smooth brain o'clock

On Thursday night I reunited with Khaled, Nizar, and Ashwin. We had spent an hour lolling around my living room after eating BLT's and a salad that I abandoned after I found a small flesh-colored slug oozing across one of the peach slices on my plate. "This is actually a good thing because you know that there won't be another one," Khaled said. Ashwin resolutely continued to eat his portion. The worm thing had never happened to me before. I felt violated and suspicious of all our remaining food after that. We walked to Million Goods to see Jon's set. As opposed to just two days ago, when the streets had been emptied out by the heat, the lively atmosphere outside gave us forward momentum. Nizar called it the U Curve of Summer: in May/early June, you're so excited for all the fun you're going to have; by July people are out of town and it's too hot to think of any activity that sounds appealing unless there's a good booking somewhere; in August as temperatures start to cool and your friends return, you suddenly have things you want to do again, and you feel sad, you complain - why haven't I been doing these things all summer? Look at all the time I wasted... I was in a bit of a depressive state the previous week, the week after Maine. A flurry of things happened in quick succession: I accepted a new job offer, told my manager I was quitting, had a work onsite, picked up backpacking gear from Alexa's, then tore a back muscle and had to cancel all my plans for the next couple weeks, including Alaska. Everything was painful except lying down, which meant I passed my hours reading on my couch then having intense, deep naps on my couch. But even before Maine, when the first round of onsites had been completed but the offers hadn't yet come in, I was feeling a little listless. The entire summer I'd thought, there's so many things that I want to do, but I just can't do them right now because I need to study for my job interviews. But when I stopped studying, I found nothing waiting for me, no desires or plans that I was looking forward to. One night I finished a book and thought, I guess I'll just start the next one. If I ever felt any pull towards something it was purely intellectual and had very little to do with desire. Sci-fi (which I've been trying to get into) is interesting, AI is interesting, but none of it feels particularly exciting or produces any sort of internal emotional reaction. Whenever I get into this state I feel like there is literally no meaning to life. Like, life is just this endless cycle of finding diversions large and small to occupy yourself. You're doing things to grasp at a sense of meaning, but being cognizant of doing so almost negates any joy that the activity would be producing. On the one hand, I always feel this way at the end of a period of concentrated effort on a single thing (i.e. job search). But I probably also feel purposeless because I'm not really doing anything morally good with my life; all my meaning-making is towards some personal end rather than anything external, and I've not yet signed up for any of the volunteer commitments that I postponed for post-job search, post-Eurotrip. All of this culminated in me being pretty depressed the week I tore my back, but not in a sad way, more in a "the days are passing and I'm disappointed that I feel unfulfilled." It's the kind of thing that really annoys me when other people say it because we all have the agency to change that, and I do think the solution always lies in doing something communal and outside yourself, like organizing. But here I was/am, saying it. Recently I read a Substack essay about "aspirational software." It proposes that, amidst the shit being spewed out by vibe coding, the most magnetic software is not just well-designed but rather embodies some principle/ideology that is aspirational to its users. The same role that hope and desire for self-improvement or happiness play in our physical consumer purchases shapes what kind of software we choose, which can also be the brainchild of or otherwise linked to a person that we might admire (social media apps or Things You Just Need For Life in the 21st Century like Uber or Gmail don't count here). It reminded me of an interview I'd read with Bradley Shawyer, a staff engineer at Cinder who was supposed to interview me before he got pulled into some incident and who apparently also DJ's at Panorama Bar and is friends with Priori. The interview mostly grazes his perspectives on how an engineering org should function/be led, but he mentioned this book about minimalism that "really influenced him." Knowing his background as both an accomplished (or at least institutionally validated) engineer and musician added gravity to this statement that in other circumstances I would have just discarded if not reduced to typical tech bro talk. For whatever reason (probably the fact that he gets booked at Pano Bar), I'd decided that I trusted the quality of his thoughts and work, and it lent an aspirational, romanticized air to whatever he said. I don't really feel compelled to examine or learn about minimalism after reading this interview, but I do feel self-conscious about the sprawl within my brain. If I were to distill how my brain works into a product, I don't think anybody would really want to use it. ----- July happened in ebbs and flows, weekends packed with activity, then blank expanses during the week as I studied for interviews, took them during the day, then caught up on work before studying again. Strangely, I was coding more in my free (non-studying, non-work) time. Juhi and I agree, tinkering is so boy and we hate it, but it's a hatred I'm trying to overcome. Vibe coding has unexpectedly been super helpful in this way because it eliminates the friction of getting something set up in your local dev environment, so it's super quick to get initial feedback for what you're trying to create. For the first time, I feel a quasi-agency around coding, like it's a skill that I actually have and can use to make things, whereas my former relationship with coding was that: (1) it's just something that I do for work and don't actually understand outside of what I use it for at work, and (2) "real coding" is something that belongs to people like Ashwin and Raph and Xander and Zach who have actually built stuff in their free time. More coding in these varied contexts has also increased how cognizant I am of how my own brain works. AI makes my brain short-circuit, and I always have to be one step ahead of it / think one layer above it in order to use it effectively. I hate how music streaming has changed how I listen to music and how reading on my phone makes me skim everything I'm reading. I remember when Meghyn O'Gieblyn wrote in God Human Animal Machine that sometimes she felt like a machine, and I'd thought, I don't relate to that at all. But I get it now--to try to assert agency over my own brain, I'm forced into thinking of myself as something being molded by the technological interfaces I interact most with, and it reduces the problem of living into a computational one. ----- Every time I leave The Big Manzana I find some resolve to live differently upon my return. I think that's a pretty universal experience when traveling, but whenever I'm with my parents it's motivated mostly by understimulation. My Instagram usage shoots way up, I go down a million Internet rabbit holes, and I make copious lists of things that I want to do both in general life and in NYC, and I enter this dissociated frenzy of aspiration that I also know the entire time is totally unachievable. (Last winter when we were in Sedona, I thought I was going to join the NYC chapter of the Sierra Club and learn how to ice fish.) This process also makes me feel like a machine, the kind where I'm nothing more than an accumulated patchwork of Wikipedia trivia. But I guess I don't know why my everyday life feels so unsatisfactory when I step away from it. I think in part it's because I'm not that good at taking care of myself--I spend no time on my patio, my apartment these days is always three days away from being a total mess, and dinner at home usually means I'm eating Jubilee rotisserie chicken out of the bag. It really hit when Will Sharpe tells Meg Stalter in Too Much that she doesn't treat herself well, like "she doesn't even warm up her pho before she eats it." My muscles for fulfilling the basic parts of Maslow's hierarchy have atrophied. And it doesn't really feel like life has any particular meaning if you're just making a bunch of lists. Khaled's new resolution is to walk 18k steps a day as a cure for depression. "10k steps is nothing. 18k steps makes you feel like life is worth living." Ashwin doesn't get the same kind of resolution mania because he's already good at living like he's traveling. All of us are practiced in some form of social stacking, but he's specifically good at chaining personal desires that normally one would discount as being too logistically laborious. For example, I think of the time that we walked through Times Square to get fresh donuts from Krispy Kreme after spending a day hovering in the mid-30's of Manhattan. I would never honor my desires so much as to go through such trials (i.e. walking through Times Square) to achieve them, so much so that it would never occur to me to even want such a thing. I guess my desire vectors are also different, mostly presented as overarching activities such as going to Greenwood or biking to the beach. In any case, being around Ashwin teaches me to slow down and make the most out of the present moment. When I shut my laptop on Friday to meet up with him in Bedstuy before returning my work equipment to the office, I felt this magical sense of possibility. In the split second that I registered the sun slipping around the fluttering leaves' shadows across my laptop's surface, a feeling of serenity surfaced within me that I literally cannot remember having felt in years, that a life held over day to day by rich and guaranteed moments of happiness was within reach. I got the same feeling when I was reading Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You last night and he's describing some Bulgarian town that he's happened to be in for the day. It reminded me of when I was in Plovdiv with Claudia and we walked down some nondescript street with beige, mixed-use buildings on our way to the Roman ruins, the kind of buildings with neatly-framed glass doors and windows looking into dentist offices and local banks that you'd see in a livelier American suburb like Palo Alto. Although it was March, I remember the trees having green and yellow leaves and the afternoon light strong and honeyed as if it were fall. I had felt very happy in that moment, on this vacation where everything was random and funny but also interesting and novel no matter how nondescript the sights were. It made me happy just be in a different part of the world that neither of us had been to before. "They clung to their wooden supports, vestiges of winter in a landscape already lush with the turned year. The trees were bright with fresh leaves and with flowers of a sort I had never seen before, blossoms and buds and cones of flowers, a kind of elaborate drunkenness. Our hotel was at the edge of the town, where human habitation made a halfhearted charge farther up the mountains, getting nowhere; just past the hotel's vigorously mowed lawn there were dense woods and thickets and, farther up, dramatic crags. Even in the park along the river, where I spent my mornings, there was a kind of romantic wildness to the path between the great shorn face of the mountain and the river, which, though small, charged from the peaks with remarkable speed, roaring as it beat against rocks already broken in its bed. As I walked along that path, I felt drawn from myself, elated, struck stupidly good for a moment by the extravagant beauty of the world. The air was thick with movement, butterflies and day moths and also, hanging iridescent in the sun, tiny ephemera shining and embalmed, pushed helplessly here and there by the light breeze..."