song of the day: https://open.spotify.com/track/1oTo3ijRbaDAtrjJrGAPSw (I Miss You - blink-182)
Today started off with a journey to the allergist, and the accompanying 50 holes poked in my arm for a comprehensive allergy panel. He said that he’d seen true EIA 2-3 times in his career, and food induced EIA 20-30 times in his career (the allergist was a ~50yo man, so presumably a fairly large sample size). I guess I’m pretty Rare (in a bad way).
I just came back from a walk with mom and the dog. I’m glad mom can walk outside now, if only for ten minutes to our neighbour Pan’s house. She literally only discussed dating during the walk; I guess it occupies more of her mind than I realized.
I haven’t really done any work in the past 3 days. I can use the excuse of “I’ve been taking care of my mom”, but if I’m completely honest, it’s maybe an hour or two of cumulative work a day. It’s moreso just the mental overhead, combined with truly awful sleep, some of the worst of my life.
I guess this is nothing new. Some days I really care about the craft and I can work 12 hours straight. Other days, I couldn’t care less, and it’s difficult even starting. I’d often dive into some blog (recently Paul Skallas’s Lindy Newsletter) or do some research on some insanely obscure topic (recently r/goodyearwelt, a subreddit for $1k work boots which last a lifetime, of which I’ll probably soon purchase one). It feels like such a waste for 80% of my work to be done on 20% of days. I’d be a literal god if I could just… consistently get shit done like I could in my first months in SF.
Thankfully, it seems Refract didn’t miss me in the meantime; the tasks from the past week were all done anyways, and we didn’t ship much. We really don’t know what to ship. We’re directionless, growth-less. We’re probably moving onto Solana token rugpulls soon, I’m actually quite excited to work on Solana with a clean slate and free of expectations.Blowfish’s Solana stack was a little too much for me sometimes.
I’ve spent my idle time in the past couple days thinking a lot more about my purpose. As with any adolescent, my purpose evolves drastically; from age 0-17, it was purely parental happiness. From 17-20, it was almost a pure obsession with money? At some point money did feel like a game more than anything real; at no point did I ever spend anywhere near my income (or enough to maximize utility). These days… I really don’t know.
I got a lot of utility out of the first bit of money I made when I was 17. For my entire life, most unhappiness had been some what money-related. Perhaps my dad yelled at my mom for buying blueberries $1/lb more expensive than he found, but it was easy enough for me to say something like “bruh i’ll pay you $5 to just not argue”, to bring the absurdity of the argument to light. My life got tangibly better with that bit of money.
I’ve always liked the idea that money is just a medium of stored time and will; that at some point, I’d figure everything out, and the money I’d spent years working towards would be spent with greater utility than ever. Sometimes it seems the opposite is true; youth is more valuable than anything (and it certainly makes mathematical sense to spend given consumption smoothing). And yet, in the face of all evidence, in the back of my mind, I still believed in it; maybe out of insecurity/scarcity mindset that money wouldn’t be so plentiful in the future.
Another longstanding belief is in children. It was best summarized by an avabear quote I read a few nights ago:
In high school I volunteered for a couple years at a care home for people with dementia. All anyone there ever talked about was their children (I think their spouses were mostly already dead). The ones who had children who visited were happy and the ones who didn’t weren’t. Everything I needed to know about life was revealed to me right there, though it would take me a long time to see it.
But what if it all adds up to the wrong thing, and you stare at the house and the wife and the baby and realize it’s no solace in the face of your own mortality? The timeline of decades just leaves nigh infinite uncertainty.
In the recent years, I’ve had my need for purpose fulfilled by my belief that what I do actually helps real people. At both Blowfish and Refract, I have tangible metrics of how much money my direct work saves users, and so every second of my time felt like it was going towards something. It works great when there’s tons of product to be built, but quickly falls off a cliff when… there just isn’t. I remember at one point during the bear market I was super jaded with Blowfish and questioning whether I was just “enabling” glorified gambling indirectly. Now, Refract’s building solana rugpull protection, which is a much more direct way to say that yes, in fact, I am just building gambling tools. Back in those Blowfish days I wrote that I needed to somehow diversity my identity such that a slow week at work doesn’t completely obliterate morale/sanity. Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure this is the way to go, but at the least, it’s the most direct step out of a rut for now, even if it’s temporary. So what’s next?
These days, I meet up with friends a lot more than I ever have. I’m meeting Shez (a High School friend) tomorrow afternoon; I haven’t seen him since 2019. Then, Rachael/Richard on Saturday; I haven’t seen them since the tail end of last year. Even if there’s less obvious direct “utility” in meeting some folks. It’s a stark contrast from 2020-2022, when I met literally nobody for two entire years. Sometimes I wonder what that period did to my mind, or how I didn’t notice the abrupt absence of human connection. Is meeting people the answer to purpose? I don’t think so, I’m just not the extrovert type who really loves people for the sake of people. I find some people fascinating, but 99.9% only on a “hey let’s catch up, I haven’t seen you in 6 months” basis, rather than a “I want to know how the entirety of your mind works and how you became who you are” way. So these meetups moreso feel like practice to refine social skills (for which purpose they have served quite well, if I do say so myself), than an actual means of fulfillment.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about purpose in this way, and maybe I should read back on my previous journals to see how it’s changed; but it’s pretty frightening to know that… there isn’t an answer. It’s nice to know that making it from startups is possible; there’s been thousands of exits. It’s nice to know that being a billionaire is possible; there’s been hundreds of billionaires. Yet, the simple human need of purpose remains so uncertain.
A few weeks ago Sunny (one of my closest friends in elementary/junior high) was in town, and I got coffee with him. He asked me if I was religious. I responded somewhat jokingly with “i wish”. He was confused. I really do wish I was religious, or that I could wholeheartedly believe I was religious. I remain convinced that religious faith is one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised. It’s served a historical purpose; Islam banned pork because historically pork had orders of magnitude more meat-bourne diseases . Most religions shun incest for… well… obvious reasons. I wish I was religious not for utility or spirituality, but for the traditions.
We’re all perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from this search. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become connoisseurs of art and music and film — but our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as often as we are able.
If we enjoy some great success, our feelings of accomplishment are intoxicating for an hour, or maybe a day, but then people will ask us “What are you going to do next?” Steve Jobs releases the iPhone, and I’m sure it wasn’t twenty minutes before someone asked, “when are you going to make this thing smaller?” Very few people at this juncture, no matter what they’ve accomplished, say, “I’m done. I’ve met all my goals. Now I’m just going to stay here and eat ice cream until I die in front of you.”
This is what’s gotten humanity so technologically far; the inability to settle, accepted as an element of human nature. But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention (meditation) as a means of examining their moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of wellbeing is there to be found.
This was a long-winded way to say that religion is by far the most accessible route to persistent happiness; if the all-powerful superhuman Creator was pleased, then us mere mortals shall finally be fulfilled. If the goal is purely fulfillment, then why would I not just dedicate my life to model the will of one of the assorted superhuman entities?
But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim — to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. I’m often reminded of this when I learn of someone else’s lifestyle, and instinctively think to myself “damn if I lived a life like that, I’d literally rather kill myself”; and yet, they’ve actively worked towards it, so surely, they must enjoy it (or at the least, believed they’d enjoy it at some point). From memory, the last time I thought this was some woman on Twitter who was in her late thirties, dancing at a club, and childfree bragging about how much fun she was having.
The question of “purpose” is so vast. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build their own telescope before they could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science. And perhaps a topic for a future blog, but “mOdErN soCieTy” has only made it more aspirational.
I’m sure it’ll be fine; existential angst is often a subject I converge upon when having too much time to fuck around rather than doing real productive work, or having something tangible to be excited about.
I despised HS English and never read any of the required novels, but even still, I still sometimes think about the last line of The Great Gatsby.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
addendum
i wrote this in my notes app when i was significantly more purposeful a couple months ago, and i find some solace in it still.
