoths moving all around us. The role of normal humans is just to catch onto these behemoths and surf them, like a Fremen hooking a sandworm or like YT harpooning a bimbo box. His human protagonists act intuitively and without foresight, longterm planning being a behemoth-level ability only, and human intuition is usually successful to the extent that it’s subconsciously responsive to some larger pattern in the superscale (eg Case seeing the patterns of movements in Night City, Pollard’s coolhunting ability, Milgram’s algorithm to predict order flow). In Thielian terms, the behemoths are the only “definite thinkers”, the engineers, architects, and agents of the world, while normal humans are “indefinite thinkers” who can only speculate and hitch a ride on the true movers. Because of this, all of his novels have a certain dreamlike inevitability to them — even if things hadn’t ended this exact way, they would always have trended in a similar direction, given the momentum of the behemoths’ predetermined, ineffable motivations.

(I’m not the first to observe that this worldview makes cash-incinerating startups like MoviePass into something like folk heroes, robbing fatcat VCs to give to the moviegoing public. You can’t stop the insane ZIRP cash spews, but you can redirect them towards worthier goals, not to mention skim some off the top for you and yours.)

I suppose I enjoy Gibson because I find this to be very resonant with my own outlook. It’s always been so much easier to react to someone else’s ideas, choose among other people’s trends. Although I’m reasonably creative, it’s easier for me to produce variations on a theme instead of creating something from scratch. I’ve always favored “keyhole” solutions based on insight over “elbow grease” grinds based on consistent hard work. This makes sense given my primary instinct to hook into some existing pattern instead of trying to create a new one.

I don’t endorse this way of being. I'd prefer to be more of a creator and less of a ride-hitcher. I’m an engineer by training and I think it’s a nobler profession than being a speculator. Still, I think it’s just the way I’m wired (a fatalistic point of view I also picked up from Neuromancer, Molly employing this excuse repeatedly throughout). I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. I’ve been tired for as long as I remember too, another trait i have in common with most of Gibson’s protagonists. One of the earliest fantasies I remember entertaining is a dream of waking up on a marble slab high up on a forest island, disconnected from the world, with nothing to do and nothing to be done. Just wait and see how it all plays out.

This really came into focus for me as I was writing a graphic novel with a friend of mine about a decade ago. Nominally it was about an oracular treasure hunter, and it could have been a swashbuckling adventure story in the vein of Indiana Jones. But instead I just kept thinking about why her world was the way it was, an empire crumbling and continuously reclaimed by desert, shadows leaking through the cracks in the world and deepening. Inevitable. The protagonist became less a heroine and more a trickster nearing the end of her rope. A depressing vision, flowing naturally from my depressed outlook at that time.

Maybe it’s only a matter of framing. You could say: the vision I had for that project was bleak, but there was a project, and we labored over it together, and we did finally complete it. It was beautiful in the end. None of that was actually predetermined or inevitable, far from it. It was an act of unpredictable and spontaneous creation, good work that we did because we both wanted to. It was more or less disconnected from any behemoth’s system of rewards, though again it was only made possible by the shipping containers and offset printing presses created by those behemoths for their own original purposes.

Of course this is all a million times more true then of Gibson himself, the cyberpunk genre he spawned now full-grown into a behemoth of its own, spinning off countless imitators, crossing into games and music and any other medium you can imagine and now fully disconnected from any steering mechanism he might ever have attempted, the author now just one of many tiny human specks hooked onto its mighty hull.

I wonder what he thinks of that, and whether it matters at all.

What did I hope to get out of writing?

I was hoping that someone would explain my life to me. I was hoping that I would feel more understood.

All of these things just happen. Sometimes you feel sad, or lonely. Sometimes you expect to feel happy but you feel nothing. Sometimes you are happy for no reason. 

You get on airplanes, you sit in classes. You type some words into a computer and they make twenty million dollars for someone else, somewhat less than that for yourself. Your parents get sick. You meet a girl and together you have a baby.

Why?

There are a hundred different stories you could tell to weave these things together. Most of them would be absurd, or leave you unsatisfied. Maybe one of them would make it all make sense.

When I started working with Sasha I asked him to explain some process to me that I could mechanically repeat to generate good writing. This isn’t as silly as it sounds. I have some mechanical processes for having difficult conversations with people, for writing good software, for finding great companies to work at, even for making friends. Why not for writing? 

The process I had in mind was something like: idea dump on paper. Write an outline, then flesh it out. Edit to remove the extra stuff. A mechanical process doesn’t mean that it’s easy. But it means that if you have the will, you can just turn the crank and at the end you’ll be done.

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Did I get that?

No, I never learned to do any of that. My life makes no more sense than it did when I started, probably it makes less. I did write some pretty sentences.

What did I learn instead?

Try to lean into the things that make you a little uncomfortable. The frisson comes through into your writing and makes it come alive. Write at the edge between what you know and what you don’t.

You have to write things that are true for you. It’s already hard to write things that are true, so it’s nearly impossible to write things that aren’t.

Editing is for amplifying, making a piece more of itself.

If something feels really boring to write, it’s probably kinda boring to read too. But you have to be able to distinguish resistance (natural) or discomfort (good) from being bored (probably bad).

Wasn’t there something else you wanted to get from your writing time?

When I was in high school, a girl a year ahead of me wrote this book called How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Here’s the Wikipedia summary: “Opal Mehta centers on an academically oriented Indian-American girl who, after being told by a Harvard College admissions officer that she is not well-rounded, doggedly works to become a typical American teen: ultrasocial, shopping- and boy-driven, and carelessly hip.”

She  was a first-time author and reportedly received a $500,000 advance for this book. We were all flabbergasted. How was that even possible? Were all of the chick-lit authors pulling in this kind of money?

It was a real light-bulb moment for me when our English teacher explained it to us. Chick lit is one thing, but the author had actually gone on to go to Harvard. The surface message of the text was that there’s more to life than academic success and that it’s important to have fun and be well-rounded. But the barely-veiled subtext was a how-to guide for legions of immigrant families hungry to get their kids into the Ivies. That was worth half a million dollars to the publisher, easily.

So that was the brief: write about my own immigrant success story: magnet high school, Stanford, Google, hypergrowth startup, cloak it all in some self-deprecation, and ride the trend to a nice little payday.

So what happened?

It turned out that I couldn’t really write about most of this. I wasn’t sure which parts of my life people would care to emulate. The writing felt boring or inauthentic. 

I guess the core of it is that I couldn’t figure out how to write about the “success sequence” in an interesting way. I don’t know whether it was nature or nurture but I was already very smart by the time I had any conscious awareness of it, and it feels like being smart was the main thing that really mattered in my life. Be smart, take a few smart risks, figure out which one is the gravy train and ride it for as long as you can.

There are a few tricks for getting out of your own way, if you’re the kind of smart person who doesn’t ever feel like doing anything productive. Make a plan and execute it. Work on it for five minutes even if you don't feel like it. But is that really what you’re interested in reading about? I was boring myself as I tried to write about it.

It turns out that the things that felt alive and interesting to me were the moments in between. Figuring out how to talk to girls, or how to know what you really want, or what you’re supposed to do with yourself at a party at two am when you don’t know anyone or why you're even there. What it feels like to have a baby daughter.

What now?

I do want to write about the headline parts of my life at some point, I just don't know how yet. I still need to learn how to talk about my successes without sounding like I'm bragging, and about my philosophy without sounding like a fortune cookie. If you find some writing that does this well, please send it my way.

I'm probably going to get a job again.

There was a little more to the Opal Mehta story, by the way. Shortly after it came out, pretty conclusive evidence came out that large parts of it had been plagiarized from another author's books. The publisher recalled and destroyed all of the Opal books and clawed back the advances. That's probably what most people remember about that story, if they remember it at all.

There's something really poignant and also disturbing about this sequence to me. An author writes a semi-autobiographical novel, ostensibly about how getting ahead isn't the only thing in life, but the book is wildly successful because people want to hear her thoughts how to get ahead, but it then turns out that huge swathes of those thoughts were actually someone else's! Even though she had in fact lived through that life, and presumably had access to the thoughts behind it.

What does that mean?

I think it means that writing is just kind of hard. It's hard to create a narrative and some kind of meaning out of the bare facts of your life. It's hard to remember how it really felt to live through something, and hard to put those feelings into words. And it's a lot easier to do something else instead, just paste in the parts of someone else's story that you find along the way. 

Probably it's inevitable that you'll do some of that. I’ve heard it said that there are only seven different stories in the world and everything else is just remixing. But you have to try, at least, to change some of the words as you go, to make them yours.

Deciding to get married was a mind-altering event for me. Some side-effects included confronting my mortality, dropping my religion, quitting my job, and publishing a comic book. Several friends have told me that my decision-making process was helpful to them, so I decided to write it up.

I met Amy in 2006 when we were both freshmen in college. Our relationship was a very slow burn, moving from an undefined kind-of-dating thing in that first year to a year of long distance after graduation, during which we enjoyed our almost-single lives in separate cities and spoke barely once or twice a week. Even when I first moved to New York to join her, we lived in separate boroughs for a year.

Because of how early our relationship started and because of the reality-distorting playground that New York represents for young adults, we were able to put off conversations about the future of our relationship for years. I don’t think marriage was even brought up until 2015, after nine years of dating. By then we’d fully merged our social circles and had drawers of things in each others’ apartments. Most of our friends had only ever known us as a couple. She eventually delivered the traditional message: it’s been fun, but now it’s time to make a decision.

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worries and mental haze

This was a surprisingly difficult decision for me. I won’t go into the full timeline but it stretched over months and involved multiple outside counselors and a lot of hurt feelings. When I asked my friends and family for their thoughts, the advice was basically unanimous. Most memorably, a cousin told me, “I’ll support whatever you do, but you’re an idiot if you don’t marry her.” This was a pretty lonely time for me.

It’s obvious why other people gave me that advice. Amy is lovely, kind, generous, smart, and very cute. She has two doctorates and a great smile. One time when I was on a business trip and my dad was unexpectedly hospitalized, she spent a full day with him after pulling an all-nighter the night before to study for an exam. She was once spontaneously proposed to on the street. So what was wrong with me?

I had a few specific concerns. I think both Amy and I would individually be great partners to a lot of different people. We’re both even-tempered and easy to get along with, we have good professional careers but aren’t too obsessed with our jobs. We laugh easily and don’t escalate fights too often. But were we really specifically right for each other?

The details of my concerns don’t matter too much but I’ll go over them briefly. One mismatch is that I am much more novelty-seeking than her. Put less clinically, I feel like there is some kind of divine / creative spark behind our lives and I’m hungry to seek it out. There’s some feeling, like one day I’ll meet the right stranger or peek behind the right door and find a whole new world, behind the veil, that is suffused with light and meaning. I’m more interested in strange movies and scenes, weird art and weird artists. Amy prefers to watch the West Wing and the same three police procedurals on repeat. I get it! If I was working 10-hour hospital shifts every day I’d probably want to relax more too. But I’m not.

When I thought about our relationship, I didn’t feel the deep longing or the feeling of finally finding a missing piece that other people talk about. As silly as it is, this XKCD comic gave me serious mental stress during this time

Underneath it all was a lot of fear. What if I woke up one day in middle age and regretted spending my whole life with the wrong person? How was I supposed to know who the right person was? On the flip side, could I really walk away from such a great person over such vague misgivings? I looked for peace and reassurance but all I could find was more anxiety. I was paralyzed with indecision for months.

one day you will die

I know this is weird, but one truth that helped me finally make a decision was this: one day in the not-so-distant future, I was going to die. On that day, there wasn’t going to be a scoreboard or an instant replay to tell me whether I’d made the most optimal decisions throughout my life or show me how things would’ve gone if I had married someone else. There was just going to be my life, and how I felt about the choices I’d made. Would I be able to accept them?

Thinking about the end helped me in another way. The stakes felt so high because marriage is forever. How could I make a decision for forever? I’d never done anything like that before.

But I realized that actually, I was just making a decision for the next 70 years. And by putting off the decision for so long, I’d actually already made a decision for the last ten: to spend them with her. So I wasn’t trying to scale something up from 1 to infinity, I was trying to scale it up from 10 to 70. And by the way, I’d better learn to start making decisions consciously, because by putting off the decision, I ended up spending ten years in an undecided state. It’s not like I got to stay young forever by putting that decision off. Every day I was just getting older with an implicit decision instead of a consciously chosen one.

trust your instruments

Those realizations helped lower the stakes and helped me realize I really did have to choose. But I still didn’t feel anything, and no one had ever taught me how to make this decision or anything like it. I didn’t have any role models I wanted to follow. So how was I going to choose?

Sometimes I like to follow my wild impulses and see where they take me (see novelty-seeking, above). That’s led me into plenty of decisions that I won’t confess to in writing. But for the most consequential decisions, I try to be level-headed and just get the most important things right.

When new pilots get lost in the clouds, it’s easy for them to get disoriented and start to make bad decisions. The advice they’re given is: trust your instruments. When your senses are lost, they’ll tell you which way is up and which way is down.

The goal here was to find a partner that I could build a life with. The important criteria were the same ones they would be for anyone else: a partner who is kind, reliable, good at making decisions and resolving conflicts, someone that I was physically attracted to. I asked trusted people around me to double-check that I wasn’t missing any red flags. I might never know if this was going to be the best person for me, but I just had to make a decision that I thought would work out, and all of the signals were green. So I went for it. And she said yes!

postscript

As I mentioned above, the process of making this decision shook a lot of other things loose in my life. It’d been ten years of adulthood already! How long was I going to wait around in a job I didn’t love? How long was I going to put off creating the comic I wanted to write? Wait for some kind of sign from a God I was losing faith in?

Making decisions in the face of uncertainty is hard. I’d always been great at school, where careful analysis eventually yielded the fixed right answer. But learning to make this decision without a sure answer unlocked the rest of my life for me. Fingers crossed, but so far it’s been great.

I used to spend a lot of time in the 2 am mental space. As a new parent it's now completely closed to me, so I thought I’d try to capture some of the essence before it’s gone forever. You can’t access 2 am by being woken up by a screaming baby at 1. 2 am is a space you only reach by staying up intentionally.

No matter how fucked your sleep schedule is, there were at least a few off-ramps earlier in the night. You made it here because you wanted to, because you missed something in the early hours that you’re looking for now. You wanted to get one more loot drop, get a moment alone with that girl in the corner, untwist yourself more completely. You wanted to find something new. You thought that maybe the TvTropes rabbit hole would get you there, this time.

2 am is also about the time you start thinking it isn’t going to happen. If it was going to happen, it would’ve happened already. You’d be deep in conversation by now or your body would already be pressed up against someone else’s, you wouldn’t even be aware of the time. The night is pretty committed by now. You aren’t going to meet someone new, at least not someone that you’ll want to remember tomorrow.

2 am is a time that you can give up. You can still sleep six or seven hours and wake up in the morning. 2 am is your last chance to make a good decision.

2 am is the time for quixotic choices. You don’t have to go home yet. You can have one more drink. You can go to the 24-hour McDonald’s and fumble your phone onto the ground. You can send dopey texts before you really think them through. You can make conversation with the bored cashier, or anyways you can try. They have the white lights on very bright here, bright enough for you to see the streaks that the mops leave on the brown-tiled floor. You can wash your face in the bathroom, but when you look in the mirror you'll see the deep bags under your eyes and the reddish tinge of your skin.

You can think of other choices, other ways you could have been. You could have gone to bed early and volunteered at a soup kitchen in the morning, or had a nice cup of coffee with the birds in the park. You could have talked to that girl in the corner. Even now you could be sharing a drink and the view from the rooftop of your buddy's apartment. You could have tried harder in school. You could have tried again with the girl from high school Spanish. Back home, people your age don't walk home alone from McDonald's at 2 in the morning. They wake up early and make toast and push their children on the swingsets. 

2 am can happen even when you’re at home. You can watch a nice movie with your girl and stay up while she goes to sleep. You feel faintly annoyed with her for leaving you alone like this. It’s too late to go out, too late to call your friends, but it’s not too late for Twitter and Substack and watching other people play on Twitch. It’s a good time for listening to drunk girls hollering outside your window. You can be annoyed or you can attend to your twinge of envy.

I’m not sure what happened to those 2 am feelings. Is existential angst just sleep deprivation? I had that sense of yearning for about as long as I can remember, but it’s mostly gone now. When I was younger I thought it meant that something was missing, something that I could find if I kept on looking. Now I’m not so sure.

A young Asian woman dressed in leopard print and wrapped in a fuzzy blanket was telling me about her new career as an "embodiment coach", and in the moment it seemed not even slightly absurd. This was partially because I was at a house party in the Berkeley hills, only just starting to come down from whatever was in the sticky brown wafer a stranger had offered me several hours ago, but mainly because this woman actually did seem to have the best posture of anyone I'd ever met. Not just posture, actually, but a full sort of mind-body alignment – the way she closed her eyes and swayed from shoulders to hips when she was thinking, or how her spine and neck and gaze all snapped into focus together when she wanted to make a point. 

I was explaining that I didn't quite know what I wanted to do next – not at this party, which I'd been thinking of leaving until I'd met her, nor in life more generally since I'd quit my job a few months earlier with basically no plan at all. "What is your body telling you?" she asked me. "I just try to listen to my body and then do whatever it tells me." 

Recently I've been meeting a lot of people who say things like this. This seems impossibly hippie-ish to me, but living in California you discover that the hippies are everywhere now, disguised in business casual in Beverly Hills coffeeshops or at techie burner parties in Oakland. The morning after the party, I drove back to LA with a different acquaintance, who I primarily know as a very sharp trader of shipping and commodity metal stocks, and recounted this exchange to her. "Oh yeah," she said. "I just wake up and do whatever I feel like doing. I guess I'm lucky that I mostly prefer reading K-2 forms to playing video games."

So there are surprisingly functional and even successful human beings who claim that internally they are like children in a candy store and not tightly bunched up bundles of self-coercion. This sounds lovely but awfully far removed from my own experience. Personally I wake up in the morning and start thinking of ways to trick myself into doing all of the things that need to be done. My model of success comes from people like Marc Andreessen who said "being a startup founder is like chewing glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood." Or as a friend once told me, if you're picking a cofounder, look for someone who would beat you in a ditch-digging contest. 

The hippies call this being internally unaligned. If you really wanted to do something, why would it be so hard for you to focus on it? It's true, it often feels like I'm hosting a group of squabbling children in my head. Do I want to make money, or work out, or level up in whatever stupid video game I happen to be playing? Or make art, or make friends, or just lie in bed? I've learned that it's no good to wake up and start asking myself these questions, I'll just be paralyzed. I have to make a plan and stick to it, and if I don't feel like doing that in the moment, that's just too bad. I'll feel better when it's done. 

It took me a long time to figure this out for myself. I never really learned to bear down on anything in school. At math team practice, I yelled at my body to pay attention to theorems and sometimes it did, but more often it just fetched another donut and rode the sugar crash down into oblivion. For my tests I'd wait until the night before and then cram, and I was smart enough to make it work. But even then I felt the panic around the edges, how weird it was that I seemed to not quite be in control of myself. I wasn’t enjoying procrastinating. I was just noticing that I wanted to do other things instead but not doing them either. Why couldn't I just do the things that I wanted to do?

It became a real problem at work because the deadlines were looser and less well-structured, easier to shirk at least for awhile. I spent hours on Reddit and other internet forums, trying to press down this feeling of falling further behind, of lacking control. One well-intentioned manager asked me if I needed classes in touch-typing, at a loss for any other explanation for why a bright kid consistently failed to turn in any work on time. "Has trouble managing his time hour-by-hour," wrote another coworker on one performance review, surely having noticed how rarely my code was actually up on my monitors. If I had asked my body what it wanted to do at that point in time, it surely would have told me that it preferred to stay in bed.

Looking back, it wasn't very fun spending my time this way. I was caught up in a spiral of panic and attempted self-soothing. The further behind I fell, the more avoidant I got, putting me yet further behind. I was lucky to be working in an undemanding corner of a famously cushy tech behemoth, where this behavior was not just overlooked but basically rewarded. 

Against this backdrop it might seem insane that I decided to quit my job and strike out on my own. "I'm worried I'm losing my edge here," I told my coworkers. "What edge?" they must have wondered. I was coming in at 11 and dipping out right after the company-provided dinner, taking an hour off for a coffee break in the afternoons. I had all the edge of a spatula. 

I couldn't picture what I was getting into at all. But I had a model for what I was doing, based on the single concept that I'd retained from an otherwise thoroughly wasted three-year masters program in decision theory. It's called the multi-armed bandit, and it goes like this: imagine you’re placed in front of a row of slot machines with unknown but different payoffs, but you only have a set number of tokens to feed them. Every play is a tradeoff between exploring the possibility space and exploiting what you already know. You should explore early on, so that later you can exploit your expanded knowledge. It was too early in the game for me to be so settled and comfortable. The model said it's time to explore, and so I did, ignoring the loud and panicked protests of my inner couch potato.

I hooked up with a cofounder who was my diametric opposite. Hypercapable, psychotically organized and driven in both her personal and professional life, she immediately instituted sixty-hour weekly minimum hours for the two of us and set an exponential growth target before we'd even closed our first customer. She and her fiancee were also juggling wedding planning, an apartment renovation, and a cross-country relationship, using professional project-management software, biweekly planning meetings, and a remotely-located personal assistant to keep it all on track. She'd already developed a prototype before I joined her, and my job was to translate it to a production-ready environment, run massive rounds of simulations to test it, and get ready for our clients to integrate. 

I was miserable. We were working out of her unfinished apartment which was freezing cold in the middle of the winter and a constant reminder of all the things that weren't going well. I'm a low-conflict person who needs hours to calm down after an argument, where she was high-strung and preferred communicating via loud debate. At one point we hired a Taskrabbit to help us get the broken and drafty AC unit out of one window, only to discover after hacking it out that the window was rusted stuck and we'd only made the problem worse. I took to wearing fingerless gloves indoors and sticking my hands under her dog's warm belly when they got too cold anyways. She did sprints on her stationary bike to keep her blood flowing. 

I was trying to learn all kinds of things that we needed for our business – how to work with clients, keep our servers up at all hours by myself, debug statistical anomalies in our data, or send out cold emails to find new business. I was the only one who could do these things, so I got them done. I woke up early in the morning and had trouble sleeping at night. Once I worked past midnight to compile a report for a client who'd requested a last-minute meeting in the morning, only for them to no-show, followed by an email two days later asking me why I hadn't found another way to send them their data. If I had asked my body what it wanted in that moment, it surely would have responded with incoherent screaming. It basically did that without being asked.

Our company folded in less than a year. But in eight stressful and mostly unpleasant months I accomplished more than I had in the eight years before that. We made some money for our clients and a minimal but nonzero amount for ourselves, and I was able to parlay the experience into an early position at a much more successful startup. More importantly, I learned how to just get things done when they needed to be done, instead of feeling like a helpless bystander watching a car crash. 

If I could give any advice to myself ten years ago, I would say: just ignore that panicky feeling that sets up in the pit of your stomach whenever you think of doing something new. Make a plan, and try executing it for five minutes, then twenty, then an hour. Then do it again, and again, and soon you'll feel better. My body doesn't know how to plan ahead, or how to do something hard now so it can feel better later. That's what I have my brain for. Body sensations are for enjoying yourself after you win.

And yet. Now that I have enough money to stop worrying for awhile, I still wake up in early in the morning and can't figure out how to relax. I still find myself chatting up this embodiment coach at a random party hundreds of miles from home and I'm not sure why. And I have a daughter now, just a few months old, and I'm not sure I'd want her to take the same advice I said I'd give myself. 

I make spreadsheets full of weights and metrics to figure out where to move, where to work. I make a plan the night before so I don't have to decide what to do with myself the next day. I create huge funnels of job opportunities and push myself through dozens of interviews to make sure I score just the right spot.

But what is that, against the body-sureness that simply wants what it wants? What if the hippies were right, that you really could just live in harmony with yourself, every day just doing as you please and that chain of desire leading somehow ever onwards to something new and good? I can't really imagine it; it sounds absurd. But if it were true, if I could, I think I would want to live that way too. At least, my body says it would.

i

I think of my time with my baby as "meditative", by which I mean that it's boring in a mildly pleasant way, if I can maintain a specific mental equilibrium. When that equilibrium is disturbed, then it's just regular boring. Babies want constant low-level stimulation, requiring just enough that I can't space out into a separate train of thought or focus on a podcast, but nowhere near enough to fully occupy my attention. I can interest her in basically anything, whether it's a rattle or a book or a piece of cloth, by shaking it a few times in her field of view. In the early days when she was prone to unexpected projectile vomiting and I was sleeping only three hours at a stretch, there was a certain edge to the experience. But now it's just that meditative slight boredom. 

ii

How are babies so heavy? I'm not particularly athletic but I work out occasionally, and a 20-pound baby is just heavier than a 45-pound dumbbell. I don't know how but it's true. Babies want to be held in some specific way that somehow engages a set of muscles that is completely distinct from the ones you might have built up in any other circumstance. 

iii

A family friend named Natalie has been helping us care for our baby. She is so, so good with her. She has a lot of previous experience with daycares and new mothers, and she was a steady hand and a godsend especially in the dazed early months. There are so many little techniques you don't know you need until you need them. How to hold a baby's ankles in one hand without mashing their ankles together, so you can pull up their legs for a diaper change, or how to tilt a bottle up to stimulate their palate, then back down to restore the flow. How to warm and massage a mother's breasts when her milk ducts are clogged. How to cradle a screaming baby downwards, their chest against your forearm, and rock them until they relax and fall asleep. For various reasons, none of our parents were able to come and help us after our daughter was born. Instead we had Natalie.

She didn't tell us until after she'd come by several times that her daughter had passed away unexpectedly just a few months before ours was born. Her daughter was just a few years younger than us. When I found out, I didn't know what to do or say. Was it good for her to be around so much hopeful new life in the middle of her grief? Or for our daughter to be around such deep sadness? She hid it well from us, but babies develop a quick grasp on their caretakers' emotions, one that seems all the stronger for their inability to comprehend anything else. 

She still comes by often to help us and I am grateful in a way that is not really possible to put into words. She speaks no English and my Mandarin is somewhere below a first-grade level, and it seems impossible to say anything meaningfully comforting across this chasm. Her loss is a wound in the world, appalling and unfair, impossible to heal.

iv

Before our daughter Gloria was born, I had a lot of thoughts about the kind of parent I wanted to be and the kind of values I'd try to instill. I wanted her to be independent and resilient, high-agency and resourceful. The kind of person who would be inspired by some pretty photos one week and the next would sport a used DSLR and a little gallery website she'd put together with the help of a friend or a Youtube tutorial. Her photos would start out amateurish but evince some hidden spark, and over time they would get better and better until her genius (of course!) was undeniable. I wouldn't hover or helicopter, I'd give her space and let her learn that failure is a part of the process, but I'd help with her projects and show her that she could make a dent in the world.

Maybe that stuff comes in later, I don't know. So far it's mostly been about trying to get her to drink her milk without puking. It turns out you have to hover a lot in the early days just to keep them alive. And it's hard to be chill when (as they say, and it's true) your heart is walking around outside of your chest.

v

Our daughter was born six weeks early due to a condition her mother developed during pregnancy called preeclampsia. She was born with her skin blotchy red, her limbs spindly and birdlike. She was so small and helpless that just drinking a few milliliters of milk wore her out. Lying on the tiny hospital bench listening to the monitors beep over mother and daughter, I cursed myself silently for having been so relaxed and unaware of this impending near-disaster and vowed in the future to bring every molecule in the world under direct control to prevent anything like this from ever happening to them ever again. 

The delivery nurses are studiously reassuring. We are told repeatedly, unprompted, that this was no one's fault. They do not ask about work pressure, or sleep schedules, or whether the maternal grandparents had perhaps been inconsiderately badgering the mother throughout the whole damn summer about idiotic and irrelevant concerns, which one imagines could only raise the mother's blood pressure (preeclampsia being really just a fancy way of saying that) and contribute to the whole mess. Said grandparents later calling only days after delivery to raise yet another set of inconsiderate/idiotic/irrelevant et cetera, et cetera.

Later, fortunately, it turns out that it is difficult to stay upset with someone when your daughter adores them, regardless of how rude or inconsiderate they may previously have been.

vi

These days it is easy to entertain Gloria but hard to make her laugh. Peekaboo made her giggle for a few days, but now she only smiles. There was one week where she'd always laugh if you looked at her upside down, but the next week she was over it. Yesterday my wife made a buzzing noise through her closed lips, and Gloria laughed until she started coughing.

Some things stay the same and some change faster than you can believe. It's been eight months and she can't even crawl yet, but in another four she'll be able to kick a soccer ball. She used to be so floppy that we had to support her neck to pick her up, and now she cranes and twists her entire body to grab the thermostat as we carry her past it. One day she'll be too big for us to carry at all.

Today Gloria wants to watch us dropping things. A ball, or a book, or her crinkly elephant toy. We think that maybe she is learning about gravity, the way that everything falls if you let it go. She is delighted every time we drop something today, and by tomorrow maybe she'll have moved onto something else. So we pick up a toy, and let it fall, and listen to her laugh, and we do this over and over and over again until finally she stops.

A couple of years ago I was in a car with a beautiful woman, headed up the hills towards a cabin that our friends had rented out. Her boyfriend was sitting in the front with her, but we were the only ones talking. I had to kill my shadow recently, I explained to her. It hurt but it was good for me.

What I meant by killing my shadow is this. There is one part of me that moves through the world, and does practical things. I did well in school and got a comfortable job working with computers, a job that wasn't too demanding and paid well. I married a sweet, kind, practical girl, one with a good heart and a beautiful smile. We go to brunch with friends and send them notes on their birthdays, when we remember.

There is another part of me that looks at this all skeptically. Is this all there is? What if there was more? Everyone you meet might be a portal into a different world. I used to walk past this one place on my way home, a badly-painted stairwell leading to a door that was always slightly ajar, with an LED light pulsing and changing behind it, cycling from blue to purple to pink. What was behind it?

I think this shadow self must sometimes become visible, somehow, to people around me. Once I was standing on a subway platform at 3 in the morning when a girl struck up a conversation with me about the game I was playing on my phone. A few minutes later she got into the same train as me and kissed me, open-lipped, as we went through a tunnel under the river. I swear I gave her no conscious invitation to do this. Another time a group of strangers outside a closed bar in San Francisco lifted me bodily off the ground and brought me into one of their apartments, where they shared boxed wine and a joint with me. This isn't normal, is it? I think there must be something that shows through my face somehow, sometimes, saying something like: I am not rooted in this place. Would you take me away from here?

I was trying to explain all this to Mia, my friend's girlfriend, but she looked horrified. She was a psychologist and also a bit of a hippie, and this shadow-killing thing is verboten to both of those kinds of people. Your shadow is part of you, she explained. You can't kill it. You can suppress it, but then it grows hidden deep inside of you, like a cancer. It can become a real cancer, actually. Steve Jobs might have died from trying to kill his shadow.

I started to backpedal. I don't really know what other people mean by killing their shadow. I didn't grow up with the mainstream here, but I hear other people use these little phrases that are so evocative and resonant with something I feel that I just have to assume it must have meant the same thing to them. I had to kill this shadow so that I could get married, put away the unformed what-if so I could build the now. It was forever dragging me out of bed, this shadow, taking me to the shore with another woman at two in the morning or to these artsy gallery openings in the Bronx where I stuck out like a sore thumb. How could I find a place to belong, with this restless, hungry shadow attached to me?

Hidetaka Miyazaki said that he was inspired to create his Dark Souls series by an illustrated fantasy book that he had seen in a bookstore when he was a child, back when he couldn't read any English at all and had to imagine his own stories to go with the dark-scaled dragons and knights in shining armor in the pictures. In Miyazaki's world the dragons are changeless, sorrowful and wise, and the knights cutting them down are foolish and driven by ambition. He was looking at the same pictures but he'd gotten them all backwards from how the author meant. That's how it was for us with this phrase "killing my shadow", that seemed so necessary and wise to me, and misguided and dangerous to her.

I'd only just met Mia but I wanted her to like me. She lived in a beautiful new apartment building on the west side, black marble interiors with gold trim, huge pieces of metal art on the walls and a full grand piano in the lobby, her car fetched by a valet from the garage just as I arrived. She charged her clients four hundred dollars an hour, no insurance, and sometimes gave them ketamine. 

She started telling me about this book that she had just started reading about shadow work, something about the jungian archetypes and how they need to be properly incorporated into the self. I didn't really know enough about Jung to follow. I started thinking about how she looked in her makeup and dangling gold earrings, quite pretty and a little sad too, and how she'd taken so long to get ready just for a road trip, and how another girl might have just thrown on some sweatpants and put her hair in a ponytail, something practical for a long drive through these very dark woods.