Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? Rough Draft 2024, Part Two
Reflecting on a decade of work
This is the twin post to this one from the start of the year. Typically, my “rough draft for the year” would be more direct, less searching, and published earlier. But this year I feel the need to review many years of work and set the stage properly for the next batch of years.
In a post at the end of 2023, I wrote that one of the themes I am interested in exploring this year is “uncertainty”, the idea that “you don’t want to know what happens next” and that the best things that have happened in my life had an unexpected bend to them. I think I was onto something without really knowing it yet. This year feels like one that will be characterized by comfort with uncertainty. Patience and space.
Setting the scene
If you want to imagine how it feels to be me at this exact moment, consider these details:
I found my copy of Neil Young’s Harvest yesterday while cleaning out our garage. It is playing as I write this. Heart of Gold just finished.
I am drinking my second cup of coffee of the day, out of a very special Octane mug somehow recovered from the depths of the coffee archives of Atlanta, Georgia and gifted to me by Landon. The time has just reached noon.
Yesterday I had, as Paul Simon might put it, “a little bit of a breakdown”. I am totally fine, this was a normal and healthy expression of frustration and overwhelm.
This post will detail why I think I am feeling those things. This post was going to be written regardless. I like to do these rough drafts for my year. This one is just a bit delayed and a bit more introspective than usual, because of the mentioned overwhelm.
A major theme of the last three years has been me exploring, quite deliberately (and yet still playfully), what it is I ought to be doing. In fact, I can honestly say that has been a theme of the past decade or so of my life. Over that time the search for the right kind of work has rarely felt imposing, probably because for much of that decade of exploring the question most of us eventually must answer or cast aside, I was considered by most people (including myself), young. When you are in your late teens and early twenties you sort of always feel a sense of space. It is quite acceptable to be interested in many paths and there is less social pressure (though definitely not none) to have already picked a path and have done great work. You have what David Lynch would call, “room to dream” and time to meander. “Time for all the works and days of hands. That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
But over the last few years, time has felt short and this question on my plate, this question of what I ought to be doing, has begun to impose. I’ve made my indecisions, had my hundred visions and revisions. And now it feels important to get things right. What does that mean exactly? I don’t mean I need to “pick” a career and never deviate or experiment again. I deeply value experimentation, playfulness and iteration in work. What I mean by wanting to “get things right” is putting my energy into the right work and making a focused well-executed run at it. And I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve done that yet. So, what have I done? And how is it different than what I feel I should do?
What I’ve Done
As I’ve written about before, I’ve always been interested in doing many kinds of work. The first sort of work I was drawn to is what we might simplistically consider “right brain” work: writing, poetry, music, and film. From an early age I decided I wanted to be a writer and began to play in the creative side of the pool. I bought my first Mac by saving my allowance and began making songs on GarageBand and movies on iMovie in 4th grade. I tried writing a fantasy novel in fifth grade. I started a blog in 7th. Later, I started a local poetry night and wrote poems all the time. I sent them to the New Yorker and never heard back. I learned to play piano. I joined a rap group and envisioned performing at Bonnaroo rather than going to college.
Slowly, a second type of work began to interest me too, the “left brain” work: physics and math, design and engineering, sustainable energy and material engineering, architecture and urban planning, startups and software engineering. I began to love my physics classes, climb the calculus ladder, binge Feynman and Neil Degrasse Tyson books and videos, started learning to program and solder and work with Arduino. This emerged when I was a teenager as I began to feel a call to help solve problems in direct ways with functional work, rather than simply creative and self-expressive work. Of course I now see these impulses as deeply entwined, they are different modes of the same drive to generate. Yet they are distinct and feel different when I am doing them. One simple way of understanding this blog and newsletter, started in 2017, is my desire for a place where these two “separate” types of work I’ve been drawn to can blur.
So over the years, from about 2013 to 2019, I continued doing all of these things. I studied engineering at NYU (after deciding not to study liberal arts at Georgia Tech), started a design + engineering consultancy with Tessa and Camilo, kept programming, wrote hundreds of songs, made strange art, worked for a nanomaterials startup, began playing guitar, entered the software industry, wrote half of a novel, made furniture prototypes, wrote hundreds of essays and blog posts, and recorded dozens of podcasts and YouTube videos. It was unfocused but that didn’t often matter. I was trying things and that felt right.
Until late 2019 or early 2020. That is when I think I began to sense it was time to change my approach. Not by stopping any of the activities I loved. It was more of a feeling, an intuition that each next project or attempt at good work ought to be a bit more serious and better aimed. And more complete, a “finished thing” that the world (and I) could hold onto and evaluate on its own terms without considering potential.
Many people must have this moment. When you feel like you’ve got so many ideas to share with the world and so much drive to succeed and do great work, it begins to feel oppressive when you feel you haven’t “arrived on schedule”. I’d experimented with many attempts at creative work, yet none of them gained the momentum to “sweep me up” that I’d romanticized as a characteristic part of a successful person’s early career. I think I anticipated making a living from my own creative work (rather than doing work for someone else) by 24 or something. In hindsight that feels like something I will characterize as naïve eventually, but I think that mentality is actually a totally normal one if you’ve got ambition. And even now, I feel there were moments where a bit more focus and patience might have made that happen.
At first this new underlying tension and worry was not just manageable, but actually a useful source of energy. I think I channeled the oppressiveness into motivation to work harder, on more things, quite effectively. From 2021 to now, I shared more finished work with the world than I ever have. I did a month of creative programming, where I made a new project every single day. I had my first short story published nationwide in Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million stores. I sold my first products to strangers on the Internet. I got way better at programming. I got invited to Replit’s Builders in Residence program. I wrote 45,000 words of fiction for two separate stories that I genuinely believe will be special projects. I built my own website from scratch. I wrote some of my best songs and made countless demos. I wrote some of my best essays and blog posts and have grown my circle of interesting peers wider than its ever been. I did these things “on the side” while maintaining a steady income by working for other people, but they have always felt central. These projects are my work, and my job is simply the necessary placeholder. And I know that all of these accomplishments and attempts are wonderful things worth celebrating. And yet…
These attempts to sustain myself on my own work have not “succeeded”. And perhaps it is unfair to have expected that they would have by now. There is the rational voice in my head that knows part of this is just a matter of patience. Resisting discouragement and managing my own psychology is, in some ways, the whole game. But I must admit I feel a kind of disappointment that the past several years of real effort have not afforded me the privilege of spending my days doing the work that brings me joy.
There is another balance needed here, one that Tessa is great at reminding me of, between gratitude and ambition. I know these past years have been a period of rapid growth and worthwhile effort full of achievement worth celebrating. The point of doing these things is far more robust than financial reward and autonomy. In many ways I’ve never felt more aligned with my authentic self and that is an incredible sentence to get to write. But I also cannot deny that I have so much more ambition for my work and sometimes, an undeniable feeling of misery for the days I cannot do the work I ought to be doing. It’s precisely because I feel so joyful when working on these things that the time spent not doing them (in order to pay the bills and rent) feels like such a betrayal. And that has led to the burn out and overwhelm I feel today at the start of 2024.
I recognize that I’ve worked hard on the things I love, but I’ve been questioning if I channeled that work the right way. What you work on is as important as how hard you work and the pressure to get that right has never been higher because of the stark feeling of sacrifice that I’ve been experiencing lately.
I can picture a life of trade offs, I can imagine the compromise and justifications for never committing to the work I love due to the responsibilities of life and want for comfort.
I do not want that life.
Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?
I’ve framed my decision to balance my life with salaried stable income as a kind of betrayal of self or “selling out” in the past few days in conversation with Tessa. I know this isn’t fair. It can just as easily be described as a rational strategy, a smart approach to trying to find a way to make a living off of the work I ought to be doing while minimizing suffering. Because the reality is that the work I do to pay my bills and rent is great. I do get paid to solve problems using technology. I get to work with super talented smart people. I get to work from home. I get to program and build products at work. This path has afforded me a lovely life, a warm and comfy home, and flexibility. It’s a good fit as far as things go.
But I will not let myself deny that I have higher aspirations for my work. I do not want to settle, compromise, or make tradeoffs. And I know that means it will be hard, I am up for the difficulty involved. And I know I will need to be patient and play the long game. And I will also be honest in acknowledging that I made a decision to take a safer route there. Some people burn the ships and go all in sooner. I won’t rationalize away their courage for my own self-esteem. I toast to them with my cup of coffee and its twirling steam.
The time is right for making space for the right things. To live the life I want where I can do the work I love. I have to confront the feelings of frustration I am feeling without letting them consume me and alter my shape. The stakes are high but I will remember to go for it with style, patience, playfulness, and ease rather than desperation, frustration, and entitlement. The gift of my frustration is clarity, it has made the path forward obvious.
What I Will Do Now
Ordinarily at this point in a rough draft, I make a table of things I’d like to occupy the majority of my time each year. This year I won’t do that. I will however, still seek out a productive plan for the year and an optimistic approach.
I felt the first few years of being a thinking person were about identifying the things I enjoyed doing. Finding that list is not easy, many people never discover it for themselves. I’ve found the things I enjoy doing. I know how to work hard on those things. I’ve established routines of consistency around them. For this I count myself lucky.
Now, I feel the challenge is finding a way to do those things on that list full time. The goal is to do work that enables me to do more work. The goal is to sustain my life with the work I love. Given my above statements that I do not wish to compromise and take the safe route over the long term, that leaves two action items: make more money from my work and lower my overhead. Doing the former requires good judgement and focus (scaling the right things) and doing the latter requires discipline and sacrifice.
To do those things I need to simplify and focus. I need endurance, patience, and space. Persistence, discipline, and judgement. How can I pursue autonomy through my work without compromising the work itself? In other words, I don’t want to trade one form of tradeoffs for another, where I churn out lifeless software or writing simply to make money from work I can call my own. I want the real thing, the authentic path of creative work that I love.
Here is what I am thinking:
I want to make / grow one great product, write and publish one great essay, write and publish one great piece of fiction, and write and share one great song this year. Each of these will get 2-3 months work of focus and after that I will make a conscious decision on next steps. Of course, evaluating whether I succeed is a matter of “I’ll know it when I see them.”
For the great product, it may be Printernet. It may mean focusing on scaling Printernet and growing the readership and revenue. But I want to spend the next few weeks really considering if that is the best vessel for this odyssey and want to be open to any answers I may find. Whatever the answer ends up being, this work will likely be the constant throughout the year.
For the great essay the method is to write a lot. I’ve done this well and trust something good will happen.
For the great piece of fiction, this requires routine. I want to spend the next few weeks considering if I have the energy and discipline to incorporate this into the year or if I’d rather carve out space for a more lighthearted and playful approach to my fiction writing. Maybe it’s better to be open to failure and possibility in equal parts for this.
For the great song, I think I’ll spend one quarter of the year recording one of my existing demos and then releasing it to the world. I will need help to make sure the quality is something I am proud of, but this goal feels fun and light. To my musically gifted friends: I may recruit your powers, expect an invitation.
And in the background I want to focus on rest, beauty and excitement, sustaining my own happiness outside of the work, and cultivating routines and hobbies that bring me joy. I think this will mean being outside and active, traveling when I can, and building routines of relaxation and inspiration. This is one area where I’ve always been decent at by default but could certainly improve with intention.
So that’s the plan.
I am not sure if this will work. Maybe even this is too much. Maybe truly simplifying would be only pursuing one of the four “great” things I am after this year. But this is the right direction for me, these different areas bring me tremendous pleasure so I need to find focus within that fact. I can narrow my focus, but not my ambition. I know this is an ongoing puzzle. I will continue to seek the right balance. That is, after all, the practice of Polymathematics.
Happy 2024, I am wishing you success and joy in the work that matters most to you.
note: this post was written on the morning / afternoon of 2/11/24. Writing it felt like releasing it. As always, I am grateful that writing tends to have that effect on strong emotions.
Thanks for this! So many thoughts and emotions. First of all, all of it was very relatable. Seeing your approach gave me many ideas about how to hone mine, also reading your journey helped me reflect on my own. I've been pleasently surprised by your essay!