(there’s a gif above this paragraph that you might not be able to see in your email reader so consider opening on substack if that’s the case? this is a sequel to YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT OR YOU CAN JUST GET OLD; that post was about a general vibe and this post is about specific blockers / directions)
in the five months from september to january i didn’t meet a single new person i liked in sf. then in february and early march i ran into a handful of new people, all of whom i could see myself becoming close friends with. it was a jarring shift. i was happy for an entire month, not because of the hangouts but because of what they represented: every once in a while i meet new people who remind me that there are so many more friends waiting to be discovered, that i haven’t seen everything there is to see, that the world is not ending. i think that’s really important. i didn’t realize how completely my faith in strangers had been depleted until after it was restored
here’s what scarcity feels like to me: you’re preparing to go on a hike through the desert, so you pack as many water bottles as possible and you study up on how to breathe / walk / dress to minimize water loss. then you start the hike and a mile in there’s a water station but you’ve been too disciplined to actually drink anything yet, so you take a few sips from your first bottle and then refill it. the same thing happens at the second mile mark, the third mile mark, and so on. at some point you run into another hiker who comments wow, you’re carrying so many water bottles, why haven’t you consumed any of them? - but you’ve learned not to open your mouth because mouth-breathing results in more water loss than nose-breathing, so you just smile / nod and continue walking. it turns out there are water stations every mile for the entire length of the hike but you spend all your energy thinking about how to manage your water supplies anyway because you’re sure that at some point the stations will stop coming
now imagine the water bottles are your friends or skills. what i mean is: you hold on desperately to your existing friendships because you think all the strangers in the world are worthless, and eventually your friendships crystallize into constraints instead of pillars. you spend all your time thinking about the best ways to utilize your existing skills because you don’t expect to acquire new ones, so instead of ever choosing to work on what you really want to do you always end up choosing to work on the best thing you already know how to do
(these behaviors aren’t always bad. it’s good to fight to keep your friendships, for instance. but what if you held onto your friends because you really loved them, and not just because doing so felt existential?)
at some point over the years i became convinced nothing good would ever happen again. i don’t know how or when this came to be, though i have a few guesses? for instance, there’s a meme about high-achieving teens peaking in high school or college, and while this meme can be useful and accurate, it can also be dangerously self-fulfilling: the meme finds its way to a teen with low self-esteem, said teen sees themselves reflected in the meme and buys into it, and then over time they stop believing in good outcomes (how do we share useful memes without harming the people they describe?)
what i’m describing wasn’t a conscious belief as much as a deeply internalized pessimism that colored every experience. it was a lens so deeply embedded in my perception of reality that i could never observe it directly; all i could do was observe around it, collect datapoint after datapoint orbiting the same void, until one day a few weeks ago i took a step back and realized oh wow, there’s this single pattern underlying everything i do
there’s a real oppression that comes from believing your dreams can’t come true. you stop trying as hard; you stop trying new things; eventually you forget you were ever capable of trying in the first place (when we say people become more static as they age, how much of that just comes from a loss of faith?)
i often think about this passage i read recently: It only takes one night for your decades-long desire to cross over from your imagination into your memory, which tells you that all of this is at least possible. Maybe knowing that your joy is possible is what finally sets you free. it’s surprisingly accurate. i’ve only really had one decent research idea so far and somehow i now believe i can keep doing research and be good at it. starting one new hobby is all it takes to remind myself that i’m capable of learning anything. the shift from zero to one is seismic in a comical way. a single spark of hope and i begin to feel the electricity flowing between my fingertips and i start thinking these hands can work miracles
i think simply knowing that your joy is possible really does set you free
and then i realized what my friends have probably known for years but didn’t tell me for whatever reason: i’m a case of extreme resource mismanagement. not to say that my life is bad right now, but i finally understood that my life could be so much better if i actually managed my assets properly. there are so many pieces of myself that i somehow decided to bury in mediocrity just because my assessment of the world was too dim? some examples:
by default i’m an extrovert who enjoys meeting new people and talking to them. however, i accomplished the impressive feat of becoming so pessimistic about strangers that nowadays whenever i meet new people i typically have zero enthusiasm and come off as introverted
in a similar vein, why have i never hosted any social events? it’s not because i lack friends or skills. somehow i managed to convince myself nothing good ever comes out of larger social gatherings so it’s not worth organizing them
during the grad school application process i spent a long time thinking about why i’m not better at research. towards the end i realized the answer actually has very little to do with experience or technical ability and is mostly about my relationship with new ideas; i’m so good at shooting down ideas that it’s impossible for me to do research independently because everything always looks unpromising? this is also the blocker to me working on more projects - i really love my projects but i’m usually too pessimistic to commit to starting anything
i have some weird image self-sabotage going on where i’m only comfortable presenting as much less confident or competent than i actually am, i guess because of some superstition about jinxing / the world coming after people who declare themselves too boldly, which is just stupid? literally what is the point. i have eventually solved every personal problem i’ve ever encountered and there’s no reason to keep pretending otherwise
now i want to talk about “agency”, which has been one of the big buzzwords in my circles lately (“just be 10x more agentic”, “agency is the new intelligence”, etc). personally i’ve found the agency discourse to be actively unhelpful, for reasons that are hopefully clear by now but i’ll complain about them anyway
people generally discuss maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the context of survival needs like food and shelter coming before everything else. some people will occasionally also discuss the second layer of needs, psychological ones like safety / love / friendship, which are widely accepted as prerequisites for self-actualization
i think confidence and optimism are extremely underrated psychological needs. we don’t really treat them as such - when someone lacks confidence or optimism we often explain it away as “X is just an unconfident / pessimistic person” (by contrast, we never say “X is just an unlovable person” when someone is missing love). but confidence and optimism are serious needs that have to be met before you can fully realize yourself, in the same way that safety and love are
the agency discussion often labels people as agentic vs non-agentic, which i find very unhelpful because how many people are blocked by psychological issues like self-sabotage and internalized pessimism and hypercompetitive frameworks? i think agentic people are lying in hibernation everywhere, waiting to be unblocked (and please don’t tell me waiting to be unblocked doesn’t sound very agentic of them; that’s the whole point. they’re not agentic yet but they very easily could be)
announcing to the world that Agentic People Are Awesome & You Should Simply Be More Agentic just makes people with structural blockers feel bad when they want to be agentic but are unable to and can’t understand why. most people don’t need reminders that agency is a good trait to possess because they already know that; instead they need tools and frameworks to help them understand what is actually holding them back
L gave me a funny anecdote recently. i asked her where her agency came from, and she said it was probably her parents supporting her in all her endeavors: “for example, when i was in elementary school i got a cut on my hand so i used tissues to wipe the blood. then i saw that the stains on the tissue got darker over time, and i didn’t understand why so i cut myself more to release fresh blood. when my parents saw what i was doing they didn’t get upset; instead they said ‘oh my god, L is a scientist!’” to which my reaction was wow, i didn’t know that kind of upbringing was possible. i wonder what my other friends would be like if they had these parents
last month my house celebrated K’s birthday. K insisted on having a talent show, and in one of the acts M lit a candle and extinguished it in his mouth. i asked to try it, so M lit another candle and handed it to me, and all of a sudden i felt… paralyzed? like, how does this work? will it hurt? does the flame go out because of the moisture or the lack of oxygen? how long does it take to burn yourself? my mind went into overdrive trying to calculate exactly what would happen before any of it happened
and then i thought, are you really going to let pessimism block you yet again? stop calculating; just open your mouth; put the flame in, all the way; close your lips with conviction; feel the heat die down; breathe out all the smoke; taste the melted wax still attached to your lips and tongue; spit it out if you want, or leave it there as a reminder of what you’ve just done; ready set go!
all of which is to say, i am finally going to Utilize My Assets Properly & Do All The Stuff I Was Too Pessimistic To Do Earlier. actually i’ve already started. recently i organized my first social event. planning is in progress for the ddr machine and future social events. i am exploring new storytelling formats and getting a clearer sense of how to do better research. i am figuring out how to access my dormant extravert energy and maybe it’s a placebo but parties have been feeling more fun and i’ve been dming my favorite internet strangers to hang out?
life is so much better when you finally understand that the places you want to go to really, truly are within reach
“most people don’t need reminders that agency is a good trait to possess because they already know that; instead they need tools and frameworks to help them understand what is actually holding them back” +++, i think it would be cool to normalize (in circles where “agency” is thrown around casually) sharing anecdotes around gaining confidence/optimism starting from real moments when they weren’t, from the ugly to the smooth
>i have some weird image self-sabotage going on where i’m only comfortable presenting as much less confident or competent than i actually am, i guess because of some superstition about jinxing / the world coming after people who declare themselves too boldly, which is just stupid?
right there with you - one blocker I have with speaking out more frequently or confidently is the belief that some number of people from 1 to a million will come along and pick me apart for the crime of daring to be visible. it’s probably because we’ve all been part of the mob at times