To my surprise, two activities I spend hours doing every week could easily be automated.

But that wasn’t what unsettled me. It was the question that followed:

If I no longer needed to do these things, what would I actually choose to spend my time doing?

That exercise came from Unreachable: How NOT to Lose Your Mind in an AI-Obsessed Era by Mohan Nair.

In the book, Mohan distinguishes between a mission and a cause. A mission is often external and temporary, while a cause is deeply personal and enduring.

And this ties to one question I’ve been thinking so much over my past year:

Why is it important to find our deeper purpose?

But first, allow me to define what I mean:

A deeper purpose is something that requires two key ingredients: for us to remain curious enough to discover what is meaningful to us and be courageous enough to organize our lives around it.

Here’s my two cents.

1. Striving towards finding a deeper purpose allows us to feel more fully human.

For millennia, humans have looked to the natural world to explain our existential purpose.

From my history of renaissance class this semester, I learned how an ancient poem by Lucretius helped shape centuries of intellectual inquiry, inspiring many famous historic figures - Einstein, Franklin, etc - to question the nature of the universe and humanity's place within it.

In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius attempted to explain everything from the movement of atoms to the possibility of free will. He described the swerve, an idea from Epicurean philosophy that atoms could deviate unpredictably from their paths, introducing an element of indeterminacy into the universe. His work was the inspiration for many to pursue different fields - astrology, governance…

It fascinates me that so much of modern life rests upon centuries of discovery made by people who were simply trying to understand why the universe works the way it does.

And yet, nowadays we rarely regard the modern world with that same sense of wonder.

We see smartphones and laptops as conveniences, rarely stopping to consider the centuries of curiosity, and discovery that made them possible.

I think to be human is to chase our nature “whys”.

As kids, we wondered about everything, from why the grass is green to why my mommy’s angry to why we have to eat.

But as we grow older, we gradually stop questioning the world around us. We get used to our own routines and become so occupied with getting through our lives that we rarely stop to ask why we’re doing what we’re doing.

that’s why the subway exercise really stuck with me. I really had to force myself to stop and think.

But what if curiosity doesn’t come to you naturally anymore?

That’s okay!

My friend and I reminisced about a class we took in our sophomore year of college. Real Analysis.

for the majority of our class, we forced ourselves to abstain from using AI, and that meant forcing ourselves to conjure up creative solutions, and struggling through them.

What was satisfying was not coming up with the right answers, but the time spent wrestling with a hard problem and the ensuing sense of wonder and renewed confidence in ourselves to be able to figure things out.

That class was instrumental to me believing that finding one’s purpose can be as beautiful as solving a math equation. It may never be solved in a finite lifetime. But like a math equation: the beauty lies in that the struggle to understand something changes the person doing the searching.

I don't think every question needs to lead to a discovery. And not every fascination needs to become something useful. Perhaps being human means allowing ourselves to pursue something simply because we want to understand it.

Yet curiosity alone doesn't necessarily change how we live. The harder question is whether we're willing to organize our lives around the things we've discovered matter to us.

which brings me to point 2.

2. Having the goal of a deeper purpose allows us to become more fully ourselves.

In the book, Mohan describes how transformative causes does not begin with perfect plans, but with people who are willing to listen deeply to the world, notice its suffering, stay connected to their dreams, and eventually wholeheartedly commit themselves to something they believe in.

I think a lot of potential visionaries fail on one of the points from above and thus fail to achieve their best possible selves.

Here, I note that there is no objective measure how good a version of yourself is.

But I believe (this is rooted in person experience but I’m interested in hearing other’s thoughts on this) that the purest form of yourself is one that recognizes the self as subsidiary to some greater purpose.

And perhaps being ourselves doesn’t mean spending the rest of our lives examining who we are, but rather finding something we care about so deeply such that — just for a moment, we forget about ourselves completely.

There are many causes worth devoting ourselves to all around us, thought we might not have learned to recognize them yet. And I think part of discovering our cause is learning to distinguish between the things we do because they genuinely satiate us, and the things we do merely to achieve some external outcome.

So often we think that we have to find the crooks and crannies in the world where we belong, but we forget that it has to start from within. I’ve found that the times I more openly pursue the things I’m genuinely curious about, the more I encounter people who share the same sort of curiosity.

So as much as your spend your time striving and seeking, spend an equal amount of time listening to the world around you, and when an idea strikes, don’t shy from it, be the proudest backer of your own idea and do it shamelessly.

And that’s it! I’m still thinking about the conversations I’ve had during my time in NYC, and going to finish this book on the flight. So I’ll sign off with a very excited headspace.

PS: I changed the name of my newsletter to Letters from Limbo - a series of letters documenting my journey through my 20s as I navigate the thoughts and stories of the people I meet. To all the people who recently joined, thank you for being here.

Thanks for reading fam & hope everyone’s having a great day/night wherever you are,

Marv

I wrote on this idea at the start of this year, after I had a conversation with my friend Phil. This time, I want to offer a slightly different account for how we can live despite not knowing our objective purpose in life.

Here’s a thought experiment:

Let’s suppose you are living for some ultimate goal of “fulfillment”.

Then, your friend asks you: why are you pursuing this fulfillment?

You answer: I’m pursuing fulfillment because of X (here, you can substitute anything - inner peace, etc)

Your friend presses further “well, why are you pursuing X?”

Now you're stuck. If you pursue fulfillment for the sake of X, then fulfillment was never your ultimate end; X was. And whatever you name next, the same question follows.

the greatest human folly is thinking one has it all figured out :)

Put simply: if there were an objective meaning, it would have to be an end in itself. But we can always ask another why. Why X? Because of Y. Why Y? Because of Z. And so on, until you run out of ground to stand on.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy captures this thought beautifully through one of its main characters, Konstantin Levin, a landowner in 1870s Russia with a restless mind and a serious moral compass. He broods over his ‘meaning of life’ and loves engaging in serious intellectual dialogue about how one can live a life with purpose.

When I read this, I felt as if Tolstoy read my mind. Having spent most of the past year ruminating over questions about purpose and leading a good life, I felt like he was using Levin as a vessel to communicate his thoughts to me. But what exactly was he saying?

Funnily enough, I was about to give up on this book around the 700 page mark. I was starting to get bored at the character development (which after finishing the book I realised were crucial in building the society the characters inhabit). But I’m glad I pushed through.

Below is an imagined dialogue with Levin, the character I resonated with most. (Anna herself, arguably the lead, deserves her own essay.)

Me: you said understanding your life purpose is one of the most important enterprises in your life. why?

Levin: to put it crudely, to live or to die. I mean what is the point of all of this if I don’t even know what I’m here for?

Me: Fair enough. oh well… do you talk to your friends/siblings about this?

Levin: My half-brother, Sergei Koznyshev. He knows my struggles, and we discuss all kinds of intellectual topics. But to him, religion, morality, and society are just abstract principles.

It frustrates me. It’s all nice to talk about, but when it comes down to it, it’s nothing but a mirage. It never answers the real question: why am I alive?

[For context: Levin and Sergei clash over farming reform. Sergei reasons from principles about what society should do. Levin, who works alongside his peasants, finds those principles fall apart in practice.]

Me: interesting… so you don’t like to talk in abstract terms… is that why you approach questions such as that of peasants’ farming life, and social reform from more of a experiential standpoint?

Levin: Absolutely. When you work in the fields, you will understand what it means to toil and work. You understand the different incentives that make a peasant work well. You start asking yourself. Is it giving them more land ownership? Or is it giving them part of the crop yields?

Me: How has this shaped how you think about your meaning of life?

Levin: Man that’s a good one. throughout my life I’ve obsessed over the idea of fulfillment. As someone born into orthodox christian, I struggled with this idea of living for the good.

I feel dishonest calling myself a christian when I don’t truly believe, yet I always felt that we should act for the good. I was really depressed at one point… you know. It was really hard…

(Levin goes quiet for a while)

Levin: it wasn't until Fyodor… told me that some people live for their belly and others for their soul that I realised what I'd been missing. I’ve known this without seeing it my whole life: that to live a good life, I have to live in service of others, and ultimately for God.

Me: Wait, doesn’t this contradict your pursuit of reason?

Levin: Yes yes, I know it doesn’t sound super rigorous, but the more I look at the workers around me, the more I come to this realisation. The peasants don’t reason their way to the meaning of life. This is not a proof but merely an insight you can get through lived experience.

Have you ever thought about it? What if meaning is not something you can rationally come to terms with, what if it is something only accessible when you come into contact with the real world. Look at the people around you, and people who have came before you, meaning is embedded in the way they recognise goodness and live morally.

Me: Are you suggesting that rationality obstructs you from understanding meaning? You seem to make the case that reason and purpose belong in two separate dimensions and there are no overlaps between the two.

Levin: Precisely so.

Me: Hmm, I’m not sure I buy that. Why take the peasants’ way of living as proof they’ve found something true? When you’re focused on meeting everyday needs, ordinary goods seem good enough, and there’s no room left for the deeper question.

Aren’t you mistaking the absence of an existential crisis for its cure?

Levin: Fair objection. I’m not claiming that they have solved it intellectually. In fact, I’m saying the opposite of that. It’s despite them not having solved it, they are living a life embodying the sense of goodness, love, obligation I’m striving for.

Me: I hate to say this. But I’ll have to press, why prioritize these three things?

Levin: I came to them through my own lived experience. this is the closest to starting from first principles for me.

Me: I see, are you calling these things meaningful because they bring you a subjective sense of fulfillment?

Levin: sorry I can’t give you a mathematical reason for why they are meaningful. I’ll end at this, I recognise them as meaningful and that recognition is more fundamental than any proof I can come up with.

So did Levin convince me? Not completely. I still suspect the peasants might just be too busy to ask.

But I think he answers a different question, the one that I started with. Every chain of “whys” has to stop somewhere, and I’d always assumed that it stops at reason. Levin suggests that it stops at recognition: things like love, goodness, obligation appear to us as important before we can say why, and there is no argument that is stronger than that. And that, I think, is where reasoning starts.

So perhaps that’s how we live without fully comprehending our ultimate purpose. You don’t have to answer every why before you start living. You keep asking but you simultaneously live by the things you recognize as good, and let that be part of how you find out the ultimate why.

my friend & I at a Malaysian restaurant

This week I skipped all of my classes to be in New York for a media conference. I was initially hesitant to come but then I remembered something I’m trying to live by: that to be the person I want to be, I have to try different things. The easiest way to break out of your current “mould” is to actively seek discomfort. So I booked the next flight out to Newark.

The conference costs $900, and my initial reaction was “Oh shit.” It was a weekend away and I wasn’t sure if they still took applications. Plus there was an entrance fee of 900 bucks.

Then my friend Amy told me “Rule #1. Never pay for a conference. email them to see if you can get a free pass. if not, volunteer”

The idea of getting a free entrance didn’t even occur to me as a possibility. And here I want to draw on a very important lesson:

we’re programmed to learn in school, in society to reward diligence. But rarely the creative or the unorthodox.

To elaborate on that point, recently I met a lot of friends who took a highly unconventional path to job search. Cold email, public pitches, in person pitches, even cold phone calls. These people all taught me one thing: the world is inherently malleable, but for the sake of regularity and stability, we don’t even realize just how much we can achieve when we act “delusionally”.

But the idea that anyone can live the life they want just by putting themselves out there is obviously not true. there are countless creators, founders, builders who wear their hearts out for everyone and yet we don’t know about them. So this brings me to my first lesson learned.

1. don’t just pursue things blindly. know you deeper why

One thing I learned a lot throughout my summer and abroad is the importance of inner coherence. For any CS nerd out there, this is similar to the concept of cache coherence.

“In a multiprocessor system, data inconsistency may occur among adjacent levels or within the same level of the memory hierarchy. In a shared memory multiprocessor with a separate cache memory for each processor, it is possible to have many copies of any one instruction operand: one copy in the main memory and one in each cache memory. When one copy of an operand is changed, the other copies of the operand must be changed also.”

This idea is a perfect analogy for why — I think — people burn out or feel demotivated so easily. What you do ostensibly on a day to day level should coincide with your personal philosophy. When they are at odds, you will feel this inner angst that typically takes the form of: insert name, what the f are you doing man.

But this is not at all advocating for you to work only after you clearly find something you’re passionate about. In fact, I’m a believer that people don’t know what they truly like. Clarity is built, not found. So for anyone in their early 20s, except for a few anomalies, most would not know what they want to devote the rest of their lives to — and that’s okay!

Take Elon Musk for example, I learned recently from his biography that his pursuit in creating revolutionary companies is not guided by his desire for wealth. In fact, that cannot be further from the truth. After founding his first startup ZIP2 and selling it, he poured all his money into X. He did the same for SpaceX. Then Tesla. Again and again. His companies almost died on numerous occasions. But he freakin wanted it. He loaned, borrowed, and went all in.

So what motivates him to do so? Back in college, he complained about not having friends he could talk about the “meaning of life” with. Similar to Jobs, he suffered a brief period of existential angst. He burrowed himself in philosophy, reading Schopenhauer, nihilist philosophy, and so much more. As one usually does by reading philosophy, no firm resolution comes out of it. But he did find something to live for.

To paraphrase what Walter Issacson said of him, Musk believed that we very well could be living under a simulation, but that doesn’t change his purpose. He feels drawn towards understanding the world. He is radically curious. He believes that it is of imperative importance for us to preserve humanity. As a youngster, he loved The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. He wanted to preserve human consciousness so we can keep learning more about the human condition. When I read about this, I was blown away.

It is incredible to me that someone’s desire to create a private rocket company is to preserve our human civilization in order to keep learning and exploring. If this doesn’t bend your mind, it should. His firm conviction in his company, in what he built, is firmly rooted in his personal philosophy. So when the falcon failed 3 times before his eventual success launch, despite many pushbacks from investors, teammates, he didn’t relent. He pushed onwards. He believed that he was the savior needed for humanity.

So that was a bit of a tangent on Elon, but back to the point, know your deeper why. If you cannot simply articulate your “why” in one sentence. Rethink. Flesh it out. Don’t strive for a life you won’t even recognize when you achieve it.

But you might be thinking: Okay fine, I know I need to have a deeper why. But how the heck should I go about finding this?

2. Your “why” is not found through doomscrolling. Or thinking in a vacuum.

For the longest time, I thought that my purpose is something found through self introspection. When i felt lost, I could castigate myself and say that I’m just not at peace enough with myself, that success doesn’t not come from hitting glamorous milestones but from within.

While I no longer believe in this, I do see the merit, or rather, appeal in such a belief. The belief that you can find your purpose through coming to peace with oneself, or in a religion are all common ways people use to outsource their existential dread. And on the point of religion, I’m referring to people who believe in a religion without going through a rigorous intellectual wrestling with its underpinnings and historicity.

But all this yields one fundamental problem.

You’re thinking in a freaking vacuum. There is no base you can work off of.

Without a firm knowledge about the world, and the wider context surrounding your life, how can you begin to understand your place in the world? Not to mention your purpose. Over the summer, I shared with a friend of mine about my desire to learn more about history. Now I come to believe, to learn history is not a option if you want to reduce your existential dread. It’s a prerequisite if you want to even begin interrogating at the grand question: “what is the meaning of my life?”

So the quickest and perhaps most nonobvious way to approach existential angst is to learn more about your place in the world. Pick up a book. Go on Khan Academy and revisit AP world history and scrutinize everything you learn. Talk to someone from a different walk of life and hear about how they went about it.

Now you’re probably thinking: okay marv, I get it, what if I still don’t know what I should align my deeper “why” with?

To that I would say the following.

3. instead of finding an objective why, optimize your life around something that intellectually excites you.

Coming back to Duke, I had talks with friends who feel genuinely invigorated by the work they are doing. The excitement in their eyes, combined with their high praise of the people they are working with and their newfound confidence in being able to create something meaningful is crazy contagious. I’m currently in the search of meaningful work. (more on that in the next newsletter).

My advice is: If you can’t figure out the meaning of life. start small, reduce your thinking to first principles. Oh you like aviation? why? oh it’s cool to learn about it. Why? because you can help humans see things from a different angle. okay, what’s so important about that? so on and so forth.

Ultimately, I believe everything when reasoned from first principles goes back to philosophy. We are all in a state of un-knowing. And that very well could be a principle you live for. Because we don’t know, so we have all the more reason to learn, be curious, and help others explore the world.

To end this piece, I just want to add another super important insight I’ve learned lately.

4. if you’re not happy in solitude, you won’t be happy with others.

This rule extends to cases beyond simple interpersonal relationships, but I will start from there. So often, as humans, we seek some form of validation through our kinship, friends, strangers, but forget the fact that things external from us will never fill the void inside of us.

One crazy quote my friend said yesterday that stuck with me:

I don’t need someone to understand me on all levels but rather I need people to understand me on some levels so i feel understood in all forms.

The human longing to be understood, in its totality starts by first understanding that you need to know yourself. And what better way then through spending some time in solitude?

To list a few additional benefits of solitude.

a) it gives you a new lens which you can use to see your friendships through

I used to be the type of person who would hangout with friends like a random piece of debris floating around in space. I would hang out with friends without much intentionality.

In times of solitude, you are able to think, reflect deeply about the circle you want to curate around you. The pithy adage “You are the average of the 5 closest people to you” cannot be more true. If you want to change, grow, curate the circle around you like your life depends on it.

b) it helps you regain self-coherence

This extends to other facets of your life. Solitude also allows you to be more in sync with your inner self, the oftentimes hidden part of you that yearns to have itself heard. This is the pure version of yourself that has goals and ambitions that is waiting to be unleashed.

This is again related to the idea of self coherence. You NEED time by yourself to check in with what your doing vs what you feel you should be doing.

c) it recharges you

As someone who naturally really loves to chitchat, this is not a lesson that came naturally to me. No matter what your MBTI is, you can benefit from sometime alone. I mean alone without your screens, tabloids, just you and the world. I don’t know the neuroscience behind this, but it makes you more present in interactions. Maybe it’s being more self-aware.

Lest I bore you with too long a reflection, I’ll end here.

If any of this struck a chord, shoot me a text & we can chat more.

Thanks for reading fam,

Marvin

Two friends and I were driving up from Talkeetna to Anchorage to pick up another friend for the trip. In between conversations about our favourite movies, one of my friends perked up and said “Look!”

A middle-aged man stood not too far ahead of our car, with a big smile and a big white sign spelling Wasilla. I immediately started rolling down my windows.

His name is Nenad, and my friend immediately invited him in, and that sparked the start of our 2-hour drive down to Wasilla.

If you’ve known me for a while, you know that I go absolutely ballistic when it comes to hitchhikers. For those that don’t know, hitchhiker is essentially a tradition where travelers raise their thumbs/some object signaling travel needs at oncoming cars, hoping to hitch a ride (for free) to a destination nearby. I always thought this has gotta be one of the coolest things to have done ever. If you told me one day I was going to meet someone who does this for a living, I would’ve said you’re bluffing.

During our ride, we talked a lot - a lot of which consisted of me nosily asking him questions that always fascinated me about the nomadic lifestyle: Why did you get into hitchhiking? How long does it take on average before someone picks you up on the road? Does it get lonely at times? What was the biggest lesson you learned from hitchhiking? What’s the biggest difficulty you faced doing this?

But the question that I was really interested in hearing an answer to was this.

“How did hitchhiking influence your life philosophy? did it fundamentally change a part of your worldview?”

a brief period of silence ensued my question.

“Yeah… there’s so many. well firstly it teaches you not to judge others. The media portrays the world as unsafe, and it shows a lot of distrust between people. But this is not at all true in real life. When you go out there and hitchhike, you meet a lot of really nice people. They show you that there are a lot of good people in the world, and that people are very kind. After hitchhiking for 20 years, I also learned that you can never really judge someone because you have not spent a lot of time with them. When you spend time with these people, you will realise that they are all really nice. For example, Arab people, the people there are very kind, but the media does not show it that way. another thing… hitchhiking teaches you to live life simply. I have one backpack, two T-shirts, and three pairs of pants. Sometimes, having too many things makes you worry. people these days get depressed because they feel like they have things to lose. But when you live life simply, it is a very freeing feeling. hmmm…. what else…. Ah yes. Hitchhiking also teaches you to be ready for uncertainty. A lot of the times, your plans will change, but you will just simply need to adapt. There is a lot of changes in life and it is important to know how to face them with positivity.”

What he said was exactly the lifestyle 17 year old me wanted to live. I kept going.

“Do you find that it was difficult to hitchhike, for instance, when you were in Asia?” I had always been curious about this since I my assumption was that Asia is probably more closed off to foreigners and people would be less likely to help out.

“No, not at all! Except for small parts in Northern Canada and maybe some parts of the East Coast in the US, most parts of the world I found relatively easy to get around. People are really happy to help out.”

He said this with such a calm and relaxed disposition. Mind you, this is coming from someone who has spent the last 20 years of his life hitchhiking across the world. He has been to 113 countries. In between our chuckles and conversation, he even pulled up a map on his phone, showing us trails he went on, labelled in red, blue, and green. I felt an excitement growing within myself as we talked on and on through the trip. My two other friends were similarly entranced by this road sage..

Beyond just being so enraptured by the fact that we found a wandering hitch-hiker on the road, this experience reminded me of the belief I firmly hold: something truly magic happens when you are able to form genuine relationships with people around you. When you can truly put yourself in their shoes, understanding who they are and how far they have come and the necessary contexts that led them to who they are as a person, a special bond begins to form and creates an irresistibly, unexplainably happy state of mind. And what better way to experience this than to hitchhike?

Growing up, I watched a lot of Discover connection, a channel that promotes social connection and self discovery/actualization through socializing with people far from your comfort zone, meaning people across continents, cultures, political beliefs, and religion. They did a series on hitchhiking across the US, where they met so, SO many wholesome people and heard so many amazing stories. I remember crying watching it because the rawness of the human emotions was so clearly shown through my 13-inch macbook. Hearing Nenad speak reaffirmed in me the idea that to understand the world and the people around you, discovery cannot be something done purely through introspection and thinking. you have to actively wrestle and learn through meeting people.

Hitchhiking, unfortunately, has become more of a loss art form. It is a type of art. it celebrates something so close to the human condition. That is, our ability to overcome the discomfort of reaching out and rejoice in the reciprocity of care between two human beings.

Something I always think about is. There are billions of people on this earth. how many of them can you truly know? and I mean truly truly know? Probably not a lot. But one thing you can most certainly do is connect with a few of them on a deeper, almost spiritual level. When that happens, it is such a beautiful feeling that idek how to put into words. But that cannot be done through socializing alone. It is something cultivated through shared experience.

Signing this off as an ode to my respects for hitchhiking.

PS: thinking of hitchhiking sometime soon, possibly in the upcoming year or so. If anyone reading this hasin tried it, please reach out. Would love recommendations for places to hit up.

thanks for reading fam,

Marvin

A week and a half ago, I was, as usual, working at my corporate internship. In between my Copilot prompts, I asked Copilot: which famous person in history was spiritual? I asked this not because I wanted to know which religion they believed in, but because I wanted to see what “lived faith” looks like. I wanted to see someone who not only believes in it, but lives it out in their life.

Copilot returned a list, and I was surprised to see Steve Jobs on it. It wrote:

In 1974, when he was 19, Jobs spent 7 months in India seeking spiritual enlightenment. The journey introduced him to Eastern mindfulness, intuition, and minimalism, which later heavily influenced Apple’s design philosophy of focus and simplicity.

I was fascinated. I had a back and forth with Copilot, digging out the details of his interest in mindfulness and Eastern philosophy. What I found is that he lived through the US counterculture, a youth-led movement that emphasized a rejection of social conformity and an embrace of psychedelic drugs.

I thought: I need to find out how Jobs lived. Maybe that’ll give me some insight. So when I got the chance, I went to a bookstore and bought Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

Reflecting as I write this, I must say — I am in awe. The book is a stunning chronicle of Jobs’s ascension to fame, but more importantly, a record of his failings and learnings as a student, innovator, CEO, parent, and friend. Isaacson built it out of interviews with Jobs’s friends, colleagues, and family, and I finished it feeling like I knew him as a friend. The book touched me in so many ways and I’m still surprised that it almost made me cry.

I have so many things to say but to start with, what I loved was how fully Isaacson captured Steve as a person. From his humble beginnings, to his early endeavors in spiritualism and Zen, to his first venture with Steve Wozniak, to his many fabulous inventions, to his harsh dealings and brash temperament, to his go-getter attitude on love, to his fallouts with his mentors and close friends, and of course, his technical and innovative genius, this book is the epitome of good storytelling.

Here are 4 things reading this biography taught me:

Cultivate your own sense of a reality distortion field

Throughout the book, Isaacson keeps returning to the “reality distortion field”, the idea that anything can be willed into existence as long as you believe in it. Across the numerous inventions Jobs came up with, his sheer will and determination wrought most of them into existence.

Here’s one instance: when Steve was designing the new glass screen for the iPhone, he met with Wendell Weeks, Corning’s CEO, and ordered the glass shipped within 6 months. Wendell explained that Corning did not have the manufacturing capacity or facilities to make it in such a short time frame. Jobs famously stared at him and said, “Yes, you can do it. Get your mind around it. You can do it.” The results reaffirmed this. Corning retooled a manufacturing plant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and produced the specialized glass in time for the iPhone’s 2007 debut.

To me, what’s so inspiring is that Steve was not an extremely technical person. He was technical compared to the average person, but he was not the typical computer geek you imagine when you think of building great products — think Bill Gates. What he had instead was a sharp and unyielding vision, and it beat expertise almost every time. On numerous occasions he changed the minds of hard-set engineers, people who knew far more about the specifics of the iPhone than he did, and got them to adopt his timelines, his design specifications, and sometimes his unrealistic desires. Interestingly, although Jobs practiced Zen and minimalism, he was not religious in any conventional sense. His ability to “just do things” was a product of his own manifestations.

When asked if he did any market research before creating his products, he said you do not need to, because people do not know what they need, and your role is to figure that out for them.

Cultivate the courage to be disliked to do things that matter

Last year around this time, I stumbled across a book my younger cousin recommended, The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. I think there is no better representation of this philosophy than Steve Jobs. An extremely unrelenting person, Jobs had a very unique style. He would berate people for their bad ideas, use expletives in meetings, walk barefoot around Apple’s campus, and go weeks on end only eating apples. He claimed that to build great products you have to face disagreements, and his brash leadership style backed that up. His logic, as far as I can tell, was simple: if you want to get things done, you have to be strict with your people. If you don’t do it, someone else will.

As a bit of a people pleaser myself, I think I sometimes assume the role of John Sculley in the book — the consensus-seeking CEO who could never quite hold a line against Jobs. It is hard to not care about what others think, especially in our digital age where everything is so widely and easily disseminated. But Jobs’s philosophy reminds me that to truly make a difference, sometimes being disliked is a nudge in the right direction. Needless to say, take this with a grain of salt. Don’t go to the extremes.

Challenge people, because that will make them better, and in the process you will become better too. In Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford, he said that death is the greatest tool for making life choices because it strips away pride, fear, and outside expectations — which is pretty much all the things that govern our choices in everyday life. So ask yourself, next time you steer away from conflict as a means to salvage your “reputation,” would facing it help you grow more as a person? Think twice.

No one is perfect

This is arguably the point that hit home most for me. Throughout the book, Jobs is both a hero and a villain. At times I found myself thinking: is this a fiction book I’m reading? How can someone possess such charismatic and devilish traits at once?

Isaacson does not brush over his flaws. The one people know is his daughter. When Lisa Brennan-Jobs was born, he denied he was her father, forced a paternity test, and paid the minimum he could get away with, all while Apple was going public and he was worth millions. He came around later. She lived with him during high school. Then he pulled away again during her college years. He was not a perfect person by any measure. There is a lot to take away from him, but it was grounding to learn that he suffered the full range of human emotions like everyone else. He was prideful whenever he bashed competitors like Bill Gates. He was sensitive to other people’s feelings and still manipulative, using people when he needed to.

But the flaw that actually stuck with me is a different one, and it’s one related to the first section.

In October 2003, doctors found a tumor on his pancreas. It was a rare, slow-growing kind, the treatable kind. Surgery was available immediately, but as obstinate and unrelenting as Jobs is, he refused it for nine months. He tried to do it his way, which involved a vegan diet, juices, acupuncture, and herbal remedies. He eventually operated in July 2004, and by then the cancer had spread. Jobs later admitted he regretted it.

That is the reality distortion field. The same conviction that got Gorilla Glass manufactured in six months is the same thing that told him a tumor would obey him if he believed hard enough. You do not get one without the other. I spent the first section of this essay telling you to cultivate it, and I still mean that, but I would be lying if I left out what it costs when there’s nobody around who can tell you no when you need it. So talk to friends who can keep you accountable, but in most cases, keep your focus on the right path.

Reading this book taught me that understanding someone, anyone really, means knowing their whole story. Taken in isolation, Jobs can look like a terrible person. But from a bird’s-eye view, you start to see that he was very human. There is a humanness to his approach to life. The approach may be different from what you are accustomed to, but again, which two people on this earth are the same? We are all different and it is important to recognize that. Being superbly good at one thing sometimes means you lack in other faculties, like care.

Alas, reading this book did not solve the “meaning of life” question for me. Jobs is a brilliant innovator, but the book does not cover his belief system as much as I expected. What it offered instead was a scintillating look at his pragmatism and how an extremely smart person navigated his life. Interestingly, only near the end did he say he thought the chances God exists are “fifty-fifty”, and even then he admitted the estimate might be inflated by where he was standing. In a sense he willed himself into the role of God, lived a life true to himself, and left behind an inspiring one for many creatives to come.

thanks for reading yall,

Marvin

Two strategies on one boat: wax and the mast. Hold onto that, I'll come back to it at the end.

The Siren Scene from the Odyssey

Just last week, I finished reading The Sirens’ call (Chris Hayes) and Brave new world (Aldous Huxley). Two different writers, from completely different eras, but somehow they seem to point towards a similar central question: How much of what you want is actually yours?

Huxley's book is the more popular of the two. Set in a futuristic society, he follows Bernard, an Alpha (the top caste in that world), as he navigates a planned society, and later John, an outsider raised entirely beyond its reach. In that world, everything was controlled, from infancy all the way to your genetic pre-disposition to your choice of work to your partners and your choice of entertainment. More importantly, the societal leaders deemed it inappropriate for individuals to have too much consciousness, for it threatens the very fabric on which the society is built upon.

Hayes’ book, on the other hand, is written more recently. Published in January 2025, it provides an in depth analysis of the attention economy and how large corporations seek to commoditize our most precious resource — attention. Amongst the many things he mentions, one of the things that struck me most was the mention of the zero sum game. Whereas most things in economics worked via supply & demand, eg. if the price of eggs goes up, the supply of eggs should go up consequently, our attention as a resource is somewhat fixed in supply. To increase the supply would literally, in his words, require us to “grow more eyeballs”, which is impossible.

Sit with that for a second, because that is not just an abstraction. The attention economy is a ledger, and every minute has to come from somewhere. The forty seconds a platform wins is not conjured from nowhere. It’s subtracted from a meaningful conversation you didn’t have, a walk you didn’t take, a silence you didn’t sit long enough in for something to surface.

For those who have read these books, I don’t want to bore you with more details. The above was mostly for introductory purposes. Below I will expound upon points I thought was most interesting to me & which I believe holds instructive value.

1. Why should we care about our attention?

Backtrack 100 years, you might hear people talking about fuels and other natural resources as being the most precious. These days, the most important resource is the ability to effectively capture and direct attention to what is important. Note that I say “direct attention”, and not merely capture attention, because it is easy to capture attention, but to hold it and sustain it is a whole other ballgame. Instagram, Tiktok, and Youtube are perhaps the most prominent versions of attention capture. They operate on algorithms designed to keep you hooked and in return, they maximize profit through the corporations and individuals that pay them to promote their products.

Now, whether you know it or not, your eyeballs are subject to being traded around on this “invisible market”. Just by noticing this very fact it should alert you of the importance of safeguarding your attention, because if you want to live a life where you have self-agency, the number one thing you should work on is your focus.

Funnily enough, the man who put the black box in our pockets seemed to understand this better than most. In a 2014 piece, Nick Bilton recounted asking Steve Jobs whether his kids loved the iPad. He responded by saying he limited how much technology his children used at home. The people building these things are often the most careful about how much of it they let into their own houses, which should tell you something

2. How does having our attention stripped affect our individual sense of “self”?

This is where I will try to draw connections between the two books. Whereas Huxley focuses on the effects of governmental control over individual autonomy and desires, Hayes focused on this far more insidious and latent form of control.

In Brave New World, there is a substance called "soma", which is essentially a sedative people in that world take whenever they feel unhappy, unsatisfied or purposeless. In our world, "soma" is the introduction of cheap media. The small bursts of dopamine you get everytime you open your phone. On the sidewalk, in between your cooking, waiting for a coding prompt to load. These small doses of entertainment are the sedative for the modern mind. With these small gadgets, we have effectively eliminated all sources of boredom. So while that might be good, perhaps from a societal planning and stability standpoint, it is terrible for anyone trying to grow and mature as a person.

In Brave new world, because of these pills, virtually everyone in the society has ceased to search, to learn, and to explore beyond the confines of what is possible. The lesser abled people were assigned manually tasks, and the more abled would be put in charge of intellectual position. Now you might say, if they feel happy as a result - aren’t they ignorantly blissful? To that I say yes, they are “happy”.

Huxley actually stages this exact argument towards the end of the book, and it has arguably one of my favourite scenes. John, the outsider, is brought before Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers. Mond doesn't defend the system with propaganda. He concedes the trade openly: they gave up God, poetry, real danger, real freedom, and got stability and comfort in return, and he thinks that was a good deal. John refuses it. He tells Mond he doesn't want comfort, he wants “God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness, sin”. He claims the right to be unhappy.

And that’s the whole thing. You see, feeling purposeful is different from being happy. Happiness is a fleeting neurological state, which can be prolonged with substances, but your sense of purpose, your sense of self and what makes you truly human, cannot be wrought into existence through pure external consumption. I believe this is the biggest reason why most people feel deeply unsatisfied, even after a the momentary high from scrolling reels late into the night. These corporations gave a outlet to help you become distracted but didn’t offer you fufillment. There is no soma for meaning, and there is no algorithm for it either.

3. How to start finding yourself

Back to the boat example.

Odysseus had two tools, and only one of them is still available to us. The wax is a total fix, but it only works on someone who has never heard the song. Once you know what is on the other side, plugging your ears doesn’t remove the wanting.

So the mast is what's left. And notice what actually made it work: Odysseus didn't tie the knots. His crew did, before he could hear anything. He did not trust future Odysseus, and he was right not to.

Most of what we call discipline with our phones is a mast we tie ourselves. Screentime controls easily by-passable with a click of a button. Deleting the app but keeping to browser to allow for occasional “It’ll just be one check.” You are giving yourself the ability to untie the ropes whenever you want to, which is the moment the whole thing needed to hold. So have someone else tie the knot. Give the phone to a friend for the weekend, leave the phone in another room when you work.

As someone who loves encouraging friends and family to have a “radical relationship with their phones”. I believe the first step to even begin finding purpose or meaning in your life begins with using less of what drains you. Again, the principle these companies run on is to disturb your clarity, hook you in, make you feel drained, and since you cannot do any meaningful work when you’re drained, you get sucked back into the negative cycle. Rinse and repeat.

So take the measures that look extreme by societal standards. Step away from electronics for a weekend, return to in person connections, read paperback books, talk with strangers and marvel at the beauty of the world. When you do that, I believe that you too will feel a sense of awe at the creation of our world. (or manifestation if you prefer a more secular term)

One of the greatest moments of clarity came after reading The Siren’s Call was when I was walking home from the nearby cafe. I was able to sharpen my focus on the reverberations of the sounds around me, from insects to birds, and observe the slightest changes in hue of the flowers that I have seen a thousand times when walking by my house. I believe that the power of the mind when undisturbed is a whole different beast, and I truly hope that you get to experience this sense of awakening as reading Chris’s book did for me.

Thanks for reading fam & hope one of yall check this book out,

Marv

“How’s your morning… good?” A sweet, amicable man greeted me.

His name was Jay, and that was the start to our unexpected friendship.

It was a Sunday morning. I was on my train to my usual philosophy lunch when I met Jay. He was the only person on the Amtrak (train in Charlotte) without a phone. So naturally, I started chit chatting with him.

Thinking that I may have just stumbled across another digital detox nomad, I didn’t give much thought. But the sincerity in his eyes as we spoke told me he had a cool story to share. So I asked him:

my dinner with Jay

“Hey Jay, how could people be more grateful in our day and age?”

“Wow.. funny thing you asked. Uhh well… you gotta be grateful, Marvin, for you know the people who are in your life for one, because you’re gonna see it… there’s many people who you don’t agree with and you kind of have to overlook that and believe that God has a reason for everybody… and that took me a long time to realise that cause I’m hardheaded like a lot of people.”

But that was not the end of our story.

Two weeks later, Jay gave me a call. He told me that he got a new job. In fact, not just one, but 3 offers waiting for him. I wanted to hear more, so I asked him to grab a meal.

Sitting across the dinner table, Jay shared with me his doubts and frustrations. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for the job, despite really wanting it. He is willing to give his 100% even if it doesn’t work out. He was fortunate enough since his old manager from 6 years ago offered him a job for his old role as an engineer.

But I wanted to learn more about him, so I asked him about his life story.

“Jay, you haven’t told me about your childhood yet. What was that like?”

“Oh yeah - I was born in a foster home actually. My parents were the best. They really were. They loved me. Here… let me pull up a picture of my dad. You can literally write a book about him. He served in politics and he was really good at his job.”

The picture he showed me was Wallace Stiffen, a democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates.

“Oh wait, what happened. Did you leave the family?”

“I had a lot of problems in my teens, I was not a good kid. My parents were great, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Eventually I ended up in prison.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, why were you in prison?”

“It was for B & E, err but you prolly don’t know what that is, do you? It means breaking and entering. I was jailed for 28 years for that.”

It was shocking how calmly Jay said that. 28 years.

Mind you, prior to our meeting this night, I did not even know he went to prison, because he just radiated so much positivity and upliftingness. After dinner, I watched him interact with other homeless people — the way he would say hello to people on the street, the hearty goodbye he would give to everyone he knew. The most unsmall small talk he would give to everyone, complimenting them, telling them to have a “blessed day”. It shook me, really.

Meeting Jay reminded me something important about how to stay hopeful in the midst of a world where you feel like you are constantly suffocating and odds seem stacked up against you. He taught me that true gratefulness comes from forgiving yourself first. Not dwelling on your past but thinking forwards about how you can actively shape your future. Even at the age of 65, Jay is still choosing to be seen, to contribute. His readiness for life and decision to look optimistically into his future deeply inspires me.

I’m someone who is naturally quite distraught, whether that is from work or from overthinking life. But one thing Jay said to me really stuck. “It isn’t about what circumstances you’re in. Be grateful for life. There’s so much love that you have received that you don’t recognize. People need to recognise those people in their lives that love them. I’m grateful for what God has given me.”

And we parted.

Thank you Jay, and I hope your message stays with me.

Wanted to share this today.

ty for reading fam,
Marvin

He said “At some point in our life, we’re all performing, in conversations, in meetings, on dates, in friendships, online, in the mirror. You have constructed a version of yourself, let’s call it the approved version, and you present that version to the world, because at some point, probably very early in our lives, we learned that the real version wasn’t safe to show. Maybe the real version of you was too emotional for your parents, and you learned to mask it. “

when you were 5, you weren’t told anything. You were carefree, running around the kitchen floor picking up scraps that may be dirty, but there were no reprimands. Everyone loved you and adored you and wanted to touch your chubby little cheeks.

you turn 9 and all of a sudden you’re in 4th grade. You were told that school matters. That discipline and merit was reflected in the grades and accolades from teachers and classmates. So you start baking that thought into your head. You remember having fun with friends, only to come home to berating from your parents who are telling you that your grades are poor and you need to improve. You nod and promise you will improve.

you’re now 14 and you are in the first year of high school. Friends around you are addicted to video games, as most children in your age group is, and you become addicted too. You succumbed to the allure of electronics you have. You are told you were wasting time, but you were also the happiest ever.

you turn 16 and you are in 11th grade. Your parents, in a flight of panic (for your sake), removed the handle of your bedroom door to stop you from gaming. The very one you hid behind to escape into the virtual world. So you finally decide to change. You learned, ravenously, everything you missed in the first two years of high school. You eventually got better grades.

you are now 18 and you got into a great university that your parents approved of. You felt that pang of excitement but it very quickly goes away. You learn that the outcome is all that matters. You gradually internalize the metric that living a good life is no more than simply playing by the rules other people set for you. You believe this without even thinking.

congratulations. You are now 21 and you begin to think. Was that the life I really wanted? Why did I optimize to be the person that wasn’t me.

maybe the real version of you wanted things that weren’t realistic. So friends, family, and taught you to want smaller. Maybe the real version of you, however kind, and honest, was faced with rejection after rejection. And so you built the “approved version” as your armour.

The armour version of yourself kept you safe. It allowed you to go through family gatherings with pride. It allowed you to navigate into the fancy workplaces believing that you belonged there. But here’s what nobody told you about: it took away something dearly precious to you.

The ability to truly and deeply connect to those around you, including the friends, recognition, love that would not only reach you when you are not performing under this alternate facade of yourself.

Beginning this year, I’ve come to realized that the very thing I think will get you rejected, your real self, your real thoughts and desires and weirdness and idiosyncrasies, is the most true and raw thing that brings you cohesiveness and belonging with the self. The performance is what brings you loneliness.

Living abroad in Japan this past year also taught me this. As a foreigner, I had to learn the language to blend in. I would talk to people and they wouldn’t fully understand me. But that was okay, there was a feeling of freeness in not being understood. I learned that sometimes being okay with not being understood is the best form of self-acceptance and reassurance.

In the Zen tradition, there’s a concept called Shoshin, Beginner’s mind. It means approaching life without pretense, without the need to appear as an expert.

And in that expertise, it eliminated the possibility of being surprised, discovered, and most importantly, being genuinely known by even one person in the world.

The cost of pretending to be someone you’re not is not knowing the possibility of what could’ve happened had you been true to yourself. So take off that armour. Start slow, not all at once. Dare to show yourself. Show yourself to one person you trust, and observe what happens.

Cheers,

Marvin

Earlier today, I had a 4-hour conversation with a friend about meaning, power, God, AI, and whether life needs to mean anything at all.

I don’t think I left with an answer.

But I did leave with a question I can’t stop thinking about:

Can you have a meaningless reason to live?

Here’s the conversation, to the best of my memory.

After catching up for a bit, I told Phil something I’d been thinking about all semester.

“I’ve spent most of my semester trying to find my deeper purpose.”

“Any leads?”

“Not really. I feel like I’m still in the agnostic camp. I don’t know how I could actually find meaning after reading the Unabomber’s manifesto.”

For context, this is a piece by Ted who wrote about technological societies and its consequences for humanity. It talks about the destruction of the power process- the way in which one gains respect and fulfillment over their own work.

Phil paused for a second.

“Yeah… I mean, you just need to find something where you can gain power & respect from people.”

“Is that really all it is though?” I asked. “And with all the AI companies held in a deadlock, how can you possibly make any impact as an individual?”

This is where the conversation shifted from meaning to power.

“Here’s how I think about it,” he said. “You as an individual may not have that big of an impact, but there are ways you can maximise your exposure and increase the chance that you create impact.”

“What do you mean?”

“Throughout history, there have always been ups and downs. But you can be the person who links and connects people together for a cause you believe in. To get there, you need influence. And for influence, you need some level of power.”

“Okay fair enough. How do you get power then?”

“There are many ways. Take me for instance, I’m currently working on AI agents. I think it’s important to work on things that are crucially important for your era. For us, that could be AI safety, climate, and things like that. You work on these problems, build a following, build a personal brand, gain authority in the field, and then use your voice to address change.”

He paused.

“Another way is politics.”

“Ah okay. But for the AI companies, I feel like they’re just in a prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone knows the risks, but everyone keeps racing anyway. It feels like we’re heading towards destruction.”

“Well, that’s where policy comes in. A great avenue for change is policy. If you’re not necessarily interested in the fields of direct change, like important technical problems for our era, you can go into policy and try to effect change there.”

“Effect change — how?”

“There are a bunch of political and philosophical ways. Marx, for instance, proposed his idea of praxis — practical ways for reform. It might not have worked necessarily, but making mistakes is better than not trying at all.”

That part made sense to me.

But I asked him the question that had been bothering me underneath everything else.

“Okay, so you think these are ways to effect change. But now I want to ask you a more tangential question: why do we want impact at all? How can you bring yourself to help with a cause when ultimately life can be meaningless? Why bother living at all?”

Then he said the line that stuck with me most.

“well… I believe life is inherently meaningless, but you can still have a meaningless reason to live.”

“Wait what…?” I said. “How could that work? If the reason is meaningless, why wouldn’t you just commit suicide?”

“Think about it,” he said. “You can have meaningless reasons to live. Take your parents for example. Even if they knew that 100,000 years later none of this would matter, would they ask you to all die together in this instant?”

“Hmm… fair enough.”

“It just feels unsatisfying,” I said. “A meaningless reason. How does that even make sense?”

“That’s the funny thing,” he replied. “If you posit that everything is meaningless, then it does make sense. You can still have a reason to live. It just might not be satisfying. But with math, sometimes things can be unsatisfying and still be valid.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I don’t know man. I guess we just have to empirically try and see what brings fulfillment.”

“Exactly. And remember, logic and emotions are on two different planes. Also, who says you necessarily need to have a meaning for the life you’re living? They can coexist.”

I asked him another question.

“Okay, then what is a good reason to live? Are there different qualities to these reasons? Can there be good and bad ones?”

“Yep, definitely. For me, there are a bunch of criteria. But one of the biggest ones is that the reason to live has to necessitate your existence.”

“For example,” he said, “take Mao Zedong. He felt, to some degree, that his existence was needed to ameliorate the lives of Chinese people at the time. Even though he made mistakes.”

I thought about it… a reason to live that somewhat needs you.

“Well,” I said, “under that definition… let me think. I think the only reason I can come up with is a cyclical one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe the only reason to live is to seek an answer to all of this nonsense. There simply has to be an answer. Otherwise, I’m always stuck in the agnostic camp, since I don’t know if God exists or not.”

Then the conversation shifted again. This time towards God.

“What about God then?” I asked. “Doesn’t God make it logically coherent? At least emotionally, it feels satisfying.”

“True,” he said. “But even if you do find an abstract God, what good does that do? How does it inform you practically speaking? You’ll still be confused. whenever you're unsure, you start over again. Because you started from the agnostic camp.”

“Fair enough. Have you considered major religions? Like Christianity?”

“To be fair, I haven’t really put those through scrutiny. But yes, fair point. I probably should check those out too.”

And that was where we ended the conversation before he headed to Shenzhen.

Shoutout to Phil for the great convo.

I still don’t know if I believe that a “meaningless reason to live” is enough. Part of me wants something more satisfying. Something that doesn’t just work emotionally, but feels true under some sort of logical structure.

but oh well… maybe meaning isn’t something to be found so easily, and for now, I think my answer is still the same:

I’m living to keep looking.

I sat with this question today.

And honestly, I thought for a long while.

I don’t know exactly what I want my life to look like. But I know I don’t want to live by default.

The question came from one of Ali Abdaal’s journaling prompts, and it made me realize how rarely I actually sit down and ask myself what I’m building toward.

I usually think about goals in terms of what I want to achieve.

But this question forced me to think less about outcomes and more about the kind of person I want to become.

Here’s what I wrote:

I don’t know what my ideal life would look like but I think I want to be continually learning. I want to be in a place where I can be in position to inspire and help others, in whatever way possible. I also hope that I can teach people that life isn’t like school - you can just do things you are passionate about and make it work. I hope to inspire more people to not just work in vain but look introspectively to think about the deeper reason behind the reason they do things. I am currently on a journey to find my deeper why in life, and I hope to bring countless more others along this journey with me so they can live a life they are not just content with but feel fulfilled and excited everyday.

The second question was similarly interesting:

What end/intermediary goal should the job I’m pursuing bring?

1.I want to connect with more like minded people who are also contemplating about life, and inspire others who also feel this deep seated mismatch to think about how to get started, & how to live a fulfilling life.

2.I want to be able to help others find meaning in an ever evolving world. I believe that more and more people will start to feel restless and begin the search for meaning, but an equally large proportion of people will never have the courage to start thinking about it/procrastinate finding it through modern day sedatives like social media. I want to share my insights with people and transform even just one person’s outlook on life.

3.I want to be able to achieve financial freedom with this. I want to be able to support my parents comfortably so I have more time to think, try, experiment with crazy ideas, and put money toward causes I genuinely believe in.

4.I want to be able to connect with other creators/builders that I like. I hope to collaborate with cool people and work on interesting projects. I hope to always be learning, learning from others, learning from the best in every domain and field and creating a lasting impact on people’s lives.

5. I hope to scale my impact to discover even more genuine human connection. I think part of what makes a good life is not just connection but this growing sense of belief that you can serve others in a deep capacity you never imagined possible. I hope to be interacting with the people I’m helping with and develop a true connection with them.

I don’t think I have a clean answer yet.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the goal isn’t to have a perfectly defined five-year plan. Maybe it’s to keep asking better questions, pay attention to what makes us feel alive, and slowly build a life that feels more chosen than inherited.

I’m still figuring this out. But I think I’d rather live in the uncertainty of asking these questions than spend years optimizing for a life I never actually wanted.

“How long have you been working here?” I asked Ms Wu, the head of volunteering at the food bank.

“About 9 years? It’s been some of the best times of my life”

“What made it so special?”

“I feel like I was at a turning point in my life. I spent half of my life working in sales roles at big luxury companies, Hermès, jewelry shops shops. I’m a very straightforward person. I’m not good at feigning flattery and all that. But where I worked I was always servicing rich people. so when I found out about Food Angel (the food bank) I realised this was what I wanted. Funny enough, they rejected me 3 times before finally letting me work here. “

The conversation went on and she shared about how she found the most meaning through volunteering.

I don’t know about you but when I had this conversation I was pretty moved. Maybe it was the sheer look of sincerity in her eyes as she said it. But I thought: Service. What does that have to do with meaning?

I started my semester looking into volunteering. Not because I was by nature a very charitable person (although I really wish I was), but because I kept hearing the common trope: serve others and you’ll live a life worth living. So meaning was precisely what I was after.

The author of “the courage to be disliked” pointed to a similar idea: our lives are governed by our relationships. All of our emotions, regardless of whether you like it or not, are shaped in some way by our social relationships. He gave a thought experiment: try imagining yourself in a world where you are the only being, how would you derive any emotion?

I remember thinking about this and brainstorming ways in which an isolated person can still live a life worth living. For instance, they can look inwards and explore the basic fabric of the self. But anyways, that’s a side tangent.

So then how does volunteering bring about meaning? Is there any specific reason why people pursue them as their life calling? Are people inherently selfish for pursuing such altruistic activities?

These are questions I set out to understand. But so far, my answer is as follows. It’s not necessarily that volunteering brings meaning. I think almost no one argues that volunteering brings about fulfilment. There is something very primitive about the idea of servicing the vulnerable. But meaning on the other hand? My understanding of meaning thus far is loose one. I define meaning as lived fulfilment that is theoretically sound. What I mean by that is, one cannot have a meaningful life if he merely does what brings about fulfilment. He can feel fulfilled but he may not feel meaning since he cannot ascertain why he feels fulfilled. (Blind meaning/faith) But this is not an argument to be idle and only interrogate the idea of meaning itself. This semester taught me that meaning is something not static, but rather something that is actively being understood, wrestled with, and shaped as you engage in everyday activities. You cannot simply intellectually understand whether something is meaningful. There’s something more at work. I think sometimes emotions speak louder than pure intellectual logic.

So does volunteering give you meaning? Idk, but it certainly placates the mind. I can’t rationalise it but it almost feels like it helps you be more aware and gradually changes your heart's posture. Gratefulness is something that I joke with my friends a lot, but also something I think I need more of. Volunteering I think helps you build up a capacity to feel. So when a lot of people say that you have to be empathetic to volunteer, I think it’s actually the opposite. Volunteering breeds humility, gratefulness, and a greater appreciation for life.

P.S: I have a faint guess that most people that do volunteer long term might not necessarily be naturally disposed to altruistic work. I think it’s through working that makes their hearts change.

This year’s suco felt nothing like last year’s. Admittedly, I did come in with pretty high expectations.

I’ve been calling this year a pursuit of self actualisation. From deciding at the end of last semester to go all in and train for the Hong Kong climbing team at Japan, I knew that deep down it wasn’t just climbing. I wanted to find my true calling.

But…

did I find my true calling?

Over the gap semester, I’ve experienced with numerous things, from going all in on things I personally enjoy (like climbing) to things that help others( volunteering) to the typical self improvement process (learning and building), I found that none of these in isolation provides fulfillment. It may bring a whole lot of satisfaction and comfort and heck, I might even feel a bit of fulfillment. But deep down I knew something was missing.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m super grateful to even arrive at the point where I realise the three things above (when balanced well) can sustain my daily morale. But this past week at summer conference showed me something that I hadn’t accounted for. Community.

This is my second year at suco. And for people that don’t know, Suco is a summer conference organized by reformed university fellowship, a Christian camp of sorts that is dedicated to teaching, learning, competing and enjoying the gospel. For starters, I am not a Christian, but a lot of my good friends are so I kinda got brought into RUF in my freshman year. Seeing the guys I knew from a while back again was quite a way to start the week. But beyond that, it was the people that I barely knew before the trip that made it so worthwhile. There’s so many names that I can’t begin to enumerate. People that I didn’t really know and people I knew the names of but never talked to. Everyone I saw during the camp was amazing. On top of that, great conversation and great good of course.

Part of what made this week so good for me owes to my recent exploration into meditation. The start of SUCO marked my third week into meditating every morning. It was the week on self introspection and many of the meditation sessions were on “finding the thinker” & “observing the inner mind “ were perfect for this week. I feel like meditation has this insane power to quiet your mind. In today’s world, with such rampant anxiety, distraction and stress, meditation really is a superpower.

Meditation has this insane power to quiet the mind. A year ago, I was that semi anxious kid that would go around, try to lean into different groups, trying to find where I fit. But this year, I guess with the help of meditation and just extended “sedimenting” abroad— alone, for the most part— helped me connect with people with a deeper sense of security. I didn’t seek connection. I simply received. And that was empowering.

Moving onwards this week, some of the things I want to hold to myself include growing my sense of curiosity and initiative when it comes to reaching out to people that I may not necessarily be close friends with, but genuinely think are super cool people and thoughtful. This is something that I haven’t done a great job of in the past and I really hope I can find the time and motivation to reach out. I also hope to keep meditating, potentially even signing up for an offline course to see if there’s any significant difference. & lastly, to stay grateful. I always joke about this with my friends (ever since high school) but sometimes, no amount of reflection beats a short time alone marveling & feeling grateful for the amazing events that transpire in your life.

Urban exploring (termed urbex) is an increasingly popular hobby amongst the new generation. Starting around in the 1970s, it is a hobby where people visit old, derelict buildings to experience history first hand. Picture this: you’re standing in the hallway of a 1970 tobacco factory, no glass panels between you and every object in the building. It’s history made alive.

I honestly don’t remember how I got started with urban exploring. Lucent, a good friend from high school, first brought me to an abandoned hospital back in my senior year of high school. But at the time I didn’t really understand the point behind going into old dirty places. I thought it was only for people who wanted a fright night.

One night, when me and my brother were thinking of things to do. I think we must’ve wanted to do something high adrenaline, so we decided to hit up one of hong kong’s oldest mansion — 顏成坤大宅. Located in Wanchai, central, it used to be home to one of Hong Kong’s richest transport moguls. Yan, who founded the HK central bus line back in the 1900s, has since deserted it and his descendants rarely visit.

The act of exploring this buildings is incredibly exciting, especially when there is a good chance you may get caught. You see, urban exploring sometimes involve private premises with guards in check. The mansion me and my brother visited had an active guard, which really took us by surprise. It ended up being the only urbex spot that we didn’t get to explore. In fact, my brother got huge gash when escaping through the barbed wires. We barely escaped.

What makes urbex fun is the combination of both adrenaline and the fact that you are doing something, possibly very few humans have done. For every location, there will only be a handful of people who can ever see them first hand, before the buildings themselves get taken down. Most urbex spots are buildings waiting to be demolished, refurnished to fit our ever evolving urban landscape, which is why it is so beautiful to see them before they’re fully gone.

Urbex also taught me a lot about myself. Treading in the grey areas of legality, I found much joy exploring, using creatives ways to get into these highly inaccessible areas. It taught me creativity, alertness, improvisation, and living in the moment. Though you really do have to live in the moment, otherwise you’ll be caught.

Fun times, going to run it back when I get back to HK.

Just came back from a pretty interesting cable car ride to the top of Maokong hill.

We visited a quaint looking tea shop, where rows of books can be see against the backdrop of plaques saying things like “一等獎“, “二等獎”. Inside the shop, there was a bookshelf. A book titled “生命很短，但我很懶”, which translates to “life is short, but I’m lazy” caught my eye.

A couple pages I already started feeling the gravity of the book, but I wasn’t sure what it was until around… an hour in. The book describes many different important life lessons, mainly of which are common tropes that I grew up listening to, such as: “don’t blame the situation, work on improving yourself”, “the best way to prepare for your future is to work hard in the moment”. But for some reason, I felt that it really spoke to me.

Most of the book were simply recounting important lessons, but it felt especially relevant to me. Just last night, I had quite a long reflection where I reflected on my lack of discipline. I constantly set goals for myself but never ever follow through with them. Countless examples since my childhood shows me that I keep setting overly ambitious goals just to fall short by quite a mile.

In Chinese saying, this is the classic “三分鐘熱度”. (three minute hotness- which literally translates to my motivation lasting for three minutes). Of course, I can stay motivated for longer than that. For example, this semester, I trained for climbing for almost 3 months straight. I also coded an app nonstop for several weeks straight. However, they all have one common flaw, it inevitably stops when my motivation dies down.

Most people would probably call it a lack of discipline. But I think the root cause is something deeper than that. So… I went on a little deep dive reading the book today.

In the book, they talked about how people like me always complaining about not wanting live a ordinary life (不想過的碌碌無為，卻老是放棄時說平凡可貴: don’t want to live an ordinary life, but you always have a fallback saying about how being ordinary is a blessing) Not sure if my translation’s right on this one, maybe someone can correct me. But yes, point is: I spent more time thinking than doing, and always soften the blow for my own inconsistency with “is this even worth it?”

But this isn’t the first time I’ve had this sort of thought. I always jump to start initiatives but never end up finishing through with them. It’s often easier to openly proclaim a challenge than to work silently in the trenches. Above all, it’s a procrastination issue. I don’t fear failure. I just fear “hard work”.

So what’s the cure? After giving it some thought, I initially thought about starting just yet another challenge to see if I can follow through with it. But I’ve decided to continue with what I already have. But this time, I’m going to do it differently. I’m not going to openly disclose my goal. Not even to my parents and friends. I’d just have to work on it until I hit my own personal milestone. And in truth, I think this is my best bet at telling myself that I’m capable of following through with goals I set for myself.

There’s also a couple other interesting points covered in the book, unrelated to my goal setting for myself. One of which is the idea of direction (similar to my own problem albeit in a different light). The book talked about how we’re living in THE era filled with possibilities and opportunities, but with that also comes unprecedented levels of confusion and indirection. The author gave an simple yet powerful analogy: you should handpick the books you read, since your memory is finite — you should keep it stuffed with significant content. Same goes for our daily lives. We should handpick only a finite number of things that we should focus on. As for myself, trying to concurrently devote myself to app building, whilst competing for the national team, and reading lots of philosophy is not impossible, but for me to get good at all of them, I would either have to be really good at time management or have a really bad sleep schedule. Having too many goals simply renders my attention too scattered.

Anyways, coming back from the teashop my brain cleared up a little. I think I’m starting to understand what the phrase action speaks louder than words mean in my context.

Honestly my brain’s kinda fried so these thoughts are probably quite incoherent. I’ll update this newsletter a month later to see how far I’ll go.

For a long time, I thought social media addiction was only a problem for people who were constantly on their phones. But after taking a lot of days off my phone during this gap semester, I realised the problem goes both ways.

Even when I choose to stay off my phone, the people around me often aren’t. And somehow, that makes me want to reach for mine too — even when I don’t actually need it.

That’s the part I hadn’t fully understood before. Phone addiction is not just personal. It’s social. It feeds off the environment around us.

Everyone around you is half-there, half-scrolling, half-distracted. So you start doing the same. Not because you want to, but because being fully present can almost feel unnatural when nobody else is.

That cycle feels like one of the quiet drivers of modern loneliness.

The average American spends around 5 hours a day on their phone. Over a year, that adds up to roughly two months. And if you include computers, a lot of us are probably spending 7–10 hours a day on screens. That’s close to half of our waking life spent on digital devices.

That honestly feels alarming.

Back in my senior year of high school, my younger brother and I did a digital detox challenge. We stayed off Instagram and most forms of media for nearly two years. Two years without constant stimulation.

But the strange thing is that in today’s world, media is also one of the most powerful ways to share ideas, build things, and reach people. So for me, completely walking away from it no longer feels realistic — at least not right now.

So I’ve been asking myself: what does a more sustainable way of living actually look like?

I don’t have a perfect answer yet. But for the next month, I’m trying one thing: Saturdays are going to be non-negotiable.

One day each week, I want to do something outside my usual routine. Maybe that means going on a hike with strangers, trying a new food spot with new people, or doing something slightly unhinged like running 10 miles across Hong Kong.

My hope is that this becomes a reminder to myself that I can still make conscious decisions about how I spend my time.

Long term, though, I’m still unsure what sustainable living looks like in a world where so much of life happens through a screen.

And on a side note, I’ve realised I haven’t been giving myself enough time to reflect lately either. That probably needs to become non-negotiable too.

Shoutout to one of my favourite YouTubers, Discover Connection. They’ve inspired me to talk to more strangers and be more open to the world around me. On a normal day, that still doesn’t come naturally to me. But maybe that’s exactly why it matters.

Then, spontaneously, I proposed to my parents that I would go meet her in Japan. Her name? Climbing. (had to fit the valentines theme)

Coming to Japan for a month has changed my perspective about climbing as a sport discipline as a whole. Training at B-pump-ogikubo, one of the most infamously hard and sandbagged gyms in the world has allowed me to meet people from all walks of life. I’m talking professors, aspiring professionals (like yours truly), actual pro climbers, kiddos, SWEs, even nuclear scientists… the list goes on. But one thing that unites us all is our shared passion and drive for the sport. That burning passion to get 1% better every day. Showing up and training and giving our absolute all until our fingertips start aching. Being surrounded by that energy, from professionals to casuals to little kids who send harder than me, pushed me every single day to train harder and take strides towards perfecting my art.

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect to confront on this trip: I don’t think climbing is the thing that will give me enduring purpose. When I first took time off to come to Japan, I thought being able to climb every day would be the best thing I could ever ask for. And honestly? It really is quite awesome. I absolutely loved climbing here. But if you asked me whether I’d drop everything and just climb, my answer would now be no. And why no exactly? I’m not really sure — which is sort of why I’m writing this piece. I want to share where I’m at in the middle of my climbing journey, almost like a mental checklist for myself to see how far I’ve come and where I stand mentally.

During this trip, I spent 70% of my time climbing and 30% of my time reflecting. In between sessions, I delved into the indie-hacking space, talking to founders who have scaled their own SaaS products to hundreds of thousands. I joined two hackathons to keep myself accountable and continuously sharpen my coding skills. I built a climbing analysis app and an app that connects nomad travellers, people like myself here in Japan, with other nomad travellers. It’s been really cool through this entire process.

But something still feels a little off. It comes back to the perennial question: why exactly am I doing this, and what meaning do I attribute to the things I do? Frankly speaking, I still haven’t found an answer. What I have found is spontaneous bursts of passion. Some days I wake up and feel genuinely fired up about the things I’m working on. Other days, I’m just not that excited. I’m still doing the things I think I ought to be doing, but I’m not really sure why. I don’t know if that’s normal. I’ve thought about it a lot.

But this trip has also shown me just how important it is to be working on something you’re genuinely passionate and intellectually curious about. Taking climbing for example, I spent on average up to 7 hours at the gym without realizing the time had passed. It’s just that enjoyable. But I’m sure some of yall might think — what if it’s your own job? Not everyone gets to go professional in climbing. And my answer is still the same: find something you’re curious about. It doesn’t have to be your ultimate goal but it definitely cannot be something you’re working on without any intentionality behind that choice.

I realised this through a mix of things. One of which was my Timeleft dinners during my stay. For those that don’t know, Timeleft is a social media platform that brings strangers together for dinner. I joined initially to stress test my own app in the same niche. But what I found out from talking to these complete strangers is that when you’re young, you’ve got the leverage. The leverage doesn’t die out, but when people get older they become more risk averse. At least from what I’ve seen so far.

So what’s my plan after this? Again, idk — because I think that’s the only truthful answer I have. Calling my brother the other day, I told him I’m going to set some goals for myself by the time I graduate, heck just for the sake of it since I’m still lost and I’ll share them here:

Inspire 100,000 people in some way or form — don’t know through what yet.

Find a techy cofounder and scale a consumer-facing app to 10k MRR.

Pitch to Mark Cuban (I know he’s retired but he’s my favorite Shark Tank judge).

One idea I have been sitting with, though, is starting a podcast. I want to reach out to people who I think lead fulfilling lives and interview them about their compass in life — why they find their life meaningful, why they wake up every day doing the thing they do. Less of a career advice show, more of a personal biography type podcast. One that interrogates more deeply into the deeper whys behind why people do things. I figured since I’m facing this question myself, I might as well use it as an opportunity to do something that could also help other people on the same path. Let me know if that’s something you’d listen to.

Today is my last full day of climbing in Japan. Had one of my best sessions. Some hard metrics have actually gone up — I can do around 28 pull-ups in a row now, and I’ve hit benchmarks in climbing that I never thought were possible when I started last summer. Going to be a tough ride from here. But Japan has been my first step in taking small risks.

Valentines day was spent with my good mates here, climbing. Met some incredible people who inspire and fuel me to keep pushing through my climbing journey. Japan’s a great, great place. I just really hope that someday, hopefully in the near future, I’ll be able to figure out what I really love doing.

Happy valentines everyone, and sorry for disappointing those who came in looking for who my date was. It’s climbing man, cmon.

As for how it’s going — since coding in public, I started a twitter account(@Marvin Tai) to document my journey, connected with super cool builders from across the world, and even got the chance to speak with some of them over call. I also applied to Duke’s Startup Showcase with one of my apps (2ndegree). Climbing wise, it’s been the highlight - meeting olympic winners, training with world cup winners, and making new friends with other aspiring national team kids is one experience I cannot forget. All of this has been incredibly exciting, but it came at a slight cost of my sleep deprivation, which I’m trying to fix.

Group picture with Yoshiyuki Ogata, World Cup Winner

What else have I done? In my free time on weekends, I’ve been watching some Alex O Connor videos, videos on free will and determinism. Below attached is a log of my mini “debate” with ChatGPT on this topic of emotivism (mostly me playing devil’s advocate):

Taking a gap semester in Japan is honestly something I never thought I would do personally. I remember freshman year me had a long list of startup ideas, said I was going to commit to them but never did. So when it came around to actually doing this, I can’t lie there was a quiver of doubt in my mind.

But I’m really glad I came to Japan. Even though I have to admit, on certain days, I would feel just the same: Lazy, unmotivated, and unproductive. Not in the sense of doing actual "work”, but that I didn’t really use this time as a space for reflection and learning as I said I would. One thing I really need to work on is doing more reading on my own (whether that’s watching and listening to podcasts or just taking time off to journal - like what I’m doing now). For anyone who also journals, pls let me know how you can stay consistent haha because sometimes I really don’t feel like it. (I know I should do it, but I’d appreciate some tips :))

More than anything, this trip has taught me that you learn the most when you’re working even though you don’t feel like it. And I’m not saying doing work that you don’t care about, but work that you know is good for you but you just can’t summon your body inertia to do that work. Very cliche, I know, but I guess this was a newfound realization.

With a little bit over 3 weeks left in Japan, I really want to take this time and build out a more effective schedule.

If you’ve read until here, appreciate ya fam and let’s catchup over call because I got tons of free time here in Japan!

Signing off with a semi-distracted headspace,

Marvin

At some point, I realized I cannot keep stalling this process. If I don’t take initiative to ask these questions seriously, life will quietly decide for me. And I don’t want that.

As a junior studying at Duke University, I feel like most of my life looks good on paper. Modest grades, great friends, good physical health, things that most people would be content with. And that’s not to say that I’m not grateful for all these things. But lately, in the midst of all my friends applying to jobs and their “dream internships”, I couldn’t help but think: What is the point of it all?

I am someone who enjoys reasoning from first principles. Whether it is Math, Computer Science, or Philosophy, I love interrogating the suppositions that undergird the basis for our belief. So then naturally, when it came to job search and post-college life, I began to think… what is the basis for what I choose to do?

Needless to say, the question of career choice and following your dreams is not an uncommon one. I’ve grown up listening to advice in the likes of “You’ll never know what you like until you try”, “Philosophy does not apply to the real world; wait till you get your first job”, “What’s life but to honor your family and live a life you’ll remember?” These are all good, cogent advice, and I see merit in all of them. But yet I still found myself yearning for something more definite — or more grounded.

This brings me to why I’m writing in public.

For the longest time, I’ve thought about these questions either in private or with my closest friends and family. Unsurprisingly, our conversations either went in circles or never got anywhere. So, as a kind of headstart to my new years resolution, I decided to start writing here: journaling my thoughts, lessons, successes, and failures as I try to think more carefully about meaning, work, and the kind of life I want to build, and most importantly, learn and connect with people who have first-handedly experienced and thought about these questions of meaning, faith, and work.

Writing in public also forces clarity. It slows me down, makes me process ideas more carefully, and helps me distill what I actually believe…or don’t.

So who is this for?

This newsletter is for those who are doing fine on paper, but deep down feels a mismatch between who they are in the present and their “true selves” living a life of meaning and purpose. It’s for those who don’t want to live life in passing and are okay with saying “I don’t know”, at least for now, to the broad questions of meaning and purpose.

I don’t know where this journey will lead me. I just know that I want to be thinking more carefully before choosing a life, and writing seems like just the place to start.

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