A few weekends ago, we decided to host a writing session at my apartment. In the past, these looked like a group of half a dozen writers squinting and tapping away at their laptops mostly in silence, occasionally punctuated by the sounds of water being poured or clementines being peeled. This time, however, we decided to only allow for analog writing. Laptops were not permitted, and to fill the void, we would have a variety of craft supplies to work with, along with a stack of old New Yorker magazines to scrounge for scraps.

I had never attempted to do any sort of collaging or decoration of my notebooks as a creative exercise. My notebooks for years had been walls of text, only occasionally interrupted by shoddy sketches of easy-to-draw things in my environment (lamps, water bottles, rectangular facades). It was the easiest approach, even as my moodboards and Instagram saves were filled with images of beautifully decorated pages, modern-day illuminated manuscripts. Finally, surrounded by all of the materials, there was an opportunity to do something different: to let ideas be represented outside of text, or for my inspiration to appear through visuals.

As I flipped through a New Yorker looking for images to cut out, I was struck by how often their silly cartoons were interspersed throughout the glossy pages. Within long, thoughtful pieces, you’d see crudely drawn characters accompanied by an occasionally funny caption. In the room, you’d hear someone exhale sharply every now and then, and wait for them to show you a cartoon that was almost funny. I was tickled by it, the balance of levity with seriousness, and I pondered how I could write something inspired by this dance of approaches.

I decided to do some blackout poetry, looking at different articles to see which ones had words interesting enough to try and convert into something punchy and fun. I skimmed an article about DNA testing, skipped over the diary of a centenarian, before finding the perfect piece — a review of Tartuffe, a theatrical comedy that had returned to the stage in New York. I felt like a prospector, searching for shiny words in a large pile of them, underlining interesting ones and seeking to make something that held some amount of meaning.

I wrote a poem (if you could still call it writing). It didn’t sound like any of my other poems, because they weren’t my words. Yet, as I linked these phrases together, they felt like a new voice of my own — something unlocked. It felt like a loose form of painting or dance, where I could be carried by feeling rather than being wholly focused on finding ideas. It felt light. It felt collaborative, for once, possible only through the resources of the people in the room with me. It was wonderful.

Surprisingly, the phrases came easily, feeling more relevant than I expected. I came up with the following:

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New York has chosen god after a decade of neglect. 

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it’s the year of the clown 

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a man of virtue depends on him 

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and so 

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You don’t need to understand 

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we can pick up some pointers

At first, it felt like these were random phrases strung together, but they started to feel like a moment from my life. A discovery of meaning after being adrift, a declaration of an answer, and an openness to what it might hold. Aren’t there a million stories like this? I thought I knew something, I discovered I was wrong, I think I’ve found the truth.

This time, the truth came on a warm Saturday at a wooden table covered in notebooks, scissors, gluesticks, magazines, and stickers. Music from the speakers intermingled with the sounds from the window of cars driving by. The blueberries were sweet. I had sat down at the table with nothing in mind, hoping to maybe make some pretty pictures. I made some pictures, had some fun, wrote in ways I had never written before.

We end the poem with “You don’t need to understand / we can pick up some pointers.” It’s how any new learning, new direction, new day should go. It’s something like permission to be confused, something like we don’t know what’s ahead, but we know we can figure it out. And we can, and we will.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - U by Underscores - hyperpop! yay!

• POEM - “you’ve got green pennies for eyes” by Maria Giesbrecht - “when copper kisses oxygen, it turns / into malachite”

From a young age, I hated writing. Creative writing exercises in school stressed me out, school papers felt unnecessarily difficult. I remember how frustration would build in my chest, welling up into angry tears when I couldn’t figure out what to write next, knowing that it was due the next day. Those essays would be formulaic and boring, and when I deleted one in a bout of rage, I would inevitably be able to re-write something in time for my deadline.

It’s never a linear journey from hate to love. In high school, I started reading long essays and New Yorker reviews; I found value in the written word, even as I continued to hate my own experience of crafting it. I watched slam poetry videos on YouTube, laughing, tearing up, never considering that I could do anything of the sort. But when I started working on my college essays, I had to dig deep to try and show enough of a personality to outshine my mediocre extracurriculars.

I wrote dozens of drafts trying anything and everything: an essay about my favorite pairs of headphones, one about my role model Kanye West (2015 was a lifetime ago), another about art history. A flip had switched — I wasn’t anywhere close to tears, no, I was having fun writing.

That was where it all started. Over a decade later, I’ve been writing a newsletter for nearly nine years and have published some pieces and poems elsewhere.

This year, I wanted to take writing more seriously. I figured that I lacked the knowledge to write better without help. Surely, the difference between an unserious writer and a serious writer was knowing about critical theorists and what they stood for. Surely, I could be a serious writer who wrote about serious things, like social problems and the economy. Some of my most successful writer friends were like that, so why couldn’t I be? I signed up for a few classes, learned about Kant and excellent writers, and wrote some poor imitations of their work.

To my surprise, I hated it. Even though I enjoyed learning about these things as an intellectual exercise and reading the works of great authors, I couldn’t find myself in this work. For instance, I could never see myself writing anything like Joan Didion’s “New York: Sentimental Journeys”. It’s an incredibly well-done and well-researched piece that gives a serious subject the respect it deserves, as you’d expect from a well-renowned and serious journalist. But that will never be me; I couldn’t write so seriously.

At some fundamental level, I had internalized the idea that the only way for me to be serious about my work was to write highly serious work. I imagined what came naturally to me — offering dumb puns and jokes, making jokes or melodrama out of everything — would diminish the quality of my work. Basically, I came to think that “fun” wasn’t as important for my work as being “interesting” or “illuminating.”

As I wrestled with the idea of seriousness vs fun, I decided to look at some of my favorite authors. I placed them on the continuum from fun to serious. Ernest Hemingway and Jhumpa Lahiri were serious writers, while John Steinbeck and Haruki Murakami were fun. While the serious authors tackled a range of topics and emotionality, they felt mostly focused on tragic events, compared to the lightness of mundanity that appears in the dialog and pacing of the fun authors’ works.

I realized that when a work of art is too serious, it feels distant from my reality. In my eyes, life is a mix of humor and fun and darkness and absurdity. Every day, or at least every week, there is something to crack a smile about, so shouldn’t our art reflect that properly? I respected the work of all of these writers, but my worldview aligned more strongly with the fun authors, and I wanted my work to look more like theirs than the serious ones.

What came next was self-acceptance. I am not a serious person, I whispered to myself with a stupid grin on my face. I’m a 28-year-old man who sleeps in a Tom & Jerry t-shirt and bright purple shorts. I get really into jumping rope every time I see a boxing movie so I can be as cool as the main character. I have written an essay mentioning cooking almost every single time I’ve cooked a meal, even though I can’t make it through a recipe without calling my mom to help me fix a mistake.

I am not a serious person, I’m someone who wants to have fun playing with words on the page. And I’ll do it. Now and forever.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Covers by Justice Der - 3 hours of instrumental covers by an excellent guitar player

• POEM - “Goodtime Jesus” by James Tate - But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day.

It was a beautiful party. Merry voices, warm lighting, candles, decorations, cake — what else could one ask for? It wasn’t my party, I was simply the person with the apartment and the boyfriend of the birthday girl, but mostly, I thought of myself as the co-host. My girlfriend had had a vision for a long time of what her birthday party would be like, and I sought to be the executor of that vision. It would be a talent show with the aesthetic of a fairy-tale circus.

During the party, I made sure that there were always enough napkins, crackers, fruit, cheese. That glasses were full. I ordered food as people began to trickle in so it would arrive once everyone was there; I prepped the television so people could easily share if their talents involved drawing or presentations. Beforehand, I went through the mental checklist: vacuuming, wiping down surfaces, making mocktails, hanging streamers, planning the pizza order, ironing tablecloths.

I found myself relishing the opportunity to be useful, to try and create a wonderful experience for everyone who would be in my home. I enjoyed being able to focus on building on someone else’s creative intent, working from a detailed Pinterest board and instructions on how everything should be. Unlike my own creative projects that would often get blocked by my lack of will or my aversion to making decisions, I was freed from such thought, able to serve as a steward of another’s creative vision. I felt honored to be trusted with such a thing, especially one that was crafted with such intensity and specificity.

It was a beautiful party. It came together better than I expected, perhaps because I hadn’t tried to throw an event like it in a long time.

I suppose it surprised me that I was capable of making something beautiful in the real world. I sometimes forget that I am not just a digital being, when most of my life hasn’t been in the real world. My hobbies, my job have all been largely digital. My days begin and end with a phone or an e-reader in my hand. And even when I use my body in the gym or walking, my ears connect me to the digital.

In contrast, there were my hands. They did more than tap a screen or type on keys. No, they were more useful than that, working parts of the world to make an idea into something real. I doubted how much decorations could make a difference in how my apartment could look until my hands were able to prove me wrong. The same thing would happen when I tried to cook or otherwise really engage with the real world. Reality was always so different from anything I could think of. There was so much to the world that my analytical mind didn’t know, even though it liked to believe it had accounted for everything.

For much of my life, things would stop with my brain. I would spend so much time imagining how I’d ruin a recipe that I’d never cook. I would give up on the party before a streamer was hung. But it’s different when there’s another person, when there’s love. It’s easier to cook when the meal will be shared, it’s easier to throw a party when it will make someone happy.

It was a beautiful party. The first of many.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• LIVE PERFORMANCE - Nujabes Mix by OMA - I listen to a ton of Nujabes, and this live performance adds a lot of juice

• POEM - “My Story in a Late Style of Fire” by Larry Levis - And maples along a street in this neighborhood until / They’re all moving at once, until I feel just like them, / Trembling & in unison.

Tell me, what do you know? That the sky is blue, how it feels to receive a smile from a stranger, how a slippery sidewalk feels on a rainy day? You know a lot more as well: capitals of random countries, a nickname for mitochondria, the many ways the world is slowly collapsing. The latter list — the things that we know without experiencing — grows constantly, incessantly, more and more with each passing year and new technological advancement. As a result, “mystery has gone out of the world.”

The endless tap of knowledge was exciting once, like Instagram filters and text messages once were. As a neurotic kid, I relished being able to look up facts about leatherback turtles (the largest of all living turtles!) and learning new things constantly by clicking around Wikipedia. It was easy to stumble down a rabbit hole and understand things that I hadn’t even considered a few minutes before. It felt like the answers to any question could be found with just a few clicks.

But this only worked for certain types of questions. As I grew older, I tried to find the knowledge that would make social interactions less anxiety-producing. If I theoretically had access to the sum of all human understanding, couldn’t it answer every difficult question? But the internet failed to answer the questions I really wanted answers to, like “does everyone think I’m annoying?” and “did anyone notice how sweaty my palms were?”

There were answers online for these types of questions, but not ones that were satisfactory. No one could tell me the answers to the specificities of my life. That was ultimately up to me to figure out. No amount of reading would offer the knowledge that socializing, getting embarrassed, and learning from the embarrassment would. I would Google these things, get zero useful answers, and would be forced to endure uncomfortable situations until I learned how to deal with them.

What I did read (self-help, motivational quotes, etc.) created moments of apparent clarity that ended up being illusory. A book told me to repeatedly call people by their name, but that would make everyone uncomfortable. A blog post would offer a single rule to apply to interactions with everyone, but everyone I met was so different. These ideas framed as facts would make me feel like I understood people around me, but I didn’t understand anything at all. Yet, the confidence that they spoke with was alluring, as was the idea that all of life could be distilled to lists of facts explained clearly.

Through the advancement of technology, we’ve never had more access to facts, statements, and opinions about the world around us. They’re found in the same places and forms, alongside each other with little to differentiate them. My YouTube algorithm serves me videos about the animals of the Great Plains alongside video essays about the collapse of culture. The mysteries of nature, which once required an arduous journey into the unknown, are now as digestible as a video essay of a man at a desk. When every mystery of the world becomes so easily accessible, everything feels less worthy of curiosity. What a pity.

It’s curiosity that forces one to ask questions about what is being consumed and look outside of what’s in front of them to find truth. It’s curiosity that helps to uncover the mystery and unknown in things that are already known. Even if I learn about the bison of the Great Plains — its history and lifestyle — curiosity tells me that it would feel completely different to see these animals tower above me, trudging through the grass in front of me. More than a YouTube video could tell me.

I try my best. I go to the American Museum of Natural History. I stand in front of a diorama of a massive taxidermied bison. I gaze into its blank, shiny eye.

Tell me, what do you know? it asks.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - february mixtape - my friend makes sick playlists every month!

• POEM - “My Education” by Diane Seuss - When I needed Keats, I got him. I read enough / to get the point, then tuned in to his ghost.

It was winter. Every morning, the boy excitedly climbed down from his bunk bed and ran to the window, peeking between the blinds, hoping to see a world transformed. The forecasts had mentioned snow, so the boy dreamt of a thick white blanket covering everything. He read fantasy books about magic and wondered if somehow his imagination could become a reality. So each morning, he checked the window. And each morning, he was disappointed.

It didn’t snow much in Georgia. That’s what would make it special, he thought. But when snow finally arrived, it was never in the way that he wanted. It would barely stick, or disappear after a few hours, or turn to ice far too soon. It was slippery and uncomfortable and cold and wet. It wasn’t the snow he dreamt of, the one from movies — for snow angels, snowball fights, sledding. He decided that snow was overrated.

The boy grew up and focused on things bigger than snow (books, love, football). He went to college, got a degree. He got a job across the country. He moved to a place where the weather was always pleasant enough, grew to enjoy the greenery and wearing a jacket to a beach that he could walk to. Though everyone he knew seemed to like to go skiing on the mountain a few hours away, he decided that it wasn’t for him, because snow was overrated, and because he was plenty good at getting injured without needing to fall down a mountain.

When the boy decided to move to the big city, he didn’t think about snow. Everyone told him that it was a thing of the past, that the climate had changed too much and there was only freezing rain and short days in the winter now. But that was okay. He was focused on the big beautiful park, the live music, the wonderful people, and finding his place among all of it.

Thankfully, weather forecasts tend to be inaccurate. We can only make guesses about what the Gods of the sky will decide for us, whether our days will stay dry or we’ll find ourselves wading through the streets. And when weather arrives, despite all of the technology and all of the worries and interests in the world, we cannot ignore it.

The first time it snowed this winter, the boy, arguably a man now, was sick at home. He spent his day indoors, gazing out out the window, and feeling like a child once again. The second time it snowed, he watched the streets disappear under the white blanket as night fell. Before he had a chance to appreciate it, everything had mostly melted away.

The third time, he walked at night with his hand clasped in his lover’s, as flakes floated down from the sky. The streets were quieter than usual, as the white dust absorbed sound and crunched between their feet. They threw snowballs, they took pictures, they marveled. These streets had never looked so beautiful, an illustration from a storybook. He was happy he had been wrong. Snow was not overrated.

A week later came the snowstorm. The boy, feeling more like a boy than he had in years, woke up and went to his window. He pulled the curtain aside to see the lightly dusted city, and an unending snowfall gliding from the sky. After all of this time, in a completely different place, his dreams had come true.

The city was transformed, unrecognizable. It was an entirely different place, one where everything old had been erased, replaced by cool white. The perfect coat was only interrupted by the plowed streets, and elliptical impressions of footprints. In the park, there was more activity than in the summer; the whole city had come out to witness the beauty of the new land they found themselves in. Joy everywhere. People slid down hills on skis, snowboards, cardboard boxes, and sleds. Spectators cheered. Dogs danced around like they’d never been happier. Some attempted to make snowmen and igloos. The snow, light as air, crumbled between the boy’s fingers.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - In Rainbows (From the Basement) by Radiohead - one of the greatest albums of all time performed live

• POEM - “Snow” by A Xin - Snow is decorating the cosmos, as we / Seek our path to get back home, and the mountains are joyful.

The skyline had been painted over with a stone gray haze. Below street lights, you could make out the snowflakes dancing in the wind. By the windows, cool air exhaled into the sweaty space. Rhythmic electronic music pulsed through the air, the ground, the bones of dancers. Some were dressed like characters from The Breakfast Club and others like the extras in a LMFAO music video. Everyone resembled an archetype of the people you’d find in a school: nerds, jocks, athletes, teachers, even a janitor. The decor matched — a set of decorated lockers flanked a stage where a dark green chalkboard stood, coated in messages in multi-colored chalk.

The hosts of this party, Book Club Radio, had rules for the event, which made the entire experience feel more like school. The notable ones:

1. Face each other instead of the DJ.

2. No phones allowed on the dance floor.

3. Dress to express yourself.

4. Dance your heart out.

It was unlike any other party that I had gone to. People watching was more entertaining than ever before, it was rare to see anyone on their phone, and the dance floor was filled with people actually dancing.

These rules reached toward an earlier version of dance parties, focused on music and dancing rather than celebrity DJs and self-documentation of a good time (in lieu of actually having a good time). Wrapped up in the aesthetic of high school, the whole experience dripped with nostalgia, but not in a bad way. We got to live out this strange facsimile of school, where there were no classes, but there were rules and we were forced to be present and disconnected from the world outside. There was genuine joy in the experience, as everyone got to perform their outfits, throw paper airplanes, and dance to some great music.

I was dressed as a teacher, wearing a tie that A had gotten me (featuring a cartoon teacher in front of a chalkboard), and A was dressed like a schoolgirl. We joked about having an illicit romance, moving to the music. As we danced, we gazed across the crowd, finding different characters to pay attention to, enjoyed their enjoyment. A dance circle formed around a man in a skirt, someone dressed as a janitor danced with a mop and a wet floor sign. The sun set. The music picked up, the crowd grew denser, and the snowflakes grew thicker.

My main intention for 2026 was to spend more time outside of my apartment. The idea was simple — too much of my life was happening online, at home. Real life had become an escape from digital life, and I sought to reset the balance. But simply going outside wouldn’t be enough. I knew that I wanted to lean into what was most different from what I could find at home. I sought the unpredictable and human, the surprising things that appear when you leave what’s familiar and get to witness people being people.

And so I found myself in a cardigan, being handed a paper airplane by a man who looked like he could’ve been a stoner I knew in high school, nodding my head to techno. Eventually, we grew tired after a few hours of dancing. We headed home.

With the winter’s unrelenting freezing temperatures and waves of rain and snow, it had felt difficult to ever leave home or go outside at all. But that night, humming with energy from our day at school, we walked through the snow. The quietness of the streets was amplified after the volume of the speakers. We delighted in the sound the fresh snow made under our shoes. Neither of us had grown up in snowy places; this was magic. I thought of the winter mornings as a kid when I would climb down from my bunk bed and run to the window, hoping for snow.

Imagine that younger version of myself reacting to me dressing up to pretend to be in school. Imagine him watching me dance my heart out, imagine him seeing my snowball fight at twilight. Think of the alternative: another night at home, watching something on Netflix, unaware of the beauty that night held.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Aqua by Hiroshi Sato - city pop!

• POEM - “It Is Not the Fact That I Will Die That I Mind” by Jim Moore - but that no one will love as I did / the oak tree out my boyhood window

I feel suspicious of anyone who felt like they belonged in high school. That period of time, for me, was for feeling uncomfortable among my peers, thinking about all of the ways that we differed. While the popular people seemed to move through the world with ease, everything social felt difficult for me when I was at school. I wasn’t particularly unpopular or disliked, but I felt invisible, distant.

But at home, I was the opposite: comfortable, understood. I would plug my headphones into my laptop and play a playlist that my older brother had sent me, or some artist I discovered from him. Every song felt like a revelation, different from what was playing on the radio or what anyone at school seemed to be into. My shoulders would unclench, my mind would clear, regardless of the genre I was listening to. It wasn’t just music — these sounds were enchanted by their association to my favorite person, by how they expanded the gap between me and my classmates.

When listening to new music, I had initially just been excited to copy my brother. This was my birthright as a younger sibling. But slowly, I realized that my engagement with new non-mainstream music offered a way to feel superior to my incomprehensible peers. It was a classic move for a teenager, to use music as an identity and as a shield, one used rather clumsily. One day, when every single one of my classmates seemed to be talking about the upcoming Darius Rucker concert, I moodily hummed “I don’t belong here” from “Creep” by Radiohead, thinking I was unique for relating to a song that had gone quadruple platinum.

I continued to explore beyond just my brother’s playlists, reading Pitchfork’s album reviews religiously, finding new songs on Hype Machine, and finding album flowcharts on subreddits for individual bands. I developed opinions on genre names that only appeared on Wikipedia pages, and worked through lists of best albums. My motivation was initially partly performative — I sought to appear cool; however, to appear like I cared about interesting things required me to actually care about interesting things. And I started to care a lot.

As much as I relished the opportunities to mention how I didn’t know Top 40 artists or name-drop an artist I thought was niche, those moments became secondary to a genuine excitement for music, for me to delve deeper into the medium than ever before. Music grew, no longer just entertainment or background noise, but also a means to understand myself and see others more clearly.

I paid attention to myself less, started to realize that some of my friends were already listening to the music that I had thought I was discovering by myself. We grew closer, talking about our favorite songs, introducing each other to new albums, favorite lyrics, inside jokes. Each new playlist glimmered with familiarity like my brother’s playlists would before. An entire summer of memories plays in my mind with Wolf by Tyler, the Creator in the background.

What had started as a way to distance myself from some people drew me closer to others: first the artists who seemed to know me more than anyone else, then my fellow fans to share my joy with.

In college, where I once again felt like I didn’t belong, I repeated what I had learned. I was no longer motivated by a desire to differentiate myself, but I sought to first experience the brilliance that art could grant me and then find others who felt the same. I went from barely reading to inhaling novels; from watching only blockbusters to taking film classes and making short films; I listened to more albums than ever before. I relished this work, how it made the world look different, how it drew me closer to new friends, how much the time investment had wrought.

This much is obvious: taking art seriously unlocks an entirely new world, filled with joy, sorrow, and other people who have spent some of their limited time on the planet to understand it. I met many people this way, and I continue to.

Over a decade after I started to dig into music out of a lack of belonging, I moved to NYC knowing very few people. Soon after, I was surrounded with fellow book nerds and film buffs and music enthusiasts, a bit more at ease.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - indie&other - a playlist from high school, when I thought I was on the forefront of music discovery

• POEM - “In a Yard of Fallen Yellow Peaches I Am Listening” by Andrew Hemmert - though what even is solitude / in a world of cellular phones and satellites?

I came during the coldest week of the year in February. The temperatures were in the teens and it was pitch black when I arrived in the evening. My gloveless hands fumbled with the lockbox, then the key of my sublet for minutes that felt like hours. Eventually, I made it into the lobby, where I could finally warm up. My next task was carrying two 50+ pound suitcases up five flights of stairs, and the strain made me wonder if my heart would explode. So began my life in New York.

When people told me “the first year in New York will be hard,” I didn’t believe them. Unlike the average person who would move to this city without doing their research and spending time in the city, I was convinced that I was different. As a realist and a planner, I would avoid all of the most common issues that other transplants faced. Having spent short stints in the city over the years, having read so many books set here, having a healthy set of expectations of the lows possible here, I thought it would be easy enough.

It hasn’t been as simple as I expected. A hard thing doesn’t transform into something easy through knowledge alone. Solitude, leaving your friends behind, adjusting to the seasons, being exposed to brand new situations in an unfamiliar place — these things don’t become easy, even if you expect them, even if you make all of the plans in the world to insulate yourself from them. Any one of them would be taxing, but they only seemed to build upon each other.

In the face of all of these hard things, what was most surprising was how the parts of myself that felt stable suddenly disappeared. Over the course of my twenties, I thought I had made huge strides in creating a stable sense of self that I could feel comfortable in. Disconnected from a strong support system, forced to live outside of my comfort zone, my confidence about my ability to socialize or to write seemed to evaporate. In a room full of strangers, I questioned my fashion sense, my worldliness, my haircut, my hands, my feet. In a room full of writers, I imagined myself the least accomplished and least well-read.

I was surrounded by more people than ever before, finally in the city that I thought would make me grow tremendously, and I felt more disconnected from myself than ever before. I had spent years in SF crafting a self that was confident and educated. Where had that person gone? Had he only been a reflection of my life in San Francisco, held together by my friends and environment?

Questioning everything, including the quality of my writing, I wrote less. Tired of what I saw of myself, I tried to find things to write about that had less to do with me — deep dives into art that I loved or pieces of theory that seemed much more interesting than I did. For the first time in several years, I started skipping my weekly newsletters semi-regularly, and then decided to shift to writing bi-weekly, hoping that having more time would help me to write things that I actually felt proud of.

Instead, the time went elsewhere. While my creative life was in flux, my work life became more stressful with increasingly demanding projects that barely interested me. In search of a change, I started looking for a new job, letting my free time get consumed by the endless task of organizing my portfolio and applying to jobs. Some days, I would finish work late into the evening, having spent the whole day at my desk, allow myself to do a workout, before returning to my desk to prepare for interviews.

My job search was all-consuming and unhealthy at times, but it was ultimately worth it — I landed a job offer at the beginning of December, and will start my new job in the New Year. On the other side of that stressful time period, I’m able to reflect on the rest of my year through rosier eyes: what a weird and wonderful year it has been.

The story of this year isn’t a depressing one. I moved to New York to grow and I got what I asked for. My life in San Francisco had become far too comfortable, and I knew that I wasn’t growing in the ways that I wanted to. The same people who intimidated me into insecurity also served as inspirations for my ambition. Surrounded by hard-working people across every profession and field, I couldn’t help but become more ambitious and work harder than I had before.

As uncomfortable as I felt in many social situations this year, I still showed up. I met a ton of new people, some of whom became my friends, while others disappeared into the night. I met writers and musicians and photographers and philosophers. I had conversations about books and films and birds and whales and leaves. And, at a random meetup for writers in my first few weeks here, I met a woman who also had moved to the city recently. We walked to the subway station together afterwards and talked about books we liked and wanted to read. A few weeks later, we started dating. Every difficult day became easier, every good day brighter.

The story of this year is a joyous one. I left behind a comfortable and wonderful life in San Francisco for an uncomfortable and wonderful life in New York. I describe the difference between life in SF and life in NY like this: every day in SF ranges from a 6 to an 8 out of 10, while every day in NY ranges from a 2 to an 11. The lows are low and the highs are so high, and nothing this year could’ve overshadowed the joys of seeing the autumnal leaves upstate with another or dancing into the night or foot-tapping to transcendent jazz or cheering on the NYC marathon. Nothing could overshadow the way the city inspires me to live a bigger life.

I didn’t figure it all out this year. Things were harder than expected. My identity crisis as a writer continues, and I’m still wracked by insecurity and doubt. But I grew in other ways while working through these emotions. This year was hard, and that made everything feel more worthwhile. Next year might be hard too, but I’m excited, knowing that there’s growth on the other side of it all.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Sakura by Susumu Yokota - great ambient record

• POEM - “Hagiography” by Whitney Rio-Ross - All divine whispers yield a curse.

One of the most famous poems in the English language is WB Yeats’s The Second Coming. Composed following the end of the First World War while the Spanish flu pandemic raged, the poem highlights Yeats’s uncertainty about the state of the world and his belief that the world was about to enter a new era, ushered in by something like the second coming of Jesus Christ:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats holds nothing back here, an entire first stanza filled with apocalyptic visions and denunciations of the moral fiber of the world. Any of these lines alone would feel like an emergency, but they’re all bundled together, and it feels like even the ground beneath your feet is unstable. The speaker of the poem isn’t entirely driven by fear, though; instead, we learn that the chaos serves as a sign of something to come. The speaker sees ominous visions of a monstrous creature, something that has been sleeping since the birth of Christ, and believes it will soon arrive to bring in a new era.

As bleak as the second stanza can seem, the speaker seems to describe it with a dark fascination that contrasts with the hopelessness that the first stanza holds. I wonder if the speaker welcomes the change, just to see what could come next, however scary it may seem.

A reason that this poem is so famous is that it feels incredibly relevant during times of uncertainty. Much of the first stanza feels like it would be entirely at home among the average headlines of today, in the most popular articles that we share with each other, and the conversations we have between deep sighs. But even if these statements are true and all-encompassing, then perhaps they still signal the coming of a new era.

I see examples of the first stanza everywhere, but it’s less common to see suggestions of how the future could differ. However, I was reminded of the poem in the work of W. David Marx. His latest book explores the cultural stagnation of the 21st century. Marx posits that the last few decades of culture lost the innovative edge that the 20th century was defined by. Things do fall apart.

In an excerpt of the book published in The Atlantic, Marx suggests several ways that the culture around artmaking must change, but sums it up this way:

“Making art with lasting meaning requires resisting the pull of instant exposure and early buyouts. We must think through ways to encourage artists to disappear into their own worlds for a while, developing ideas away from corporate influence and assimilation. Not everyone will have the discipline or capacity for this, but those who do or can will shape the future. And the least that critics and fans can do is give them esteem—when justified—for attempting to move culture forward, instead of ignoring them as marginal, castigating them as pretentious, or belittling their view counts. The past 25 years have taught us that the contemporary economy and media will not prioritize creative invention.”

I largely agree with Marx, though I still think there are some incredible works of art that have come out this century. Still, I find it incredible how much of music, films, and writing seem to be rehashes of what already exists, how market-tested everything feels. I’m saddened by the way that many who enter creative fields end up focusing on attention rather than the details of the work, either accidentally or out of necessity. I’m saddened because, at times, I fall victim to the same desires.

But I wonder whether the ideas we have of a creative life are out of date, formed by social media and even the films we watch. Consider the idea of the starving artist, the pervasive idea that originated centuries ago but still appears in modern films. In both La La Land (2016) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), we meet poor artists struggling to make ends meet. Both of these characters have a purist idea of what a creative life can look like, failing to find steady income in part due to their resistance to finding other ways to make money.

In La La Land, we have Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian, who dreams of opening a club where anyone can play anytime as long as it’s “pure jazz.” In his pursuit of such purity, Sebastian gets himself fired from a gig playing piano at a restaurant for freestyling too much, and seems to be in agony when forced to play pop music at a party later on. But eventually, in search of stability, Sebastian ends up joining a pop band started by a former bandmate, even while disliking the music.

By the end of the film, Sebastian has left the band and opened his own jazz club, and has achieved his dreams of keeping his concept of jazz alive and well. Though it’s never explicitly talked about in the film, it’s hard to imagine that Seb would’ve ever been able to open his club with the money he earned before he sold out to join the band.

In Inside Llewyn Davis, we find the titular character penniless and sleeping on the couches of his friends while he tries to land gigs as a folk singer in the early 1960s. We learn that he’s a solo act now, after the suicide of his music partner, and grief surrounds him throughout the film as he tries to keep his folk music career alive.

Llewyn finds his own opportunity to sell out, gritting his teeth as he records a novelty song about space travel to earn a few bucks. Pressed for money, Llewyn gives up his royalty rights in favor of a quick $200, a decision that’s easy for him because of how little he thinks of the music he’s recording. We later learn that the song is a massive hit, something that could’ve completely changed his life financially.

When Llewyn auditions for a record producer, he’s told that he isn’t a frontman, that his only shot would be joining a trio the producer was putting together or getting back together with his old partner. “That’s good advice,” Llewyn says before leaving and essentially giving up on his career.

In both of these narratives, the pursuit of purity puts these men into a false choice between abandoning their dreams or selling out. They’re ceaseless in their belief that their art is the only way forward. Sebastian, the successful sell-out, is able to achieve his dreams, while Llewyn, with all of his baggage and desire for purity and distaste for selling out, is left penniless, beaten down, and dreamless.

What films about artists rarely show is the very real possibility of working any sort of day job to support their creative passions, the way Philip Glass was a plumber before he was famous, or Richard Serra ran a furniture removal business. If an artist truly wants to resist “the pull of instant exposure and early buyouts” as Marx suggests, then perhaps not associating art-making so closely with money is an important part of it.

These ideas are self-serving, as someone who has only ever written while having a day job. I have felt shame in this at times, wondering if I can consider myself a “real writer,” despite the fact that I have spent so much of my life dedicated to writing over the years. But I appreciate the freedom that this approach gives me, that I rarely cede my interests to what I think the market desires. If enough artists were to find this freedom, perhaps that would end the stagnation.

In the face of the widening gyre of cultural stagnation, I gladly look forward to what that rough beast may hold and imagine a world of art far beyond what I currently know.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - 1996 by Ryuichi Sakamoto - just an excellent album

• POEM - “Poem” by Ron Padgett - I’m in the house. / It’s nice out: warm / sun on cold snow.

It was like the least subtle exhibit in a museum criticizing the present: a woman with a comically arched neck angled toward her phone, which was just inches from her face as her fingers incessantly swiped through TikTok. Over the course of the two-hour flight, this woman across the aisle never shifted from this position, only looking up to receive drinks and snacks. Holding my e-reader, I felt my head inflating.

My row featured two other people who had joined me in the morally superior approach to entertainment — reading books. I imagined us as a coalition in a battle against illiteracy. And even as my comrades in literary consumption fell asleep, I mentally commended them for their thoughtful consideration of their bodies’ needs, that they would be able to spar with the written word more effectively once they were rested. In contrast, it felt impossible to be similarly charitable to our adversary on her phone.

Why did I react like this? For no real reason, I saw and judged a stranger with an unrelenting ire. I went against all of my stated values of empathy and openness, creating a tribalist “us vs. her” narrative in my mind, based solely on our choices of media consumption. The viscerality of this emotion, of these thoughts, arose from my growing distaste for modern technology.

To me, the technological advances of the last few decades have all been tainted with the stink of the attention economy, of the promotion of polarization, anxiety, sleeplessness, and fear. In these devices I see sin and apparently ascribe that sin to those who let themselves disappear into them.

In contrast, I ascribe nobility to flip phones, CD players, Blu-ray discs, and paper notebooks. In these slower means of consumption, one must think more, be more intentional, and thus see the world in a better way. By these standards, what would be considered a completely dull and uninspired life of someone in the ’90s — sitting around doing nothing, reading the newspaper, going to the movies, reading mass-market paperbacks — would be worthy of immense praise.

I really do believe that these forms of engaging with the world are richer and deeper, but I feel uneasy giving myself up to this sort of nostalgic obsession. I can (far too easily) envision a version of myself that leans into this lifestyle, feeling superior as I listen to an iPod and read a well-worn paperback of The Old Man and the Sea, pointing my nose up at any new films, music, media, or technology. I can hear myself saying, the world peaked in 2005, and attempting to ignore modern life through artifacts.

The impulse is strong; the call of nostalgia is inescapable. With every news story about a present crisis or recollection of another time or moment of reflection, a voice seems to whisper things used to be so much better. And if things used to be better, why not attempt to re-create the past through the last remnants of those times? Why not reject the present and cling to the old? Won’t time pass a bit slower — won’t I be insulated from whatever comes next?

But I must refuse. To become so rigid and divorce myself from the current moment would be a form of self-betrayal, as someone who has been shaped by my embrace of the new throughout my life. Have I not been so deeply shaped by all of these technologies? Did I not meet some of the most important people in my life through Instagram, find jobs through Twitter? Would I have this life today without them?

So where does this leave me when it comes to nostalgia? The novelist Michael Chabon once tried to define the true meaning of nostalgia. What he wasn’t interested in was the more common form of nostalgia, the one his critics ascribed to his work — nostalgia that is “predicated on some imagined greatness of the past or inability to accept the present.” This was the type of nostalgia that I found myself wrapped up in, an inability to accept the present that led to cruel judgment.

What I aspire toward instead is the type of nostalgia that Chabon describes: “the emotional experience — always momentary, always fragile — of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing, of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios.”

There’s beauty in nostalgia that can make the chaos of the present more digestible, but it is ultimately just an emotion to experience. It won’t change the world, it shouldn’t guide one’s judgments, and it won’t stop the flow of time. Because as James Baldwin said, “The world will change, because it has to change.”

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - “FUSION JAZZ” by Findout Records - it’s fusion jazz

• POEM - “The Silver Lily” by Louise Glück - Will / speech disturb you? We’re / alone now; we have no reason for silence.

There is no hope. Everything is in an endless crisis. The world is in decline, this is obvious. People are turning away from each other. People are no longer reading books and no one is talking to strangers and movie theaters are dying and the music industry is dying and shared community doesn’t exist anymore. To interact with another person is a burden, every person is seeking ways to avoid it. We’re giving up on each other. There is no hope.

I look up from my phone with a knot in my stomach. It’s the same knot in my stomach that I’ve grown used to, as my free time is filled with more and more of the same — constant reports of decline, ones that I can’t stop clicking on, anxious to discover all of the different ways the world is in a state of collapse. I feel myself turning into a doomer: someone deeply pessimistic, even fatalistic about the future of the world.

The problems of the world are specific and nonspecific: individual industries are facing varying challenges, but the core point is that human civilization is in shambles, everyone is becoming antisocial, and that technology is replacing everything human. This reporting sometimes has nuance, but among the deluge of these pieces, it barely registers. My flawed brain exaggerates statistics: a majority means everyone, every downward trend will continue until zero, the future is shrouded in an ominous fog.

I tell myself that reading all of these headlines makes me better informed or better connected to reality, so I continue to gorge myself on the rot. These narratives solidify and congeal in my mind, seeping into my overall worldview. When I leave my desk to enter the world, I expect to discover firsthand evidence of everything in decline.

I board the subway, thinking of the Reddit comments with thousands of upvotes of people complaining about how unsafe it is. Apparently things have changed — the people have changed — and it feels too dangerous to use these days. When my train arrives, I cautiously watch everyone around me. A couple of friends in their thirties give up their seats for an older gay couple. A few people exit the car, and a little boy waves goodbye and yells “bye!” to each of them. Everyone smiles, at least a little bit. The knot in my stomach relaxes.

Thinking more clearly, I return to Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, knowing he would have something relevant to say. I re-read his reflections on Lewis Mumford’s investigations into the impacts of the clock on our lives:

the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.

Is the news just like a clock for me, something that turns reality into trends and crises? Where does my view of the world come from? Have I ceded my own engagement with the real world, become irreverent toward the world it was meant to represent? Do I still watch people and understand the nature of human behavior, or do I just trend-serve? Have my attempts to gain a wider perspective of the world stymied my ability to see what was in front of me?

In the face of such thoughts, I try to spend more time noticing, hoping to regain agency in my own understanding of the world. I don’t want to live with this knot in my chest. I don’t want to lose sight of reality. I want to be able to see beyond the narratives that surround me. I think about the different crises that I have been entertaining in my mind, try to see how it lines up with what’s real. I force myself to keep my eyes on what’s in front of me, rather than what’s on my phone.

If no one is reading anymore and there’s a literacy crisis, why is it impossible to find a library empty, or a bookstore that doesn’t have a line? Why does every subway car have a few people reading a book or e-reader? Why do my holds for every book at the BPL take forever to come through, and why am I always 25th in line?

If people have given up on film and art, why are the museums always so crowded, why does the Metrograph never have enough tickets, even on a weeknight? Why do I overhear conversations about what films have newly landed on the Criterion collection, and a bartender talking at length about obscure horror films that she watched throughout October?

When I look with my own eyes, experience what surrounds me, it becomes clear that however dire the crises in art are, they aren’t as all-consuming as I had once thought. Artistic appreciation hasn’t yet faded away, to my relief.

However, even if the humanistic impulses of New York are alive, larger problems theoretically afflict our society. What proof do I have of the nature of community? Haven’t we all become deeply individualized and atomized? No one knows their neighbors, most people in the city speed-walk past each other, separated by headphones and sunglasses. What if the communal nature of New York is simply a relic of the past?

One Sunday in November, the morning is brighter than usual. The sky is a deep blue, completely clear. It’s the day of the New York City marathon. I had heard people say that Marathon Day was their favorite day of the year, but having lived in other cities that hosted marathons, I couldn’t imagine why. In other cities, the marathons finished before I left my apartment in the morning, and as a non-runner, they barely registered as something to consider. In search of answers, I take a short walk to the route of the race, only a few minutes away from my sleepy corner of the city.

I hear it before I see it. As I walk towards the course, a wave of sound washes over me. People scream and clap, bands play in some sections, while DJs spin in others. A normally quiet street has been turned into an endless block party, filled with an infectious, animated energy. Runners fly down the asphalt, flanked by raucous fans holding motivational signs on the sidelines. Fans are of all ages, races. Signs range from embarrassing photos of individual runners to jokes about the G train to simple phrases of encouragement for anyone to take to heart.

Despite the fact that most of the people don’t know most of the other people around them, it doesn’t feel like we’re among strangers; there’s an indisputable collective spirit to the crowd. Everyone shares in the excitement of the day. I had planned only to take photos and observe, but I quickly lose the impulse to reach into my pocket, to be anywhere but here. Soon, my claps and screams blend with those of my neighbors, my joy blends with theirs. I stand taller in this crowd, and I swear that the runners do too. “New York Loves You,” declares a massive, hand-drawn banner hanging from a nearby building, and it feels true.

This experience — the sounds, the energy — brings to mind sociologist Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence:

The very fact of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and that quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.

It’s joyous, an experience nearly divine. In this blissful state, with tears in the corners of my eyes, I wonder how we could ever live without one another, without congregating into something greater.

There is hope. We haven’t given up on each other. Not yet.

Special thanks to Catherine, Jasmine, and Zoë for offering some great feedback on this one!

Programming note: after 8+ years of publishing mostly weekly, I’m switching to a biweekly cadence to better support the type of essays I want to be publishing. Stay tuned!

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Time by Hiroshi Sato - city pop and jazz fusion~

• POEM - “Earth-Like” by Megan Pinto - At home, we keep my father from the news. / The news addles his mind.

At times, being in New York in 2025 feels like arriving at a party as it’s about to end. There’s a sparseness to the air, a sense that the lights will turn on soon. It’s the economic uncertainty, the political uncertainty, the feelings of cultural stagnation and moral rot that feel inescapable at times. References to prior golden eras abound — people fondly remember long-gone restaurants and bars, reflect on the indie sleaze era, even if they only ever consumed it through the internet.

When I talk to my friends about it, they all agree with the sentiment, and we think about ways to cope. We all moved here for a reason: to experience a more interesting life, to fill up with culture, fashion, or excitement. And even as we do our best to do everything we wanted, there are nagging moments of discomfort with the atmosphere, with the energy we feel. Is there something we’re missing here? Are the best days of this city behind us?

Despite how specific this feeling is, I know it can’t be new, and I go looking for how people have thought about it in the past. If people have grappled with this before, perhaps they will know why or how to deal with it.

I stumble upon the work of the late, great cultural critic Mark Fisher. In his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life, he wrote, “The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.” He wrote this in reference to the concept of “the slow cancellation of the future,” alluding to the 21st century’s lack of a vision—or a new vision—of the future, in stark contrast to the 20th century’s constant reinvention of culture. He continues:

While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century.

He offers two suggestions for why we arrived at this state of incessant retrospection. First, there is how consumption has changed — that we’ve become so worn out and overstimulated by our work culture and digital consumption that we seek the comfort of the familiar past. Then there’s the way that production has shifted. It’s more expensive now to have the time or the mental space to form innovative art scenes; art must match consumer expectations to make money, and we are all now so deeply connected that it’s impossible to do the type of withdrawal from the world that inventing something new requires.

In the decade since the book was published, these things have only become more true in our increasingly chaotic world. Is this why the present feels so bleak? We both face a present of uncertainty while engaging in a culture that cannot imagine a future that doesn’t look like a departed past.

Fisher’s words were illuminating but depressing. What were we supposed to do, knowing that we were living in a particularly dark time culturally? Was there room to imagine a different version of decline — a way to reach back for what was once great? Among these questions, I discovered some of the letters of The Lord of the Rings author, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Decades ago, he wrote much about his understanding of the world. He believed that all of civilization, ever since the Fall of Man, had always been in a permanent state of decline, evoking what he once called “the heart-racking sense of the vanished past.” Rather than let this sort of belief collapse him into any sense of hopelessness, Tolkien believed that myths and mythmaking were a means to recover the virtue that man once had:

The creation or, more correctly, the sub-creation of stories or myths is merely a reflection of the image of the Creator in us. As such, although “myths may be misguided... they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, whereas materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to the abyss and to the power of evil.”

In Tolkien’s eyes, regardless of the nature of the times, the creation of art (myths in this case) serves as a correcting force, guiding us back toward the divine path. Even if we’ve stagnated, even if we only grow more wretched over time, the endeavor of creation is worthwhile.

Tolkien’s words make me feel better, but I wonder how well they apply to today. When I talk to my friends, they echo similar sentiments. Emily talks about leaving social media, sick of how boring and derivative the work she sees is. She resolves to make her own essays, videos, and electronic music mixes that are better. Paul talks about finding ways to feel like a child again — like hiking and crushing orange leaves beneath his feet, creating art in a way that you lose yourself in the process.

And I, after consulting the experts (my friends) and the experts, want to talk about how things feel less desolate when we talk about them together and how we seem to sit up straighter when we agree about these feelings. I want to withdraw in the ways that are necessary — like Fisher said has become difficult. I want to move toward Tolkien’s true harbor. I want to make things that are less derivative. And I want to feel like a child again.

After mulling on these feelings for weeks, talking about them reconnected me to these friends. After feeling alone, I grew closer to these lovely and creative people, grew more inspired to create instead of mindlessly staying connected, untangled my brain from social media apps. My mind vibrates with ideas for projects and events. I think about writing a myth of my own: a creative community of collaborators and peers that keeps making new things, regardless of what the world demands. There are new essays and films and paintings and novels and poems. A giant, golden banner stretches across a star-filled sky announcing, “The Party That Never Ends.”

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - “Z29vZCB2aWJleiBob3VzZSBtaXg6RA==” by 111loggedin - this artist shares really great playlists on YouTube but all of the titles are encoded in base64

• POEM - “The Sick Rose” by William Blake - The invisible worm, / That flies in the night

References:

• Great note from the Culturist that put me onto some of the Tolkien quotes

• Larger list of quotes from Tolkien letters that I consulted

I must admit, I’ve been feeling hopeless lately. Despite the wealth of gifts in my life, I find myself losing hours of my life trying to analyze the news, expecting the latest atrocity from the American government, or the latest prognostication of an economic crash. I don’t know why I find myself so obsessed with keeping up with the news lately. It’s like watching a car crash — you can’t look away. When did I develop this dark fascination with finding everything that could possibly be going wrong? When did I become a person who reads The Financial Times?

The news is bleak. Even during the darkest times of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was this constant feeling of hope that we would one day get vaccinated, be free of our restrictions and live in a world like what we had once known. These days, it’s nearly impossible to predict what tomorrow will look like, or any day after that. Even if I know that an economic crisis is around the corner, even if I donate to all of the right causes, or volunteer in my community, what can one really do about the current state of things? What can I do about the AI bubble, about the affordability crisis? What are these hands even capable of?

So I think about my hands. I think about what they’ve wrought. In the midst of all of this anxiety, I’ve been feeling a deep desire to create, in a way I haven’t felt in years. I think about the last Trump administration, the last time I found myself consistently distraught by the news. In college, I was always being creative in some way — whether it was newsletters or illustrations or photos or posters or my latest portfolio iteration. I started my newsletter during that time (eight years ago!) because I realized that creating consistently was a great way to maintain my sanity.

I seemed so creative back then, even among coursework, among perpetual internship searches, among the confusing nature of the world’s events. I wonder where that creative power went — whether it was a unique feature of being 19 and invincible. But I know what has changed. I know that most of my mind and creative energy has been dedicated to being overwhelmed by an onslaught of information: short-form video, short-form text. Social networks that once felt like two-way flows of communication have become firehoses, precluding any sort of real thought.

With six-plus hours of screen time, what can I expect? Even if I spend that time reading The Financial Times or other economic analyses, I’m still overwhelming my senses at all times. It’s unsurprising that I often can barely find the energy to do anything other than constantly scroll.

In the face of this negativity, this hopelessness, and this frustration, I was shaken by the most unexpected thing. I received a routine email from a dumb website. Goodreads.com, the website dedicated to tracking your reading, sent me an email asking about my progress in my yearly reading goal. At the time, I had read fifteen books, which paled in comparison to the twenty-nine books I read last year. The idea of being surpassed by my older self, of regressing into a worse version of myself, of reading fewer than twenty books disgusted me. I had once read fifty books in a single year — I could not let myself read around fifteen books in a year. I had worked so hard to return to my reading habit after years of reading no books that anything less than some sort of progress felt like a failure.

And suddenly, after weeks of feeling directionless and lost in a sea of negativity, I found a new focus. I decided that I would read thirty books by the end of 2025. I downloaded apps to block websites and apps, and started to place holds at the library that could enable a greater focus on reading. My commutes were now for books, my nights and mornings were for reading, and time on my phone competed with my larger purpose.

These changes worked. Last week, I read four books — a quarter of what I achieved in the four months prior. I flew through Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (amazing!), found solace in Keep Going by Austin Kleon (necessary and wholesome), obsessed over The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut (absolutely incredible!), and finally read Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod. I felt invigorated — on the days that I read a lot, my mind was clearer and calmer, and I vibrated with creative energy. On other days, I would forget about my books and continue to scroll in the same ways that I used to, still getting used to these different habits.

Through this new means of consumption, deeply steeped in longer-form media, I was changed — I found myself feeling more creative. I was more productive at work, I explored more ideas for a portfolio concept, I wrote more poetry, and I even ended up drawing a silly comic.

All of this made me feel something different — relief from the overwhelming anxiety that I’d been soaking in for weeks, but also a rare feeling of agency. Sure, there was an immense number of insane, newsworthy things occurring, but the consumption and expression of real, human creativity felt like a step in the right direction — toward a type of non-algorithmic existence that could make my everyday life more livable. I’m reminded of an inspiring speech by a person who doesn’t deserve to be credited:

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

If nothing else, we should consume good art. We should make good art. And we shouldn’t let ourselves lose hope. This is all we have.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - “Luis Miguel = City Pop ??” - Japan is everywhere with those with eyes to see it.

• POEM - “Sea Calm” by Langston Hughes - How strangely still / The water is today.

There was a time when the use of the word “unlimited” felt revolutionary. We once lived in the world of limits: phone minutes, text messages, data, channels, movies, music. The world was smaller — when you only had 1000 minutes, or 1000 messages, or 10 channels, you had to learn to make do and avoid hitting your limits. In those days, unlimited was an impossibility, so we found ourselves excited by big numbers instead. The first iPod had the tagline “1000 songs in your pocket,” which seems quaint compared to what Spotify describes itself as today, a service that “gives you access to millions of songs.”

If you’d asked anyone at the time if they could have unlimited talk, text, data, movies, TV shows, and music, they’d say yes before you could finish the question. Limits kept us constrained, so making everything unlimited had to be good, right? Who wouldn’t want to have access to abundance and excess? What bad could come of completely opening the floodgates to unlimited access to all of the things that we desired?

And when unlimited started to become common, first with talk and text, and then with everything, it became less of a differentiator than a standard. A new platform or service never leads with “unlimited” as a selling point anymore, since everything is endless in the same way. Social networks once showed a limited set of information — only what your friends did. But now? They’re endless social media feeds, an unlimited set of content.

The costs of the unlimited lifestyle are invisible, but disquieting once you look at them. Musicians are underpaid and forgotten, the movie industry features more mergers and consolidation, as we lose our sense of value for art. An album that took hundreds and hundreds of hours to make is just one of a million songs you have access to. A film that had over a hundred people on cast and crew for a year is worth a tiny portion of a $7.99 monthly fee. In the sea of abundance, the importance of a water drop is forgotten.

Often, the tech billionaires who provide this exploitative abundance also wax poetic about defeating death, finding a means of attaining immortality. Unlimited media isn’t enough, they say — we need unlimited life. And, just like with all of their actions, the idea is incomprehensible to me.

Look at life with me for a second. We toil, God knows we toil, but we also sing and dance, and witness change of ourselves and our surroundings and everyone we love and hate. We make choices every day about how to spend our time, who to spend it with, and every choice is loaded with meaning. We have choices every day but we only have so many days. Every choice matters because there will always be a day where we run out of choices. So every choice to spend a day with someone is an act of love and an act of sacrifice of the limited choices we have left.

Then, what happens when the days never end? Doesn’t everything lose some meaning, knowing that it lacks sacrifice? Won’t we lose our sense of time, or any sense of urgency, knowing that we could do anything at any time? I see an immortal version of myself. I see him taking everything for granted; I see him procrastinating everything. I see him and want nothing to do with him.

Unlimited life is not here yet, but unlimited consumption is, and I question whether I want to continue to be a part of it as I have been. Unlimited life would rob us of realizing the importance of each day, but unlimited consumption already makes us forget the importance of everything we consume.

I look fondly back at older times that were filled with limits. Limited connectivity, limited visibility; it offered a sort of freedom. Every new release of a movie or game felt special, rather than something adding to the endless sea of content. I still remember my excitement building up for weeks leading up to the releases of Halo 3 and then Halo: Reach a few years later. These games would fill hundreds and hundreds of hours of my life, because I loved them, and because there was nothing else as interesting competing for my attention.

With the limitations of the time, it made more sense to relish what you had. It made sense to rewatch the movies you had on DVD, to re-read the books you had, to gleefully sink hours into the same video games day after day.

I’m making small changes to try and reconnect to this type of joy. I try to spend less time on unlimited feeds. I buy books from the used bookshop and borrow from the library instead of just downloading e-books. I watch movies in the theater and think about buying Blu-rays. I redownload my old iPod library onto my phone and use Spotify less and less. I buy a few albums from Bandcamp, and I feel more connected to them as I play them on loop for days at a time.

It’s not the same, but it feels better in some ways. As I wonder how much I can reclaim, “R.I.P.C.D.” by the Flatbush Zombies comes on, and I zone out to the chorus:

“RIP to the CD, can’t even play my hits
’Cause new computers ship without the means to play the shit
We love the boosted speed, we love the memory.
It got me feelin’ like we’re nothin’ like we used to be”

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - 3001: A Laced Odyssey by Flatbush Zombies - I still love this album

• POEM - “I Woke Up—Smiling” by Ha Jin - If a poem arises, it’s merely / an accidental blessing.

After returning from my third Japan trip, I’ve been trying to figure out what there is to say about it. It was my third trip to the country, the first since I moved to New York. Last time, I was struck by everything — the unfamiliarity of the language, the universality of humanity despite it, the small interactions with Tokyo residents that I had the benefit of spending time with. I was so amazed by the possibilities of the city that I moved to the American city most similar to it, one that reaped the benefits of density and public transit.

But, this time in Japan was different. Everything was familiar. I had practiced my few Japanese phrases enough to feel comfortable with most service interactions, I knew what the iconography on signs meant, the general etiquette to avoid committing any faux pas. I felt comfortable there, the way that I do in cities I know well, like Atlanta, San Francisco, NYC.

For this trip, I was a part of a larger group than before, and I felt more like a tourist than ever before, walking to all of the major sites with friends that had never been before, spitting out facts about one thing or another. At times, I felt like a tour guide, comfortable enough with the city to navigate us to our destinations: all of the greatest specialty coffee shops, quirky dessert shops, and whatever interesting stores were on the way.

During my previous trips, I’d failed to purchase much of anything, being overwhelmed by options or spending too much time at vintage stores that only stocked American clothes that were too small for me. This time, I bought a t-shirt that was made using a process that can only be done in Wakayama, Japan, I bought Japanese denim that would’ve cost double across the Pacific, I bought souvenirs for friends that I never had room in my suitcase for during my previous trips. Even as I shopped better, things felt odd.

The differences of this trip were most clear when returning to places I’d been before. It was jarring — a couple of years ago, I had felt so much younger and so shocked by everything I saw in a country I didn’t understand. Despite my efforts to be present, I couldn’t help but compare visiting the Bamboo Forest to the first time I saw it. Then, I remembered feeling overwhelmed by the crowds, only to find solace in the shade that the endless shoots created. This time, in the absence of the crowds, in the absence of unfamiliarity, and in the presence of 95 degree heat, I just saw pretty bamboo and glimpses of my past. The same thing seemed to happen at the Inari Shrine or at the darts bar. Could anything compare to the first time?

Instead of dwelling on this in the moment, I talked with my friends, spending our time identifying all of the things that felt different from our lives in America. There was the visual culture that manifested in every sign having an illustration, there was the ubiquity of convenience stores, the dense variety of shops and bars and restaurants that could exist due to the sheer number of people and low cost of rent. I pointed out the politeness of every interaction, the quietness of the streets, and the subway system, but I wondered if I had already started to miss the racket of human life that made me appreciate New York so much.

Frequently, we were surrounded by enormous amounts of people in the train stations and malls, but it never seemed to get very loud. People didn’t talk to each other very much, and the sounds of cars and sirens never grew to anything close to the din that I was used to. By the time my trip was coming to an end, I yearned for messy, crazy sights on the street, something to listen to.

On my first day back in New York, I tried to recover from my 14-hour flight by doing chores — laundry, grocery shopping, organizing my souvenirs. I took pleasure in the slowness of the day, ambling down aisles of the store, appreciating that I could read every label with ease. But as my backache caught up to me, I decided to go to Chinatown for a massage. The wall of noise from the subway was a shock after the quietness of the Tokyo subway, and escaping the station into the street was a welcome change. On the way to the spa, I walked past a table of older Chinese men loudly gambling in a park, a beautiful cafe, my favorite indie theater. The street had some grime, the din of cars and sirens was inescapable, but, after a few weeks away, I felt as comfortable as ever.

💧 Drop of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - The Bill Evans Album by Bill Evans - some good ole jazz

One day in 1940 in Nazi-occupied France, four teenagers and a dog stumbled upon a cave beneath an uprooted tree. Deep into a war ravaging the entire world, as men attempted to assert their will and their importance across Europe, these boys gazed, awestruck, at walls that would've astounded their ancestors millennia before. Within this cave, they traveled back in time, discovering walls covered with hundreds of paintings dating back over 17,000 years.

The many paintings in the Lascaux caves are thought to have been painted by many different generations of early man. Each generation would learn from the existing paintings, and create their own versions, sometimes overlapping. It was art school, it was intergenerational learning, it was a religious space. In the flicker of firelight, the images seemed to come alive and move.

There were very few images of man on these walls. No, like the Paleolithic world, the caves were filled with megafauna, some still extant, some long gone — bulls & equines, aurochs & stags, a single bear. Those days, it wasn't a man's world. Man was something small compared to the apex predators and the enormous herbivores, and man was humble enough to honor these beasts with their paint.

We don't know a lot about the time before writing. We don't know why these paintings were created, what they might've meant, who would've held the brush, and what a painter would've gotten out of the experience. In a world that was likely filled with greater amounts of death and loss, hardship and toil, humans still found a reason to make art. And somehow, this art survived thousands and thousands of years, awaiting the day that a tree would fall, and some kids would uncover the splendor once more.

I think about Lascaux all the time — how incredible it is that it exists at all, how two of the boys served as guides for the cave for most of their lives, how certain paintings exhibited forms of perspective that didn't reappear in art until the Renaissance. It feels like proof that there's an inherent human need to create art, despite the circumstances.

These ancient artists have been haunting my thoughts more than usual lately, as I've been trying to counteract my waning motivation to write over the past few months. It increasingly has been feeling like I'm simply releasing words into a river of content, reaching fewer people than ever before. Maybe there have been other times in history where more art has been made but it has never been done so visibly. In this version of the world I can hardly keep up with the work of my friends these days; I'm sure my friends feel the same way. As I tried to find the point of feeding into the endless stream, I tried to put myself in the shoes of our ancestors.

Any given post of mine probably reaches more people than any of these painters would ever meet in their lifetime, and here I am, feeling disconnected from my work. But, even though we can't possibly know the motivations of the Lascaux painters, I imagine that the painters didn't care too much about how many people saw their work, that they could lose themselves in the craft as an escape from the dynamic world around them.

Obviously, the world has changed enormously, yet re-focusing on the process of creation feels like an evergreen lesson. I've even learned this lesson before. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for a magazine that argued that the only way to sustainably create any sort of art was to fall in love with the process, rather than fixating on the result and the response.

Even though I was happy with the piece when it came out, I was forced to practice what I preached: the magazine folded within a year of publishing. The contrast with Lascaux is laughable — their paintings outlasted entire civilizations, my essay barely lasted the lifespan of a rat. This was the sort of randomness that the results that a given work of art could entail. This randomness was no place to build the foundation of an artistic practice.

So I return to thinking about the process, about craft in all forms. My state of artistic ennui led me back to trying to learn how to draw again, my fourth or fifth attempt at the practice. Watching tutorials and reading books about the practice are always torturous — the teachers seem otherworldly in their abilities to draw straight lines, render perspective accurately, make an image appear out of nowhere. Their skill comes from their repeated effort at their chosen craft, despite the results, or lack of results.

And this is true for any craft, including writing. I notice it as I try to help my father write a eulogy for his late friend, or consult my cousin about his college application essay. After writing 357 of these newsletters along with several other pieces and poems, I had forgotten about the progress that I've made, about the way my mind transformed. I had forgotten that it didn't always come so easy to bring disparate ideas together into a coherent narrative, that even my worst essays these days blow my 2017 essays out of the water. I had forgotten that art can be a process of self-transformation, with the side effect of a pile of work.

Returning again to the photos of the cave walls, I remember when I first saw these images in an art history class over a decade ago. They didn't seem very special to me then, before I'd ever begun any sort of artistic journey. Then, they were just some marks by some cavemen, but now, they feel like the marks of a fellow artist, someone who may have faced struggles and triumphs in their practice just as I have. All that is left is what Picasso said, after witnessing Paleolithic art for the first time, "we have learned nothing in twelve thousand years."

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ARTICLE - “‘Humans were not centre stage’: how ancient cave art puts us in our place” by Barbara Ehrenreich - the piece that informed a lot of the details about these caves!

• POEM - “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry - I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I am a person in the world: I see at least one person I love every day, I walk thousands of steps, and I take in my environment, photographing the beauty around me. But I've been having trouble knowing what's real lately. I know the problem. It's my skyrocketing screen time, which never really ends, only taking small pauses during the occasional moments of disconnection. I live in the most exciting city in the world, but most of the time I move through it, my ears are covered and filled with the words of a podcast or YouTube video; my mind is elsewhere.

The other day, I read a book about Spotify and learned how the recommendations seem tailored to you, even as the algorithm promotes songs that will cost the company the least. Today, a tweet told me that if you have 15 people post about something at the same time, a platform like TikTok will think it's important breaking news, even if it's basically advertising. Yesterday, I fell for an AI video of a hummingbird. It seemed to fit perfectly into my feed of bird videos and absurd comedy.

Consuming all of this content is corruptive. Social media constantly reminds me of the bitterness and stupidity of my fellow man, instructs me to judge any man reading as performative, or whatever dumb new way people have decided to make themselves feel better than another. At times, I notice myself conjuring judgments from strangers that I never would've thought about before, like someone would care that my shoes are too gorpy for my outfit, or that people would even know what that means.

I do know about some things that are real. My friend hosted an ice cream stroll on Friday. In a group of mostly strangers, I met new people, expressed anxiety about the state of the world, and saw beautiful vistas over the water. With one new friend, I gushed about my latest rabbit hole about the financial system, while he told me about his readings on how the West carved up the Middle East around WWI. While we both passionately spoke about what we learned, I couldn't stop thinking, *this is what it's all about.* There was an electric feeling to sharing knowledge, to the mutual interest in learning more about the world. This was undoubtedly real.

The next day, I went to see a horror movie in theaters for the first time in seven years. Going to a packed theater is always fun, but it's even better with horror, when the sounds of emotion fill the air. During Weapons (2025), there were plenty of laughs, groans when characters made bad decisions, shrieks at the gore. Even during the scariest moments of the film, it was impossible to forget that we weren't alone in the theater, that everyone else was experiencing the same things we were. Even as I anguished about what was coming and watched parts of the film between my fingers covering my eyes, I couldn't stop grinning at the excitement of it all, of the shared experience.

On Sunday, I walked over twenty-one thousand steps, around nine miles across Brooklyn and Manhattan, with people I hold dear. The day grew warmer and warmer, and it was undeniably present as I walked. My feet grew tired, my body grew tired, and the next day I had a cold, and everything that was real felt distant. I immersed myself back into the digital to pass the time, or to feel anything at all, but it all tasted so artificial in contrast to the weekend I had.

It's the same feeling I've felt a million times — every time I'm sick, or every time I decide to delete social media apps from my phone. When I feel better, I won't take my good health for granted, and I'll remember how poor my phone makes me feel. When I'm better, I'll live a different life, one where I remember where my feet and heart are at all times, won't get swept up again in a sea of filth. I'll toss aside my headphones in public, I'll gaze into the eyes of the people around me; this body is the only technology I'll need. When this congestion and fatigue leave me, everything will be perfect.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Through Lines by Martyn - some electronic goodness!

• POEM - “Holy Sonnets X” by Jack Underwood - We like our dying lives.

Some days I wake with anxiety, even before I read the headlines, before I become aware of the car horns or the room-shaking construction. On these days, I do what I can to keep things moving, finishing the work as well as I can, attempting to claw back my sanity wherever possible. How can I let go of this heaviness in my chest?

For a while, my solution has been to find beauty wherever I can. When I let myself fully engage in something beautiful, my body seems to reset: the temperature comes down, I breathe easy, I forget about thinking.

I've been lucky to have only lived my adult life in beautiful cities. I spent five years in San Francisco, where the fog blankets the shining sea, the lush hills. Every sunset was among the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I was a few blocks away from a park that was verdant year-round, I was a thirty minute walk from the Bay, a thirty minute walk from a waterfall, a thirty minute walk from a park filled with happy dogs and a perfect view of the skyline.

New York City is beautiful, but in a completely different way. The city drips with something — maybe history or memories. The past seems to ooze out of the walls of the subways, the old brick buildings, the murals of icons of the past. The beauty of this city commands respect, put together by hands long gone, even as their fingerprints remain everywhere.

I think about how the Aztecs settled in the ruins of the ancient city of Teotihuacan. They worshipped the pyramids left there, revered them as the place where time itself began. They came to regard the builders of the city, the Toltecs, as the originators of all culture. It feels like a natural reaction to awe at what came before. Even if the Aztecs knew much less about their predecessors than we do now, I share some of their reverence for the builders of our environments.

After decades of movies and TV showing this city, doesn't it exude the same sort of mythical quality? The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building still feel more beautiful to me than anything that was built in the 90 years since they were constructed, each of the major bridges have stood for at least a half a century, the subway has been running since 1904. There is the myth created by decades of culture, and there is the authentic grandeur that exists in this city and many more. It never ceases to be impressive what humans are capable of creating and sustaining.

On a day when my stomach churns for no reason, I appreciate the vintage clock at the barbershop. I walk a block in the wrong direction while adjusting my umbrella and enjoy how different each neighborhood feels. When we go to Transmitter Park and walk down the pier, skyscrapers poke against a gray blanket of clouds. Some are new, others have weathered thousands of storms. Flashes of light illuminate the dimming sky, umbrellas become percussion, and we're laughing and running and screaming to the closest restaurant that will save us from the rain.

The sky darkens, the buildings disappear, the clouds roar until they don't. When it's light again, we head to the station to go our separate ways. The buildings are visible over our shoulders again. As I fly through the tunnels again, I notice that I haven't felt anxious in hours. And the skyline gleams in the night.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - God Does Like Ugly by JID - Atlanta’s finest

• POEM - “The Poet at Seven” by Donald Justice - he would spin around
  Faster and faster till the drunken ground / Rose up to meet him

At the DMV the other day, I gazed around at the other poor souls that were trapped with me. We all sat idly, waiting for the robotic voice to call our numbers. A woman in my row of seats stared at her laptop while talking on the phone. A teenage girl waited impatiently with her mother, maybe hoping to get her learner’s permit. The man next to me hunched over his phone, staring at the Wordle for a bit before googling “what is the first letter of today’s Wordle?” When I want to be charitable towards strangers I’m silently judging, I think wow, everyone is so different, with their own needs and desires. But why would someone want to cheat on the Wordle?

I needed to understand desire to understand this man. I had already been reading about desire a lot, mainly about the philosopher René Girard, who sought to explain the nature of man through what he called mimetic theory. The core focus of mimetic theory is the source of all desires. It posits that “we want things not because they are inherently desirable, but because someone else’s desire for them has made them attractive to us.”1 Rather than believing that we were able to cultivate some powerful and unique eye for quality in the things that we desire, Girard argued that every single desire was mediated by a third party, some model.

Mimetic theory also explains the entire conception of the attention economy—all forms of advertising, from influencers to podcast ads, are attempting to create the models that mediate our desires for whatever they’re peddling. An influencer that appeals to my value system becomes a model, and all of the things that they own and show off feel like things that I want to have as well.

This idea feels straightforward and obvious for some things, like fashion trends, but seems completely incomprehensible for others, like a desire for another human being. However, Girard suggests that we’re often completely unaware of the mimetic origins of our desires. As we move through the world, driven by various desires, many of us are completely convinced of our own agency—the idea that our specific individuality grants us a unique ability to decide what we want and what we don’t. Perhaps we are simply reacting to models that we are unaware of, ones that shape the beauty standards that we look for, the ideas of what a good life can be.

This theory of desire is humbling. It forces us to exit our own individuality for a moment and think about how much of what drives us comes from outside of us. Aren’t our beauty standards derived from our society? Don’t we learn the models for falling in love from our media and our surroundings? When we desire something that would help us belong, we are choosing a model in a person that we want to belong with. When we desire to be different, that is a desire mediated by the models of those we want to be less like.

I often find myself feeling pretentious and highfalutin when encountering extremely popular things. As I see people obsess over Labubus, or the latest trendy water bottle, or whatever new consumer good is popular, a part of me feels sophisticated in my lack of desire for these things. I, with my superior coastal elite taste, am beyond being influenced by such things. But even this desire to be better than everyone else is mediated by someone else! I only look down on these things because my taste is influenced by different models from the ones that everyone else does.

Who are these models? At a young age, our parents must guide our desires, as we seek to be just like them. We develop values that we inherit from them, and use those values to identify new models.

I imagine my parents’ value of humor led me to see George Costanza as a model of sorts, while their value of virtue led me to see Hindu mythological figures as models. When it comes to my pretentiousness, I can imagine that being praised for my performance in school and for reading created models out of people I perceived to be intellectuals, or whoever I understood to be cool. I don’t know if I can even name all of these models, the ones that make me desire to write and desire to research theories of desire.

What about that man? Was there a model that taught him that victory was the most important thing to desire? Did this model not care about the virtues that were needed to achieve a victory? Would this model also be comfortable cheating when it came to Wordle?

It was clear that there was a world between me and him, even as we sat next to each other in the same DMV. But as his number was called before mine, I became aware of how much I wanted my number to be called. For a moment, this incomprehensible man had become a model for my desire to go up to one of the counters and get my renewed license. No amount of knowledge or intellectualism or research on theories of desire could protect me from mimesis. I will always just be a man, seeking the same things as another man.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - july 25 - where do the months go?

• POEM - “No Regret” by Rochelle Kraut - but I study the beauty / and know the names

I’m 28 now. Another year has come and passed, and so I must write something to try to both reflect and look forward to what lies ahead. I feel jealous of my past self, the lightness and clarity I seemed to have had as I wrote last year's post.

Growing up once seemed like a linear process of figuring things out. Each year brought a better understanding of life itself, what worked and what didn't. Maybe it felt easy to keep growing when there was so much to learn, when I was starting from knowing nothing at all. But it turns out the answers to life’s questions I kept arriving at didn’t always have staying power. What seems true and useful one year ceases to be anything the next.

What was the last year of my life? I moved across the country. I finally got LASIK. I wrote a lot, but less than I would’ve liked, maybe less than previous years. In San Francisco, I had started to feel settled, imagining that the rest of my life would continue the way it was going — a stable office job, mostly uneventful weeks with long walks in the park and occasional shows on the weekends. This was perfectly fine, but it felt too early in my life to feel this stationary. How could I choose to stick with this life when it was basically the only adult life I had ever known? So I dug up my shallow roots and planted myself on the other side of the country.

It’s uncomfortable to try and grow into a new place. The water tastes different, the weather is unfamiliar. But, my current unease feels right. I am more confused than I was a year ago, and I appreciate it. Rather than seeing a single future in front of me, I can visualize dozens. In a city bursting with energy and talent, it's hard not to feel inspired to do something, whether that's performing music or hosting a cafe in your apartment or getting into birdwatching or seeing way more music live. Possibility drips from every building. This is electrifying, but also petrifying. It leads to an existential crisis as well... what should I be doing?

I spent much of the last few months racked by ennui and confusion, wondering what to do with all that lies before me. In my search for relief, I watched a YouTube video titled something like “How to Find Your Purpose in Life." It instructed me to think about what I liked to do as a kid. Apparently, my purpose in life could lie in my childish hobbies. Eight-year-olds typically don't have existential crises; maybe the video was onto something.

As a nerdy child, I spent time playing a lot of video games. I would read the wikis for each game franchise, soaking up as many details of their worldbuilding as I could. I was also a bookish kid, tearing through fantasy novels about dragons and magic and elves, anything I could get my hands on. But when I wasn't immersed in fantasy worlds, I was deeply curious about this world. I was thirsty for knowledge.

There was a straightforwardness to learning when I was younger. Sheafs of paper would find their way towards me throughout school, we carried enormous books filled with knowledge, there always was something new to read and learn in a world I was only just starting to understand. I knew little about anything, other than basic math, simplified science, the broad strokes of history. Everything was a revelation.

I tried to figure out how much of that child still appeared in my current self, if there was a spark I could harness into the flame of a purposeful life. I remembered a conversation I had with Jonathan. He often remarked about my laziness, how I would sit in a completely dark room if it meant I didn’t need to stand up to turn on the light. But he also told me I was the person he knew most interested in learning new things. The bar for effort for me to deep dive into a research rabbit hole or seek to understand some random subject was low, even though the bar for effort in other domains in my life was much higher (because sitting in the dark isn’t that bad).

The spark survives.

This year, I want to sustain this spark into something greater, by returning to my childhood curiosity and tapping into my thirst for knowledge with greater intensity. Even though I have so much more knowledge than I once did (about birds and novels, software and politics), my mind is still dwarfed by the sheer amount of information I’ve yet to consume.

Even as I doubt my ability to grow as I once did or to predict the direction of my future, I know that time spent researching and immersing myself into my curiosity can't hurt. In an interview about his writing process, Ezra Klein talks about how "there's something about your process of grappling with something that integrates it into the way that your mind actually works." And I agree! After spending time researching the life of JMW Turner and tying it to research into volcanoes, I felt fulfilled in a way I hadn't felt in a while.

After writing over and over again about myself, I had run out of things to say, forgetting that there was a rich world and history to draw from. Once immersed in academic papers and historical accounts, I was awestruck by the toil of humanity and all that it wrought, by the artists mentioned and the historians and scientists who sought to revere them. To engage in this sort of research was to become less individual. In a review of Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis, Hua Hsu admires Eco's idea of the "community that results from any honest intellectual endeavor—the conversations you enter into across time and space, across age or hierarchy, in the spirit of free-flowing, democratic conversation." My limited research was my introduction to this community.

As I venture into my next revolution around the sun, I know nothing about what awaits me. But perhaps it will be easier if I'm not alone, supported by a community of words from times gone by.

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - TRON: Legacy Reconfigured by Daft Punk - remix album to an amazing soundtrack

• POEM - “What I’m Saying is” by Jeffrey Hermann - This stone, he says, spent a million years in the dark, part of some bigger layer of earth. Then, it spent a million in the light, sunning itself on the hillside.