Everything Under the Sun

September | Family and Career  |   Week 38 | 9/24/2023 What are your career goals? It's been a very poignant time recently, as I contemplate the next stage of my career journey and of my life. Where do I want to live, what kind of work do I want to do, how much of it do I want to do, and for whom? For all the unanswered questions, one thing is obvious; the time of a vast landscape of potential is over. I'm not choosing my college major anymore, not choosing between a grad degree or an internship, not even choosing the field where I'll work, I'm choosing from a much smaller set of possibilities, constrained by my own choices and decisions up to this point. But at the same time, paradoxically, I've never felt so much agency and freedom in my future. I have good experience, good degrees, good compensation, good references and good options.  I could contemplate how I arrived here, dwell on or praise my decisions, decry or celebrate my options, and simply live in the pas...

September | Family and Career  |   Week 37 | 9/17/2023 Where does your career fit into your life? Work to live or live to work? The poetic juxtaposition, pontificated and professed towards the attitude of one's career. Steel-manning both sides, on one hand there are those with identarian careers like lawyers, doctors, professors, who work because their livelihood is their identity and their identity is their work. This runs contrary to those with white collar or blue collar jobs whom work to live, seeing that their job is part of an assembly line of manual or intellectual output. It makes sense, spend an exorbitant amount of time apprenticing, either academically (PhD) or physically (blacksmith), and one's identity will codevelop in conjunction with the duration allocated to said craft. Also, because of the specific and somewhat self-evident nature of the work, it is far easier to attach an identity to those careers. Doctors know medicine. Lawyers know the law. Professors know...

September | Family and Career  |   Week 36 | 9/10/2023 Why create your own family? Many compelling arguments have been made for why one should have a family; duty, biology, genealogy, history, morality, mortality. All these arguments have merit, we are the product of families going back hundreds of thousands of years, the product of a biologic imperative, the product of legacy, the product of a sense of duty to ancestry, to history and to religious imposition. Each of those arguments appeal to me at different times depending on the emotional state I find myself in - when I'm feeling nostalgic, when I'm feeling dutiful, when I'm feeling mortal - but one argument not listed here appeals to me regardless of emotions, one made from logic.  There are only so many things to do in life, [1] make friends, [2] travel, [3] push the body, [4] experience awe, [5] gain wisdom, [6] purchase material goods, [7] fall in love, [8] raise kids, [9] grow old, and [10] give back. The counter ...

September | Family and Career  |   Week 35 | 9/3/2023 What does family mean to you and how do you honor it?  In the grand narrative of one's life, there are characters and context which one does not choose - where we're born, who our parents are, how many siblings we have, what languages we're taught, what information we're given, how we're treated or loved - a list so long it's impossible to delineate the varying degrees of impact for each. The exposition of one's life is granted to us not crafted by us . It's up for debate, how much of the proceeding narrative is out of our control due to the annals of ancestry, but we know undeniably that there is agency prerequisite for the rising actions, climax and falling actions of one's own narrative. The stoics have a famous aphorism, Amor Fati , lover of fate. We colloquially equate fate to the final destination of our life - the resolution - where we end up, our "eventual fate". But fate stipul...

August | Travel and Experience  |   Week 34 | 8/27/2023 Experiencing life  I have vivid memories as a child, getting battered by the waves at the beach, one after another as I attempted to body surf with my older brother and my Dad. In reality, they were catching the waves and I was surviving, but nothing was more exciting than being out there with the men, facing nature. I felt alive. That feeling was reliably present with any activity even slightly infused with adrenaline as I continued to grow up: rollercoasters, cars, snowboarding. And as I became an adult I found myself craving that feeling more and more. First it was hiking, like Angels Landing in Arizona, then it was skydiving on my 21st birthday and twice more after that, and it hasn't slowed down since. 14,000 foot mountains, 1000 cc motorcycles, black diamonds in the peak of winter, partying in LA; I have a craving for life, for experience, for the fruits of my labor.  When I look back to the days of youth,...