Today’s writing will be a little different — more of a personal update than an essay. These will be rare, maybe once every 6 months or so. And always, feel free to respond to this email with thoughts, questions, comments — anything you’d like.
So what happened?
Earlier this year, around February, I left my job at Lyft and embarked on a 1-2 year long hiatus to focus on my creative endeavors. Perfect timing, right?
So in March, my partner and I boarded a flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The original plan was to stay there for a few months, then move to Berlin, Japan, China, and India (I had only planned it out until November). In May, I was supposed to attend the Cannes Film Festival in France (which was sadly online this year).
It just so happened that the entire country of Argentina shut down the day after I arrived. I won’t get into details, but if you’re curious, you can read about what it was like here. So for 3 months, I was shelter-in-place in my Airbnb.
What I did in Argentina
A lot of my days were spent learning. I read a wide array of books and enlightened myself with artsy films (see Books + Film). I recently finished A Splendid Exchange, a book about the history of global trade, and romanticized the feeling of traveling once more. That likely will not happen for a while.
For the beginning months, I was vetting screenplays and putting together pitch books for a film studio. Most stories were feature-length science fiction, fantasizing dystopian worlds with the occasional love story. I spoke to many filmmakers during this time about the impact of COVID and the future of the industry. In general, there’s been a lot of uncertainty in the arts.
I wrote on a wide range of topics, from prostitutes in Russia to COVID’s economic impact and cultural implications. You can view my past writings on Substack as well. I was able to finish a novella that I started back in 2017 on the true story of how an Afghan refugee smuggled himself to America (here is a preview).
Then the government shut down the airport from May to September — no flights in or out. So in June, we took an embassy registered flight (after two failed attempts to get to Japan) back to the U.S., lugging with us our unopened oversized suitcases.
What I’m doing now, back in California
The past few weeks have been busy, so I haven’t published recently, but I will start to do that at least once every two weeks on a topic about society, economics, technology, and/or policy.
Despite the early end to my adventures abroad, I’ve decided to continue working on my writing. Lately, I’ve been writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. One piece is a fiction short story about SF in a post-covid world, and the other is a journalistic story about the future of technology and the arts. I’ll be sharing them on here as well, so stay tuned!
I’m brainstorming a new newsletter and podcast that I hope to launch next month. Rather than a collection of essays on a wide range of topics, I’ll be focusing on analyzing a niche subject.
Lastly, I’m moving to Hawaii.
What’s been on my mind recently
Commence massive brain dump.
In a recent conversation, a friend told me that "just because you're good at something doesn't mean you should be doing it." It's simply a rephrase of "do what you love," but for some reason, the latter feels like a no-brainer while the former evokes a sense of unease.
Unpacking "doing what you love"
The phrase has a romantic tang to it. We chase happiness and fulfillment through our pursuits and decisions, so ultimately doing what we love should bring us happiness, right? It means that we're following our passions, living each day feeling alive up until we sleep, and even at the tail end of the day, we slide into our covers excited about the next. “What adventure will doing what I love bring me tomorrow?”
Why, then, do so few people do what they love? Or the harder question, do you genuinely love what you do, or did you simply convince yourself that you're doing is what you love? Deep down, is it that anxiety of financial insecurity that keeps you where you are, or is it that fear of being mocked at, or failing if you decide to pursue something new? Or are you simply romanticizing the idea of this alternate life to which you live, and fearing that the realities of this life will come nowhere close to where you imagined it to be?
You may ask yourself, why is it that I have to choose? Can't I do it all? I can work my mundane job while maintaining an exciting and artful life, making a difference for this world. I can make money but also paint in my garage. Or I can keep my cushy job and run a non-profit on the side. But somehow doing these things on the "side" doesn't feel like conviction, as if you're too scared of failure from placing all your eggs in one basket.
And so you reminisce about a past life working on passion projects and impact-driven work. You tell yourself, “someday I'll leave my job and work on this full-time.” You muster enough energy to start a few Masterclasses online and tell yourself “yea, I can do this!” But time passes, and you know not a lot will change.
Our tendency to work on what we're good at
Our society is constructed with incentives that reinforce us to do what we're good at. Promotion cycles exist so we work hard for that high status and financial reward. We end up sticking to a job or a company longer than we want to. The higher up we climb up, the harder it is to leave it. If our career were to be described as a bunch of ladders that vertically lead up to space, then when we're high up one ladder, it's hard to fathom going all the way back down and starting another ladder from the bottom. If we do jump, we try to lateral over to a ladder that's close by. But then doing so, we will always operate within a tiny radius.
There’s also that tendency to self-justify our actions. We graduate from college feeling like we should take on certain professions because $280,000 and our degrees indicate that. Once we choose something, we don't want to admit that we made the wrong decision. So we convince ourselves to tolerate what we do. "After 3 years grinding in investment banking I will switch to private equity, so life will be better." That’s your confirmation bias at work there. The week I logged 110 hours during my banking internship, I could not comprehend why anyone would put themselves through this misery. Then again, I tried banking because my degrees in finance and math point directly to that profession.
Doing something you're good at is validation. It's a sign that hey, I'm not all that useless. It feeds into our ego. We want that. We like that. And we're good at something, we want to teach others about it. And then they will regard us with respect. We like that too.
Breaking away from that mentality
That’s been the toughest for me to do. And I struggle with it everyday. Ideally I am good at what I do AND I love what I do. But everything, when starting from scratch, will take time to build. What I didn’t foresee were the institutions and systems in place that seemingly prevent me from doing more — e.g., breaking into a hyper network-based film industry as an independent filmmaker without film school is definitely not easy.
Instead I think about it from the perspective that life is long, I’ll have multiple careers. And as long as I stop comparing myself to the people around me, and rather, look for validation internally with the work I produce and the decisions I make, then at the very least, I’ll be more of the person I want to become.
But currently, I have no great tips on how to break away from that mentality. If I figure it out in the coming months, I’ll be sure to update. And please, I welcome all thoughts.