28

on research and uncertainty

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.

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💧 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.