2022: Year in Review
2022 has ended.
I’ve been inspired by members of 1729 (a network state led by Balaji Srinivasan) to condense my growth over last year into writing.
That’s what this page is, a topical overview of my journey in 2022. It’s impossible to surface an entire year of growth, but here is what came to mind stream-of-consciousness style.
Pregnant with a new Self
This year I made sense of my teenage development.
Adolescence is beautiful in the same ways birth is. It feels like it takes an eternity, your flesh is rejecting you, and your hormones are going nuts. It marks the beginning of a journey of a life as it separates from its host. Adolescence seems to be pathfinding what you think about the world and how you relate to it independent of your parents. Family circumstances required me to grow up fast. I sped through adolescence, hurrying to play the role of a successful adult and leader within the home who had everything figured out. I found myself hunting for ways I was unique and different and when finding myself empty-handed, I’d invent ways. It produced in me an allure for contrarian perspectives and living. Anything to be different from those around me. Deep down I knew I wasn’t, but I wasn’t ready to swallow that, so I’d look for grander and grander ideas I could identify with to separate me from my insecurity. Looking back, this was quite cute. My logic that I was special because I thought differently. Bigger, grander thing than the others. I’d spend a lot of time procuring esoteric opinions to derive a sense of specialness. I know now being contrarian for the sake of contrariety is just a form of conformity. The desire to be contrarian converted my natural self-differentiation processes into isolation. Now this wasn’t all a matter of personality, insecurity, and ego - much had to do with my environment and premature leadership role in the home - but the personality is a current matter of interest, so we will continue tracing it for now.
The human mind mass produces systems of thought to rationalize and sensationalize things that we do. This is one of our species’ most incredible features. Not only can we inhabit and conceive of the real world, atoms and particles, we can inhabit and conceive of any possible or even imaginable world, ideas and stories. We can look at an empty field and imagine a city; the sky and imagine atmospheric rivers; a canvas and imagine cubism. We can actualize that imagination in the mobilization of people to build via delusion (storytelling + leadership). This is spectacular, unique, and plagued with risk. Not all imagined realities are productive, indeed they can be disastrous. These same mechanisms helped Newton imagine gravity while Hitler imagined the Third Reich and built a war machine.
Ideas spread between minds similar to bacteria between bodies, but contact is made in conceptual space rather than physical. Additionally, bacterial movement is bottlenecked by 3D vector space, ideas aren’t. Ideas transmit at the speed of thought through any medium. A human mind in the information age is more exposed to illness and contagion than ever before. Our digital environment is unhygienic in the best case and zombifying in the average. Returning to my development, a positive effect of my adolescence speed-run is I built a hardy intellectual immune system and an intuition to separate human rationalization from actual occurrences. As a result, I’ve yet to be burdened by other’s thoughts of me - something that seems common in my peers. Usually others’ words reveal more about how they rationalize the world, making themselves feel special, than who I am in objectivity.
Our identities are constantly being refined through feedback. We use the gazes of people around us as mirrors to assess ourselves. Adolescence is usually when we first wake to these reflections and chip at our identity. I desired to be seen as smart, successful, and interesting. I was quite successful at fulfilling this desire. I’d dramatize revisionist stories about who I am and what I’ve done to drum up that perception in those around me. And when I was honest and open, rarely was it an invitational openness. As a result, the fracture between who I was known as and how I saw myself grew into a crevasse.
Principle: Transparency is not vulnerability. Visibility does not equal participation.
In 2022, the remnants of this tense part of myself was tenderized by the caring, intense love of close friends who desired to see me as I am. Then, with enough time to myself, I excavated my foundations. It was revealed to me that I deeply struggle to trust people’s intentions. The roots of this finds its way back to my family of origin (as most things do).
I grew up in “Guess Culture.” A culture that depends on a tight net of shared expectations to function. Guess culture is the opposite of directness, things aren’t said as they are; they are said with nuance and tact in order to signal the desires of a person without solidifying them, so that, in case the desires aren’t shared, there is a clear escape route. “Oh that’s not what I meant.” When this blankets the conversational environment, intentions are left to interpretation and intimacy is muted. It dilutes an honest view of familial relationships, creating puzzles to know what someone feels toward you. One could imagine that dad hates them or that dad adores them based off the same interaction. Deliberate ambiguity of intentions kept my family at an intermediate level of intimacy. Loving and being loved in reality was a casualty of this. Love became general and assumed rather than specific and direct. I’ve had to unlearn and relearn relationships this year. The relationships that have been built during this maturing process are among the most fulfilling things in my life.
Principle: You can only feel loved as much as you’re seen.
Out of this place of growth, I was launched into a relationship of honesty with myself. I made many key decisions in 2022. I decided that in the same way I choose to no longer spin stories, be indirect, silence my thoughts, or compromise my integrity with others, I will no longer prostitute my emotions, intellect, or time to things that don’t align with my deepest desires. I will hold honest, brutal, and compassionate conversations with myself daily about my actions and rationalizations to get to the root of things. What do I actually want? What pain am I avoiding? Why did I say that that way? What must I do to shed my weakness to get closer to my soul? I will no longer substitute the desire to be thought of as something with the desire to actually be that thing. No cheap dopamine. No protective vagueness. I’m calling this “living from my roots.”
Principle: Your strongest desires are not your deepest desires.
All that to say, these days I have more questions about who I am and what truth is than ever. Endlessly, I wander through possible realities without the tools to weigh one against the other. For the first time, my foundation is not challenged, but everything else is. In the English translations of the Hebrew Bible, there is a delineation between knowing intellectually and knowing intimately. “Know” being a euphemism for sex, the deepest and most integrated sense of understanding. It’s not a head-centric cognitive word as in the west, but one concerned with the heart. In this way, I feel I’ve come to know myself. Put concisely - I don’t understand myself in the slightest, but I know myself. Whatever this phase of life is, each morning I wake covered in it. A heavy residue that must burned away in the early hours otherwise the day is spent in the mire, avoiding feeling the transience of what everyone around me seems to think is concrete. One foot in front of the other.
Mantras:
Excellence always, in all ways.
Rational in the fullness of time.
The Mountains
Wilderness appeals to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offers an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind
Morbidity pushes me into nature. I see myself and the thoughts of my Creator in the rotting flower, the vivid moss, the post-humous deer, and the still growing mountain. I want to be intimate with death, life, and the patterns of everything in between. In the mountains, I find the Joe that plays again, that tunes into the still small voice, that crucifies the flesh, that becomes immersed in “the still point of the turning world” and engages in the dance.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
T.S Eliot, Burnt Norton, No 1 of Four Quartets
After being waitlisted for a year, I was let into Santiam Alpine Club and took an alpine climbing course. I then had a series of summits throughout 2022 and began rock climbing (I have a long way to go). I spent a lot of time observing animals and ecosystems. I have much to learn about these things, but it doesn’t take a professional to recognize the profound. Time outdoors is well spent, it eases my “nervy, craving mind” in the words of John Edwards.
I grew up exuberant in body but with a nervy, craving mind. It was wanting something more, something tangible. It sought for reality intensely, always as if it were not there…. But you see what I do. I climb.
John Menlove Edwards, Letter from a Man
I’m being a bit melodramatic with these quotes. In earnest, I don’t have the words to express how the outdoors make me feel. My heart is in tune with something my head is not. Until I decrypt these utterances, I’ll borrow words from those more verbose than I.
Building things that Matter
In May of 2022 I visited Italy with two of my closest friends. It was a delightful time.
On this trip, 3 people I had been mentoring for years who live in Europe flew out to spend time with me. In 2016 I started a community of young entrepreneurs with the mission of democratizing access to information, particularly financial literacy and digital business strategy. Mind you, in 2016 I was not financially successful by any measure, but I was so sure I would be that I started the community and started teaching. Getting to meet these people that I had poured into for years in person was one of the most fulfilling points of my year. I am so grateful.
This revealed a passion in me to build communities wherever I am, out of whatever I have.
More to come on this.
Preparing for War
2022 was a crescendo. There’s a fire in my belly. A hunger for something I’ve never tasted before.
Selling my Soul to the Corporate World
I’ve never been closer to the people that are changing the world, and I continue to inch ever closer. It’s no secret that technology has radically transformed the ways humans interact, spend their time, and see the world. It has been a marginal revolution powered by the transistor. Working at NVIDIA has given me insight into the processes and thinking of the people who build the technology that shapes the future. Astonishingly, I’ve come to realize that they’re just people! They’re just like you and me. They’re full of bias, ego, and emotion like the rest of us. They are neither unapproachable geniuses nor tyrants hell-bent on controlling the world. They are just people.
This is a freeing notion. The people I want to be like (in one aspect at least) are no different than me on a hardware level. That said, they don’t behave like most people. They take philosophy very seriously. The reasons why we should do things are argued over intensely for days. It’s brilliant to be a fly on the wall for these conversations. Since October I’ve been mentored by Greg Estes, he reports to our CEO Jensen Huang (who I believe is one of the most impactful and brilliant people alive today) and plays the role of CMO. That has been eye-opening and fun. He’s a down to earth guy who also happens to have created billions of dollars of value for our company. People like him see three layers deep. I relate to him because he also hasn’t been to college and has had to bootstrap his education.
My appetite for the intense discussions previously mentioned about systems, reasoning, and philosophy has grown immensely in the last year. I have had a hard time finding people to talk to about these things. I turned to media to satiate this craving, but I’ve ended up addicted to platforms like Twitter and YouTube. This is a habit I will need to break in 2023 to maintain my intellectual trajectory. It’s not good to be dependent on these algorithmic dopamine dispensers.
At the end of the year, I accepted an offer to transition from leading marketing for our dev program to leading marketing for our data science products (multi-$100M opportunity for the business! Will save billions of kw/hs - making tech more sustatinable). I’m excited about it, but am wary of spending too much time in corporate environments. I’d rather die than see myself become a bureaucrat.
2022 by the Numbers:
Weddings attended: 5
Mountains summited: 8
Dogs raised: 1
Countries visited: 4
Surf trips: 3
Books read: 25
Side businesses built: 3
Car (or Vespa) wrecks: 2