YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT OR YOU CAN JUST GET OLD

on leaving, safety, confidence, tradeoffs, abundance, etc

the greatest compliment i’ve ever received came from my friend anson at the start of this year. i’d mentioned how i mistakenly thought a former employer hated me because of an escalating series of miscommunications, and then she replied i think this will keep happening to vincent, not because of miscommunication, but because he doesn’t realize how much people like him

it wasn’t until recently that i figured out many of my issues are self-imposed and come from underestimating my own value. undervaluing yourself doesn’t sound so bad in theory but in practice it creates problems such as: staying in worse situations when you deserve better, not asking other people for things you could easily obtain, and so on. i think i arrived at the habit of consistently underestimating myself partially because of parenting issues and partially because i was scared of failing to meet my own expectations

i left my job at imbue in the second week of august. to be more precise, i asked to quit engineering/research and advise on policy part-time. this is a somewhat unusual move but it fulfills three of my goals - learning more about how tech policy works in practice, keeping access to fancy gpus to run personal experiments on, freeing up my schedule for exploration instead of sinking time into projects that i no longer believe in. it’s the kind of arrangement i would’ve been too scared to ask for or even come up with a year ago, and which i’m only comfortable doing now because i finally have an accurate sense of my own value and of how much other people like me (thank you to all my friends for helping me realize this <3)

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in my experience the thing imbue does best is creating a culture where people feel safe expressing their feelings and being authentic while working. this is extremely valuable and rare to come across, and i’ve benefited tremendously from it - it’s allowed me to rethink my approach to feelings and communication - but good cultures can also trap people. you start to wonder: how will i function in other environments that are less psychologically safe than the present one? do i really want to go back to dealing with all the bullshit - avoidant communication, toxic managers, office politics, etc. -  that exists in the rest of the world? will things be okay if i leave? and so it’s easy to end up staying for vibes at the expense of other factors like progress and alignment; it’s golden handcuffs except with culture substituting for money. (i don’t fault the company for this; rather it’s a case of the company being good in a way that is somewhat lopsided and interacts badly with my specific personal situation)

working at a pre-product startup that is constantly pivoting naturally creates a lot of whiplash. it’s possible to be insulated to a degree - founders and team leads have some protection from whiplash because they’re the ones driving it, employees who don’t care about the company won’t mind, people who are deeply immersed in their day-to-day tasks will barely notice - but if you’re someone like me who doesn’t have control and cares too much and isn’t usually in a flow state then it becomes pretty exhausting to be repeatedly told that there is a Very Good Outcome and that we have no idea how to get there but the next set of pivots will get us closer

not to be overly dramatic but i’m often reminded of this line from dune: “You want to control people? Tell them a messiah will come. Then they'll wait. For centuries.” i often notice all the ways in which i am relinquishing ownership of my life - to the bus driver every time i take public transit, to boeing every time i board a plane, to the gods every day i walk through this city overdue for a major earthquake - and i’ve concluded that life is too short to spend waiting around for prophets to lead you to the promised land

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on the sunday night before funemployment i thought about how i had literally nothing planned for the weekdays ahead. it was my first time wrestling with complete freedom and zero structure and it felt liberating but also incredibly bleak, like staring into total darkness. of course i’ve dealt with decision paralysis, but i’d never confronted it at this scale before, face-to-face with the option to do literally anything. the pressure to choose correctly and make the most of my time was so overwhelming i wanted to scream. am i just wasting my time being funemployed? will i ever come up with anything good? why am i still unsure about what to do next when everyone around me has it figured out? what if nothing comes out of this? i can live with disappointing myself, but am i going to disappoint all my friends too?

i wish i could say that i’ve figured out how to resolve all this doubt, how to move on or find self-assurance, but i still struggle with these questions every morning. (maybe that itself is an answer - you resolve these things not by filling yourself with delusion or idealism or false certainty but by wrestling with them day by day until one day you realize the struggle is no longer difficult.) some things i’ve learned so far:

there is a brand of self-confidence which originates from putting other people down and which is quite common among adolescents (maybe also males in general), especially those who spend a lot of time competing with other people. without being conscious of it i think that was what powered me through much of college. the issue is that at some point you may enter an environment where other people are much better than you at everything, and then you either stop believing you’re capable of doing meaningful work (unfortunately this occurs very often and is a big contributor to the math contest → quant trading pipeline) or need to find a new source of self-confidence, one rooted not in superiority but instead in optimism and joy and courage. you need to genuinely believe that things will turn out well and not just because you’re best in the world at whatever. of course all this requires believing in abundance over scarcity, otherwise you’ll never escape the framework of competitiveness

this is one of the major realizations i had to reach before i felt comfortable leaving imbue - something along the lines of yes, i feel extremely safe here, but also, i’m discerning enough and competent enough to be picky about culture in whatever i work on next, or to build up my own culture if necessary. i have no idea where i’ll end up if i leave, but i’m sure i’ll end up somewhere good, not because i’m a top engineer / ai researcher / etc, but because i know i’m capable of finding good things

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i’ve spent so much of my life deciding what to do by evaluating tradeoffs - job alignment vs salary, working all the time vs maintaining friendships, being effective vs being silly, exploring technical interests vs other interests like health and clothes. only recently have i realized that, actually, tradeoffs are lame and none of this makes any sense

one problem with focusing on tradeoffs is that they distract from what is truly important - it’s easy to end up in a myopia where you’re balancing two factors that are relatively unimportant because the tradeoff is legible and easy to optimize over. and of course the other problem with focusing on tradeoffs is that, when you focus on balancing two factors that are both important, it becomes harder to find outcomes that score highly on both axes because part of you stops looking as hard. your model of the pareto front becomes your model of the world. it turns out none of the tradeoffs in the previous paragraph are as real as i thought they were - additional salary barely matters after a certain point, and similarly for hours worked, and being appropriately silly helps with being more effective, and actually i have enough time to think about both technical topics and nontechnical ones like health and clothes

maybe a different way to frame this is that everything which is truly important will stick, and everything else was probably not as important as you thought, and optimizing tradeoffs is satisfying because it lets you feel like you’re being principled and rational but it is actually not an effective way to explore or resolve highly open-ended problems like “what should i do with my life”

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i recently realized that along every major axis (physical health, social skills, emotional awareness, technical ability, general experience, etc) present-vincent is easily the most competent version of vincent that has ever existed

i know that i can do anything if i put my mind to it, i just need to figure out what exactly that thing is. i know that sometimes it takes people a decade to find the right things. i know there’s no point in getting hung up on the past or in blaming myself for landing where i am or for feeling bad about not yet knowing what i want to do next - it’s not my fault that the things i happened to be obsessed with in childhood ended up not being the things i want to do now, it’s not my fault that i was raised with a scarcity mindset that caused me to waste a bunch of time over the last ~5 years, it’s not my fault that i didn’t understand feelings or people well enough to see obvious things earlier, it’s not my fault for choosing to join imbue and then leave without a clear plan, all these circumstances are just how the past happened to unravel and it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with me it just means i have more work to do to get to where i want to be and the only thing left to do is to move forward with all my heart

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i’ve been thinking again about that one paragraph from kealoha wong:

We are not cavemen anymore. There are no sabertooth tigers lurking in the shadows, yet most of us cling to the fears of the animals we evolved from. What are we so afraid of? We've been etching the same patterns in the same predictable places for years! Why do we live the way they tell us to? And who the hell are “they” anyway?

and also about this tweet i saw recently:

The basic issue with Asian parenting in the West is that it tries to forcefeed a scarcity mindset into kids obviously living in a post-scarcity society

it’s time to stop pretending i’m still resource-constrained and stalked by sabertooth tigers when it’s so clear that i’m not - i have great friends and a burn rate of <$2k/month and i live in a beautiful house in a beautiful city during the best time in all of human history and i have constant access to intelligence far smarter than me and technology far more capable than me - what more could i realistically ask for? how can you see all this and still decide that you can’t leave your job because the culture is too addicting or the money is too important? how can you see all this and still conclude that it’s appropriate to live governed by fear - fear of uncertainty, fear of the future, fear of scarcity? how can you see all this and still invent reasons to avoid doing what you really want to?

i think there is no excuse not to try my hardest to figure out what i think is truly important and then follow it

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(i like across the spiderverse more but god i still can’t get over how good this scene from into the spiderverse is)