In an 1817 letter, the British poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability.” He defined it as the capability of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

I’ve been thinking about this term since I first heard of it in one of Rosalia’s interviews promoting her album “Lux.” She attributed Keats’ term as an influence in her latest work and general approach to life. This term is also explored in an old post from The Marginalian.1

This term captures fairly well my mental state as I reflect on last year and how I’m approaching 2026.

2025 was an odd year for me. I started it with one intention and ended with another. I had certain hopes and expectations, which did not materialize. I’ve made decisions which to most sidewalk observers would seem like regressions.

I started the year zealous about freelance writing and extending the mainsail of “getting paid to write is getting paid to do what I love.”2 In 2026, I’m scouting LinkedIn job postings like a theater cast list.

I thought 2025 would be the year where I consolidated my writing, earned enough loyal readers to fill out Benaroya music hall, and wistfully refer to 2025 as the year my writing truly evolved, bridging the proverbial “gap” that Ira Glass talks about in the now famous musing on taste and creation. Yet, my writing has become sparse, as many of you have noticed—and remarked with the same politeness taken when telling someone that their fly zipper is down.

These situations, these regressions, have filled my life with uncertainty. Was 2025 “rock bottom”?3 Or in the fog of my circumstances am I still riding a streetcar named desire, steering towards a boulevard of broken dreams?

Oddly enough, the question itself doesn’t awaken the same sort of balmy hands and insomnia that these types of anxieties surfaced years prior. Part of me believes that, no—yes, I should absolutely be pressing the panic button now and reduce uncertainty, and search, search for answers; reason my way out of my doldrums. There is a latent fear that I end up like Ignatius Reilly, the grotesque anti-hero in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces; hardly able to keep a job, dedicated to writing about obscure medieval history, while his Mom is exasperated with her son’s mediocrity and lack of empathy.4

Yet, I’ve become more “chill” with not having everything figured out.

I’ve been reading ’s Meditations for Mortals. There is one passage that encapsulates my evolving relationship with uncertainty:

“the driving force of modern life is the fatally misguided idea that reality can and should be made ever more controllable — and that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control. And so we experience the world as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer.”

This is not to say that I’ve shifted my approach to “jesus take the wheel” mode. Life requires agency, it rewards intrepidness and action. But for so long I’ve tried to bring things under my control—my career, my relationships, the world—with more frustration than success. Reducing uncertainty and bringing things under my control became a game of whack-a-mole where the number of holes doubled at every blink.

Building negative capacity is a tough task worth embracing. It sure beats leaving my relationship with uncertainty unexplored, lest I allow it to kindle a myriad of anxieties and compulsions I concoct and then try to escape from.

And escape I do. Daily. I indulge in the escapism offered by social media and the Internet, which allows me to conveniently ignore the tensions that arise, in the process shortening my attention span, which makes it harder to sit with any feeling. This is how we begin living superficially; trading awe for scrolls and falling into clichés of every kind because we’ve become unable to think about things with enough depth to form original thoughts.5

So my efforts to improve my negative capability have also become a mission to lengthen my attention span, to avoid tapping out whenever I feel fear or discomfort, and to go beyond the superficial in my thoughts and appreciations of everything around me.

*****

Near the end of Meditations, Burkeman asks us to imagine the lives of our medieval ancestors:

“In those days, you couldn’t ever have known with confidence what caused a famine or an outbreak of disease, nor felt reassured that a total eclipse didn’t presage the end of the world. Our ancestors’ inability to find the why with precision would have accustomed them to move through life enveloped in uncertainty about almost everything that was going on, or what might happen next.”

Perhaps this medieval bit of wisdom is what Keats had in mind when penning this term, and this whole piece is essentially a monologue where I tell myself “I’m learning to be ok with not knowing everything” — a hard thing for an overthinker-not-anonymous.

But I also think there is something about negative capability in demanding our attention, seeking depth in our thoughts, even our darkest ones, and not swiping it away as if we were closing an app on our phone. Negative capability is the refusal of irritable reaching for fact and reason. It invites us not to reach, but to learn to sit. To accept that fact and reason may have a place, but when it comes to just plain ol’ living, being is the simplest and hardest thing to do.

“When I have fears that I may cease to be” by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
   Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unrelenting love; – then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Milan Kundera escribió que el hombre desea un mundo “donde el bien y el mal se pueden distinguir claramente, ya que tenemos un impulso innato e irreversible de juzgar antes de entender.”

La situación en Venezuela es imposible. Entre la espada y la pared. Entre el Trumperialismo y la Tiranía Cachapa. El bien y el mal no existen como polos opuestos. Aquí no hay héroes, ni menos libertadores. El “salvador” no es Simón Bolívar, sino alguien con las características de Jabba the Hutt.

El terremoto que desató Trump con la captura de Nicolás Maduro va a agitar a Latinoamérica desde Tijuana hasta la Patagonia. Una región que todavía muestra las cicatrices del colonialismo y siente el ardor de estas con otra intervención de un imperio.

Pienso mucho en la leyenda del “pacto fáustico” que se trata de un hombre que le vende el alma al diablo a cambio de tener todo el conocimiento del mundo. La frase surge cuando pienso en la coyuntura de Venezuela. Y por más que me duela, me temo que a Venezuela no le quedaba otra alternativa que aceptar un Pacto Trumpiano.

En la coyuntura de Venezuela existen dualidades contradictorias que son ciertas a la vez. La tensión que genera afrontar la complejidad de estos elementos se siente como si las tenazas de un cangrejo apretandomé la sien. Lo que ofrezco es una mirada más allá de la narrativa “EEUU malo” o “Maduro bueno,” que son tan simples que suenan bien para Instagram, pero no agregan ninguna comprensión crítica de la situación.

La Situación

El objetivo de Estados Unidos es el petróleo. No nos hagamos los pendejos. Lo que busca la administración de Trump es promover a un gobernante que esté dispuesto a restablecer relaciones con Estados Unidos y que esté dispuesto a darle acceso prioritario a Estados Unidos a las reservas de petróleo más grandes del mundo.1 Barriles por libertad.

Para lograr esta operación, la administración de Trump se ha saltado todos los procesos establecidos en la política americana para tomar este tipo de operación. Lo que resulta con esta operación es que hoy en día, Estados Unidos y sus instituciones son más débiles, y el poder autocrático de Trump se sigue consolidando. Además, la operación es parte de la cortina de humo que Trump quiere formar para distraer al pueblo americano sobre las falencias de su gobierno. Claramente no soy fan de Trump ni de sus mentiras, ni de su narcisismo, ni de su descaro, ni de su falta de respeto por las instituciones. Es un agente del caos con el fin primario de enriquecerse a él y a los que considera leales a él.

Dicho esto, llegamos a esta situación en gran parte porque la dictadura de Nicolás Maduro se robó las elecciones a pesar de que el candidato de la oposición Edmundo González (y la inhabilitada María Corina Machado atrás) las ganó. La oposición venezolana, sagaz en anticipar las artimañas del régimen, logró sacarle copias a las actas de votación para corroborar su clara victoria. Tan contundentes fueron las pruebas y la falta de transparencia del CNE (la entidad que regula las elecciones y está bajo el control del régimen) que tanto el Carter Center, que fue designado como observador internacional bajo el Acuerdo de Barbados del 2023 que el gobierno de Maduro firmó, y la ONU determinaron que las elecciones no pueden ser consideradas como democráticas, con el Carter Center declarando que la elección fue una “grave violación de los principios electorales.”2

Mucho se ha hablado de la violación del derecho internacional y de la soberanía de un pueblo con esta acción militar de Estados Unidos. Es más, yo estoy de acuerdo en que sí se violó el derecho internacional. Pero la soberanía de un país se pierde cuando la voluntad del pueblo se ignora. ¿Qué legitimidad tiene un gobierno que no fue elegido? ¿Qué soberanía existe si se usurpa el poder a través de mentiras y represión? Si exigimos que se respete la soberanía del pueblo venezolano, ¿dónde estaba esa exigencia en el 2024?

Para Maduro, el apoyo de la administración de Biden al Acuerdo de Barbados que la dictadura firmo con la oposición le daba una rampa de salida viable. Para incentivar su firma, la administración de Biden le devolvió al colombiano Alex Saab, hoy ministro de industria del régimen y una figura oscura asociada con la corrupción y el lavado de dinero del régimen, Maduro se comprometía a elecciones libres con veedores internacionales. Maduro incumplió su palabra, inhabilitó a Machado con mañas, y destruyó cualquier legitimidad del proceso democrático en el 2024.

Naturalmente, la respuesta de gran parte de la izquierda ha sido un repudio visceral a esta intervención. Y lo entiendo.

#HandsOffVenezuela

Entiendo las ganas de decir #HandsoffVenezuela, de protestar el imperialismo, y exigir que la soberanía de nuestros pueblos se respete. Yo comparto esa posición y veo la intervención de Estados Unidos con consternación.

Pero la pregunta que me he hecho durante las últimas semanas anticipando este acontecimiento es la siguiente: cuando hablamos de #HandsoffVenezuela, ¿de qué manos estamos hablando—las de un régimen cuyas manos se han manchado de tanta sangre que ahora son coloradas? ¿O del gobierno gringo, desesperado por untarse sus manos en oro negro?

¿Cómo se puede argumentar por la soberanía de un pueblo sometido por décadas bajo un gobierno que destruyó la economía, las instituciones, el proceso electoral, y que a raíz de eso ha causado la diáspora de más de 8 millones de venezolanos, o 25% del país? ¿Se puede decir que las cosas van bien cuando 25% del país huye? ¿Es coherente y serio decir que la diáspora se debe a las sanciones de EEUU (una línea argumentativa muy rebuscada y que curiosamente ignora la realidad económica y social de Venezuela antes de las sanciones en 2014)?

¿Qué alternativas quedaban?

La vía democrática se extinguió. Maduro cerró esa puerta al emborracharse del poder y de su propio narcisismo.

La otra opción viable podría haber sido la presión de la comunidad internacional, en particular en Latinoamérica. Pero los gobiernos que hoy reniegan y gritan sobre la intervención de Estados Unidos en la región abdicaron su responsabilidad con declaraciones tibias y ningún tipo de exigencia clara de que se respete la voluntad del pueblo.

Lula de Brasil pidió las actas, la dictadura nunca las presentó y Brasil opto por no escalar la repercusiones al regimen fuera de echarlo de la alianza BRICS (que en realidad no le hace daño a la dictadura). Sheinbaum en México se limita a no dar comentarios, y decidirse por una neutralidad frente a las violaciones de derechos humanos y la burla a la democracia del régimen. Y Petro en Colombia, que hasta recientemente se atrevió a decir que Maduro era un dictador, mantiene una estrecha relación, bien documentada, con el chavismo, a pesar de que la dictadura es una de las amenazas de seguridad más grandes de Colombia, ya que en su frontera le da resguardo al ELN, la guerrilla que en el gobierno de Petro ha crecido su presencia territorial un 22%.3 Los homólogos de Maduro decidieron lavarse las manos y mirar al otro lado, cuando era su responsabilidad mantener la soberanía de la región.

La única opción que quedaba era un conflicto civil, que el mismo pueblo venezolano tome las armas para sacar a Maduro del poder. Pero para mí es imposible, como colombiano, proponer una guerra civil como medicina. Un conflicto armado en Venezuela sería una quimioterapia que sumergiría al país en décadas de miseria. No es una opción viable.

El régimen chavista lleva más de 25 años aterrorizando Venezuela.4 Se destruyeron las instituciones, la capacidad productiva del país, la libertad de prensa, la libertad de expresión, el sistema judicial, la separación de poderes, la integridad del proceso democrático, el respeto a la propiedad privada, la dignidad del pobre, la fe de toda esa gente que votó por Chávez porque Venezuela sí necesitaba un gobierno que respetara y cuidara a las personas más reprimidas y humildes… pero no al costo de destrozar el país entero.

Y vemos el mismo patrón comenzando en Estados Unidos. Para mí los paralelos sobre lo que hemos visto con Venezuela y lo que veo con horror en la administración de Trump son claros: En su segundo mandato, Trump ha debilitado las instituciones, consolidado el poder ejecutivo, afectado la capacidad productiva del país a través de aranceles sin sentido, y establecido la corrupción y el enriquecimiento de su cúpula más cercana como si fuera una ocurrencia única y que no se debe cuestionar.

Las Secuelas

Ahora no soy tan ingenuo en pensar que ahora que Maduro se fue, los arcoíris van a volver, los papagayos volarán en júbilo y los loros cantarán “libertad!” Hemos llegado al punto más frágil de Venezuela desde el 11 de abril del 2002.

La intervención americana martiriza al chavismo, le da alas a la narrativa de que los gringos son intervencionistas y los pueden caracterizar como los malos de la película Avatar. Esto puede desatar un conflicto interno, esa guerra, esa quimioterapia a la que le tengo tanto pavor.

Le puede dar alas a Trump de seguir en su descarado plan de intervención como cortina de humo, y llegar a hacer lo mismo en Colombia, donde tiene a un presidente con un perfil muy similar a Maduro (y también una personalidad muy similar al mismo Trump). Colombia no es Venezuela, pero desafortunadamente el gobierno de Petro, objetivamente, sí nos acercó más al chavismo que ahorcó a Venezuela.

O peor aún, temo que individuos en el régimen de Maduro estén dispuestos a negociar con Trump para que los deje mantenerse en el poder mientras le dan acceso a los Estados Unidos a las reservas del petróleo. Este sería el peor de los casos, pero viable ya que a Trump no le importa mucho la democracia.

Mi miedo principal es que a largo plazo se consolide una nueva oligarquía con más afinidad a Estados Unidos que esencialmente le robe los recursos a Venezuela y los mantenga en una recuperación frágil que haga a la gente pensar que, sí volvieron la democracia y las instituciones, pero para qué si la élite se sigue robando todo.

Este patrón no es hipotético. Es el patrón que Colombia conoce bien: cambiamos gobiernos, firmamos acuerdos, prometemos reformas, y la concentración de riqueza apenas se mueve. Es cambiar un grupo de ladrones por otro grupo de ladrones con mejor branding.5

¿Para qué le sirvió a Venezuela organizarse, ganar las elecciones, preservar las actas, hacer todo bien, si al final la “libertad” que recuperan es solo la libertad de elegir entre oligarcas? Eso nos dejaría en el mismo punto en el que partió el chavismo. No se puede repetir este ciclo, ni para el chavismo ni para las circunstancias que le dieron alas a ese movimiento.

Ahora las secuelas para el mundo también existen. Aunque no compro ese argumento de que porque ahora Estados Unidos operó militarmente en Venezuela, eso le da luz verde a otros titanes como Rusia y China a hacer lo mismo. Perdón, pero Rusia y China han operado con luz verde por décadas. En el caso de Rusia, ¿acaso nos olvidamos de Georgia, o Crimea, antes de la invasión a Ucrania con el fin de anexarlo territorialmente (una distinción versus la agenda de Estados Unidos)? ¿O qué decir de China? Nos hemos concentrado tanto en la constante amenaza y el deseo explícito de retomar Taiwán pero nos hemos olvidado de cómo anexó el Tíbet ilegalmente bajo el derecho internacional y cómo está usando su poder económico para subyugar a gran parte del territorio africano a través de su nueva ruta de seda donde usan la deuda como arma económica para ganar control.

La secuela inmediata a nivel internacional es que esto deja en transparente evidencia la falta de poder de la ONU para contrarrestar cualquier acción que atente contra los derechos humanos y el derecho internacional. Es más, yo diría que eso quedó claro cuando a pesar del consenso casi unánime de la ONU sobre la masacre en Gaza a manos de Israel y la evidencia de crímenes de lesa humanidad, tanto Israel como Estados Unidos no han sufrido consecuencias por la destrucción total de Gaza.6

Las preguntas sobre precedentes internacionales y soberanía son válidas. Son las preguntas que me he hecho por varias semanas. Pero vuelvo al mismo punto: ¿qué precedente se creó al dejar que Maduro se robara las elecciones con evidencia de ese robo? ¿Qué soberanía existe cuando la voz democrática de un pueblo es silenciada a punta de mentiras?

Escuchen Al Pueblo

Venezuela, de cierta forma, es aquel fantasma del futuro del libro A Christmas Carol de Charles Dickens. Yo les pregunto a los que hoy dicen #HandsOffVenezuela: si esto fuera Estados Unidos, empolvado en las cenizas de un país destruido, ¿no desearían un Deus Ex Machina, un milagro que le ponga fin a la dictadura?

Imaginemos que el golpe de estado de Trump el 6 de enero del 2021 hubiera sido exitoso. ¿Podríamos decir entonces que Estados Unidos fuera legítimamente gobernado por Trump? ¿Se podría decir que fuese un país soberano si se hubiera posesionado Trump ilegalmente? ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre este hipotético escenario (que afortunadamente no pasó) versus lo que sí pasó en Venezuela?

Hay muchos que se olvidan de los muertos, los desaparecidos del chavismo. No los olvidemos. No nos olvidemos de los que hoy en día están en El Helicoide, la casa matriz de las torturas de la dictadura. Escuchemos a las víctimas, a todos los venezolanos en la diáspora que anhelan regresar.

Antes de formular cualquier opinión flash para sentirte parte de la conversación en las redes sociales o por puro instinto de hacerle resistencia a Trump, vale la pena preguntar cuánto sabes sobre la dictadura chavista, la manera en que se destruyeron las instituciones, el derecho a la propiedad privada, y cómo persiguen, mienten, y torturan. Hasta el momento no he visto a NINGÚN venezolano que no esté celebrando la salida de Maduro, así ellos mismos tengan conciencia de que todo no está resuelto, o sin tener ninguna afinidad a Trump.

Admito que esta situación me lleva a un conflicto interno en donde siento rabia y alivio, preocupación y satisfacción. La situación es imposible, pero el pueblo venezolano merece un país digno de su grandeza, de su belleza, del calor de su gente y su gracia. Y escucho su júbilo, el júbilo de las víctimas de la dictadura, y se me hace difícil imponer mi visión de la manera perfecta de ejecutar un cambio de gobierno frente al llanto de un pueblo que se ha quedado sin comida y sin lágrimas.

Yo sí pido #HandsOffVenezuela, pero empecemos con las manos de la dictadura de Maduro.

Milan Kundera wrote that man desires a world “where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, since we have an innate and irreversible impulse to judge before understanding.”

The situation in Venezuela is impossible. Between a rock and a hard place. Between Trumperialism and The Cachapa Tyranny. Good and evil don’t exist as opposite poles. There are no heroes here, much less liberators. The “savior” isn’t Simón Bolívar, but someone with the characteristics of Jabba the Hutt.

The earthquake Trump unleashed with the capture of Nicolás Maduro will shake Latin America from Tijuana to Patagonia. A region that still shows the scars of colonialism and feels their sting with another intervention from an empire.

I think a lot about the legend of the “Faustian pact” about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for all the knowledge in the world. The phrase comes to mind when I think about Venezuela’s situation. And as much as it pains me, I fear Venezuela had no alternative but to accept a Trumpian Pact.

In Venezuela’s situation there are contradictory dualities that are simultaneously true. The tension generated by confronting the complexity of these elements feels like a crab’s pincers squeezing my temples. What I offer is a look beyond the “USA bad” or “Maduro good” narrative, which are so simple they sound good for Instagram, but add no critical understanding of the situation.

The Situation

The United States’ objective is oil. Let’s not kid ourselves. Everything else is an excuse based on half-truths or blatant lies. What the Trump administration seeks is to promote a ruler willing to reestablish relations with the United States and willing to give the U.S. priority access to the world’s largest oil reserves.1 Barrels in exchange for freedom.

To achieve this operation, the Trump administration has skipped all established processes in American politics for undertaking this type of operation (which to be fair has been largely ignored by both parties for decades). What results from this operation is that today, the United States and its institutions are weaker, and Trump’s autocratic power continues to consolidate. Furthermore, the operation is part of the smokescreen Trump wants to create to distract the American people from his government’s shortcomings2. Clearly I’m not a fan of Trump, his lies, his narcissism, his brazenness, or his lack of respect for institutions. He’s an agent of chaos with the primary goal of enriching himself and those he considers loyal to him.

That said, we arrived at this situation largely because Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship stole the elections despite the opposition candidate Edmundo González (with the disqualified María Corina Machado behind him) winning them. The Venezuelan opposition, shrewd in anticipating the regime’s tricks, managed to obtain copies of the voting records to corroborate their clear victory. So overwhelming was the evidence and the CNE’s lack of transparency (the entity that regulates elections and is under regime control) that both the Carter Center, which was designated as an international observer under the 2023 Barbados Agreement that Maduro’s government signed, and the UN determined that the elections cannot be considered democratic, with the Carter Center declaring the election a “serious violation of electoral principles.”3

Much has been said about the violation of international law and a people’s sovereignty with this U.S. military action. I agree that international law was violated. But a country’s sovereignty is lost when the people’s will is ignored. What legitimacy does a government that wasn’t elected have? What sovereignty exists if power is usurped through lies and repression? If we demand that the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people be respected, where was that demand in 2024?

For Maduro, the Biden administration's support of the Barbados Agreement that the dictatorship signed with the opposition gave him a viable exit ramp. To incentivize his signature, the Biden administration returned a key regime player, Alex Saab, today Venezuela's industry minister and a shady figure associated with the regime's corruption and money laundering. Maduro committed to free elections with international observers. Maduro broke his word, disqualified Machado through tricks, and destroyed any legitimacy of the democratic process in 2024.

Naturally, the response from much of the left has been a visceral repudiation of this intervention. And I understand it.

#HandsOffVenezuela

I understand the desire to say #HandsoffVenezuela, to protest imperialism, and demand that the sovereignty of people in Latin America to be respected. I share that position and view U.S. intervention with dismay.

But the question I’ve asked myself during recent weeks anticipating this event is the following: when we talk about #HandsoffVenezuela, whose hands are we talking about—those of a regime whose hands have been stained with so much blood they’re now red? Or the gringo government, desperate to dip its hands into all that black gold?

How can one argue for the sovereignty of a people subjugated for decades under a government that destroyed the economy, the institutions, the electoral process, and as a result caused the diaspora of more than 8 million Venezuelans, or 25% of the country? Can one say things are going well when 25% of the country flees? Is it coherent to say the diaspora is due to U.S. sanctions (a highly contrived line of argument that curiously ignores Venezuela’s economic and social reality before the 2014 sanctions)?

What alternatives remained?

The democratic path was extinguished. Maduro closed that door by becoming drunk on power and his own narcissism.

The other viable option could have been pressure from the international community, particularly in Latin America. But the governments that today denounce and scream about U.S. intervention in the region abdicated their responsibility with tepid declarations and no clear demand that the people’s will be respected.

Lula of Brazil asked for the voting records, the dictatorship never presented them, and Brazil chose not to escalate repercussions against the regime beyond expelling it from the BRICS alliance (which doesn’t really harm the dictatorship). Sheinbaum in Mexico limits herself to “no comment,” choosing neutrality in the face of the regime’s human rights violations and delegitimization of democracy. And Petro in Colombia, who until recently dared to say Maduro was a dictator, maintains a close relationship, well documented, with Chavismo, despite the fact that the dictatorship is one of Colombia’s greatest security threats, since it shelters the ELN on its border, the guerrilla group that under Petro’s government has grown its territorial presence by 22%.4 Maduro’s counterparts decided to wash their hands and look the other way, when it was their responsibility to maintain the region’s sovereignty.

The only remaining option was civil conflict, for the Venezuelan people themselves to take up arms to remove Maduro from power. But for me it’s impossible, as a Colombian, to propose civil war as medicine. An armed conflict in Venezuela would be chemotherapy that would plunge the country into decades of misery. It’s not a viable option.

The Chavista regime has been terrorizing Venezuela for over 25 years.5 They destroyed the institutions, the country’s productive capacity, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, the judicial system, the separation of powers, the integrity of the democratic process, respect for private property, the dignity of the poor, the faith of all those people who voted for Chávez because Venezuela did need a government that respected and cared for the most oppressed and humble people... but not at the cost of destroying the entire country.

And I see the same pattern beginning in the United States. For me the parallels between what we’ve seen with Venezuela and what I watch with horror in the Trump administration are clear: In his second term, Trump has weakened institutions, consolidated executive power, affected the country’s productive capacity through senseless tariffs, and established corruption and enrichment of his inner circle as if it were a casual occurrence that shouldn’t be questioned.

The Aftermath

Now I’m not so naive as to think that now that Maduro is gone, rainbows will return, macaws will fly in jubilation and parrots will scream “freedom!” We’ve reached Venezuela’s most fragile point since April 11, 2002.

American intervention martyrs Chavismo, gives wings to the narrative that the United States is interventionist and given Trump’s comments during his address to the nation, make it really easy to characterize the US government as the villains from Avatar. The martyrization of Chavismo could unleash an internal conflict, that war, that chemotherapy I so dread.

It could give Trump wings to continue his brazen intervention plan as a smokescreen, and do the same thing in Colombia, where he has a president with a profile very similar to Maduro’s (and also a personality very similar to Trump himself). Colombia is not Venezuela, but unfortunately Petro’s government, objectively, did bring us closer to the Chavismo that strangled Venezuela.

Or worse still, I fear that individuals in Maduro’s regime are willing to negotiate with Trump to let them stay in power while they give the United States access to oil reserves. This would be the worst case scenario, but viable since Trump doesn’t care much about democracy.

My main fear is that in the long term a new oligarchy will consolidate with more affinity to the United States that essentially steals Venezuela’s resources and keeps them in a fragile recovery that makes people think that, yes, democracy and institutions returned, but what for if the elite still keeps stealing everything.

This pattern isn’t hypothetical. It’s the pattern Colombia knows well: we change governments, sign agreements, promise reforms, and wealth concentration barely moves. It’s changing one group of thieves for another group of thieves with better branding.6

What good did it do Venezuela to organize, win the elections, preserve the voting records, do everything right, if in the end the “freedom” they recover is only the freedom to choose between oligarchs? That would leave us at the same starting point as Chavismo. This cycle cannot be repeated, neither for Chavismo nor for the circumstances that gave wings to that movement.

Now there are also consequences for the world. I don’t buy the argument that because the United States now operated militarily in Venezuela, that gives the green light to other titans like Russia and China to do the same. Sorry, but Russia and China have operated with a green light for decades. In Russia’s case, did we forget about Georgia, or Crimea, before the invasion of Ukraine with the aim of annexing it territorially (a distinction versus the U.S. agenda)? Or what about China? We’ve focused so much on the constant threat and explicit desire to retake Taiwan but we’ve forgotten how it illegally annexed Tibet under international law and how it’s using its economic power to subjugate much of African territory through its new silk road where they use debt as an economic weapon to gain control?

The immediate international consequence is that this makes it very clear that the UN lacks any power to counter any action that violates human rights and international law. I’d even say that became clear when despite the almost unanimous UN consensus about the massacre in Gaza at Israel’s hands and evidence of crimes against humanity, both Israel and the United States haven’t suffered consequences for Gaza’s total destruction.7

The questions about international precedents and sovereignty are valid. They’re the questions I’ve been asking myself for several weeks. But I return to the same point: what precedent was created by letting Maduro steal the elections with evidence of that theft? What sovereignty exists when a people’s democratic voice is silenced at gunpoint with lies?

Listen to the People

Venezuela, in a way, is that ghost of the future from Charles Dickens’s book A Christmas Carol. I ask those who today say #HandsOffVenezuela: if this were the United States, covered in the ashes of a destroyed country, wouldn’t you want a Deus Ex Machina, a miracle that puts an end to the dictatorship?

Let’s imagine that Trump’s coup attempt on January 6, 2021 had been successful. Could we then say the United States would be legitimately governed by Trump? Could one say it would be a sovereign country if Trump had taken office illegally? What’s the difference between this hypothetical scenario (which fortunately didn’t happen) versus what did happen in Venezuela?

There are many who forget the dead, those disappeared by Chavismo. Let’s not forget them. Let’s not forget those who today are in El Helicoide, the dictatorship’s torture headquarters. Let’s listen to the victims, to all the Venezuelans in the diaspora who long to return.

Before formulating any flash opinion to feel part of the conversation on social media or out of pure instinct to resist Trump, it’s worth asking how much you know about the Chavez/Maduro dictatorship, the way institutions were destroyed, the right to private property, and how they persecute, lie, and torture. So far I haven’t seen a SINGLE Venezuelan who isn’t celebrating Maduro’s departure, even though they themselves are aware that everything isn’t resolved, and many of them don’t have any affinity for Trump.

I admit this situation leads me to an internal conflict where I feel rage and relief, concern and satisfaction. The situation is impossible, but the Venezuelan people deserve a country worthy of their greatness, their beauty, the warmth of their people and their grace. And I hear their jubilation, the jubilation of the dictatorship’s victims, and it’s hard for me to impose my vision of the perfect way to execute a change of government against the tears of a people who have run out of food and tears.

I do ask for #HandsOffVenezuela, but let’s start with the hands of Maduro’s dictatorship.

2025 was the year I’ve read the most books in one year. I guess my Book Polygamy worked out.

Joke aside, I’m prouder of the process of integrating reading into my life more than the number itself.

I had a couple goals this year: To decrease my phone/social media time substantially (check), and to lengthen my attention span (in progress). The reduction of one and the pursuit of the other were the perfect recipe for reading more. Perhaps it was reading for 10 minutes instead of opening up instagram, or committing to sit at my favorite cafe and read for 45 minutes uninterrupted.

Besides making more time for reading, what changed?

My appetite for buying books, for indulging in Tsundoku,1 finally caught up with me. My bookshelf grew to a towering height, turned into a troll with a coarse, terse voice that warned: “You’ve got to make a dent here, buddy. Otherwise, I’m just going to swallow your room whole.”

The prospect of my book collection’s warning not being enough, I was also influenced by the “good writers are readers” motif, which is best said by Stephen King:

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

I was threatened into reading by a monster and guilted into reading by the guy who writes about them.

Below are some observations from the books I’ve read this year.

Most Surprising Book: The State of Affairs by Esther Perel

This book deals with the taboo topic of infidelity and affairs. I was surprised by how well Perel humanizes and presents all dimensions of affairs. She offers a much more nuanced version of the transgressor and the victim, and shows how affairs, while not a desired milestone in any relationship, don’t have to be a death penalty to a relationship. Instead, they can be the death of the first relationship and the beginning of the second one (if both parties want to). It challenged a lot of my notions about infidelity and brought voices to all parties involved.

I was also surprised by Esther Perel’s lively, biting, and compassionate writing. She delivers wit and insight with a lot of warmth and grace.

Most Frustrating Book: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I had high expectations for this novel since it won the 2024 Booker Prize. If you like novels with no plot, then this book is for you. Now, why would anyone read a novel with no plot is a question I want to ask Harvey.

What’s the book about? It is a day-in-the-life account of astronauts in a space station above Earth with plenty of musings about their life in space, and life on Earth. That’s pretty much it.

The most frustrating part of this book is that it has some of the most beautifully written passages/descriptions I’ve ever read. There are pages within this book that are deeply intimidating for me to read as a writer. Yet, for all the beautiful prose, there weren’t really any stakes or tension. So if you want to read this book, approach it as a collection of semi-fictional essays about space and Earth and you might actually enjoy this book.

Most Delightful Book: The Great Passage by Shion Miura

I think I have a thing for Japanese novels. They are whimsical, endear me to Japanese culture further, and are often written like parables more than twisting thrillers or multigenerational epics. What I loved about this novel was its celebration of words and their meaning, the virtue of doing a thankless task you love for decades, and what love can be when the meaning of the word is studied more broadly.

I also read The Emissary by Yoko Tawaka (kinda weird), The Lucky Ride by Yasushi Kitagawa (a bit too simple, but great message), and Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (beautiful! probably runner up for favorite fiction book this year).

Most Insightful Book: The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

I’ve read multiple Kundera books this year, and if you want to understand his writing, I think this is the book you start with. I loved Kundera’s definition of the novel…the novel is meant to explore what only the novel is meant to explore. The definition is circular, but what I love is that he defines the novel as a vehicle for exploration, not just merely telling a story. And I think I’m attracted to writing that explores ethics, dilemmas, nuance, and conflicts that are impossible to resolve, etc. Kundera has also shaped a lot of my thinking over the past year (and some of the writing I’m working on dives deeper into a couple of his key ideas).

You know a book impacts you by how much you’ve annotated it—I couldn’t help myself but to put a sticky note next to nearly every page.

Favorite Fiction Book: Asymmetry2 by Lisa Halliday

I stumbled upon this book via a recommendation from a Bumble match that never materialized (thank you random nurse that was moving to Seattle!). This novel was excellent. It’s told in three acts, all with different narrators. It felt like two books in one, but they are all oriented towards the theme of exploring asymmetries in love and power. I have a feeling Halliday was inspired by Kundera’s writing, and hopefully one day I’ll get to ask her.

What took the book over the top was just the quality of its prose. It felt both easy to follow, but had depth. Also, for some reason I couldn’t help but to picture one of the main characters, Alice, as Dakota Johnson. In any case, once I was done reading it, my other main thought was “I want to write something this good.”

Here is one of my favorite passages from it:

So: two passports, two nationalities, no native soil. I once heard that, perhaps as compensation for their rootlessness, babies born on planes are granted free flights on the parturitive airline for life. And it’s a winsome idea: the stork that delivers you remains yours to ride here and there and everywhere, until it’s time for you to return to the great salt marsh in the sky. But, as far as I know, I was never offered such a bonus. Not that it would have done me much good. Initially, we did all our sneaking back on the ground, via Amman. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and all American passport holders were grounded from riding Iraqi storks for what would amount to thirteen years.

Favorite Non-Fiction Book: The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel

I think there are different kinds of writers:3 There are explorers, those who sound crazy because they are going way out there to explore the limits of language and understanding; there are storytellers who are masterful at keeping your nose glued on the page; there are synthesizers who are just damn good at taking complex ideas and simplifying them. Morgan is one of the best, if not the best “synthesizer” writer of his generation. The book has many great ideas that I love, but here are three that are worth sharing.

1) Nice life = independence + purpose. And independence/freedom is the true measure of wealth (not your bank account).

2) What brings happiness is the contrast between what you have now and whatever you were just expecting (he also advocates keeping your expectations low, which I generally agree with).

3) In his words: “People become so nervous about what other people think of their lifestyle and investing decisions that they end up doing two things: performing for others, and copying a strategy that might work for someone else, but isn’t right for them.” Yep. That’s been me!

Honorable mention: Honorable mention to the honorable Ursula K. Le Guin. She was the author I read the most from/about this year. She’s just awesome. I’ll probably write more about her in the future (because she’s a masterful thinker and writer), but if you haven’t picked up any of her writing, I recommend you do so. Start with the The Lathe of Heaven.

Outro: Why do we read?

I’ll trade the royal “we” for the certainty of the “I.” I read to learn, to escape, to converse. Books are a conversation and whenever I visit a bookstore, I’m in tremendous awe of the thousands of individuals who spent hundreds or thousands of hours putting something out into the world that they are hoping a few people will choose to converse with. I read because I want to converse with these authors, to see what their ideas spark in me, and because a well-written phrase, passage, is one of the most consistent levers of joy that I’ve found in my life.

Ultimately, I read because of the effect of having conversed with the pages. In the words of Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid from So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance:

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Last Tuesday, I turned 35.

Besides shifting to another demographic on marketing surveys (goodbye 28-34 selection), it also presents an opportunity to do one of those “X life lessons from turning X” posts.

Fortunately, you are not getting 35 life lessons. Actually, you are not getting life lessons at all—I am not sure my lessons would apply to you. However, I will share some beliefs, that even if applied unevenly in my life, I hold steadfast.

Don’t live on auto-pilot

This is the only “self-help” advice I dispense. I can’t tell you how to live your life. But I can tell you to actually start living it. I’ve been a prisoner of inertia, of golden handcuffs, of invisible expectations and ghostly judgments. I remember happily receiving my free meals, generous stock options, and watching my bank account rise like the sea at high tide. It all felt great…until it didn’t. I realized the satisfaction came from meeting expectations rather than pursuing what I actually wanted. It took stepping away from my corporate job a couple of years back to see that.

Some of these expectations are good; there are evolutionary reasons why being able to find sustenance (via having a job in modern times) is important. Yet, too often we are possessed by expectations and status games: You must have children. You must live a DINK lifestyle. You must renounce all your possessions and rent everything. You must buy the fancy bag along with an ugly-ass Labubu doll while eating a bar of Dubai chocolate. If you can articulate why these things are important to you, if you can be honest and arrive at an answer that you believe in, great. That’s it. Now you are living for yourself.

In my case, living on auto-pilot is what kept me away from writing in my 20s. The expectation of financial security and career success swallowed all creative energy. Now, I’m trying to chart my own path, finding my own balance between building the life I want for myself and my family while prioritizing my creative endeavors (sorry I don’t want to end up living in financial strife like Dostoevsky).

Multiple things are true at the same time

Milan Kundera said it best:

“Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire.”

Our yearning for binaries is the biggest reason why political discourse is eroding worldwide (it is not a uniquely American problem).

Here’s a maddening example of a couple of ideas that seem completely incompatible, but are both true at the same time:

Hamas is a vile terrorist group that has very little regard for the actual population it’s supposed to fight on behalf of and more about their self-preservation as a threat (like many guerrilla/insurgencies). At the same time, Israel’s Gaza campaign was brutal, disproportionate, and designed not to just get rid of Hamas, but to set the groundwork for a total take over of Gaza (and don’t even get me started on West Bank settlements).

The paragraph above will probably piss off everyone across the simplistic Palestine vs. Israel spectrum. It is a Rorschach test for the reality that you most readily believe. But my contention is that both realities are true—simultaneously. Unfortunately, most of us have seen too many Star Wars-type stories, too many tales of good vs. evil. But humans are not this simple (and yet we are, which is another apparent duality…dizzy yet?).

Embracing duality has helped me grapple with my personal anxieties; it has allowed me to surrender to what is and accept reality. For instance, I can be grateful for the life I have and all the comforts I’ve earned and/or I have the privilege to experience. At the same time, I can yearn for a version of myself and my circumstances that is wealthier (in the comprehensive sense of the word, not just money) than what I experience today.

Accepting that I don’t have to live in a binary invites me to either find the middle ground between two sides, or just surrender to the fact that this contradiction will not subside no matter how many spin cycles I put it through in my mind.

Happiness = Joy + Contentment

Let’s retire the word “happiness.” It’s been used and abused like a “welcome” door mat that hasn’t been changed for decades.1

What does happiness mean? I wrote about it a while back, but I’ll give you the punchline—happiness really means two things:

Joy - Those spontaneous and brief moments that bring you delight. A kiss. A good meal. Morning coffee. Your favorite song coming on. A rainbow. A job promotion. Your sports team winning a game. Your child saying “I love you.” Your parent saying “I love you.” Your Trader Joe’s cashier saying “I love you.” Moments of joy can be mundane or transcendent, but they are usually ephemeral.

Contentment - It’s a sustained state. Consistent moments of joy will contribute to contentment, but its foundation is gratitude. Gratitude is an appreciation for your circumstances. It is an intentional acknowledgement of what you have. It's the act of seeing how full your cup is. Once you can practice gratitude consistently, you are more likely to reach a state of contentment. There are things you yearn for, yes, but in a state of contentment, your mood is not attached to them.

Believing in something greater than yourself is one of the most important things you can do

I’m not going to tell you what or who to believe in. My version of greater than yourself is the canonical representation of God that I learned in Catholic school.2 That’s good enough for me. I don’t advocate for religious supremacy; the idea that MY God is the true God and your God is a false God. I believe that we are all worshipping the same God, just through different cultural contexts. My reasoning behind this is quite extensive and unlikely to please super religious people, but the best way I can sum it up is that God made us all in his image, and in His (or Her) infinite wisdom, gave us multiple paths towards establishing a relationship with Their divine presence.

Now, why does believing in something greater matter? Believing that there is nothing else but ourselves in this blue marble can lead to the “we are in this together” communal mindset that most Humanists subscribe to. The weakness in this worldview is that when people are constantly bombarded with crisis and suffering, it can easily breed cynicism and despair. If this harsh reality is all there is—no higher purpose, no cosmic justice, no redemption—why bother striving for a better world?

I’ve been pulled out of some of my darkest moments in the past couple of years through my faith in God. This doesn’t minimize the role that family, friends, and my own self-awareness have had in rescuing me from deep waters. But even those timely interventions, those words of affirmation when I needed them the most, those lucky breaks I was not counting on, I’d like to think those are acts of divinity, and beyond being just mere confirmation bias, they reaffirm my relationship and my responsibility to my Creator.

We become what we think. The story we tell ourselves is the script we play

“If you think you can or can’t, you are right.” - Henry Ford3

This bit of wisdom is the one that frustrates me the most. Because every time I think about this, I realize that my inner-critic (which long time readers will know as Camelo) is a fabrication that I have continued to indulge, despite knowing that he is telling me a story, and therefore a script, that leaves me frustrated, dejected, and anxious.

The most important skill we can learn is to have a healthy inner monologue, to change the polarity of our thoughts—to go from “what if this goes wrong?” to “how awesome could it be if this goes right?”

Just as your body needs to maintain a healthy pH balance—not too acidic, not too alkaline—your mind needs balance too. Chronic negative thoughts are like mental acidity: corrosive over time.4 You want to neutralize that acidity with positive thoughts to restore equilibrium.

If you are an overthinker like me, the process of changing the script so that you actually become the version of yourself that you envision feels like a Sisyphean task. But I can’t think of anything more important to practice daily than to change your script, line by line (yes, this is more important than keeping your Duolingo streak).

Attention is more valuable, and increasingly more scarce, than time

The general notion is that time is our most valuable asset. Time is valuable, but what is even more valuable is how you allocate that time. Attention dictates how you spend your time. It also dictates the inputs you give your mind that contribute to your sense of identity.

I experienced the pitfalls of time-wealth and attention-poverty. I’ve never had as much free time to pursue my passions as the past couple of years away from corporate life. However, for long stretches of time my attention has either been misplaced or diluted. The random argument with a Twitter troll, spending nearly three days doing an inventory of every piece of clothing I owned just to never look at that Airtable again, or writing six different pieces at the same time and publishing none of them.

This is not a criticism of wandering, of embracing divergence and letting your attention off-leash and hoping it doesn’t hurl itself towards a busy street. A big reason I feel more confident about how to navigate the world has come from these moments of wandering, of embracing the pathless path, per se.

But over the past year I’ve grown increasingly convinced that if I had 24 hours to do whatever I wanted, the value those hours have is highly dependent on what I give my attention to in those 24 hours. Giving that time to stupid Twitter takes, clickbaity news, comparison-ramas on Instagram, and TikTok reels that teach me things that I find interesting but cannot recall, is the equivalent of betting $100 on the Seattle Mariners winning the World Series.5

We live in a toxic environment for stillness, for creative emergence, for deep focus. A cloud of mercury poisons how we use our time, and the only way to pushback is to ask ourselves: what am I paying attention to? Is it worthwhile? And does focusing on this bring me fulfillment? Does it set me up for both joy and contentment?

We are silly little beings

From the book of “How to Find Love” by The School of Life:6

“We should learn to tolerate ourselves, not by believing we are wonderful, but via a secure realisation that everyone is both OK and sometimes a bit awful…Of course we are a bit weak, a bit sly and a bit foolish, to put it gently. But so is everyone. We are no more idiotic or wayward than the next person.”

We are all silly humans. Our communion is based on our imperfection, how irrational and fallible we are, how we live in a sea of contradictions and double standards. That’s all part of being a human.

The realization of our shared silliness brings levity. It highlights the absurdity of most of the things we do every day, not in the sense of “it’s all absurd, so nothing matters,” more in the vein of “it’s all absurd, so maybe just chill.”

All of you are silly little humans that just spent ten minutes reading this because you were hoping that a collection of words that I’ve put together here would either entertain you or make you think. I’m a silly little human that types away letter after letter trying to say things concisely and well, all in the hopes that maybe, something I wrote would be useful to you.

You are a silly human. I’m a silly human. Looks like I’m in good company.

A small recollection of doubt-full moments in the past few months:

• I spent 30 minutes at World Market choosing snacks. I walked the Japanese aisle ten times, picked and unpicked three different types of chips, until my own exhaustion led me to settle for the cacio e pepe puffs. “What if I choose the wrong snack?”

• A woman sat across from me at a coffee shop. Our eyes met enough times that I suspected that, maybe, she was interested. I fell into the quicksand of questions: what to say, whether approaching her would seem weird, whether I’d misread the signals entirely. I said nothing. “What if she thinks I’m a creep?”

• A startup posted a role that seemed great—interesting work, good pay, solid team. While I spiraled about whether I was qualified enough, the position was filled. “Would they even consider me?”

Doubt often bogs me down in moments mundane and important alike. The search for certainty, “the right decision,” becomes a siren song that casts me adrift. I’ve written many pieces documenting situations where the obvious retort is “stop doubting yourself!” Trust me, I’m trying.

But I’ve also been exploring an alternative lens to doubt. One that is not as fatalistic, that recognizes that while doubt can paralyze, it can also clarify. Doubt is the stage name for “uncertainty,” but it’s also the stage name for “curiosity.”

Doubt has its virtues. And based on the world we live in, they’ve never been more valuable.

What is real?

This is the world we live in: We drown in information. Billions of ad dollars are contingent on grabbing our attention. Misinformation has become easier than fact-checking—every fake video cutting through the fabric of our collective reality. Charlatans visit our screens and peddle certainty. They know in the digital realm, confidence brings the riches.

Doubt emerges as a necessary bullshit detector. Being fooled is no longer a matter of age. We can’t pretend that only the naïve youth or technology-challenged elders will fall for deepfakes. Misinformation will only become more sophisticated; the only way to combat it is to take everything we hear, see, read with a grain of salt, to fact-check early and often, and to continually ask ourselves how we know that what we think is true is in fact true.

Just this week, the President of the United States shared a convincing AI-generated video promoting a technology (MedBeds) that doesn’t exist, as if it were a pillar of his healthcare policy.1 The means for this kind of misinformation have been commoditized by companies like OpenAI, and while we may enjoy the whimsy of being able to create videos of SpongeBob coming out of our TVs or Sam Altman tasting clouds, the stakes for misinformation will get higher.

Not casting doubt on all the information we consume will lead to further polarization, incorrect assumptions about how things around us work, and beyond making us look like idiots, it can swing the fate of a society.

The dot at the bottom of the question mark

You know the question mark?2 Well, the squiggly line wouldn’t mean a thing without the dot at the bottom. That’s what doubt is: the foundation of the question.

The question doesn’t exist without doubt. If you are certain about something, you have no need to question it. When was the last time you’ve questioned whether water is wet?

Questions are one of the most beautiful and interesting human characteristics. All the knowledge and art and beauty that humans have created has emerged from the question.

Therefore, a doubt-full mind can be a boon for curiosity and seeing the world with the eyes of an explorer. It’s also an antidote to hubris. And the best role models, those who earnestly embrace doubt, are children.

Children will ask you the most random things: “what’s the opposite of a sandwich?” “what is thinking?” or “why do we have breakfast for dinner but not dinner for breakfast?”3 They use questions to construct reality; it’s their way of reaching for the walls in a pitch black room, slowly gaining consciousness of their boundaries. The best part is that many of these children, those who had their curiosity nurtured, go on to ask questions that allow them to break the boundaries that we know (e.g. can humans fly? can we cure AIDS? can we connect the world through bytes and wires?)

Far more than being a handy weapon against misinformation, doubt is what powers curiosity. And outside of love, I can’t think of a more constructive life force than curiosity.

Maybe this is just a cope?

I will readily concede that this reflection is all one big cope that seeks to justify a character trait that has probably cost me a few great opportunities and experiences. I will also concede that my sense of doubt is not evenly applied in all areas of my life. I tend to be too gullible and naive about people; I naturally see the best in others, which tends to lead to idolization and ignoring flaws that most people would see. I take people at their word far too often.

Notwithstanding my own personal relationship with doubt, the virtues are clear and urgent. Milan Kundera wrote that “modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.” And I fear a world where modern stupidity is the default state,4 not necessarily because we are all morons, but because the volume of ideas we receive is so vast and packaged concretely to be taken at face value, that vetting every idea becomes a Sisyphean task. We risk becoming stupid by sheer overwhelm. Doubt receives ideas with thought. It’s an antidote to stupidity.

But, hey, what do I know?

I “wrote” content for a cybersecurity startup back in June.

I remember my heavy sigh after the CEO instructed me *in a very stern voice* that I was supposed to use his ChatGPT prompt for all the articles I had been tasked to create for his startup. The SEO game is simple, you see: Just make sure you have articles that are ranked highly in Google for every imaginable keyword that your customers would search for. My job was to put up digital flyers—frenetically stapling them on every street pole in Internet City.

Using this AI-first approach, I was expected to write two articles a day. I’d use the CEO’s prompt to generate the article, and instead of a writer, my role became fact-checker and editor. The only pizzazz I could add were visuals that made the article even more skimmable. An affable tone, humor, or breaking the fourth wall were all seen as superfluous. Users just want their questions answered: that’s why everyone rolls their eyes when they are looking up a recipe for Spaghetti alla carbonara and scroll past the improbable tale of the author’s Nonna turning her beloved pigs into pancetta in the hills of Tuscany.

I dutifully churned out two articles a day. After all, I was the inexperienced writer referred to this startup by a VC, while the CEO knew more about SEO than me. Still, while I’m capable of obedience, it is harder for me to leave assumptions unquestioned, to not ponder out loud if this is how things should be done.

The gig only lasted a month. The break-up was very much mutual. I got the good ol’ “once we are able to prioritize this we’ll contact you” (thanks and goodbye). I responded with “totally understand” (I don’t want to work with you again). My guess was that the CEO got fed up with my constant hesitation and need for continuous feedback; in the startup world if one of your oars starts dragging in the water, it slows down the whole boat.

I was both dejected and relieved. Dejected because as much as I had tried to follow instructions and suppress my dislike for churning articles like lattes, I had not performed up to their expectations and was not worth being kept around. Yet relieved because the role hadn’t made me a better writer, there was zero chemistry with the team, and churning one more ChatGPT-generated article was as appealing as eating an earwax sandwich.1

The deeper I dive into freelance writing waters2, the more inadequate I feel; not quite like a fish out of water, but more like a koi fish in the ocean.3

Stormy Waters

There is this persistent tension in the world of marketing/business writing that I’ve been unable to resolve. On one end, there is the generally accepted truth that storytelling and narratives are powerful; a good product with a great story will beat a good product with a mediocre story. On the other hand, most content marketing work is about writing matter-of-fact copy, to strip away the story in favor of the answer. Optimize for Google (and now LLMs). Write like Hemingway. Don’t waste people’s time.

Granted, there is a sweet spot in this spectrum. But the sweet spot is not the norm. I don’t think most marketers (particularly for B2B) are thinking: “how do we craft a compelling, original story that happens to improve our [insert metrics here]?” Most of them are under pressure to “show results”—to make the fuzzy business of attribution crystal clear, to justify budgets with sales leads—story be damned. So marketers see AI as a way to increase output while decreasing costs. Make things, iterate, and make more things, now faster.4

Here is how I see the ocean right now: Many of the content writing jobs that allow n00b freelancers like me to build mastery and develop long-term customer relationships are now being brought back in-house and performed with AI. When companies do hire freelancers for content work (like my startup experience), the role has shifted from craft to management: don’t summon the muse to write about your next piece of copy—make the robot do it and then polish the result.

The growing scarcity of these jobs and the shift in what these jobs entail have made freelance writing less palatable.

Bonaca Waters5

It’s not all dark waters, however. There are companies and individuals out there that understand that distinctive, perspective-shifting writing can’t be prompted like a Google query. It requires a lot more skill, experience, and heart.

Here are some examples of the types of content that can only come from great freelance writers.

• Content/ghostwriting agency Ghost developed “culture books” for companies like Duolingo and Hinge. These books give language to the je ne sais quois of these organizations. It’s the type of project that requires finding hidden gems, collating many stories/perspectives, and writing them with clarity and heart. This is the type of work that AI can’t do.6

• Fintech darling Ramp has developed some really interesting content by leveraging the trove of financial data they have. Their Business Spending Reports are packed with very interesting information that their target customers would find immediately valuable.

• Venture capital firm Contrary’s research arm created an amazing blog led by Anna-Sofia Lesiv (one of my favorite writers). In their blog, she explored Ozempic, soil erosion, plastic, and everything in between. These pieces are well-researched, spark questions/thoughts, and feel like a labor of love more than an SEO checkbox.

Even OpenAI is hiring a Content Strategist. Yes—the company that created the service that has gulped the lower rungs of content writing jobs is paying nearly a million dollars (if you add equity into the mix) to hire someone to, in their words:

“shape how our brand sounds to the world, set the voice and tone guidelines, and roll up your sleeves to write, edit, and publish content that resonates with a global audience of both businesses and consumers.”

The jobs are there, but they require a set of skills that most beginner freelancers don’t have. This is great news if you are an experienced freelancer. Not so much if you are just starting out.

As I observed people getting these wonderful opportunities, I began studying what skills these writers have in the hopes that maybe instead of being a koi in the ocean, I would turn into a dolphin or a beluga whale.7

Dolphins & Belugas

There are two types of great freelance writers: Dolphins and Belugas. Bear (or squid) with me here.

Dolphins are content strategists. They move quickly, operate strategically, and are very social. They know how to get attention.8

Belugas are journalistic writers. They are also collaborative, but they move slower, and can hunt on the surface, but also by diving deep.

Now both of these types of writers share what I think are foundational skills:

• Soft-skills (inquisitive, intuitive, collaborative, fun to be around)

• Storytelling (crafting storylines and/or narratives, create stakes, tension, and payoffs)

• Copywriting (Ability to write copy that is concrete, visual, and falsifiable9)

Here’s how I think about them in more detail.

Dolphins: Content Strategists

Content Strategists can craft messaging and write content, but their expertise lies in knowing how to create, tailor, and sequence content for maximum amplification and distribution. These are the type of folks who can take a newsletter, turn its elements into Instagram Reels, Linkedin posts, and Twitter bangers. They know how to create a consistent brand voice, the places where their customers engage with content, and the media they prefer (not just writing). They also think in systems, creating feedback loops that allow them to refine their strategy quickly.

Belugas: Journalistic Writers

As the name implies, top-notch freelance writers operate like journalists: they go off the beaten path to find hidden gems. They actually use library cards. They read the reports, the studies, not just relying on click-baity articles, or ChatGPT summaries. As Ezra Klein mentioned in David Perell’s How I Write podcast, they “do the reading.” They also talk to people—interviewing customers, competitors, researchers, anyone who can add an extra layer to your piece that says “hey, I totally didn’t just make this up.” They also know how to elevate good ideas/information through craft. Journalistic writers give you the taste of thrill you get in a Michael Lewis book.10

Which way Koi?

I’m at a crossroads. There are some elements from my past career (like my soft-skills and storytelling) that make a possible evolution into “top-notch freelance writer territory” more certain. But either of these paths requires a commitment and conviction to hone their particular characteristics. Ideally, I would develop both Dolphin and Beluga skills—to write deeply resonant content designed for amplification. In the process becoming an aquatic chimera (A…Belphin? A Doluga?)

But there's yet another fork in the road. And it pops up every time I think about this excerpt of a Paris Review interview of author Thornton Wilder:

I felt the strain of using my creative energy for my work and leaving little in the tank for my own creative writing. I've oscillated between writing (and hitting resistance) and not writing (while yearning to write).

Whenever I started writing some more complex ideas that require a lot more wandering, dead-ends, and destructive rewrites,11 I would immediately wonder whether this was the best use of my time or whether I should be trying to find another freelance gig first and keep honing my skills so I could get the types of jobs I really wanted and paid well. Whenever I started looking for other gigs or worked on my business, my heart would demand that I go back to writing since that’s the essential work. The oscillation turned me into a pendulum, moving back and forth but still stuck in place.

Money has to come from somewhere; that’s just the system we live in. And I don’t think my feet would do that well in OnlyFans.12 So the broader dilemma is not just whether to become a dolphin or a beluga, but rather whether it may be better to stay a small but mighty koi fish in a pond, and earn my sustenance in a completely different realm.

Regardless of body of water, one thing is certain: I’ll just have to keep swimming.

Hello friends,

Hope you are enjoying summer, or winter, or just weather if you live close to the equator1, I’m back with another digest.

You know when you invite friends over for dinner and the dish you are making isn’t remotely close to being ready, so you open up some tortilla chips and make some guacamole and hope that satiates their hunger for 15-20 minutes? This is what this is. But instead of just chips and tortillas, I am giving you a bunch of appetizers that feel like a full meal.

I’ll be sharing a some reflections, some reads, and tunes for you to enjoy. By the way, this email may be too long to read in your inbox, so click on the Tangent header if it gets cut off.

Reflections

“I can’t be bothered”

Typically, you put those words on the lips of a petulant teenager—not a 34-year-old man. Yet, this feeling has become a mantra. It’s been spurred by an allergic reaction to the dynamics of sharing your work on the Internet: To mind subscriber growth. To “build in public” and announce every step; broadcasting to the world that you are, in fact, doing something. To participate in the artifices that have emerged from being chronically online and trying to scrape some financial value from it.

Perhaps it’s naive to think that this dynamic can be ignored if you are trying to get your work noticed and eventually make a living from it. After all, not everyone has a Theo Van Gogh—someone willing to shill your work incessantly out of sheer devotion and fraternal love. Whether these dynamics are unavoidable elements of creating on the internet or not, what I do know is that they have nothing to do with creation or craft. Cognitively, I know that ruminating on these is as useful to me as my Google Home nowadays.

Particularly for writers, obsessing over how to be online seems like a trap door on a process that is fairly straightforward: Shut the fuck up, listen to what your heart is telling you, write it down, edit it so that the reader you have in mind will feel things, learn things, and just maybe, shape their perception. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The books on writing craft are all different vantage points of the same moon.

“I can’t be bothered” has also become my general statement towards consuming social media or feeling like I need to have a pulse on the internet zeitgeist. Sunny days in Seattle have invited me to really assess the opportunity cost of staring at a screen nibbling at the thoughts of others. Twitter is too sycophantic. Substack is too navel-gazy. Instagram is a kaleidoscope of manufactured yearnings. This zeitgeist taps me on the shoulder incessantly like a toddler saying “I’m ova hewe!”

This is all a part of a broader effort to claim my attention back.

I want my attention back to hear my own thoughts and ideas. I want to follow the fictional characters my mind is concocting—observing them like a journalist seeing the events of their life unravel and documenting them. I want my attention so that I can read words, from a book (gasp), for an hour without becoming impatient or falling asleep. I want to not just notice beautiful paragraphs, but study why they are so beautiful and how I can summon similar beauty with my own words. I want to be wholly consumed by the process of writing; even if every paragraph makes me second-guess my life choices.

So I’ve been spending less time online. I’m pausing most freelance work this month. I’ve been reading more. I’ve been writing and (throwing most of it away). All of this looks like I’m an iceberg firmly stuck in frosty waters. It’s an incredibly unsettling feeling that is worsened by the innocent question “how are things going?”

But fear not, dear reader; I am not in a state of distress. If you ask me how I am right now, my detailed answer would be: I’m in a molting period where I do not feel effusive about the world, but I also don’t feel hopeless or dejected. It is an extended transformation where I’ve come to learn that any meaningful answer I look for at this point will come as a consequence of my actions more so than what I’m able to explore in my journal.

Hiroshima & Never Again

August 6th marked the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima. My mom and I visited Hiroshima last fall and one of the places that struck us the most was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. We walked through exhibits documenting the before, during, and after of the city. We read many stories of survivors: those who did not die in the initial blast, but were subjected to the torture that comes with losing everything and enduring a slow, painful death from the radiation. My heart’s heaviness left a permanent imprint in my conscience after our visit.

Our world has these places—epicentres of human horror like Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Phnom Penh—that are turned into museums. They exist to make the scale and depth of suffering so visceral that visitors vow to not let humanity’s cruelty manifest again. They exist to say “never again.”

Unfortunately, it seems like the main lesson to learn from history is that mankind does not learn the lessons from history. The “never again” keeps happening.

I’ve been thinking daily about war and conflict. On how to renounce the simplified narratives of “good versus evil,” while also sensing when you’ve seen enough horror and suffering that remaining indifferent seems to be a grotesque choice. The words still fail me: part horror, part melancholy, part doubt, part fear.

Is it worthwhile to make my thoughts more openly known beyond the few friends I’ve conferred with? Can it create enough waves to stop the horrors we witness every day? I’m not sure.

I do keep thinking about this quote:

Books

I dreaded summer reading. I remember we were assigned The Hobbit one summer in high school and I put it off until the last week—gulping the words as if it were French onion soup.2

Fast forward half-a-lifetime later, and I’ve never read so many books in one summer. This has been great for my mental health, good for my writing, bad for my bookcase, and terrible for my wallet.

We still have some summer left to go and books on deck, but here are my favorite reads this summer.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

I fell in love with Ursula’s writing through her interviews. Last year, I picked up a copy of her interview book, Conversations on Writing, and once I read it, I went down the Le Guin rabbit hole.

This book is quirky, lyrical, and quintessencial Le Guin. It follows the story of George Orr, a man that can change reality through his dreams and his relationship with a psychiatrist who has patented a way to manipulate George’s dreams. What I loved most about the book is that it is not a story of hero vs. villain. Instead, it uses this fantastical situation to ask questions of morality, agency, and trade-offs. I like that the book issues no moral judgments, even with the way the story unravels. This was one of my favorite passages:

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

This book came out of nowhere—or better said through a Bumble match.3 The best way I can describe this book is “delicious.” The prose made me smirk, chuckle, and go “how did she come up with this?”

This clever novel, winner of the Whiting Award in 2018, is broken down into three sections:

Part I follows the story of a young woman named Alice, who falls in love with a famous writer, Ezra Blazer, who is 40 years her elder.

Part II is a whole different story that follows a man named Amar Ala Jaafari, a Iraqi-American doctor who is flying back from the US to Baghdad to find his missing brother, Sami.

Part III is a transcript of a radio interview with Ezra Blazer.

The book explores the asymmetry of relationships; the age gap and relationship dynamics between Ezra and Alice, the power imbalances between the U.S and Iraq. But frankly, I don’t think you need to find a grand, underlying theme to enjoy this book; it’s just great dialogue, and characters you come to love.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

One of the questions I’ve been pondering this year is how other technological revolutions throughout history felt. It’s common to hear that we live in “unprecedented times,” and while elements of that may be true (Cleopatra didn’t have TikTok), every phase shift in technology probably felt “unprecedented” at the time.

That’s how I stumbled upon this book4, where Atlantic reporter Tracy Kidder follows a company, Data General, in their development of a microcomputer. The premise sounds dull, and that’s where Kidder’s magic comes in. He writes in a novelistic manner that people have come to love from Michael Lewis’ books, for example. Every chapter builds up the stakes for these engineers who were at the bleeding edge of the computing revolution of the 80s. I also came away seeing how both the microcomputer revolution and our current AI revolution mirror each other fairly well.

Here’s an excerpt:

Essays

Flounder Mode by Brie Wolfson

What can be initially read as yet another profile of The Incredible Kevin Kelly (one of the world’s most remarkable polymaths, in my opinion) becomes an exploration of what it means to achieve success in an era where impact seems to be measured in the number of IPO exits and how many commas your net worth has.

Brie is wonderfully honest in this piece and she expresses a lot of the angst I’ve felt growing up professionally in the tech industry, and exploring different ways to find meaning in life. There is something to learn from the levity by which Kelly lives his life, and while it may be easy to believe that him being the anti-thesis to hustle culture is an anomaly, I found myself relieved by the fact that people like him exist in this world—and seem to be pretty content.

Music

Through one of those random moments of algorithmic wizardry, I came across a YouTube short with a snippet from Sixpence None the Richer's performance of their hit, Kiss Me. Now, I can’t stop thinking about kisses.

They are an interlude, a transgression, an escalation. How many songs have been dedicated to this moment? How many of these songs unlock memories of kisses we've experienced? I think it’s one of these uniquely beautiful, human things that music has the power to make us think about these moments, these kisses, that rest in our minds, hearts, and lips.

Here are three songs about kisses that I love listening to over and over again:

Kiss Me - Sixpence None The Richer

Stuttering (Kiss Me Again) - Ben’s Brother5

La Magia de Tus Besos - Grupo Niche

On your way out…

There are just over 400 of you who decided “hey, this guy doesn’t suck…let me subscribe.” I’m infinitely grateful for that. As I wrote earlier in this edition, internet culture bombards us with things that say “pay attention to me!” so the fact that you are willingly choosing to pay attention to me is incredibly flattering.

Now this is going to sound weird…but if my writing does not bring you joy, inspiration, curiosity, then please reclaim your attention, clean up your inbox, and unsubscribe. Contrary to most advice from Growth Gurus™️, I’d rather have a smaller group of readers who get excited when I show up in their inbox, over a bigger group of people that feel “meh” about what I create. So if you’ve been indifferent about this newsletter, consider this your permission slip.

If you do want to stick around, I promise it will be worth it. There are a few pieces I’ve been working hard on and that I’m both excited and afraid to share with you. In the meantime, here some earlier Tangent pieces that recent subscribers might have missed:

I can summon a voice, a melody, at a whim. I can run past a row of poplar trees while learning how the creation of pest-resistant wheat brought the 20th century agricultural revolution and saved millions of lives. I can cue up Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to soundtrack a Seattle summer sunset.1 Words and rhythms are delivered to my ears.

Our earliest ancestors would have gone mad at the notion of hosting foreign voices inside our heads. Who in their right mind would allow other voices into the sacredness of our consciousness?2

But for us, headphones have become a modern marvel. The portability of sound that emerged in the late 20th century transformed how we accessed information and art in a revolutionary way. We went from not being able to walk with sound, to listening through devices no larger than a cashew.

I spend a lot of time at cafés. It is the natural environment where my words emerge. My habit is to wear headphones while I work. Headphones keep me focused, they fixate my squirrely mind on the task at hand, reducing the source of my distractions by at least one sense. This scene is mirrored by about 80% of the people at the café. Neutral faces, the faint click-clack of the keyboards, some heads lightly bopping. We are all there, in our worlds of sound. We are all there, but not with each other.

The Walkman Effect3

At the time the Sony Walkman came out in 1980, the youths were pretty excited about it. They could tune out the urban jungle and strut at the pace of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. To them, it ushered a new age of autonomy propelled by this artifact that became the “minimum, mobile, intelligent unit for music listening.”

Older generations didn’t have the same reaction. In one research study, young people were asked the following questions about the Walkman: are men with the Walkman human or not? are they losing contact with reality? are they psychotic or schizophrenic? This line of moralistic questioning was part of a broader trend whereby this new technology represented yet another way in which humanity was severing its relationship with not only the natural world, but also the world it had built.

It’s very interesting to see how radically our attitudes have shifted in the past 40 years. We’ve gone from questioning whether someone was schizophrenic to not batting an eye if half of the people we walk past have white p-shaped buds on the side of their heads. But perhaps as I’ve gotten older (*strikes invisible long white beard*) I have come to think that our relationship with headphones has become more sinister than intended.

Becoming Mildred

In 1953, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was published. The book describes a dystopian world where firefighters don’t fight fire, but rather create it to burn books, where censorship is omnipresent, an interactive TV the size of a living room wall is entertainment, and citizens wear “little seashells” on their ears. As the book describes, these seashells bring “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.”

One of the key conflicts in the book is between the main character, Montag, and his wife, Mildred. Mildred never removes these seashells from her ears, and in between listening to the government propaganda and interacting with the big interactive TV, she becomes disconnected from any romantic relationship with Montag and too distracted by the sounds and sights being fed to her to question the status quo.

While reading the book, any mention of the seashells triggered a sinking guilt. I didn’t have to use headphones—seashells—as obsessively as Mildred to understand what Bradbury was hinting: seashells symbolize the ways technology can bewitch us into a separate parallel reality that, in turn, severs us from the physical world and human relationships.

I fear we are becoming Mildreds. Unable to experience the world without seashells on our ear, our attention increasingly captured by what we hear. And the consequence of our indulgence in auditory isolation is a deepening sense of isolation and an inability to experience stillness.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

Headphones have become a de facto do not disturb sign. That’s how I used them back when I had a desk job, that’s how I used them in public spaces, and that’s how at least 50% of people reading this use them. They are the equivalent of retreating into a turtle shell.

The problem with using headphones to shut out the world is that, in an era of increased anti-social behavior, we are further shutting off any opportunities to converse and connect with others. We are already having problems, worldwide, developing friendships4 or even “weak ties.”5 Even in scenarios where you interrupt someone wearing headphones, the tendency is to be apologetic, as if talking to someone with headphones is the equivalent of bumping into them. And since people are spending less time socializing6 and more time in their own homes, this precious time in public—a time ripe to expand our zone of serendipity, gets drowned out by our desire to listen to Dua Lipa (again).7

Aversion to Silence

Headphones also feed our brains with constant auditory stimuli to the point of gluttony. I struggle to undertake any monotone task without a beat to help me get through them. As much as I may want to experience a cinematic moment by pairing it with a soundtrack, what this ends up creating is a pattern where noise becomes more valuable than silence.

This goes completely against one of the major revelations in the past few years: the power of silence and boredom as conduits for creative ideas and regulation of our nervous system.

My addiction to noise, then, becomes a self-defeating palliative that gets in the way of experiencing moments of discovery.

What am I hiding from?

A couple of days ago, I went to a nearby park to read. I would usually wear headphones while reading outside, but given my reflection on the downsides of headphones, I kept the seashells in my pocket. I wanted to be present, to rawdog reality.8

Ten minutes in, a middle-aged lady approached me. She asked me if there was a karaoke place nearby. “I’m not sure. Maybe close to Main Street,” I answered.

She replied, in one breath:

“Ah ok. Sorry to disturb you, I know you are reading. It’s just I was supposed to go to karaoke with this guy I’ve been seeing, but that’s not happening anymore. We are not together anymore. It turns out he has a brain tumor and he’s just very erratic and so we are not dating anymore…my friend who is a property manager told me she also dated someone like that…you have to give them space and time. Maybe I’ll get back together with him. Sorry to disturb you. But anyways, I don’t have a phone because my last one died and I went to the store and they told me it would take four months to replace the battery. And I don’t drive so I don’t want to go to the Lime [karaoke place] because it’s scary to take the bus at night…I was supposed to go to karaoke with this guy but now we are not together. I’m [redacted], what’s your name?”

I gave her my name and did everything humanly possible to gently steer the conversation to a sudden conclusion that would allow me to not get sucked into this woman’s soap opera.

Then, I reached into my pocket for my earbuds.9

This random lady telling me about her drama is exactly the scenario I seek to avoid by using headphones. I use them as protection from uncomfortable social interactions.

Something’s got to give, though, if I want to feel more connected with the world, more comfortable engaging with strangers. I don’t think it’s realistic, or practical, for me to stop using headphones altogether. But there’s probably a sweet spot between this end of the spectrum and wearing them all the time like prosthetics.10

I have to risk enduring, and starting, awkward and weird conversations. I want to be aware of when I’m using sounds to avoid silence. I want to remind myself that, yes, headphones do allow me to create my own reality, but that in the process I shut off others who may be interested in being part of mine.

Technology delivers value through optimization and convenience. The promise to make life easier, less friction, less effort. But as I’ve observed with my use of headphones, convenience comes at a cost, and on that side of the ledger are the things we yearn for the most: connection, stillness, and presence.

What we really want to experience tends to happen away from the gifts of technology, not because of them.

On a sleepless night a few weeks ago, I posted the following note on Substack:

This wasn’t a life-long dream that was revealed in the stillness of night. It was a spontaneous thought that escaped the confines of my inner monologue.

The next day, I saw this:

Traveling the world around different Starbucks, telling stories about coffee and getting paid to do it? It was a sweet coincidence.

I reviewed the application process. It seemed reasonable except for one small thing: I had to submit a TikTok video making the case as to why Starbucks should hire me to be a “global coffee creator.”

This was going to be a problem.

To start, I’ve avoided using TikTok.1 I also have a strong aversion to recording myself; I dread seeing how the right corner of my upper lip spontaneously curls, how my eyes drift in a perceived aloofness, and how I struggle to surface a natural smile while facing a lens.2

Over the following days, I kept thinking about the role. Life had manifested this opportunity and was pointing big red neon arrows towards the “apply” button. But I begrudged Starbucks for adding the TikTok video requirement, which I felt, did not give Serious Writers™ like me a chance. Did they want someone that could speak in perfect TikTok voice and gush about Horchata Lattes, or did they want someone who wanted to explore and share the intricacies of coffee, and who believed people did have long attention spans for good stories? Not fair.

As my mental block to anything TikTok began to crack, the truth poured out: I exaggerated my frustration at being forced to make a video, so that I would have a convenient excuse to reject myself.

“Who am I to go around the world talking about coffee when I’ve barely done anything of the sort? Why go through the effort of making something with a tiny, teeny chance of success?”

Many of my regrets have come from the scripts of self-rejection sticking a twig between my bicycle wheels. Most of my self-rejections were absurd and followed the following format: “not [blank] enough.” Granted, there are some things I’m genuinely not qualified for; you don’t want me anywhere near a nuclear reactor (what does this button do?), in an operating room (*faints*), or running a hedge fund (why don’t we sell NVDIA and just buy a ton of Labubus?).

My tendency has been to seek the comfort of my own “no,” over the risk (or reward) of putting that decision in someone else’s hands. It’s not the fear of a “no” that is so paralyzing, it’s the realization that important things in my life depend on the whims of others. As a recovering control freak, the uncertainty of my fate being in other people’s hands has been such a haunting thought, that instead I’ve chosen to make myself smaller and smaller, over and over.

I decided that I was going to make the damn video.

The Video

The application was due Friday at midnight. On Thursday, I decided to make the video. This gave me less than 48 hours to do this thing I’d never done before with enough quality to get me noticed.

I browsed through the #StarbucksGlobalCoffeeCreator submission hashtag to get a sense as to what other people were doing. It was intimidating. There were influencers with thousands of followers, who talked about their work with big brands. Their reels were concise, engaging, and very much in the TikTok aesthetic. I couldn’t compete by trying to play their game.

I decided to create a video combining personal narrative with the aesthetic from those old Vox explainer videos.3 This would require less time on camera, and would be a welcome break from the “me, me, me” types of submissions which would wear down the hiring committee.

The goal of the video was to establish my relationship to coffee (from my childhood in Colombia), my relationship to Starbucks (my first job), and the stories I wanted to tell about coffee.4

Once I had the script and a general shot-by-shot plan, I bought an influencer starter kit: a tiny microphone with a chinchilla tail, and one of those metal tripods that also serves as a blunt weapon.

Friday morning, I woke up early and headed off to Seattle to record. I recorded across two Starbucks locations, the fancy Starbucks Reserve store by downtown Seattle and the other fancy Starbucks Reserve store located at Starbucks HQ. I decided to begin the video with a shot showing Starbucks’ headquarters because I knew that this visual element would catch the attention of the people reviewing this video.

When I got to the first Starbucks Reserve store, I immediately sought the quietest area. Less so for the noise, more so to minimize the amount of people that would see me while I recorded. In the first few takes, my eyes drifted off-camera to gauge how many people were looking at me. Baristas and tourists walked by, noting my presence, but none of them snickered or laughed at me. It was The Spotlight Effect in practice.5 By the time I got to the second Starbucks, my nerves had steadied. I became slightly more expressive and relaxed.

Then, I rushed to edit the video. That was a pain in the ass. The audio from the video had a slight lag, as if the microphone took half a second longer to pick up my voice.6 I spent hours trying to fix it, including re-recording the audio. It felt like a cheap voice-over. I smoothed out the sound the best I could in Canva, but as you will see in the final version, there is audio lag in some clips.

After hours of editing, I decided that my perfectionist tendencies were playing a trick on me. Against the pressure of a deadline, I had to accept that I gave it my best effort and that it was time to send it.

“El que no llora no mama”

What happens next? I’m still waiting for Starbucks to recognize my sheer brilliance, A-list star potential, and give me this breakout role like Game of Thrones gave Pedro Pascal his big break.

It’s very unlikely this will happen.

But this wasn’t about Starbucks and this really cool role. It was about deciding that the cost of looking like a fool, of “being cringe,” was a lot lower than the cost of doing nothing. My mediocre video would be less mediocre than no video at all.

This realization connects to another major revelation I’ve had this year: The world rewards the intrepid far more than the intellectual.

Intrepid people ask for things. They ask, not just by asking, but also by doing.

There is a turn of phrase about asking for things and getting them. In Spanish, it goes “el que no llora no mama,” (he who doesn’t cry, doesn’t get the milk); in English “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”; in German “Von nichts kommt nichts” (nothing comes from nothing); and in Chinese "会哭的孩子有奶吃" (the child who cries gets the milk).

The universality of this wisdom is a clear sign of its value. Treating life like a game of chess, and trying to play by only making the perfect moves makes for a neat metaphor, but it’s not accurate at all. Life isn’t played on a 8×8 board, with clear roles and sets of moves. In the real game of life, the board expands and contracts, the roles appear and vanish, and the moves are only constrained by your imagination.

The scary thing is that once you see that life is not chess, you have to accept that uncertainty is the one constant. The people around us that we believe are really good about asking for things and shamelessly putting themselves out there, have learned to live with the uncertainty. Perhaps they deal with it through blissful ignorance, or on the other end of the spectrum, they arrived at the conclusion that the cost of inaction is generally higher than what we would like to believe, and so they take action.

I took on this challenge because I felt life screaming at me: “Look, I’ve given you plenty of opportunities for the first 34 years of your life and you’ve watched them go by. I’m going to give you a lot more, but you gotta do your part.”

And doing my part means taking actions, big and small, to become intrepid.

On that note…

If video doesn’t load, you can watch it on TikTok here.

You may see more experiments like this in upcoming months. If it wasn’t your vibe, that’s fine. Also, this may be an odd thing to say, but you can always unsubscribe. I won’t hold it against you.1

And now, let’s get back to the show.

I

I sit in my small fishing vessel floating in the sea's interlude. The still days are rare. Most days, I'm battling krakens, sirens, the weather and its gods, the darkness of night.

Yes, it’s a relief to not be anchored at bay, where no sailor likes to dwell. Though in rampant swell, I wonder whether I’ve made a mistake. I think of the well-meaning passersby; those who wished me “fair winds and good tidings.” The sea is deaf.

II

Who in whole conscience would undertake this voyage? I was a Thalamite2, rowing in the lower ranks of the imposing Trireme. Sitting in the belly of a wooden beast, callous hands on oar, the stroke caller a metronome. Unable to deviate. Unable to stop. Unable to ask “where are we going?” Shoulder to shoulder with my brethren, stuck in a cedar cave.

To be among the sea and not see it; to travel far and wide and never hold the compass; to count time in row strokes; to hold the hollow honor of being Athens’ nautical finest3. The sight of sweaty shoulders arranged like wood planks led to my revelation: “This can’t be all there is.”

III

I broke free and set sail. Now I could see the sea: how the sun kisses the waves, and the waves in turn, wink in shimmers of white gold. I could taste the salt carried by the wind. In those early days, I dreamed of my lore. Would I be Marco Polo, or maybe Ferdinand Magellan? What exotic destinations would I reach? When would I reach the glory and the gold?

I set out on my own, not with a mighty ship, but a vessel made by my hands. It’s mine, this dainty thing; that somehow keeps me from the indigo depth where breath leaves and never returns.

IV

The waves came, unyielding and unwilling to warn. Once, they sprung an ambush. The water unfurled like a pile of pine trunks taking swings at me, knocking me off my vessel. A sudden submersion. A miraculous buoyancy. I gasped and clawed back air into my lungs. I set myself back on my boat in disbelief that it could still float. After I caught my breath, I glanced at the sky: maybe there is a God after all.

V

On the lucky nights where stars turned into watchful eyes and the moon lullabied the sea, I wondered why I’d walked away from the safety of the Trireme’s hull. Was I overcome by a fever dream? A contempt for monotony? Was it really so bad to lean back, oar to chest, and row and row and row and row and row until reality dissolved? That wooden belly, me in its guts, was probably the last time I felt safe. In reality, I was feeling nothing at all.

VI

At last, I reached land. Not the harbor of a great empire, just a place with sand. I was able to stand and for once my feet did not fight the sway. I kissed the beach and rubbed grains of sand between fingertips; their coarseness jolting me back to life. There may not have been a reception, nor a treasure, but it was my first victory. I was not the sailor that left my home shore anymore. I was now a voyager who had endured mountainous waves and sea beasts.

VII

My journey went on for months. Each tempest between landings delivered a battering. Each time I grew ever more confident that my humble oak boat would hold, and I along with it. What started as a solitary voyage became populated by characters who've kept me afloat. Fellow sailors gifting me lemons to avoid scurvy. Blacksmiths and carpenters patching my vessel with bits of iron and wooden planks. Without them, there would be no tale to tell.

The storms, the landings, the casual help: all pulling me towards the idea that perhaps this journey, my choice, wasn't so foolish after all. Perhaps I didn't have a choice—the time had come in my life where the life I wanted and the life I had were pulling so far apart that they just tore at the seams. Bits of fabric, threads unraveling, all beyond repair. So I started again.

VIII

Life is the great passage. Great as enormous, all-encompassing. But it's not always going to be positively great. Life gave me permission to try, but not to succeed. By daring to be among the waves, I had to accept their nature—the stillness and the swell.

IX

It’s been years since I sat in the hull of the Trireme, unable to think, absorbed by the constant motion. What a shame to feel like we are stuck in a perpetual race. But the early days as a lone sailor gripped me with fear. “What’s next?” went from being a question filled with possibilities to a menacing inquiry.

Questions are double-edged. Every doubt has seeds. Some grow into poison ivy, others into lush trees. And the longer I sail the more the questions become their own kind of monstrous swell in my mind. At times, it feels like there are two storms I’m trying to emerge out of: one in the mind, the other at sea.

X

Most of the questions that matter can’t be answered in thought. I could gaze at the horizon and see if the sea would whisper an answer, but the sea is mute.

The great passage is full of matters unresolved, and the main wisdom this sailor can offer is that the best thing to do is sail towards the horizon and row, and row, and row, and row, and row. The answer will come.

On your way out

In a 2004 essay titled “Ambiguity & Truth,” legendary designer Milton Glaser presented a list he called “The Road to Hell.” The list served as a moral test for the type of work designers would take on with increasing moral dubiousness.

I liked the idea of his test as a moral compass for acceptable design work. Making the Lucky Charms leprechaun a cartoon instead of life-like isn’t unethical. Designing T-shirt decals for a company like Shein is more questionable.

Over the past few months, I’ve had Glaser’s test in the back of my head. I couldn’t escape the feeling that creating a version of this list for how I use AI would help me navigate the moral quagmire artificial intelligence presents. Establishing red lines would prompt self-reflection. Once I attempted to write something down, however, I felt my mind trying to run away. I believed creating rules around my AI usage would be helpful, yet I resisted. Giving my inner critic new criteria to torment me with felt more corrosive than continuing to live in moral ambiguity.

I discovered that defining my relationship with AI would expose two seemingly contradictory fears: Being too permissive about how I use AI would expose me as a hypocrite, and setting too many guardrails would become a form of self-sabotage. These fears melted into a quantum state of being too lax and too rigid at the same time.

I’m a hypocrite

Calling myself a hypocrite is not self-flagellation. It’s an observation of an inescapable condition from the complex, messy, weird world we live in. It’s unbearable to follow our beliefs and moral standards 100% of the time.

My sensitivity to my own hypocrisy arises from a deep desire to be virtuous. I see being virtuous as the best chance I have in life to be loved.1 And I believed that virtue could only be developed through impeccable integrity—like those vacuum sealed rooms where they manufacture semiconductors where the slightest speck of dust can ruin the entire operation.

But, I don’t live in a vacuum sealed room. My path to virtue has a long trail of fuck ups, disappointing behavior, regrets, and moral inconsistencies. Some are small, like not picking up a wrapper and placing it into the garbage bin one foot away. Some bigger, like the time I got suspended in high school for writing a biting, and homophobic, takedown of my bully on Myspace.2

The big mistakes leave a trail of atonement and disappointment. It also increases my aversion to creating new instances of unvirtuous behavior. Like being a hypocrite.

I procrastinated coming up with my own AI rules because part of me knew that I would inevitably confront not only my hypocrisy with my AI use, but also modern technology.

Take my iPhone, for instance. It has rare minerals. It is highly likely that many of these minerals were mined either illegally, using underpaid and/or underage labor, and its extraction came at great environmental cost. I can refer to this portal of infinite knowledge as a “blood cobalt” device, and it would not be hyperbole.

The same uncomfortable awareness appears when I think about AI. I’ve documented my delight using this technology and some reservations. If I had to assess the net benefit/negative of AI in my life over the past couple of years, it’s been a net benefit. It would have taken me weeks instead of days to research my piece on tariffs. The quality of my writing has benefited from using AI to critically challenge my arguments and the scaffolding of my essays.

And yet, I’m annoyed by how quickly we’ve moved on from discussing the legality and ethics of using copyrighted data to create LLMs (beyond fair use), the environmental costs (which will decrease over time, but the costs incurred should be acknowledged), or how it’s ramped up the sophistication and volume of misinformation.

But here I sit, having used AI four times in writing what you’ve read so far.3

Hypocrisy, then, is not resolved but managed. Living in transcendence of moral dilemmas would require a level of hermitage that I could never endure. The next best thing I can do is not to live in willful ignorance, confront my contradictions, and understand that for my own sanity, there are just incongruences in life I have to accept.

Building a fire with sticks and stones

The second fear is that a pursuit of purity from AI usage would turn me into an Amish—one Rumspringa away from realizing all I’ve missed because I talked myself into technological stasis.

If my day job creating content for businesses that is heartful and not jargon was 100% AI-free, would that be doing a disservice to me? Would that be doing a disservice to my customers, who in general, care less about the process than the outcome? They may not care whether I start a fire with sticks and stones versus a lighter. They just want fire.

To remain relevant in my new career as a content strategist and have a chance of growing out of the “ugly duckling” phase of my business, I feel forced to master AI tools. Otherwise, some dude on Linkedin who boasts about bringing in thousands of dollars a week through his AI-generated outreach emails will eat my lunch and take a victory lap.

The broader subtext of AI adoption that I’m influenced by is that I have to race to maximum proficiency to gain a competitive advantage in using this reality-altering technology to grow my financial and social status. This undercurrent is strong and fraught with recency bias because there’s first-hand evidence of key figures from the dot com boom becoming billionaires with immense power.4 History foreshadows that this new era will also create a new class of fabulously rich and influential winners.

But I’ve come to find the narrative that I have to learn how to use AI well exhausting and reductive.

Recently, I had dinner with Substack star Rick Lewis.5 When I talked to him about my dilemma, he shared his view on using AI:

His response lingered. None of the authors/writers I grew up adoring used AI, yet they wrote evocative, enrapturing works. Beyond the realm of writing, if AI disappeared out of thin air tomorrow, my quality of life wouldn’t substantially decrease.6

My concocted binary between technological stasis and mindless submission to artificial overlords is a false choice. Finding the synthesis between both poles is exactly why I need my own set of rules. The exercise asserts my agency over this marvelous and dangerous technology. It turns my grapple with this binary from wrestling match into the sweet surrender of embracing duality.

My AI Rules…actually they are principles

Coming up with a list à la Milton Glaser is a bit more complex; design as a field has clearer parameters than AI, the ethical dilemmas with this new technology feel a lot more expansive, and the supersonic rate of development makes it hard to create fixed rules.

What I think serves me better is to assess my usage of AI around these key principles:

1. AI as augmentation, not replacement. I want to use AI to help me do things better, not do them for me.

2. Avoid "prompt-and-go" instructions where I tell AI to do something for me. Outsourcing my thinking will erode my critical thinking skills.

3. Treat AI like a collaborator, not an intern. This approach helps me fully use its power rather than settling for mediocre output.

4. Don’t ask AI to solve my “blank page” problem. I’ve come to realize that the friction I feel when I stare at a blank page or feel like I’m out of ideas, is a fundamental part of the creative process. Depriving myself of this friction for the sake of expediency will have long-term negative effects.

5. Moderation is key. Overdoing something, even if it’s valuable, comes with its tradeoffs—many of them hidden.

What does this look like in practice?

It means that I will use AI often for research and fact-checking.7 I will also use AI for editing my writing, though I prefer it for catching spelling errors and explaining grammar mistakes so I can avoid them in the future. While editing, I may ask it for alternative phrasing. I rarely go with what AI suggests, but it will usually trigger another phrasing I hadn't thought about.

I will also use AI for multimedia creation. This one is tricky, because in an ideal world, I would love to pay an illustrator, or have enough artistic proficiency to design the illustrations myself. So I've arrived at a compromise where I will use AI-generated images partially in my illustrations for Tangent, progressively weaning off and doing more things in Illustrator/Photoshop as my skills improve.

I will use AI for vibe coding (using text to prompt an AI model to write code). I confess that I have fewer qualms with AI generating code versus generating words/images/sounds. Perhaps there is an inherent spirituality that I perceive in creating art and literary work that I've never perceived in creating digital products. I don't have a clear answer. I'm still working my way through this moral swamp.

Finally, I will periodically use AI for reflection and as a learning tutor. For reflection, I am comfortable with using AI as a conversation partner inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy. AI as a learning tutor is probably the most benign use case of AI. For example, I created a website using Replit that acts as a AI prompt coach: I feed it the prompt I want to use, I get feedback on how to make it better, and I iterate. Note that I am not asking my AI tutor to rewrite it for me, I'm asking it to teach me how to write it better.

What are my red lines?

Based on my principles, my red lines boil down to not passing AI-generated writing as my own or commercializing AI-generated work that was created by prompting a specific artist/designer (you won't see me selling Studio Ghibli-like shirts on Etsy any time soon).

Also, I will not use AI to generate posts based on my writing or the writing of my clients. I may ask it to brainstorm complementary pieces, but I will not outsource the creation of posts to AI.

***

I expect these principles to evolve as these technologies mature and as I continue engaging in earnest with my moral dilemmas. But after avoiding this exercise for the past few months, I'm comfortable with where I've landed.

My rule-making as a way to break through the binaries is partly an effort to take more authorship of my life as a way to cope with how the world is changing. The open question of what our world will look like in ten years, or even two years from now, creates a kind of vertigo that I’ve seldom felt. In those moments of uncertainty, I imagine myself becoming increasingly irrelevant, outdated, and without any clear sense of direction as to how I’d fit in this new world.

What I gained from this exercise wasn't just the principles themselves, though having them does save me mental energy. It was a reminder of an evergreen lesson that took me way too long to understand: when everything feels uncertain, build the certainty within yourself.

I wonder what cavemen felt when they saw the daffodil’s early spring bloom. Perhaps these early humans saw foliage and petals as prophets of better times ahead, leaving behind winter’s grip.

How did they express awe, joy, relief? What did they feel as they stepped out into morning dew on those March mornings?

Did they feel what I feel when I look at a cherry tree?

It feels a bit sheepish to be lost in awe of the Sakura’s pastel hues. You don’t want to follow the crowd and be impressed, but you can’t help looking up.

It’s an eclipse.

The evolution from buds to petals is a divine manifestation of the greater order of things. Things that, for billions of humans through thousands of years, were inexplicable phenomena. We live in an age where beauty has been demystified. We’ve become too desensitized.

My alma mater, the University of Washington, has 29 Yoshino cherry trees in its Quad. These trees are about 90 years old, and have been in the Quad since 1962. They’ve been shade, beauty, and comfort for 63 graduating classes of students.

I don’t recall a moment of awe, a reckoning with the volume of the foliage, the therapeutic effect of the hue, or the whispers of their petals, during my college years. They were just there and I took them for granted.

Our fixation hampers our perception. The bubblegum palette is alluring, but only part of a scene. Spring affords new life to everything. Trees emerge with a wide array of greens. Flowers of all other colors bloom. The sky spreads its omnipresent azure blanket. Water takes on the color of its neighbors; muddy green when still, or shimmering silver as the fountain’s droplets somersault.

Maybe the cherry trees are the conduit—the first lick of ice cream. Once you begin noticing them, you’ll start noticing the other trees and flowers. The whole crew. In spring’s music festival, the cherry blossoms are the headliner, but the other bands are pretty damn good.

The white magnolia is imposing with every branch end wearing a pillowy, ivory, crown. Its bloom, abundant and luxurious, expands attention and invites an extended gaze.

Bluebells are flowers that seem more impressive the larger their crowd. As a small group they sound ok, but as an ensemble they are imposing. As I stumbled upon this quartet in one of my walks, I was reminded of its cousin, the bluebonnet, that lives in broad patches resting next to the highways in Austin. Now, those are an entire philharmonic.

These dogwoods are native to the Pacific Northwest. No one knows where they got their name. I’d like to think that one day, a pack of self-determined dogs decided to become wild beasts again, muddied pets denouncing their domesticity, and made lair in a place with these flowers. Their petals are big like an astonished eye. Or perhaps that’s my reaction upon seeing them up close.

Among all the colors, the unsung hero is green. Green is like breath. Green is dutiful and modest. Maybe it doesn’t boast because of its omnipresence. It knows its place in the world. It doesn’t rub it in.

Green are the mossy patches that dress trunks with velvet sweaters. Green are the leaves of the Lombardy Poplars’ lime branches arranged like a quiver of arrows, trees lined up like Terracotta Warriors. Green are the maple leaves of the last-man standing tree in our urban jungle, an outcast on an asphalt island where it faithfully shades Teslas and Honda Civics.

Spring’s arrival is a yearly miracle. Through taking these photos and arranging them for you, I’ve gained greater appreciation for spring celebrations; the Persian Nowruz, the Japanese Shunbun no Hi, the Egyptian Sham El-Nessim. Celebrations are life’s way of saying: “hey, this moment right here? Savor it.”

Nature uses these celebrations and this season to impart its wisdom: No bloom is instant, it comes after the dread, and it’s never too late to bloom or start again.

Thank you for reading. This was a bit of a different essay, both in format and prose, so let me know what you think in the comments. More writing, of all kinds, is on its way. I hope you stick around.

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Hi Friends,

This is my monthly digest where I round up and share things I read, watched, and listened to this month that I enjoyed.

This month, I'm also giving you a window into the thoughts that stayed with me throughout the past few weeks.

Thank you for reading!

What am I thinking about?

What makes art valuable?

If you've been online over the past couple of weeks, you've likely seen the flood of images turned in the style of the legendary Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli.

This has re-ignited debates about whether AI-generated images emulating distinctive styles are ethically acceptable (distinct from legal copyright concerns). Last year I explored my own tensions with using AI in my essay, The Genie and the man. Those tensions persist and have only deepened as AI has become part of my daily routine.1

Here's how I'm currently framing the question: What truly makes human-created art valuable? From your friend's watercolor hanging in your bedroom to Picasso's Guernica, what elements give art its value, and how do these manifest in AI-generated work? Is it effort, artistic skill, or something else entirely?

I'm still in the early stages of exploring this question, but I believe it ultimately comes down to our concept of beauty—what it means and how we define it.

I'm a firm believer that beauty is both objective and subjective.

Everything is political

The word "politics" has become as taboo as the word penis.2 But I think we're mistakenly conflating politics itself with political discourse and media coverage.

Here's how I define politics: the dynamics of our collective life and the decisions that create functioning communities, societies, and civilizations.

The air you breathe is political. The roads you drive on are political. what your child learns is political, whether you or the state teaches your child is political, what you can and cannot do in public is political.

I understand the impulse to disengage. How could you not want to distance yourself from political discourse when we're drowning in tribalism, surrounded by half-truths, with family dinners hosting competing realities?

It doesn't help that mass media has clear economic incentives to provoke strong emotions like anger while avoiding the nuance complex political scenarios require.3

My fear is that as people continue to confuse politics with political discourse, and as that discourse deteriorates further, we'll accelerate this vicious cycle of political apathy—the very conditions that breed oligarchies and perpetual dysfunction. Once we reach that point, everything becomes unavoidably political as the failures of our political process become impossible to ignore in daily life.

Conviction and Optimism

Beyond my thoughts on conviction, I've been wrestling with: "How do you prime yourself daily to acknowledge the immense privilege that life is?"

How do you counter waves of sadness when they wash ashore?

How do you accept that embracing life fully doesn't require a tragedy like losing someone you love?

Research suggests avoiding phone use when you wake4 and practicing gratitude and meditation in this liminal state may imprint a default mindset of gratitude and optimism.

But what happens when you hit a roadblock during your day? How do you build the awareness to return to a positive baseline?

I do have conviction. I am optimistic. But these feelings fluctuate wildly throughout the day, creating unnecessary friction and triggering old scripts and limiting beliefs. I'll continue experimenting with what works for me and share my findings.

What should Tangent be?

My grandest ambition for this newsletter is to become a one-man magazine reflecting the full spectrum of interests that populate my mental universe—one you find inspirational, educational, and entertaining.

I want you to read a post about road rage, then one about tariffs, followed by thoughts on a book I loved. Borrowing Alice Lemee's term: to have enough "creator gravity" to bring you along an interstellar journey through my varied interests.

I realize it's a lot to ask. After all, you don't read The Atlantic for sports coverage, watch Bravo for history lessons, or tune into ESPN for psychology insights. There may come a point when this newsletter needs to become less divergent and more focused.

Why? Audience size matters. Soon, I hope to publish books that reach larger audiences and generate substantial income from my writing (the perennial writer's dream). The publishing industry remains a powerful gatekeeper of taste and distribution despite the internet, and industry dynamics dictate that most publishing houses won't consider you without a sizable audience (~10,000 subscribers).

A larger audience gives me leverage to decide whether going direct makes sense. My thoughts are evolving, but this is where I stand now.

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What I’m Watching

Craig Mod on the Tim Ferriss Show

Before watching these interviews, I only had passing knowledge of Craig Mod. By the end, I was captivated by his commitment to craft, his mindfulness, and his fascinating life journey!

Here is the link to Part 2.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing with AI - How I Write/David Perell

David is the former sensei for Write of Passage and host of How I Write (one of my top three favorite podcasts). This video showcases vintage David—the same engaging approach that kept hundreds of people captivated across every time zone for 1.5-hour sessions. Beyond entertainment value, David offers thought-provoking insights about AI's evolution in the writing context and shares practical tips at the end.

As I mentioned in the opening section, I'm still navigating the tensions around how and when to use AI in writing. But if you're ready to move beyond that philosophical stage and want actionable strategies you can implement today, I recommend you watch this.

What I’m Reading

The Great Passage

I almost put down this novel about 30 pages in. I'm so glad I didn't.

This Japanese novel by Shion Miura is a beautiful ode to words and their meaning. The story follows Majime Mitsuya, an awkward, lanky guy tasked with creating an ambitious dictionary called The Great Passage.

The plot seems mundane, and the book starts slowly. However, like growing fond of a barista at your local coffee shop through the warmth of familiarity, these characters gradually won me over. Once I found myself rooting for them, the book began delivering beautiful insights about the power of words, meanings, and definitions. I ended up falling in love with this book.

I'll leave you with a passage where one of the supporting characters, Kishibe, contemplates how working in the Dictionary's Editorial Department has begun to change her:

"She had pursued her life and her career without thinking, drifting along like someone who comes to a fork in the road and unhesitatingly takes the easier way.

Working on the dictionary, delving into words the way we do, has changed me, she thought. Awakening to the power of words—the power not to hurt others but to protect them, to tell them things, to form connections with them—had taught her to probe her own mind and inclined her to make allowances for other people's thoughts and feelings.

Through her work on The Great Passage, she was seeking and gaining access to the power of words as never before."

Finally, My Brain Makes Sense to Me by Charlotte Grysolle

Charlotte is a fellow Write of Passage friend who has been writing for years on neuroscience, breath, and wellness/productivity. Her latest edition resonated with me deeply.

Charlotte shares her journey through ADHD testing prompted by her overactive mind. While the results showed ADHD-like traits without a clear diagnosis, this experience led Charlotte down a rabbit hole that helped her work with her mind instead of against it. From her post:

Those moments when you zone out during mundane activities and your mind drifts into an endless spiral of thoughts? That's your DMN [Default Mode Network] working. It's responsible for mind-wandering, self-reflection, replaying past conversations, generating creative ideas.

The DMN is essential—it helps us make sense of our experiences, process memories, and plan for the future.

But here's the critical part:

In a neurotypical brain, the DMN is supposed to deactivate when you focus on an external task. When you start working, reading, or talking, your brain shifts gears, engaging the TPN—your brain's focus mode.

Pure Independence by Morgan Housel

I think Morgan is one of a handful of modern writers who can pack numerous ideas into the fewest words possible. The author of The Psychology of Money definitely delivers in this essay about having agency (my only gripe with this piece is that I would substitute "agency" for "independence" and it would be even more powerful). This quote stood out:

⁠⁠Less stress is a good point. It’s mentally exhausting to pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s part of why so many people look forward to retirement: it may be the first time in their professional lives they can truly be themselves.

Financial independence is easy to grasp – you no longer rely on others for income. Intellectual and moral independence is more nuanced, but not having it is a unique form of debt.

How James Bond Can Fix the Crisis in Masculinity by Ted Gioia

I'll give you an extra thing I'm thinking about: Manhood. What it takes to be a man and to engage romantically in current times. That's why I was drawn to Ted's article examining the future of the Bond franchise and what the sexy spy archetype might mean for future movies. However, it was the section Ted calls his "advice on masculinity" that really grabbed my attention.

Here’s the one big thing that movies and TV shows will never tell you about masculinity. But you need to learn it.

A man achieves happiness in life by delivering on his responsibilities. You have no idea how important this one thing will be to your mental health, your sense of self-worth, your relationships, and your ability to find meaning and purpose in your life.

I’m talking about your responsibilities to your family, your colleagues, your teammates, your friends, your communities and groups, your country—and even to total strangers. (Yes, you have responsibilities to them, too.)

But above all I’m talking about your responsibility to yourself. And when I say you owe something to yourself, I mean your higher image of who you should be.

Living up to these demands is what makes a man happy. It’s also what makes him manly.

A real man goes out into the world and gets things done in order to fulfill these obligations. And this is where traditional masculine values come in—toughness, perseverance, endurance, vitality, ruggedness, and all the rest.

If you figure this out, everything else will fall into place.

What I’m Listening To

I made you a playlist

Want to get a taste of my eclectic music taste? Well, I made you a playlist so you can go "wow" or "wtf." This playlist contains some of the songs I listened to most in March.

There's Japanese R&B. There's Classical. There's Spanish Rock. There are old-school Italian ballads. There's Salsa. There's Dua Lipa.

Check it out!

Gia Fu's Salsa Sessions

I've rekindled my love affair with salsa this year (and started taking lessons again). I've had a love-hate relationship with this beautiful genre: I love salsa music, but got too in my head about needing to be "good" at it because I'm Colombian and that's what everyone expected.

Gia Fu's jam sessions have been a perfect low-pressure way to simply enjoy the music and let my feet do the talking while I work from my standing desk.

She's also a phenomenal DJ who brings deep cuts you won't find on Spotify. She's the real deal.

In case you missed it…

I wrote earlier this week about tariffs. Hilariously enough, the situation has changed in the past 72 hours, and 72 hours from now, it may drastically change again...because 🙃.

I know most of you have an aversion to political content (based on the open rates for this latest edition), but I'm asking you to read for just 60 seconds, then decide if it's worth continuing for 2-3 more minutes.

If you like what you read and want more insight, I highly recommend Kyla Scanlon's recent post—she captures the situation brilliantly.

The best place to start is with the vanilla latte many of you enjoy regularly.

The coffee in your latte likely came from Brazil, Colombia, or Switzerland, the top coffee-exporting countries to the United States.1 The vanilla probably came from Madagascar, which accounts for 75% of vanilla imports to this country.

Your vanilla latte will become more expensive.

This past Wednesday, President Trump displayed a chart resembling a microbrewery menu, listing "reciprocal tariffs" against over 90 countries and territories including European nations, the Falkland Islands2, and even remote Antarctic territories like Heard and McDonald Islands—a place inhabited only by penguins.

These tariffs have landed as well as the time in college I dipped a friend I was dancing with at the end of the song, and we both immediately hit the ground.

The S&P 500 dropped by 10% over Thursday and Friday, and will likely drop more this week.

Libertarian economists Thomas Sowell and Tyler Cowen, who typically favor GOP policies, have expressed their dismay at these tariffs with Cowen declaring: “This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime.”

Senators from both parties introduced legislation to give Congress oversight on tariffs.3

Reactions across the political spectrum have been predictable. Trumpers argue that we aren’t seeing the brilliant chess game Trump is playing. Never Trumpers point to the red cliff of the S&P 500 chart as evidence that he just nuked the economy.

Reactions notwithstanding, I became obsessed with one question: why?

I wanted to understand the most rational, coherent argument for these tariffs and evaluate it in earnest, despite my bias.

Let me disclose my bias: I don’t like Trump, and I don’t think he has the character to govern. But, I think it’s naive to think of Trump simply as a man with the political philosophy of William McKinley, the bravado of Hulk Hogan, and the temperament of Angelica Pickles from Rugrats!

Thinking that Trump is this one-dimensional is the Occam’s razor4 explanation for everything he does, but I don’t think he’s that simple.

Since the tariffpalooza announcement, three dominant narratives have emerged:

Let's evaluate each in detail.

Note: Some of you may be familiar with tariffs, some of you less so. I’ve added a “Tariffs 101” section at the bottom of this piece if you want to learn or need a refresher.

Choose your adventure narrative

Tariffs to raise money

President Trump has claimed that "you're going to see billions of dollars, even trillions of dollars coming into our country very soon in the form of tariffs." His trade advisor, Peter Navarro, said tariffs would raise about $600 billion per year.

What will they do with the money from these tariffs?

Trump has long wanted to replace the income tax with tariffs. The Tax Policy Center studied this claim and concluded tariffs wouldn't come close to covering the $34 trillion in income taxes expected over the next decade.

Even if they keep income taxes and argue that existing taxes, plus tariffs, plus DOGE reductions (which seek to cut $1 trillion in government expenses) would create a surplus to pay down the $36 trillion debt, this scenario is simply Trump fan-fiction.

You would need impossibly high tariffs to balance the budget (and assume countries won’t have alternatives), destroying the U.S. economy in the process. Business costs would soar, consumer prices would spike, unemployment would rise, and government spending on safety nets would increase.

It’s like burning your house so that you get insurance money; you’ll never get full value, and now you don’t have a house.

Tariffs to reset global trade & re-industrialize the U.S.

This argument reflects the administration's desire to bring back manufacturing to the U.S. The path to doing so was first laid out by Chief Economic Advisor to the Trump Administration, Stephen Miran, in a paper he published in November 2024 titled “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trade System”

The paper outlines a possible path for the Trump administration to reach the following outcomes:

1. Re-industrialize the U.S. to increase factory jobs and make our supply chain less vulnerable to disruptions like COVID or freak scenarios like that one boat that got stuck in the Suez Canal and halted global trade in 2021.

2. Weaken the dollar so that U.S. companies can sell their goods to other countries more cheaply and so that, seemingly by magic, the United States is able to refinance $36 trillion of debt.5

Near the end of the report, Miran makes a key point about the implementation of this master plan.

There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit, but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences.

Careful planning. Precise execution. Minimize adverse consequences.

None of these elements exist in how this administration has rolled out these tariffs. The tariff rates appear to have been calculated by Econ 101 college students. According to Axios:

The formula is to divide the U.S. trade deficit with each country by that country's exports to the U.S. The final reciprocal tariff was then divided by 2, with a minimum of 10% (which applies even to those countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus).

Let’s look at Angola, which got slapped with a 34% tariff. The United States has a trade deficit with Angola. Why? Because we import high-value goods like diamonds and oil. So what's the plan? Force every Angolan citizen to buy enough Ford F-150s to give us a trade surplus? The average Angolan spends just $1,315 USD per year on goods and services.6

Tariffs as Trump’s Bludgeon

Trump loves to negotiate. He sees tariffs as the biggest economic lever he has against friends or foes. As Derek Thompson writes in his column “There is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs”:

Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.

This starts to make sense when you look at Trump’s declarations on Friday that he is willing to negotiate if countries offer him something “phenomenal”

What deals does he want to cut? That still remains unclear. You would expect countries to offer no-tariffs zones (essentially backing them into free-trade agreements), or payments from EU countries for NATO protection. These are hypothetical scenarios, but typical of Trump's negotiation style.

The problem is that Trump's deal-making, brash and irrational, may help in negotiations, but not in governance. To this point, economist Tyler Cowen writes in his Free Press article:

With President Trump one never quite knows what one is going to get, so any assessment needs to be provisional. But that is a big part of the broader problem—high and persistent uncertainty about the basic rules of the game.

For Trump's negotiating tactics to work, countries would have no choice but to lower their tariffs or magically increase imports from the United States.

What's more plausible is that most countries will see the United States as antagonizing them despite being the world's wealthiest country. In a lot of cases, they are likely to cut their own deals with China.7

What happens now?

Who knows? By the time you read this, everything might look different. Unpredictability is this administration's favorite tool, both domestically and abroad.

But here's what I do know: I genuinely tried to find the rational case for tariffs. What emerged is clear—the three dominant narratives used to justify Trump's tariff strategy simply don't hold up to scrutiny.

If this administration truly wanted to re-industrialize America, it would implement a strategy giving business leaders confidence to make long-term manufacturing investments. Business leaders are rattled right now.

It would continue the targeted reshoring of high-value goods like computer chips through the surprisingly successful CHIPS Act—which Trump has threatened to cut. As Kyla Scanlon wrote in her latest post:

Without sustained industrial policy (think: training, tech investment, stable regulations), tariffs alone won’t bring a big wave of well-paying manufacturing jobs.

Even with a coherent industrial policy, we must face reality: modern industrialization won't bring back jobs as Trump voters imagine. The revived mills won't be filled with workers. They’ll be filled with robots. Yes, there will be high-paying jobs managing these robots, but only a fraction of what people expect.

This is what's so frustrating about this gambit. Nearly every country would love to have America's combination of robust service industries and advanced manufacturing. Yet there's no scenario where imposing broad tariffs won't damage our service trade surplus.

Trump may end up getting concessions he can declare as a win…and for our sake, I hope he does. The man doesn’t do well when he thinks he is losing, and he may make even more impulsive, harder-to-undo decisions.

I just hope that in the path to pyrrhic victories, we are not left in the ashes holding our vanilla lattes, wondering what the hell just happened.

What are they?

Tariffs are penalties imported from South Korea, the importer, Best Buy, has to pay a 25% tariff on top of the price they paid Samsung. In theory, Best Buy can choose not to pass on the cost of the tariff to the consumer. In practice, they want to preserve their profit margins by passing the cost to the consumer.

Why do countries impose tariffs?

Tariffs have been used for centuries as a way to regulate trade. In essence, a country levies tariffs on specific goods or trading partners to encourage domestic production and consumption of those goods.

For instance, imagine the U.S. government wanted more tennis shoes to be made domestically. It could impose tariffs on imported tennis shoes from countries like Vietnam or China. This would make importing shoes more expensive for U.S.-based retailers like Nike or Adidas. As a result, these companies might explore sourcing shoes from domestic manufacturers instead, especially if local production becomes cheaper than importing tariffed goods.

Do tariffs work?

Yes and no—and the duality of outcomes is key to understanding what is going on right now. Tariffs can sometimes achieve the goal of protecting domestic industries and reducing reliance on imports. But there are ways that tariffs can become self-defeating:

• Increase costs for consumers because imported goods become more expensive, which leads to inflation.

• Other countries may impose retaliatory tariffs which will hurt U.S. companies that export goods and services.

• Increase production costs. For instance, inputs like timber, drywall, and glass, essential in the construction of houses, are now subject to tariffs, which makes housing more expensive to build.8

How do tariffs impact trade balances?

Tariffs are one tool that governments use to influence trade balances, which can either be a surplus or a deficit. A trade surplus occurs when a country exports more than it imports, while a trade deficit happens when imports exceed exports. At the end of 2024, the United States had a trade deficit of $918.4 billion, meaning it imported $918.4 billion more in goods and services than it exported.

While tariffs can reduce imports and help narrow trade deficits in theory, they don't always work as planned because:

• Higher tariffs may hurt exports if other countries retaliate with their own tariffs.

• Domestic industries may not have the capacity to replace the goods that just got tariffed.

So, why don’t all countries use tariffs to run at trade surpluses?

The simplest answer is that some goods are essential but cannot be produced domestically at competitive prices (or at all). For example, the U.S. imports coffee because the only place you can grow coffee in the United States is Hawaii. Or consider that Birkenstocks (the state shoe of Washington State) are made exclusively in Germany. So, the United States buys coffee from other countries and imports Birkenstocks from Germany.

In these cases, you want trade with these countries because they can offer you a better product than you can make or a good that you can't produce yourself. This principle is called comparative advantage and explains why global trade exists.

There are reasons why the U.S. has had a trade deficit for decades. The merits of those reasons are a whole different discussion altogether.

But to answer the question above, countries don't use tariffs to run trade surpluses because the value they get from comparative advantage exceeds the value they get from running a trade surplus.9

Currently, I lack conviction.

I don’t write this to seek pity or reassurance. It is a diagnosis, not an indictment. Its absence revealed by flashbacks to moments in my life where I experienced glimpses of conviction. Like when I decided that I was going to study abroad in Italy, or get the work rotation in Germany, or find a way to succeed at Google after bombing my first sales quarter.

I’m not sure I want to be a freelance writer. I like working with clients, I like getting paid to write, I like when clients finish working with me and are happy. But LLMs (Large Language Models) are very quickly changing what it means to be a freelance writer. There is a whole slab of work that will soon be automated. And instead of thinking “no matter what, I’m going to thrive in this environment!” the question that’s been running around in my mind has been “What am I doing here? Did I just jump into quick sand?”

Conviction

Conviction is the ability to take action compelled by an ineffable force in spite of fear. This force unites heart and mind so that they lock eyes, hold hands, and jump together into the abyss.

Conviction is not the same as finding your vocation or calling. It's not the secret ingredient to "finding your passion." Conviction is a way of moving through life. It is the bias to operate from a place of high agency, a default to thinking "what if this goes right?", and turning "coulds" into "musts" without guilt or punishment.1 It holds you accountable through internal commitment rather than external pressure. If you've found your vocation, then you are more likely to have convictions; but they are cousins, not twins.

We are drawn to those who live with conviction. They speak passionately about their interests—not as hobbies, but as vessels for expression and purpose. They lean into their quirks and compulsions, not caring for the opinions of others. They might come across as one-dimensional to observers, but this is actually profound focus; like sculptors, they chip away everything nonessential from their lives, transforming raw marble slabs into meaningful works of authenticity.

When I was thinking of conviction this past weekend, I thought about these individuals:

I thought about Craig Mod, a writer and photographer I discovered recently.2 Craig gained prominence from his monk-like walking regimen (dozens of kilometers a day, no headphones, no social media). Through thousands of miles walked in Japan, he cultivated "creative boredom," walking 50km/30mi per day, chatting with strangers along the way, and concluding each day by writing a 2,000-3,000 word blog post. He did this every night, for months at a time.

I thought about my friend , who has been learning and practicing Chinese every day for years. He has a YouTube channel where he's recorded over 1,000 videos, most over an hour long, most with less than 10 views, of him just speaking Chinese. He now lives in China and is doing daily comedy stand-up open mics in Chinese.

I thought about my friend , who has been writing her newsletter for over five years without missing a single week, and is now in the midst of writing her memoir, reading dozens of memoirs a year and talking about them in her podcast.

As I wrote, conviction is a way of being, an operating system. But I think the way this operating system is installed on our minds is by having a clear vision of the life we want to live.

This is where my sea of doubts begin.

Vision

The approach I've learned for setting a vision is to write or think about your ideal reality in rich detail, imagining not only your circumstances but also your emotional state, and to think about this vision in the present—as if you were already living in this vision.

I've written and meditated about what this vision should look like for me. It's different every time. Each iteration feels like I'm in the movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I'm transported through multiple scenes: An onsen in Japan, a remodeled cottage in Tuscany, a high-rise in New York, a vineyard in Uruguay, a vacation home in the outskirts of Bogotá. In all of these settings, writing comes into the equation, but it never looks quite the same. I'm a best-selling novelist, or moderately successful writer supported by subscribers and patrons, a journalist, a poet who unexpectedly found commercial success. It's all clear enough to reveal that writing is part of the equation, but varied enough that I can't settle as to how writing is part of the equation.

The tension remains between the idea that life is far too complex and unpredictable to have a high-definition vision versus the idea that enough clarity is necessary for movement. Visions are catalysts; if they remain merely a thought or a journal entry without activating something in you, the vision is simply not compelling enough.

Clarity is how you bridge the gap between conviction and vision.

Conviction + Vision

This is how I've married the ideas of conviction and vision in my mind:

Having a clear vision will motivate initial motion. From that initial motion, you will be both tested and rewarded. The tests are life's way to separate mere penchant from authentic purpose. The rewards are signs from the universe that persistence is not only necessary but advantageous. Navigating through the tests and rewards is what imbues you with conviction.

The outward manifestation of conviction is irrational confidence; irrational not because it doesn't make sense, but rather because it can't quite be explained. The inward manifestation of conviction is a deep feeling of alignment—authenticity made evident by the lack of tension between what you are doing and what you want to do.

As Harry Dry wrote in his latest essay about conviction3: "There is no AI prompt for conviction." It can't be automated, bought, or co-opted. This truth resonates with my own journey.

Conviction is still adrift, and the vision is shrouded by the fog. But I see an ivory glimmer in the indigo sky; a North Star that invites me to sail and test the roughness of the waters myself.

As a kid, there were three answers for what I wanted to be when I grew up: Soccer player for Real Madrid, radio journalist, and President of Colombia.1

I used to record myself "speaking English" (by appending -tion to words) and report fictional world news. Throughout my teens, I mentally crafted presidential speeches—imagining how to end Colombia's civil war, lift us from poverty, and build a thriving nation. I'm a political person at heart.

I've kept politics mostly off this newsletter, partly to avoid alienating subscribers, but mainly because I know political views mainly change through lived experiences, not blog posts. I’m hesitant to oversimplify complex issues or contribute to the erosion of political discourse. Growing up in Colombia taught me this: when meaningful discourse erodes, violence becomes the loudest voice.

However, I'm making an exception for the book "Abundance." If you expected something about the law of attraction—I love where your head's at, but that's not what I’m writing about today.

Still with me? Let's dive into the latest liberal manifesto that's infuriating both progressives and conservatives.2

What’s the book about?

It’s a book that offers a progressive political vision focused on building more housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare while removing bureaucratic barriers to innovation and growth.

The book’s thesis is clear: The future we want lies beyond the horizon of what we're willing to build and invent.

If we want a future with affordable housing, clear skies, no cancer victims, and free-ninety-nine electricity—well, you have to build and invent that reality. You can’t just manifest it.

The book is written by Ezra Klein, columnist at The New York Times, and Derek Thompson, reporter at The Atlantic. Derek is one of my favorite writers, most recently having written this incredible cover story for The Atlantic exploring our growing social isolation. His writing style—witty, insightful, and substantive—represents the kind of writing I aspire to consistently create.

The authors deliberately mention this book is written for a liberal and centrist audience. It serves as an intervention for progressives and Democratic leadership—a wake-up call to reconsider our relationship with government, question our reflexive defense of bureaucracy, and propose a shift from political performance toward delivering real improvements.

It examines four areas needing abundance: housing, transportation, healthcare, and energy. Ezra and Derek show government's vital role in driving innovation (through the Clean Air Act, DARPA, Operation Warp Speed), while revealing how excessive oversight and litigiousness have stifled progress and eroded public trust in government.

These are the ideas that resonated the most with me:

1. Subsidies don’t solve supply issues

The book makes the argument that progressive policies which have sought to subsidize things like healthcare (Affordable Care Act) and education (Pell Grants) are good. However, it faults the left for not considering that, eventually, you need more of what is being demanded if you are serious about the long-term affordability of these foundational elements of our social contract.

Consider Kamala Harris’ campaign proposal to give first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment assistance. The sum seems generous, but in supply-constrained housing markets, that’s just going to drive up the cost of the available housing by a similar amount.3

This mocking tweet actually captures the position perfectly.

2. Abundance is more constructive and effective than scarcity

The book examines the “degrowth” movement that has gained traction in Europe and parts of the US. It challenges the movement's central claim that resolving problems like climate change and inequality requires developed economies to contract and developing economies to grow more slowly.

Logically, this would result in lower emissions and perhaps greater availability of valuable resources. The problem is that it is not only impractical, but completely unrealistic. Basic game theory tells us that if players don't trust each other, they will optimize for their own outcomes. Also, humans are naturally motivated by loss aversion, which is why removing things is always harder than adding things.

The book goes on to warn that the butterfly effect of the degrowth agenda is how it creates opportunities for authoritarian governments and strongmen to gain power by promising the opposite of degrowth policies—ultimately making our problems worse.

3. Government as wings, not dead weight

This is probably the main point of the book's second half. It explores how penicillin wouldn't have existed at the scale that it did without government involvement. The United States was making exceptional progress on solar energy in the early 80s until the Reagan administration withdrew funding, making it unprofitable for innovative solar companies to continue their work.

I think the metaphor of government as wings is apt: it is not the whole vehicle, but you need it for lift, to stay afloat, and to maneuver.

To enable government to function as a productive set of wings, the authors advocate for a combination of push-pull funding.

Push funding occurs when the government invests money up-front to incentivize invention (like NIH grants). Pull funding happens when the government rewards innovation breakthroughs after they occur (like reimbursements to COVID test manufacturers).

An abundance-pilled government would strategically use both mechanisms to make aggressive bets on scientific breakthroughs. The book also argues that the current grant-making process is broken, focusing on too many safe bets and transforming scientists into grant administrators rather than innovators.

4. “It’s housing, stupid”

If I could buy a billboard in Downtown Seattle, it would say: “It’s housing, stupid.”4

I’ll reserve the why for a future essay, but I’ll give you the punchline: Our affordability crisis is directly tied to the cost of housing. It may not be the biggest component, but it is the phantom thread.

I was glad that the book covered it pretty effectively. It offers a damning assessment as to why cities like San Francisco have stifled any new construction through permitting gimmicks and bureaucratic banana peels.

It articulates what I see as the fundamental contradiction in American housing policy: Americans have grown up with the idea of a house as a wealth-building vehicle.5

As a result, any effort that might negatively impact this wealth-building asset is perceived as contrary to homeowners' self-interest. This explains why NIMBYs often claim they DO want more affordable housing—just not in their backyards.

From the book: "How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can't."

5. Invention relies on implementation

This was probably my favorite idea from the book. Derek talks about “The Eureka Myth,” the idea that, as a society, we mythologize the moment of discovery (Newton’s Apple, Edison’s lightbulb experiments, and Archimedes’ OG “Eureka!” moment), but what really matters is how “individuals and institutions take an idea from one to 1 billion.”6

The authors use the miraculous story of penicillin to illustrate this point. The initial discovery of penicillin is so remarkable that it sounds like an urban legend (I won't spoil it for you). However, the book emphasizes that penicillin only became widely available because the Office of Scientific Research Development, a government agency established during WWII, funded crucial research to stabilize large-scale production and financed manufacturing facilities. This government intervention led to the exponential growth in penicillin production "from an average of 10 million units per plant per month in 1942 to 646 million units by June 1945."

We can see similar impact with the NIH, an agency recently targeted for bushwhacking budget cuts. Recent data shows that NIH-funded research contributed to 354 out of 356 drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019. Despite criticism from certain tech figures, the NIH remains one of the world's most important innovation engines.7

However, the book is not without its flaws and here are the two big ones that I’m having a hard time ignoring.

Ok, but what about education and public safety?

The book makes no mention of education and public safety. I mean, those are pretty important things for a society.

If Democrats' focus on process over outcomes in housing and transportation has eroded faith in government, education and safety have surely done the same.

Public education’s failure diagnosis is accepted across the political spectrum, but the proposed solutions diverge dramatically (give it more money versus blow it all up). Add the cultural debates about teaching children about gender and race, and the contested boundary between education and indoctrination, and you have a thorny issue that deserved attention in this book.

Public safety presents similar thorniness. While xenophobia exaggerates immigrant crime rates,8 cities like Seattle have become too permissive of anti-social behavior. Trump's gains in major cities likely stemmed from safety perceptions, despite improving national crime statistics9—a "vibecession" of public safety.10

Where do education and public safety fit within the Abundance agenda?

Will this change anything?

My biggest criticism: I don’t think the book will change many liberal minds. The book assumes that by speaking heart-to-heart with liberals, using the common language of technocracy and appealing to moral good will motivate new attitudes around government and policies that encourages growth.

It paints a solarpunk future without explaining the consequences of maintaining the status quo. This is change management 101: you have to make the consequences of doing nothing visceral and clear—make your audience believe that they are on the Titanic.

Why should a homeowner in Queen Anne, a residential neighborhood next to downtown Seattle, be willing to accept condos next door? What happens if they don’t?

Most "doom and gloom" messaging from the left focuses on authoritarianism and institutional collapse. These warnings contain truth. Yet the affluent liberals whom this book targets often have the economic resources and social mobility to weather political turbulence.

If things get bad enough, they'll simply move to Portugal and retire.

But what about those who remain here—a Gen Z generation seemingly growing up with a brain-eating amoeba attached to their hands, uncertain about what employment will look like in five years, or elderly boomers who lack the privilege of becoming gringos in Lisbon?

An Abundant Future

I'm glad this book exists—it captures many of my political beliefs. Government shouldn't be omnipresent, but it can be tremendously helpful. I've never embraced the Libertarian minimal-government utopia, having seen how ungoverned areas in Colombia become desolate and fall under the control of warlords. Americans might say, "That would never happen here," yet daily the US increasingly resembles Colombia.

Honestly, I don't think most Americans understand how effective their government is relative to other countries. Yet, the liberals who too easily brand critics as heretics or fascists for questioning whether government is fulfilling its purpose aren't helping restore faith in our institutions.

This is the main message I take from the book: The future we want must be built, not merely imagined—by optimists who see system imperfections and, instead of accepting the status quo, march toward an abundant future for everyone.

This month, I’m starting with something I haven’t done in a while: sharing what's captured my attention lately.

These were thought-provoking essays that changed my perspective, TV shows I kept thinking about in the shower, and hidden sources for musical discovery.

I’ll be back next week with an essay. If you’ve been following me for a while, you will have noticed that I’ve been publishing less. However, this doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped writing. But since Spring is upon us, now is the time to let some of the words I’ve sown bloom for your enjoyment (hopefully).

What I’m Reading

Thank you for the roses -

Man, what a trip. Michael dives into TikTok's bizarre world of "NPCs" (Non-Playable Characters) – performers who earn serious cash by robotically following viewer commands in exchange for virtual "roses." Beyond the spectacle, the essay explores deeper questions about human agency, audience captivity, and how this strange corner of the internet has become an unexpected platform for society's outcasts.

Here is an excerpt from the essay:

When everything is anchored in pretending, you lose your grip on what’s real.

One night I saw a young black kid playing out the trope of being a slave on a plantation: he was in overalls and a straw hat, with a cotton field in the background, rehashing racist stereotypes around fried chicken and shoot-ups, all with a goofy frozen smile (again, bobbing in place to the Wii theme song). Like a professional wrestler, a good NPC knows how to provoke a crowd. The comment section started bidding on him like it was a live auction ($10. $12. $25!). Of course it’s an act, which means someone can be disturbingly racist and you don’t know if they’re part of the bit or not.

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It by Charles C. Mann

This essay kicks off a series featured in the New Atlantis publication. It explores the invisible systems we depend on daily (like for instance, the miraculous agricultural system that results in most of you reading this to have food security).

I'm drawn to writing that reveals wonder in the mundane, and Charles delivers exactly that. His premise is compelling: we're dangerously ignorant about the foundations of our modern comfort, and if we don't recognize these marvels, we risk losing them. Our children could inherit a diminished world – reason enough to pay attention.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

There’s another, equally important reason for thinking about the systems around us. Water, food, energy, public health — these embody a gloriously egalitarian and democratic vision of our society. Americans may fight over red and blue, but everyone benefits in the same way from the electric grid. Water troubles and food contamination are afflictions for rich and poor alike. These systems are powerful reminders of our common purpose as a society — a source of inspiration when one seems badly needed.

BrAIn DrAIn by

One of my most persistent themes for me this year is questioning the role of AI in our lives and what the lightning-fast adoption of LLMs means for society. Hoel articulates my concerns perfectly, using Microsoft's own research to examine AI's double-edged impact.

The takeaway that keeps me up at night: we need to be very careful about children's AI exposure. Think about smartphones – we should limit access as long as possible (even if Mandy's dumbass parents already caved and bought her an iPhone 16 for her 10th birthday).

Neither Hoel nor I advocate abandoning AI completely, but his conclusion resonates deeply: "pro-human bias and AI distrust are cognitively beneficial." Stay tuned – I'm cooking up my own thoughts on this.

Here is an excerpt from the essay:

Similarly to how people use the internet in healthy and unhealthy ways, I think we should expect differential effects. For skilled knowledge workers with strong confidence in their own abilities, AI will be a tool to chunk up cognitively-demanding tasks at a higher level of abstraction in accordance with Miller’s law. For others… it’ll be a crutch.

Honorable mentions (which you should check out):

Why You Can’t Build Creator Gravity (Pt. 1) by

Did I Miss Anything? by

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress by

What I’m Watching

Severance (Apple TV)

There's something about this show that has enraptured everyone in my circle (my sister-in-law is practically becoming a Severance scholar). You would think that a show like this shouldn't work in today's binge-watch era. The pacing can be deliberate, the scenes can feel like held breaths, the mystery so Gordian knot-like that some might prefer the simpler pleasures of Love is Blind.1

But Severance transcends precisely because every bit of dialogue, every scene, every camera angle feels intentional. What begins as commentary on work-life separation unfolds like a millefeuille2, revealing layer after layer that challenges what makes us human3. It's the rare show I find myself thinking about days after watching.

Paradise (Hulu)

This show surprised me. It began like a standard "who dun it?" thriller—the President was murdered and I thought I'd be following the main character on a quest to uncover who, how, and why. But then the first episode ends, and suddenly the show evolves into a sci-fi drama with vibes reminiscent of Apple TV's Silo.

The characters are compelling, the twists unexpected, and the pacing so perfect that my mother and I find ourselves counting down the hours until Tuesday's new episode drops.

If you are not convinced, watch all the way up to the seventh episode; that was one of the most intense hours of television I remember watching.

What I’m Listening To

This month, instead of specific tracks, I'm sharing two internet corners that have become my delightful windows into music I might never have discovered otherwise.

Herbert Music

Created by the lovely , this Instagram and Substack gem makes classical music approachable for everyone. Her storytelling and knowledge expand our palates beyond the usual Beethoven and Mozart, introducing both old masters and contemporary composers with equal enthusiasm. I’ve been on a classical music kick lately, and this account has been a nice melody that indulges my curiosity. Here is one of her Spotify’s playlists:

Art not Algorithms

This Spotify playlist curated by the organization Live2 has become my go-to for discovering indie music gems. While Spotify's algorithmic recommendations are impressive, there's something special about finding these human-curated collections that algorithms would never serve up (because it keeps trying to shove Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso down my eardrums).

It satisfies my not-so-secret desire to be a hipster (and yes, I listen to this playlist with a beanie on).

I sleep with books, multiple books.

Right now, I’m sleeping with The 5 Types of Wealth, and Rooms of Their Own: Where Great Writers Write.

I also spend time with different books throughout the day. I’ll have breakfast with Why Design Matters or Art for Money. Around lunch, I’ll have a brief daily encounter with Good Prose, and if I want to distract myself in the afternoon, I’ll go see The Book of Japanese Folklore.

The long holds, held gazes, and fingers brushing the pages are now enjoyed by multiple books throughout the day.

I am now a Book Polygamist.

Remember Book Chugging?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece called Book Chugging. I railed against the culture of performative reading that turns books into pieces of content that we gorge down our brains, as if we were at a frat party trying to impress our crush.1

The second part of that piece presented an alternative way to read, which I called Book Tasting. It encouraged “slower, intentional, and present enjoyment of what you are reading. It dismisses the need for speed, and prioritizes enjoyment and active engagement.” It took me a couple of years to follow my own advice.

The idea of going slow and steady with a book is alluring, the virtue easy to grasp. But everything about our current environment prizes speed and efficiency. The fable of the Turtle and The Hare is memorable, but the moral of the story is dismissed as a fantasy, not practical in a world where speed always wins.

Speed Demons

We are a culture primed for speed. Whether it’s getting to inbox zero, hurtling through daily action items, beating the Google Maps time estimate on our commute, making a meal under one episode of Friends, or watching TikToks at 3x speed—in our Drive to Survive, speed is a virtue.

It's also the very thing that burns us out. Ask anyone who has ever taken a sabbatical or an extended break from the corporate world, and one of the first things they notice is how primed for running on overdrive their nervous system is. These become our defaults: the reflex to respond immediately to that Slack message, the need to get through family time quickly so you have time to do one more thing for work before going to bed. Expediency bleeds into all other areas of our lives, and we don't notice life turning into a blur because we think we are doing the right thing. Achieving! Performing! Executing!

Our speed-first culture has also influenced our reading habits. There are about a dozen book summary apps and services, like Blinkist, which has become the SparkNotes of the iPhone era. The gist is now worth more than the prose.

If you actually have to read a book, good luck having the attention span to finish it. Our shortened attention span has become a big enough issue that even elite universities are adjusting the amount of reading they assign because students don’t arrive prepared to read books.2

Worse yet, reading is basically dead among teenagers. The American Time Use Survey found that teens aged 15-19 read only 8 minutes per day.3 My main suspicion is that reading's delayed gratification feels too slow for a generation that spends close to 6 hours daily on apps designed for instant dopamine hits.

The recognition about the subtle ways we are hurried through this precious and singular journey called life that has led me to finally take my own medicine and change my reading habits.

How I Read…Now

It took me nearly two months to finish reading Debbie Millman’s Why Design Matters. The book features transcripts from interviews of Debbie’s eponymous podcast, which profiles interesting artists and creatives. I decided I was going to read one interview a day, no less, no more. I usually did this after breakfast, turning it into a daily reading ritual. And I started writing quotes and observations about each artist interviewed.

It was because of my slow, intentional reading that I went down the rabbit hole of legendary designer Milton Glaser; immediately started reading Esther Perel's State of Affairs after reading her interview; and took a drawing class from cartoonist Lynda Barry after being inspired by her words.

This new way of reading alkalinizes my life, bringing a chemical balance to the speed by which I experience the world. Part of reading intentionally has been a departure from treating books as levels in video games to be completed in a sequence, but different views of a kaleidoscope offering new insights and wisdom. I’ve come to embrace my book polygamy as a way to experience the world more richly.

I’ve also abandoned the idea that I have to read. As a writer it can feel like heresy to not make reading a part of your craft. But it’s all about the framing: I don’t read because I have to read. I read because being a writer is my highest purpose, and reading is part of mastering the craft. Reading aligns with my values willingly, not by force.

I'm also reading slowly and interacting with the text. I fill the pages with post-its and annotations, and keep notebooks where I write down quotes, passages, and summaries of what I learn.4 If I only get through five pages in 20 minutes, I no longer berate myself, nor do I imagine myself with a 'dunce' hat because I'm a slow reader. I've surrendered to the fact that no matter how many speed reading courses I've taken, I'm not a fast reader, but instead of that being a weakness, I revel in my molasses-like speed.

Expand Your World

Not everyone needs to be a book polygamist. You may prefer monogamous devotion and throw yourself fully into the latest Sarah Maas fantasy novel, or the practical guidance of Atomic Habits. Whether it’s one book or a few, revel in the intimacy with words.

Because here's what happens in that intimate space between reader and text: We discover universal truths wrapped in stories of dragons and wizards. We find practical wisdom that reshapes our daily lives. We recognize ourselves in strangers' memories of love and loss. But with each new book, we expand the very boundaries of our thought. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein understood, the limits of our language are the limits of our world – and in an age where our thoughts are increasingly compressed into tweets and Instagram Reels, the act of deep reading becomes a form of resistance.

This is why I've embraced my literary promiscuity.5 Each book I invite into my life expands my world and its resolution. Most importantly, in our culture of perpetual acceleration, this might be the most radical act of all: to slow down, to savor, to let words and ideas take root and bloom in indeterminate inflorescence.

On your way out:
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Every day, I steel myself for battle. It's me—Ayrton Senna-incarnate versus a whole city of troglodytes in their wheeled tin cans.

I steel myself to face a whole host of enemies. You have pickup trucks, designed for farm life and used for Target runs. Lanes are a mere suggestion for these vehicles.

You have SUVs. Based on their growing figure, the S that stood for "sport" now stands for "sumo." Even their dashboard screens have grown; soon enough every SUV will have an IMAX screen.1

And then you have Teslas. Fucking Teslas.

Tesla drivers are the worst. They react too late, leave a stadium-sized gap between cars, and swerve all the time. To add insult to injury, people drive Teslas in one of two ways: either attempting to break the land speed record or pushing a grocery cart with a wobbly wheel. There's no in-between.

I used to love driving. It represented freedom, exploration, and quality time with my Spotify playlists. But my daily commute is now marked by evasive maneuvers from drivers in cars twice the size of mine, who seem to have no qualms about driving head down, with the phone screen lighting up their face—"eyes on the road" be damned.

There’s been a rise of this type of anti-social driving behavior post-COVID. And studies are showing that drivers are angrier2 and more distracted.3 The hazards of this behavior are compounded by two factors: cars are getting bigger; and thus, more lethal, and cars are getting smarter; and thus, turning us into dumber drivers.

Carflation

Driving my Subaru Impreza, by no means a small car, amidst a sea of Ford F-150s and Chevrolet Silverados feels like being a sardine in a school of sharks.

The spoke of the wheels spinning menacingly near eye level, their engines roaring in an uneasy bark that invites me to keep my distance, and the enormity of these chassis makes me yearn for the days where pick up trucks were actually used to carry hay and didn’t look like urban tanks.

Cars have grown shark-sized and it appears they will continue to do so. Pick-up trucks have ballooned from 4,000 pounds in the 1970s to over 5,000 pounds today4, and eight out of the ten best-selling vehicles in 2024 are SUVs or trucks.

We’ve entered a vicious cycle of consistent demand for large vehicles for two reasons: Americans are buying bigger vehicles to be better protected from other big vehicles around them (see my unease above), and because having a large car has become a status symbol for Americans, with their preferred model changing per subculture: Ford F-150s if you lean conservative, Tesla Cybertrucks if you are in tech, and Mercedes’ G Wagons if you are an Iranian living in LA.5

The consequences of carflation, however, are deadly. Between 2013 and 2021, fatal crashes increased by 30% according to the NHTSA6. While correlation isn't causation, physics is unforgiving: when vehicles get bigger and heavier, collisions become more lethal.

Car Brained

Cars haven't only gotten bigger; they've also gotten smarter. The latest models come equipped with a host of smart features—lane departure warnings, blind spot detection, adaptive cruise control, and automatic breaking. These technologies seem to be making roads slightly safer: The same NHTSA report cited above shows that traffic deaths have gone down since they peaked, going from 42,939 in 2021 to 40,990 in 2023.

But the downside of our cars getting smarter seems to be drivers not using their brains. A State Farm report7 found that drivers in vehicles with these magical safety features engaged in more dangerous behaviors like texting while driving, holding their phones while talking, and even video chatting.8

The more you automate driving, the less you feel as a driver that you have to pay attention. If Jesus is taking the wheel, why wouldn't you be able to indulge in that Reel your best friend sent you?

These assistive features could very well be a net positive, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of engaging with our environment and understanding our inherent responsibility when we are behind the wheel.

The Future

Last fall, I spent a couple of days in San Francisco and got to ride a Waymo robo taxi. Even though you know what you are getting into, a driverless car, there is that inevitable sense of wonder, kinda like when somebody catches your nose with their hand.9

The unease of seeing the steering wheel move by itself quickly gave way to the feeling that I was safe, aboard a vehicle designed to be 100% focused on driving. No human hesitation, no last-minute lane changes, no aggressive acceleration.

I began to fantasize about a future where robo taxis become the norm, and fully autonomous vehicles are the standard. In this future, I do believe that traffic casualties will become a remarkable occurrence, not a phenomenon that happens every 14 minutes.10 I’ll miss driving, but a future where road rage is a rarity is far more appealing.

Though my true fantasy would be for public transit infrastructure of cities like Amsterdam or Tokyo in every major US metro. I’m not holding my breath on that one; local governments remain shy about building the public transit infrastructure we deserve out of the fear that low ridership and expensive projects become their political harakiri.

Until that future arrives though, we are stuck in this messy middle: Some cars are more autonomous than others. Anti-social driving behaviors show no sign of decreasing. People still beat up robo taxis because grrr technology! and for most Americans the decision of going car-free is more of a courageous choice than a practical one.

It’s Me, I’m the Problem

Since I’ll keep driving I have to face an uneasy truth:

Everyone is a bad driver—and I’m just as bad as others.

I grow vividly impatient when someone is just a tad slower than I want. I speed up to block lane-mergers, then slow down just enough to trap them behind other cars. I am petty, unrepentant, and overly sensitive on the road.

Until our autonomous future arrives, I have a choice: keep fueling the road rage or accept that the driver I'm cursing at is probably composing their own mental essay about what a terrible driver I am.

When I tell my grandchildren about these wild times, I'll sit them on my lap and tell them about the time when humans drove cars themselves. I'll describe our uneven adhesion to speed limits, our neck contortions when backing up, and using the Pythagorean theorem to parallel park.11

Hopefully, I'll have the honesty to admit what a bad driver I was.