convergence point
i turned thirty this past month.
it doesn’t feel quite as i anticipated. i’ve been too busy with life and work and everything else to have much of an existential crisis, i suppose, and so the main emotions i found arising were a detached surprise (here, already?) and a vague anxiety, nothing so destabilizing as i might have expected.
back in college, i had a long meandering conversation one evening with friends about the age we felt we were, or should be. one said she was spiritually five years old. one said she thought that she would probably feel like she was in her mid-twenties forever. i said early thirties. so maybe that’s part of it, that it’s more a convergence of my internal and external realities than a fracturing of them.
still, as you might expect, i find myself needing to pause for a moment to make sense of it all. in passing this arbitrary milestone, what can i make of the past decade?
meaning-making is an act of faith.
i spent most of my twenties searching for meaning, expecting to find it and then hold it fast forever once it was in hand. i found that it’s much more elusive than that. meaning is slippery. an endeavor that feels vitally important one day can appear pale and foolish the next. meaning is as much about faith as anything else; it is generated by and persisted through the self, rather than intrinsic to any object of it.
for years, i sought objective measures of meaning, ways to orient my decisions. i was drawn toward tech because it promised scale of impact; when it became clearer that that scale was an amplifier without any moral valence, i adopted a new framework for deriving meaning, then another. there was a fear of wasting my life on efforts that didn’t matter and a distrust in my own judgment about what did matter.
really, though, everything that could matter to you looks stupid and pointless when you examine it with derision. your work is meaningless, your hobbies are childish, all of your little joys and fears are small and insignificant. virtually nothing stands up to the scrutiny of holding it against the grand scheme of the universe.
but it turns out that, by the flip side of the same coin, you can also just choose to make meaning out of anything. you can just take yourself and your efforts seriously, even if they don’t matter to anyone else, even if they don’t become anything. you can just find beauty in the tender vulnerability of trying, and, once in a while, your attempts won’t be in vain. as a famous poet once said, everything is romantic.
let go of the self that isn’t you anymore.
as is wont to happen, i left my twenties in a drastically different place from where i started it. almost exactly a decade ago (which feels inconceivable to say), i started learning to code. a year later, i moved to san francisco to work at a startup. i had been watching the tech industry from afar for years, as a kid in texas and then new york, and suddenly i was in the thick of it. it felt like catching on fire, gloriously incandescent. that was a year of pure synchronicity: the right time, place, people. the access and status and validation i had craved for so long was all at once available to me in seemingly infinite supply.
unsurprisingly, it was, for a twenty-one-year-old, a potent and intoxicating environment. i threw myself into it with abandon. i was drawn to hype and good at status games, and it was easy to optimize for that while simultaneously operating at a skeptical remove. it paid off, in obvious and compounding ways.
but years into it, i could feel myself changing, or, to be more precise, the parts of myself that i had left unattended to make the most of where i was and what i was doing made themselves known again. tech was changing, too. playing the game that had been so liberating to join began to feel stifling, limiting, like standing in the middle of a maze where i was no longer sure if i wanted to reach the other side.
even knowing that you’re changing doesn’t keep you from wanting to hold onto the form of yourself that’s dissipating, the one you know, that’s served you. i resisted it. i stayed the course on paths that no longer mattered to me because i was afraid to lose what i thought i needed to remain myself: raw ambition and a fundamental will to remake the world.
funnily enough, though, these fears were unfounded, because you don’t lose yourself by letting yourself fall into who you’re becoming. the true danger is calcification. otherwise, the pieces just recompose themselves in new and unexpected ways; giving into the annihilation is what allows you to become more yourself than you knew to be possible.
the world as you know it is temporary.
growing up is strange. you spend a decade or two mapping the territory that is your known reality, only to find that the the features and boundaries you thought to be fixed have begun to change or shift. sometimes it’s so gradual that it’s nearly imperceptible; sometimes it happens all at once.
it’s people and places, yes, but it’s also the very laws that govern your universe. as you experience more time, it becomes clearer that the world as you know it isn’t the end of history. the currents of technology, culture, and society keep moving, faster than you think. power realigns in different places.
maybe that’s all too abstract; let’s be more concrete, shall we? as a young person in tech in the 2010s, i thought that that landscape—economic, political, cultural, so on—was permanent. or, at least, even if i knew intellectually that it wasn’t, it felt like it would be. tech was the infinite money glitch that also happened to have the power to make the world a better place. the logic of the zirp era just looks like how the world works when it’s all you’ve ever seen. in retrospect, of course, that’s unimaginably naive. it was a scene, made possible by a specific set of conditions at a particular moment in time.
the corollary there, perhaps, is simply: make the most of it. spend time with your parents. take lots of pictures. meet lots of people from twitter while it’s still good (and still twitter). found the startup while there’s funding. go to your favorite wine bar while it still exists. go to the stupid fucking bay to breakers party at justin kan’s house and drink jungle juice out of a red solo cup because someday it’ll make you laugh that you did it. go to burning man. stay up late talking to people. watch the sun rise from many vantage points. drive a convertible down the pacific coast highway. be embarrassingly earnest. find the lenses on the world that fit and spend a lot of time looking through them. once in a while, close your eyes and savor how it feels to be alive in this instant.
to the san francisco of 2016, you were an absurd, magical, and profoundly stupid place, and i will always, always, love you.
you can only ever see into the next room you’re entering.
just before my twenty-sixth birthday, i was deep in the trenches of a crisis of meaning after quitting my job at square. it was peak covid, and i didn’t know what to do with my life anymore. i had spent a few months exploring different ideas for startups and toying with leaving tech entirely to... write? open a winery? who knows.
the wonderful robin sloan had replied to an essay i had written at the time, and in my return email, i asked for advice: how had he navigated his decidedly nonlinear (and interesting!) life trajectory from working in tech to writing to making olive oil?
his answer was, essentially, that it was random and unplanned, and that mine would likely be, too:
I will predict that an important fraction of the work/project/undertaking that's going to be most meaningful for you over the next ~five years is currently unknown and unknowable, which means (1) don't stress and (2) be on the lookout for interesting randomness.
it stuck with me. i had wanted to chart my path from start to finish, an impossibly daunting task with an incomplete map. instead, with his advice, i reoriented toward a kind of wayfinding—moving toward what looked interesting and what felt right, just a step or two at a time, and trusting that that would get me to somewhere i wanted to be, even if i didn’t know where that was.
i guess it would be a good time to say for the first time: i work in crypto now. a week or two from today will mark two years at zora, four years since i crash-landed into working on my own crypto project full-time. there’s a lot i hate about this space (really, don’t get me started), but the promise of what it could be, and what it’s concretely been for me, has made it unambiguously worth it. i am much happier and more fulfilled now than i was working on tech that didn’t inspire me or intersect with domains that mattered to me.
i could not possibly have predicted these life coordinates even five years ago; it was a point on the map that i didn’t even know existed. but just months after that 2021 exchange with robin, i found myself at the convergence point of threads that i had been following for, well, most of my life. it allowed me to do some of the most personally meaningful work i’ve ever done, and it only happened because i had wandered my way into the (metaphorical) right room, one i never would have entered if you’d asked me a few rooms before i got there.
become a regular somewhere.
this last point might sound trivial, or oddly specific, but i don’t think it is; in a way, it’s where these prior learnings culminate and take concrete form.
life is short. find a place that you really, really like, a place so good that you can’t quite believe that it’s even possible, and go often. be a reason they can continue to exist. it’s one small act that gives your daily life an added dimension of purpose and becomes a vehicle for the practice of everything else: meaning-making, evolution of the self, presence, openness to serendipity.
that place for me in san francisco was high treason, which i will maintain until proven otherwise is the single best wine bar in the world. opened in the inner richmond by world-class sommeliers john vuong (ame and gary danko) and michael ireland (the french laundry, quince, benu), high treason is the platonic ideal of a wine bar. it was designed to be an unpretentious and accessible approach to wine, and it succeeds enormously. it has an unusually wide selection of wines by the glass because they want you to be able to try many different wines, even if it means that they have to open more bottles that may or may not be finished. every wine they offer manages to hit the trifecta: high-quality, interesting, and affordably priced. you can go and have a $13 glass that’s the best wine you’ve tasted all year and also changes your understanding of what that varietal can be.
their sommeliers are deeply knowledgeable about anything you might ask—but they’re also preternaturally chill and good-natured. they play vinyl records all day. they chat with you. tip: if you go somewhere specifically to try new wines, always sit at the bar. high treason has a long bar that is central, not auxiliary, to the space. it’s a place you can go by yourself, with a date, with a friend, with a group. you can while away an afternoon or an evening, and no one will be rushing you out the door. it’s special. it feels good.
today in new york, this place for me is nudibranch. ostensibly, it is a restaurant in east village that serves elevated contemporary cuisine with heavy korean and spanish influences, opened by chefs jeff kim (atoboy, eleven madison park, el celler de can roca) and matthew lee (jungsik, momofuku ko, jua). but that description misses nearly everything that makes it what it is.
i wandered into it one evening, thinking it was a wine bar, as i was running out the clock between dinner plans down the block and a late-evening party. it was a quiet night. i sat alone at the bar and ordered a glass of wine with the bartender. we chatted as i waited for friends to arrive. the wine was excellent; they brought an amuse-bouche. it was an elegantly designed space but with character: a lava lamp on the bar, a rubber chicken perched on a liquor shelf, a funny poster in korean, a plastic gold lucky cat waving its arm. there was a subtle aliveness to it. the bartender, jin, was funny, and not just in the practiced, professionalized way that bartenders can be because it’s their job. he was chaotic, and i liked him immediately—uncomplicated vibe alignment.
eventually my friends came, and we had a few drinks before we left for the party. but this place stayed with me, with its steady confidence to be itself, unaffected. it was curated but not overproduced, technically exacting but not fussy. i have been to more restaurants and bars than i can count; exceedingly few are memorable. i resolved to go back.
and so i did, again and again. what i had sensed in that first encounter took clearer shape over time. nudibranch puts a name and a face to every single person who works there. there’s an understated authenticity that permeates the environment; the social layer mediated by service is thin enough to reach underneath it, without sacrificing professionalism or refinement. by even my third visit, jeff recognized me and came out to say hello nearly every time i returned. it’s a rare place capable of transcending pure transactionality by treating people as more than just their roles in an interaction.
maybe the best way i can describe nudibranch is the porrón. a porrón is a catalonian drinking vessel for wine, a party trick. i can’t remember where i first heard about it, years ago, but i was instantly drawn to what it represented: laughter-filled evenings with friends and too much wine, a hazy, warm togetherness. i had never seen one in the wild until nudibranch. there are several, scattered around the bar and the back shelf of the restaurant, that make appearances on livelier nights. it doesn’t make sense, necessarily—it’s not a signal most people would understand or even notice—but i immediately perceived it as a kind of kinship. i got it.
a porrón is an invitation to raw unfiltered communal experience. drinking from one requires its own leap of faith. it’s intimate in that everyone is drinking from the same vessel and vulnerable in that it is hard and embarrassing to get wrong. you have to commit decisively, risk spilling wine on yourself in order to not spill wine on yourself (i am bad at this part). but you do it because it’s fun and festive, a gesture of openness to everyone else willing to put themselves out there.
i celebrated this birthday at nudibranch, and, true to form, jeff brought out the porrón. it was fitting to find myself in this place at thirty, somewhere that embodies much of what i’ve spent my twenties learning to recognize: that meaning comes from the accumulated weight of small choices, that sureness of self is what lets you meet with others, that not every contradiction or complexity needs to be resolved. i carry much less certainty, now, than when i started, but in its place there’s conviction.
vignettes
waking up the day the brat remix album drops to listen to it with my morning cup of tea. the caroline polachek remix of “everything is romantic” makes me feel like i’m levitating. there’s a quiet, surreal quality to the autumn sunrise, like the space between breaths drawn out into a standstill. the air is clear, the trees just starting to tinge orange. i’m home alone, and all the walls are dappled with soft light. time expands, dilates. i’m struck with this deep knowledge of rightness, that i’m exactly where i’m supposed to be. i think: remember this feeling.
driving down the taconic state parkway in march after a night of freezing rain. every single tree, down to the leaf, is encased in a glossy film of ice. the whole world has been recast as crystal overnight—a gleaming landscape that sparkles from infinite points all catching the sun at once. it feels like we’re on another planet. we don’t even speak; there are no words. we just take in the wonder.
taking a week off from work to stay by myself and write. it is hard, much harder than i expect—in part to be on my own for so long and in part to have no obligations or chores or, really, excuses to do anything besides focus on what i think. the writing is a slog, not because i don’t know what to say but because there’s too much i want to say. every thread leads into another, and another, and another, until it’s all one tangled mess. i resolve to never neglect this need for this long again. and so i throw myself into research trusting that clarity will eventually emerge, after pushing into the discomfort, i start to feel it: activation. it feels right to expend this energy somewhere, instead of hoarding it until it turns to restlessness and discontent.
dancing all night at the brat party at market hotel. clubbing has always been more of an aspirational ideal, theoretically fun but usually disappointing. but tonight brat is a portal into clubbing as i imagined it to be, not just as it’s been in reality. i go by myself because everyone else is busy (sad) or not having a brat summer (tragic). it’s the first time i’ve ever done that, and it’s strangely liberating. the club is dense with fog and shafts of green light. i’m in all white, a halter top and a miniskirt with strappy heels and a silver choker that i can already tell will give me a rash, because that’s brat, i guess. it’s early in the night, my favorite time, before too many people have arrived—when the whole evening is just latent possibility.
wading into a lake on one of the first days of summer. the water is still bracing, a wintry chill lingering in the undercurrents. we’re surrounded by children and their parents, but i don’t care. rachel is hesitant but finally edges her way into the water with me; she keeps shouting “acclimatize,” referencing some tiktok i’ve never seen, and i don’t understand at all, but we can’t stop laughing. we swim to the floating dock in the middle of the lake and just lay there for a while. back on shore, i’m suddenly eager for an adventure. no one else wants to explore, so i wander off to the opposing shore alone. there’s a surprisingly long winding path that, it turns out, circles the whole lake. it takes me past all these scenes: a sweet family playing mexican folk music from a handheld radio, a father and son fishing, a small raised wooden stage in a forest clearing, an idyllic little bridge, a series of basketball courts, a skate park, some picnic tables. i don’t even like the woods, but, on this lazy afternoon, these woods are enchanting.
showing up at alice’s birthday party with the most catastrophic hangover of my life. i am not remotely equipped to be socializing with new people; in retrospect, it’s a miracle i even managed to get there. i start to spiral, first slowly, then all at once—in that state of mind, even people i’ve known for many years feel strange and unfamiliar. but friends take turns sitting with me, and despite the disorientation there’s a deep comfort in it. as it gets late, i find that i’m irrationally scared to go home by myself. kiera and luna and taha all offer to come with me; alice and sid say i can stay with them. in the end, luna stays with me for the night, even though she has a flight in the morning. in this vulnerability, i feel carried by a community a way i haven’t felt in a long time.
hearing the first few notes of “soulbreaker” at a.g. cook’s show at fest and feeling my breath catch. i’ve never heard this song before, but it feels like i should have, like this kind of spiritual resonance should have needed many listens and a long time to build. it pierces a deeply buried part of me, underneath the weary cynicism, the part that will probably always see the world through the eyes of a teenage girl who desperately believes that art can be transformative, that music can be what makes you believe in something again. it’s been a whirlwind weekend with coworkers and friends in idyllwild, a little mountain town full of whimsy. it reminds me that i do, in fact, love california, that the work i do matters, and that the people with whom i do it matter most.
books of 2024
my reading dipped last year, in part because i’ve been so occupied with work and other focuses. maybe it was an unlucky year, maybe my bar is getting higher, but, in particular, most of the nonfiction books that i read weren’t worthy of note, and my rate of abandonment rose precipitously. still, i finished fifty-six books, so here are the standouts.
if there are any other books you think i’d like, reply with them! i’d greatly welcome your warm recommendations.
fiction
hierarchy (trilogy) by james islington
“They ask something small of you. A thing you would prefer not to do, but is not so terrible. You think you are working your way up, but in fact they are changing you. Moulding you into what they think you should be, one compromise at a time.” He says it simply, but there’s rock-hard belief beneath the words. “I am not suggesting you should have ignored what Scitus said. I am just saying that in this place… each man has to find his line. Has to find it ahead of time, and be resolved never to cross it.”
this book was the most compelling fantasy i’ve read recently, with deep examinations of the workings of power and a system of magic that literalizes that power in a novel way that makes for thought-provoking sociopolitical commentary. only the first book is out, so i can’t speak for the series as a whole just yet, but i have high hopes.
dune (series) by frank herbert
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
i first read the first book of dune eight years ago, the first year i lived in san francisco. it was revelatory in the clarity of the vision: a world so richly rendered and unburdened by exposition that it’s easy to immerse yourself. this year, like many, i reread it and then read further into the series, all the way to heretics of dune (which i abandoned). like a few of the other books on this list, it has its flaws, especially in the later books, but herbert clearly had his own experience with a kind of prescience in writing it, and that creates a compelling thread that carries it through otherwise weaker sections.
foundation (series) by isaac asimov
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.
i’ve often kept some distance from foundational (no pun intended) sci-fi works because they can feel clumsy in terms of technical execution, and usually the concepts that made them revolutionary have been copy-pasted across pop culture to the point of making the originals feel like imitations. but after revisiting herbert, i was feeling more receptive to asimov and read most of the series (the trilogy and both sequels). much more than herbert, though, i think asimov struggles significantly with writing as an art form, which turns several of the foundation books into a slog in some ways. but the kernels of the ideas and asimov’s thinking on how different interplays of forces (political, economic, cultural, etc.) shape societies in sweeping and indelible ways held it together for me.
do you remember being born? by sean michaels
Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person’s field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte—not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.
a quietly thoughtful and humanistic exploration of art and artificial intelligence released in a time where that feels obviously salient. michaels takes a deeply skeptical and yet earnest stance toward ai, using one of the earlier gpt models to help pen the voice of his fictional ai charlotte.
vita nostra (trilogy) by marina and sergey dyachenko
There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity, and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process—the spellbinding process of creation—is infinite: this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.
another incomplete trilogy—my relationship to this series is complicated because i think it’s deeply flawed in many ways as a work and actively would not recommend the second book, which drags and adds little of value, but the first book is so shatteringly original that it borders on alien. it forces the reader into a kind of altered mental state that’s required to access the world the dyachenkos have constructed, and just for that i think it deserves significant credit. i don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that reading this book expanded what i thought was possible with fiction.
forbidden notebook by alba de céspedes
Now, under everything I do and say, there’s the presence of this notebook. I never would have believed that everything that happens to me in the course of a day would be worth writing down. My life always appeared rather insignificant, without remarkable events, apart from my marriage and the birth of the children. Instead, ever since I happened to start keeping a diary, I seem to have discovered that a word or an intonation can be just as important, or even more, than the facts we’re accustomed to consider important. If we can learn to understand the smallest things that happen every day, then maybe we can learn to truly understand the secret meaning of life. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing, I’m afraid not.
unlike every other book on this list this year, this novel wasn’t a grand exploration of philosophical ideas—it’s a remarkably intimate portrait into the life of a middle-aged wife and mother in post-war italy and how the practice of keeping a secret diary unravels her conception of herself and her place in her world by developing an inconvenient new consciousness. it’s filled with subtle complexities of emotions and understandings and a welcome contrast to the sci-fi/fantasy that otherwise dominated my reading.
nonfiction
liquid modernity by zygmunt bauman
The liquidizing powers have moved from the 'system' to 'society', from politics' to 'life-policies' - or have descended from the 'macro' to the 'micro' level of social cohabitation. Ours is, as a result, an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual's shoulders. It is the patterns of dependency and interaction whose turn to be liquefied has now come. They are now malleable to an extent unexperienced by, and unimaginable for, past generations; but like all fluids they do not keep their shape for long. Shaping them is easier than keeping them in shape. Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort - and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion.
this book was probably the book of my year. the aforementioned robin sloan (thank you again, robin) recommended it a few years ago, and i finally got to it. it just hits. bauman sees it, really sees it, with a poetic lucidity that’s uncanny at times, snapping the world into focus. i spent much of the year thinking back to his ideas, and i’ll probably keep referencing back to them in coming years.
the image by daniel j. boorstin
Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals. The domination of campaigning by television simply dramatizes this fact. An effective President must be every year more concerned with projecting images of himself. We suffer more every day from the blurriness and the rigidity of our image-thinking.
it was shocking to read this book and learn that it was originally published in 1962 because it feels so current. boorstin has a deft grasp on the trendlines of his time and extrapolates them into our present in a way that’s deeply impressive and pairs well with the work of contemporaries like marshall mcluhan and guy debord. there’s less of a clear conceptual framework, perhaps, than a set of sociological observations, but this lens produces its own valuable insights.
cobalt red by siddharth kara
“All the men must stay calm. We know the tunnel might collapse. We are not stupid. We pray before we go down. We focus on our work. It is in God’s hands if we live.” Ikolo estimated that a tunnel collapsed every month in Kasulo. He said everyone knew when it happened: “We hear the news the same day. We console the families as we hope they will console ours.”
a sobering read that traces the supply chain of cobalt across the congo, from the mines worked by children to tech companies like apple and the many parties in between the two that serve to obscure the cobalt’s origins. it’s a stark but necessary reminder of the brutal material realities that underpin the technologies that sustain modern life in countries like the u.s.
ametora by w. david marx
United Arrows’ Hirofumi Kurino says, “When it’s your own culture, you tend to stop learning mid-way through. But we kept studying until we got to the very edge of knowledge.” As Kurino explains, an American looked at a button-down collar and thought, “I have to attach these buttons,” but the Japanese in the 1960s thought instead, “Why does this collar have buttons?” One question led to another for over fifty years, resulting in a nation with an unprecedented collective understanding of American fashion.
as longtime readers will know, i really love a fun deep dive into a specific topic by a person who clearly has an intense interest in said topic and can narrate it engagingly. marx delivers with ametora, a pretty fascinating origin story of how japanese denim (for one) came into existence and became such a core fashion staple across the globe.
took a detour to write a decade-in-review for this occasion, but planning to get back to thinking through “what comes next” soon.
as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.