I’m very sick right now and sitting in bed thinking about what I learned this year (spoiler: eMoTiOnS). While I don’t write much here anymore, I do publish regularly at Milky and Moth Fund, and enjoy this prompt enough to briefly pop my head up to share a basket of learnings I collected in 2024. Thanks for listening and hope you’re all staying warm :)

Do some scribbling.

• Every lesson I’ve taken to heart has been written about — it’s how I figure out what I believe and discern what in my head is a thought vs. a feeling. It took me a long time to get into journalling because I didn’t used to feel comfortable being honest with myself on the page. I think I’ve re-learned this lesson every year to a deeper degree?

Taking care of yourself is P0. Communicating your needs to the people who love and support you is P1. Ultimately, you are responsible for your own happiness.

• What I know I need to be happy: human connection, to express myself creatively, intellectual stimulation, to feel in my body, and to be continuously pushing out of my comfort zone. I’ve come to recognize the telltale signs and stages of my slipping away from the things that make me, me, and am now a staunch defender of them.

• Knowing how much you’re willing to change yourself and what changes would be meddling with what is core to you is essential to doing anything with others without becoming hopelessly lost and resentful in the process. These core things are values!

• Spend the time to find a coach who understands you and proactively speaks their mind, note who continues to show up as a mentor as your status waxes and wanes, and ask your people to give you what you need (the shame subsides, I promise).

• You can also just give yourself love and care — it doesn’t need to be contingent on how “good” you are. A shortcut to being less critical of yourself is to picture yourself as a little kid. How would he/she feel as the receiver of your inner monologue?

Being critical and pushing back against the world is an act of ego self defense.

• What are you trying to prove, and is this even the person/thing you really want to prove it to? It can feel like you’re constantly under attack when you’re not honest with yourself about what your true motivations are in every interaction and goal.

• Accepting situations in front of you without running away from what they reveal about yourself is hard. Emotional ambiguity does not need to make you anxious!

Silence is not rejection and attention is not love.

• The way that you relate to people is something you can change. Spending a lot of time with people who are secure in themselves rewires you brain by osmosis. You will be surprised by how much your world shrinks when you feel validated as you are.

• Deeply getting to know the person you have always been instead of endlessly reinventing yourself is “how” to stop seeking validation from everyone around you. I love the title of David Lipsky’s DFW biography for this reason: “Although of Course You End Up Being Yourself.” Jenny Slate has a great tweet about the feeling at the beginning of this process: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”

You don’t need to be perfect. You’re good enough as you are and your feelings were never too much. Rooting yourself in the world is a beautiful process, savor it.

I’m continually wrong about all sorts of stuff. I like documenting this on a yearly basis:

Standing on my own two feet has been way more terrifying than I thought. 

• For a long time, all I thought I wanted was to do my own thing. But when I finally achieved personal and professional independence, I became paralyzed and actively made moves to limit my own freedom. I think there were two main reasons for this: 

  • I found it quite scary to be responsible for all of my own decisions and to have no one to blame for not reaching my goals but me. I had set an upper limit on how big I thought I should be based on how much I thought I was worth and I kept running into that limit, trapping myself in place.

  • I was terrified that the exposure that comes with attention would reveal to the world that I was a bad person.

• As it turns out, whether you’re terrified or not while assuming all responsibility for yourself does not matter much. What does matter is what decisions you make in the midst of the discomfort that comes with risk — do you see it as short-term and continue to make choices that are in your own long-term best interest? Choosing to keep going while bearing the weight of responsibility is what breeds self-respect.

• Furthermore, you are not a bad person if your conscience speaks to you all the time and doesn’t shut up till you act on it. You are flawed, but so is everyone else. Accepting this as fact has made me profoundly less anxious. I used to feel like I was pretending to be a chill person and now I feel like I actually am one.

There were answers to my questions about how to live, what to aspire to, and the role of beauty in a life well-lived.

• I found the answers, like most people, in religion :)

I had no idea what real love was.

• Or how much you bloom when you feel valued precisely as you are.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, I was just writing to the wrong people about the wrong things.

• I used to really struggle with self-censorship. I felt like I had very few opinions on the things those around me seemed to care so much about and was too ashamed of the areas my attention is naturally drawn (how people think and feel, creativity, beauty, love) to speak much of them to those who wouldn’t obviously relate.

• I’ve learned the hard way that it’s fine to let down those you share no overlapping interests with — it’s not your job to intellectually entertain anyone. Openly airing your esoteric interests is the only way I’ve found to find people wired similarly.

• Nowadays, I write almost every day to a tiny audience of people who love me and I’ve never felt less inhibited on the page. Intimacy is worth far more than attention.

In early-stage investing, inexperience can be an asset (you’re more differentiated) and the only immediate feedback loop is how fast you’re able to build trust with new people.

I hold myself to unreasonable standards and while that helped me get to where I am today, it causes me needless pain now.

• I used to value myself based on how fast I was learning and the breadth of the ground I was covering. This was a way to escape my own perfectionism — which caught up to me as soon as I started focusing on only one thing. I’m learning it’s a skill to sit with your mistakes, ask for help, and move slower and more deliberately.

Don’t try to convince people who don’t believe in your value that you’re valuable.

• Please, for the sake of self-respect (and in the name of Joan Didion), take this to heart. Accept nothing less than for all the people around you to love you very much.

• Similarly, anyone who makes you feel close to them without your having earned it probably doesn’t value themselves very highly. True closeness takes time and the trust that comes as a byproduct should be created without an end in mind.

Joy is seeing, caring for, and listening to someone you really love. Complete joy is being seen, cared for, and listened to by them as well. I think this is what life is for.

I resolved recently to stop moving. I like to say that I am “but a big leaf” that felt like a potted plant in NYC, an artificial plant in Miami, and now, a firmly-rooted plant in a prettily painted bed in SF. Yet I still find myself back in NYC regularly — partly for my job, partly because I like the feeling of being so uprooted and in limbo that it kinda feels like I’m flying, and partly because New York is the best way I know to chart the evolution of my emotions. I used to think that the work of “becoming” was something that could happen anywhere, but I’ve since realized how much easier it is to become the person you want to be if you’re planted in an environment where the sun naturally bends you towards the kind of life you aspire to (New York never did this for me, hence why I didn’t stay).

My friends are loosely bicoastal too. We all oscillate between East and West coasts, chasing a feeling of newness that is unique to people who like creative destruction and being a bit of a disembodied brain. What’s unique about New York is the way it defines itself by its mutability. The promise of the city is that you’re untiedownable — able to invent and reinvent yourself hundreds of times over without ever needing to explain your previous self. Being able to float in this way is the cheapest definition of freedom, but still, the one that I was sold on as a teenager when I moved to this city to study film. People often ask me what that was like and I find it hard to give a coherent answer. “Hard” is what I usually say. “Lonely” is perhaps more accurate. I felt anxious and apathetic all the time, mostly from a lack of affirmation. I was constantly jittering, trying to place myself by cobbling together the small cues the world gave me about my worth. It never brought me enough comfort to stand still. I craved attention, seeking it out by reinventing myself again and again, trying to become impressive enough to be deemed special. What I didn’t realize was that the eventual conclusion of all this striving was constrained to only ever achieve one thing: being coveted on the basis of my accomplishments. 

I now see “being taken seriously” at a young age as something that requires great sacrifice for not particularly fulfilling payoff. If you’re decently ambitious and intrinsically motivated, it’s probably not the respect of your idols that you need, and much more likely that you’re searching for genuine, earnest comfort in this world. Moving swiftly through life will expose you to enough false prophets for you to naturally become serious without your needing to expedite the process of losing your innocence. Maturity is a dime a dozen; it’s moments you can melt, put your head on someone’s lap, say the most unthought-through thing ever, and have them cock their head in bemusement and say “more?” that are rare. Comfort can be found in both what is and isn’t said: knowing that anything could be without an ounce of cost is the definition of acceptance and embedded in it, love. This is what grounds a person in the present enough to stand still. As it turns out, love is very much an in-the-moment activity. David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Now, every time I land in this city — whether JFK or LGA or EWR — I feel different. Walking through the streets of New York is a reflective exercise for me, a time to think about all the steps that came before and how much less sure of each one I was than I am now. I write this as I sit in my favorite coffee shop near Washington Square Park, sipping the coffee I’d get for myself as a treat sometimes during college but never on a random Tuesday afternoon without any real reason to reward myself, like today.

How I feel now: I’m happy, even if it’s not entirely evenly distributed. I feel baseline content almost all the time and frequently experience small pockets of euphoria bubbling to the surface — usually while listening to music, working out, or excitedly talking to beloved friends. I love being in love, even if it means staring in the face of destruction and becoming a destroyer. I’m actively writing and rewriting my definitions of all the most important things: how to live, what makes me happy, and what real love looks like. 

David Lynch has a great quote where he says “You have to go away to come back.” This is New York to me: a city that I use as a calibration point to chart how I’ve changed. Every time I come back, I’m aware of how much more confident and concentratedly myself I’ve become (Do we all just circle the drain on who we are till we die?). Now, even when I’m stomping around the city that holds the most possibilities per capita, I know better than to believe these possibilities imply I should be tempted to abandon myself.

MM: I decently despise when writers write about writing, but this topic has been on my mind so much lately that I’m making an exception to my rule of not doing it :)

I’ve never been good at closing sentences, last paragraphs, or finishing things perfectly. I find conclusions hard to draw because they’re so subjective. Is it really my place to tell you what you got out of my words? What if, god forbid, I draw a different conclusion than you and it jolts you out of the reverie that both of our brains work the same way?

I know, meta meta meta. These are the kinds of thoughts it’s crucial to extract from my head so I can start to see them objectively — and also why I like texting friends all the time. I find it extremely helpful to take notes on my thought patterns in whatever text box, notebook, or messaging app is closest. Texting is particularly great because it’s continuous, ever-evolving, and the exact opposite of an essay ending. Each concise little text bubble is an opportunity to shift, interrupt, and recalibrate how meta my thinking is, given a little help from people who love me.

Despite feeling uncertain about the value of my voice, I still love to document the human experience in my own words — chasing a certain mental and emotional granularity that I find great satisfaction pinning down.1 Patricia Lockwood: “Being a writer meant my voice was in a different place. There was no rhyme or reason as to why I could make this sound and not the other. Always I felt that I was writing to the tune of some music that I learned very early and did not quite remember.”

The downside of doing a lot of this first-person narration is that it gave me a false sense that there’s shame in changing — that I’d be breaking a promise to people who think highly of me under specific conditions and in certain contexts. The clearest sign that I had fallen into the trap of thinking of myself as a brand was how concerned I had become about even slightly shifting my ambitions/interests/personality. Joan Didion: “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

My excuse for not writing was always that I didn’t have anything to say. I’ve since realized that was cope. I was just uncomfortable being bad at it and kept getting tripped up tip-toeing around thoughts and feelings that I didn’t feel like I was allowed to have. I chose to be ““private”” because I was ashamed of myself and didn’t think I was worth listening to.

Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world. It’s also born from knowing that you can both stick with things and quit when you realize they’re wrong — giving a person a quietly steely quality that’s often described as “resiliency.” Resilient people know how to think on long timescales and make risky short-term bets, frequently citing having “just known” what the right decision was. Building the capacity to “just know” requires sitting in the unknown for uncomfortably long periods of time — at least, it feels that way at the start. Big reality shifts become more appealing as each bite (“What if what I’m trying to convince myself of isn’t true?”) reveals the benefits of having an appetite for risk (receiving a mouthful of something better than you could have ever imagined).

I blew up my life several times this past year: first by transplanting myself into a foreign environment and second, by abandoning that reinvention to return to the people and places that have always felt like home. It granted me plenty of moments of mental freefall (h/t Fouad): I first thought freedom was everything, then I thought it was nothing, now I’m not quite sure what to think — but I do know that I’ve proven to myself that I no longer need anyone’s permission, validation, nor to make myself very small in exchange for love with contingency clauses. I still worry that I don’t know how to consistently see others as anything more than supporting characters or antagonists, but that doesn’t discredit the fact that some people will never love me as I like no matter how hard I try to teach them.

The past month I’ve been hearing my own voice far more clearly. She’s louder than I remember. More jaded but also wiser, less willing to adopt the narratives of others. She knows what she wants: to grow up with you, dear reader, to relish in defining our shared compounding context, and for love to never be a consolation and instead, be light. Which requires we both believe in our own lights to begin with (I’m working on it). I’ve become far less willing to sacrifice my needs; in this new environment of my making, feeling listened to and seen by people that really, truly love me is merely the baseline.

I have no perfect conclusion or closing sentence. All I have is a commitment to make the most of my 22-year-won freedom: I will talk more, be wrong more, and feel less ashamed about it. I will endeavor to see beyond myself, chase moments of mental freefall, and unabashedly document the full spectrum of this here human’s experience. I will write this story precisely as I see it, even if that means losing you in the process. Franz Kafka: “I must stop, the end of the page comes as a warning that it might get too wild.”

I studied film in college. Something I noticed time and time again was that men and women tend to relate to movies differently. While women use characters as conduits for outsourcing feelings and temporarily relieving them of the need to feel their own (full subject-object convergence), men tend to think of films as sources of external aspiration (maintaining subject-object differentiation). When asked, men are much more likely to leave a theater feeling inspired to better themselves in the likeness of the strong male character, while women tend to talk more about the catharsis they felt for the characters themselves.

Extrapolating this further, I think women care much more about cultivating beauty and decreasing suffering (emotion-led), while men are primarily motivated by problem-solving and power (conquest-led). Blank slate theory would tell you that these mentalities are socially programmed into us by society, but I’m not so sure. If you’ve ever been in a heterosexual romantic relationship you probably know that men and women both behave and seem to see the world remarkably differently. Books on relationships are one of the few sources of honesty here.

This difference is interesting to me insofar as it affects ~half the population’s ability to understand my, and many women like me’s, motivations. In typical female fashion, I don’t feel like I need role models to aspire to or for my personhood to be widely understood — I just want a few true believers who support me unconditionally. This sentiment is something some (usually men) find quite confusing. “Don’t you want to define and scale yourself more?” or “Isn’t there someone whose life you’d trade with given the chance?”

The honest-to-god answer is no. Maybe that’s because I’m lucky and happy with what I have or maybe it’s because what a successful woman looks like today is a narrative that continues to be entirely up for grabs. It’s safe to say that the girlboss is dead, hardcore feminists went too far, tradwives will never make the comeback the right so stubbornly wants, and no archetype in particular has risen up to fill all three of their shoes.

And perhaps that’s OK. After all, one of femininity’s greatest strengths is its comfort in illegibility and lack of a need for wide recognition. Women paving their own path is not uncommon — it’s even preferred by many (myself included). Unlike masculinity’s obvious virtues and vices, femininity is by nature far more difficult to pin down. As H.L. Mencken puts it in In Defense of Women: “Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence.”

Which in my eyes is a distinct quality neither the girlboss, the feminist, nor the tradwife ever made full use of. Where are the women that harness their femaleness to do something real in the world beyond starting a family? I’m looking for ambitious, emotionally-attuned, smart, adaptable women that define their own measures of success. Women who want to raise kids but also raise rounds to support things they believe in — without putting their body on pause or acting as a man in a woman’s body to do so.

This is something I fully believe is possible. It just requires we take our lives much more seriously at a young age (women especially since we’re the ones with biological clocks).

I think about Paul Graham’s essay on Jessica Livingston often. They were serious about both each other and what they wanted to do from the start: started YC while in college (2005), married three years later (2008), and had their first kid four years after that (2014). She’s the closest match to the qualities I described above. He defines her as the “mom” and “Social Radar” of YC — what made early YC feel like a family and fostered one of the accelerator’s most valuable assets: the quality of its alumni network. He goes on to astutely note: “although Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written out of YC's history.”

I wonder how many Jessicas are out there, enabling great things while taking very little credit for them publicly. She embodies what I call being “famous among friends” — just in her case, friends = tech industry royalty. But more importantly, she is emblematic in my mind of what it looks like for a woman to make full use of her innate femaleness beyond the home. 

And how was she able to do that? Through a complementary partnership with a man. As shown by Paul and Jessica and every other productive partnership ever, differences in people can be a good thing. The east understood this in their conception of the unique union between yin (sun, male, consistency, order) and yang (moon, female, darkness, chaos). As Mencken writes on relationships:

The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

Despite proving her to be nothing but a capitalist fantasy, the girlboss meme left behind the pernicious assumption that women should aspire to “stand on their own two feet.” While I think self-reliance is undoubtedly good for everyone, I question the foundational beliefs upon which this premise was proposed: that atomization is good, men are bad/untrustworthy, and women should aspire to a male version of success.

Instead, I think women should think very long and hard about what they actually want and plan their lives accordingly. Feminism provided us with a great service: options. But that doesn’t mean we need to exercise them all just to prove to ourselves they’re there. Femininity isn’t merely a prettier version of masculinity either — it’s a different thing entirely. Good movies are a lot like women in this way: they both have a firm grasp on the plot and a mysterious ability to make you feel things. By any other name I’d say that’s power — even if it’s not a smell we recognize.

I can’t pinpoint exactly the moment I realized I was watching myself all the time. Suddenly I was hyper-aware of the way I filtered everything I thought, felt, and said through how you’d hear it. When my mental model of you was less complete, I felt extremely constrained in what I could say and as a result, said very little at all. “You’re quiet, aren’t you,” you said. Mm not really, I just wasn’t sure which parts of myself were safe to show. What Mary Oliver would call the soft animal inside me was sulking in the corner of my stomach, refusing to reveal what she wanted yet demanding she be paid attention to all the same.

What the rational part of me wants is internal consistency — some might call it control. It’s a stringency around my self-image that I’ve grown more aware of over time. It makes me good at self-narration, brand-building, and “putting myself in others’ shoes,” but also stubborn, sensitive, and highly impressionable to the feelings of others.

I know I’m not alone. In fact, I think most women are like this. From my observer seat, women seem to generally be much more comfortable living life through anyone else’s lens but their own. Which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: seeing in third person unlocks a woman’s ability to appease, making for an excellent survival strategy. As Joyce Benenson puts it in “Warriors and Worriers,” “a major part of being a female to be self-protective. Because the bottom line is if you are not healthy, your children in most environments wouldn’t have survived.” Watching ourselves was a strategy that quite literally kept the human race alive. John Berger understood this dynamic best:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

I call this living life in third person. It’s mostly hardwiring that has the side effect of self-erasure. Modern feminist rhetoric would lead you to believe that this was programmed into us via the patriarchy and while I don’t doubt that’s one way this dynamic is amplified, I’m unconvinced that’s the root source of it. Women are simply much more inclined to strategies that guarantee safety than men.

Which is all great and good until you realize how far these strategies distance you from your desires. See, that’s the catch about living life in third person: it makes it very hard to know, much less act on, what you want. From an outsider’s POV you only feel vague sensations that something is missing, but get barely any indication of what that thing you’re missing actually is.

Which is something we’re all probably familiar with. Everyone has experienced some vague sense of “not right”ness that usually boils down to emotional needs not getting met: connection, acceptance, feeling seen, to name a few. If you’re anything like me, after a couple of times getting burned you learned to bury the desires instead of facing the pain of trying and failing to get them satiated. I learned at a young age that I couldn’t depend on people to be there for me consistently, so, for efficiency purposes, it only made sense to turn off all parts of me that desired to depend on anyone but myself. I became a micromanager of my wants to mitigate the shame of having them. Granted this didn’t feel particularly fulfilling — but at least assuming such an active role made me feel like I had a choice in the matter.

I adopted a similar mindset when interrogating my feelings — constantly asking myself questions like: is this thought defensible? Are you sure? These are good questions to ask yourself in any scenario except the one where they’re not thoughts and instead feelings. Questioning and then discounting feelings prematurely tends to have the opposite effect of its hyper-rational intention — leaving a person in a loop of confusion, uncertainty, and unmet needs. 

Which is all to say, dear friend, I was quiet around you at first not because I didn’t have things to say but because I’m still struggling to trust the integrity of my own voice. Living life in third person means the possibility space of things I allow myself to say and feel are constrained to the aesthetics of how I want to be perceived. 

At risk here is ownership of the little thing I call my life. The worst case scenario is that by always living through lenses, I reach fifty having only ever felt success through the eyes of others — the lens permanently tinged by the residue of resentment that comes with realizing other peoples’ desires.

“Women” is too often a broad, blanket term for the opinions of a writer who happens to be female. So, again, in a way, I am hiding. I’ve been pretending, in some way, all along. I knew what I wanted, I just didn’t know I was allowed to want it.

There’s this great quote by Zadie Smith: “He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”

These two people perfectly encapsulate the primary voices in constant conflict within my head. The fight’s rigged from the get-go: my brain works at warpspeed, spinning intellectual justifications out of thin air a million miles a minute while my heart sits there watching, not saying a word. I used to be more patient — I’d sit around staring at the wall as I tried to decipher my heart’s cryptic nonverbal communication. But this past year I somewhat gave up, letting the theoretical side of me take the reigns. It made quick work too: folding up and compartmentalizing many inefficient practices in my life that had historically, well, made me feel like myself. From hiking to photography, I left most of the practices I’d previously found joy in behind because they were no longer occuring naturally in my new environment. It wasn’t entirely intentional but it also wasn’t done obliviously — I think my brain took it as a bit of a challenge to see how much power it could hold.

The one practice I kept was writing. It made the cut because I can’t deny how many good things in my life have come as a result of my putting words out into the world. It also felt like a respite: one area where I wasn’t skeptical of my identity. I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and purposeful in the case that it helps someone else understand the mess of the human condition. John Baldessari puts this best: “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” I have plenty of the latter.

The process of stripping all superfluous comforts from my life revealed just how much of my stability was rooted in my environment. Being surrounded by reminders of your patterns and past means you never have to define it. Without this luxury, alienation ensues. Which sucks, for a lot of reasons. One reason being that addressing this alienation requires tackling the daunting task of defining and defending your sense of self — a task I’ve always been resistant to and skeptical of, to say the least.

On one hand, I know the self is a made-up concept of the mind, that identity should be kept small, and that trying to pin myself down usually does more harm than good. On the other hand, when I sit down to write, I feel like every sentence disproves this. I feel the same way when I’m in Northern California, taking photos, or at a piano bench. These things make me feel like myself — there’s no better way of putting it. I know this can be intellectually explained by my pattern matching present experience with past memories in a way that feels comforting, but after experimenting with experiencing none of these comforts for a sizable period of time, I can definitively tell you that this explanation strikes me as wholly deficient in magnitude.

So how should I make sense of this? Here’s an intellectual explanation supplied by a very smart friend: the brain is constantly iterating on a mental model of our environment using sensory data (see: the free energy principle and predictive coding). While you’re not going to be able to pin your mental model down as a particular structure that persists, you can hold a predictive model of your own behavior based on pattern-matching from the past. And perhaps more crucially in understanding who you are: within the ever-changing dynamic system that we think of as the self, each of us seems to possess some minimal set of traits coupled with a distance function that defines them.

These minimal set of traits usually lead you to a pool of interests, beliefs, and desires. These are the types of things that have been both constants throughout your life and for which there is no more recursion left to do — you simply can’t break them down further or deny their prevailing prevalence in your experience of the world. These constants are what form the core of a person. For me: words, nature, art. Things that make me feel big things. People that seem particularly solid in their sense of self have usually elevated these persistent patterns to become non-negotiable cornerstones of their life. 

Which is exactly what I didn’t do and paid the price for this past year. Listening to my heart would have told me this: I think the point of life is to feel deeply — mostly good stuff like love and pride, but also some bad stuff that broadens your spectrum of experience and allows you to better appreciate the good. For instance, I like sprinting through the city streets at midnight while listening to sad music because it makes my heart feel like it’s being put through the washing machine. I like Barry’s because they scream at me and blast the music so loud my thoughts get drowned out. Victoria Erickson has a good line on this: “When you’re deeply sensitive, love is ecstasy. Music is godlike. Heartache is a wide, somatic wound. Visual natural beauty is jewel-drenched, wild bliss. Tension and conflict are muscle tightening and toxic, straight down to the cells.” While I know that the sensitivity she describes is actually just an uninhibited thalamocortical loop (most commonly that way due to youth), I still think that for those of us who see it as our duty to document the human condition, feeling everything life has to offer is kinda the whole point of being here.

So here’s what I got: asking identity-related questions such as “who am I?” creates a layer of abstraction between emotion and perception that is largely just a distraction from action. Instead, it works better to just do. As Giannis Antetokounmpo once said, “When I focus on the past, that's my ego. When I focus on the future, it's my pride. I try to focus on the moment… in the present. That's humility.” Or as many have framed it to me: “Molly, maybe you should just chill the fuck out.”

Thank you to Erik, Quintin, Rooz, Tyler, Alex, and Louisa

I’ve been thinking a lot about conviction lately — or as Mills Baker (paraphrasing William James) eloquently puts it, the union of conscience and will. From my POV some people innately have more conviction than others, sure, but most people don’t even try to build any of their own because they’re so used to blindly adopting the opinions of others. Assembling yourself out of the amalgamation of inputs and environments that were thrown your way makes your locus of control external. An internal locus of control implies that your assemblage of self was purpose-built with a specific intention in mind. Conviction in oneself is not a commodity — it’s bespoke by nature.

The best example of this kind of conviction is embodied by Steve Jobs (who, fun fact, learned it from Robert Friedland) — a man so charismatic that a word was coined to describe his effect on people: “reality distortion field.” As defined, the effectiveness of a distortion field lies in the field owner’s complete and utter belief in its being synonymous with reality. How do they put it? “The best salesman doesn’t know he’s selling.” 

The worst use case of such distortion leads to lies: reinventing the past to better align with one’s self-concept. This is an admittedly tricky line to tread: rescripting your past can be personally beneficial in changing the way you see the world (e.g. choosing not to see yourself as a victim), but trying to spread your revisionist history can often be a slippery slope towards twisting fiction into fact in ways that serve you but harm others. Reality distortion is at its most powerful and least fraught when focused on bleeding conviction into fact in the forward-looking direction.

This is why tech, “an industry concerned with what is to be” as Henryk Skolimowski puts it, finds conviction of this kind to be such a strong signal of future success. Belief in oneself and one’s vision for how the world could be different is what fosters a cult — or what I like to call the “atomic unit of human coordination.” Once the cult is formed and conviction is sufficiently decentralized, the process of refining the rallying cry of the group can commence. David Deutsch describes this as the oscillation between conjecture (spreading of conviction) and criticism (conviction refinement with an eye for actualization).

I think this theory of change is true at a personal growth scale too. For those of us who are our own biggest critics, it’s important to remember the sequencing of this cycle: conjecture → conviction → then criticism. Getting from conjecture to conviction is a step jump that usually requires the collective belief of others — not their (or your) critiques. This is why we tend to pick people who see us as we’d like to be seen. Do such people see us clearly? Maybe, maybe not… but does anyone? Chris Ferrie explains this best: “there is no way to define a reality that is independent of the way we choose to look at it.”

Personally, I find this acknowledgment of each and every one of our partialities freeing. It’s none of our job to be the reality police! It is, however, our job to learn and relearn what the people we love need from us on a continual basis. And for them, it’s their job to know. I think the best relationships are ones in continuous negotiation as to how each person wants to be seen. As George Bernard put it: “The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.” 

So perhaps it would be wiser to simply surround ourselves with people we want to be distorted by. There’s a lot of wisdom locked up in trite truisms like “you are the average of your five closest friends” — but since they don’t explain how or why they’re true I still feel the need to find my way to the same conclusion using many more words. Maybe the underlying explanation is this: whether we like it or not, each of our realities gets bent, expanded, and/or imploded by the expectations and perspectives of the people we incorporate into our little solar systems. The best example of this? Any case of someone massively raising the ambitions of another by merely suggesting they aim higher at pivotal points in their life. While Aristotle explains this as “man differing from other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation,” I prefer framing this as the human capacity to exponentially expand each other’s scale of imagination.

Personally, I don’t need anyone to think I’m perfect. But I do want to be seen as precious in the eyes of my closest friends. I want belief in me to be decentralized enough that there are others who can think I’m good enough even when I don’t. I’ve always been sensitive to the strength of the perspectives around me and can feel mimesis corrupting my sense of self without sufficient time to write, synthesize, and sort out my thoughts. But when I do, conviction is born: concentrated and refined reality distortion — woven together with words.

It’s my birthday! Someone asked me to write a letter to myself about the things I learned this year and in doing so, I realized just how many things I’d been wrong about. I like that feeling :) This is that list — sharing in case it sheds some light on my thinking or offers solace to others navigating similar waters.

You can make yourself interested in anything.

• As long as you’re curious, everything is interesting if you dig deep enough

• I’ve historically been very wrong about what I wanted to do: I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer, a product designer, a writer, a software founder, etc. I clung to these titles as my identity and was opposed to other paths for stupid, superficial reasons, claiming “lack of interest” and massively limiting myself (e.g. I’d have laughed and made a face at you 4 years ago if you’d have told me I’d find b2b saas fascinating in the future)

My path isn’t going to look like everyone else’s but that doesn’t mean it’s interesting.

• Trying your hand at lots of different career games is the best way to avoid “playing the associate game” in any given industry while growing your ambitions

• You can’t actually know whether a career path is right for you until you try it— taste-testing > advice because until you try, your heart will always second-guess you

• I prefer operating in the extremes — either being pushed way out of my comfort zone or occupying spaces where I can be entirely unfiltered. Sitting somewhere in the middle means you can never fully relax but aren’t totally sure why — this has a dampening effect on developing your intuition

All my spikey bits that made my circular self hard to fit through a square-shaped hole have become significant advantages once I managed to squeeze myself through.

• What I mean: I was an art kid. I storytold myself into being a tech kid in order to weasel my way into this industry. Now that I’m in, my art background has become my competitive advantage: it allows me to see abstract qualities in people that others might miss and make things that feel compelling to people

• General rule of thumb: if you’re sheepish about some quality of yourself that is perceived as irregular in your environment, it’s probably possible (and potentially powerful) to harness it as a competitive advantage

I care a lot about making the world more beautiful and soaking in its beauty.

• Pragmatic solutions are almost always only as successful as their packaging

• I find illegible, illusive, and enigmatic things and people the most beautiful. In my mind, the magic of them is such: there exists a space between the truth of the thing and your understanding of it. This space gets filled with stories you tell yourself about said thing that are spun entirely out of your own memories

Getting up on the public stage (e.g. the internet/social media) is only worth it if you have a goal in mind.

• It’s important to build durable competence in something before you start performing the act of self. Performing of any kind freezes your development — choose your roles wisely and know where you want them to take you

Failure exposure therapy is the main thing most people need to do big things.

The speed by which you do one thing is the speed by which you do everything.

• Collecting data points is almost always more globally productive and personal pace-increasing than introspection

The easiest way to forgive or accept someone is to see them as a tragic figure.

People with taste will always have a job, their title just might change.

1. Similarly, creativity isn’t some elusive thing — it’s just dot-connecting old ideas in a new, interesting, and/or unconventional way

Software will make almost all of us generalists, with a select few extremely spikey specialists (basically artists).

Bringing kids into this world isn’t selfish, actually.

I am extremely lucky to be in spaces with some of the most brilliant, optimistic, and high-agency people alive today.

• I have designed my career going forward to make the most of this fact

• Talent is real, intelligence is real, not everything is nurture. I was wrong about this

• If you feel hopelessly less smart than the people around you (a good sign!), find ways to focus on how you can contribute as opposed to constantly falling short in comparison

Some qualities that make someone exceptional in my eyes:

• Curiosity

• Consistency/obsession

• Contrarianism (especially about people, e.g. extending reputational lines of credit to unknown/disliked people! I think a lot of people are currently overindexing contrarianism towards ideas)

• Understanding the question behind the question

• Having a heart-led reason why you’re doing a thing (spite is fine too, this doesn't have to be altruistic — any personal-experience-built emotional investment will do)

• Ability to make people feel good around you

• Writing well, quickly

• Fast processing speed and ability to update beliefs/identity quickly

• Having an early rock bottom experience and persevering (more of a commonality than a quality)

I am often not asking the right questions and I know it. Despite that, my favorite questions to ask others right now are:

• Where were you when you had the idea for your current thing?

• What has most impacted your taste in ideas?

• Whose words echo for you?

One of my favorite questions to ask people when I’m trying to understand how their mind works is “how do you frame freedom for yourself?” It’s a loaded question that gets taken in a million different directions and that’s why I like it. I’ve gotten everything from blank stares to “backpacking” to “when I make 10M dollars.”

For me, freedom always used to mean complete and utter independence. I thought if I got out of my tiny town, graduated from the right school, and got the perfect job, I’d finally feel free. In my mind’s eye I always imagined freedom would feel like flying and fully believed that once I spiritually took to the air, I’d finally feel at peace. 

More recently though, I reached that supposedly peaceful place. I’ve been a complete and total free bird for the last few months — no one I need or owe anything to in sight. And guess what? All I seem to be capable of doing with these wings is spiral in tight sequential circles. I’ve felt lost and confused, unable to wayfind anything that might provide me direction or a sense of purpose. I thought that with freedom’s high-level perspective I’d subsequently be able to spot where meaning was hiding somewhere within me, but so far I’m just not seeing it. 

And the truth is, maybe that’s never how it’s worked for anyone anyway. As Aristotle articulates, freedom used to mean the “cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.” He conceived of freedom as independence from our base desires — which implies that in order to attain it, we can’t necessarily ‘live as we like.’ This is crazy considering the fact that our current cultural conception of freedom (that we adopted from Rousseauian liberalism) is essentially the opposite: ‘doing away with obligation to anyone or anything other than ourselves.’

Rousseau’s freedom is exactly what I’ve been experiencing these past couple of months and what prompted me to wonder why we’re so wimpy. What I was really asking was why am I so wimpy. Or more specifically: Why do people (me) find it so hard to commit? Why do we (me) even idealize this conception of freedom in the first place?

Now, I’m not an isolated incident. I’ve watched far too many friends flounder once they attain freedom for me not to mypothesize (Molly hypothesis) that this is an American culture problem writ large. After all, our Declaration of Independence says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but it gives basically no instructions beyond that. Any good editor would have told the founding fathers to go back and add more detail, for the love of god.

Now, this not-knowing-what-you-want thing is something I can empathize with deeply. America and I have a lot in common. We both have always positioned ourselves in relation to other existing entities and ideologies (in America’s case, declaring independence from Great Britain and in my own, renouncing regular jobs). This works right up until you get too good at achieving what you thought you wanted and are faced with the deeply unsettling question of “what now?” 

America and I are now in the middle of our “what now?” era. We both have achieved the Rousseauian freedom we thought we so desired, yet find ourselves searching for something more. The truth is that freedom is an empty aspiration with no endpoint: there will always be more spiritual shackles to take off until we are attacking our very selves to do so.

And on a national scale, it’s not just that we’re optimizing for freedom because we don’t know what we want — America has also grown to like being stuck in this not knowing, thinking it to be part of our charm as opposed to a temporary awkward teenage phase in our nation’s history. It’s both hubris and habit: we’ll defend freedom till our dying breath because we’re spent three adult lifetimes acquiring options and at this point, it’s all we’ve built a track record of being good at (relatable). 

It’s easy to invalidate this problem by saying that we Americans have everything we could ever want and shouldn’t be complaining. While that’s one way of looking at it, such a response also strikes me as cope to avoid facing the unsettling reality that in an age where our nation is the wealthiest it’s ever been1, we seem to be set on a dangerous trajectory toward the utter dissolution of any shared commitment to the things that have historically made life worth living — like family, friends, and broader connection2. 

True freedom of the soul cannot exist purely in opposition to something else — it has to be born from finding something we positively want to be. So perhaps a better question to ask ourselves than “how do you frame freedom for yourself?” is “what do you really want?” Personally, I want to be a mom and have a family and a cat. I want to play in the world of ideas, make beautiful things, and tell stories that change peoples’ minds. I want a neighborhood of close friends to host dinners for and sense-make with. I want to feel proud of the slice of earth that I exist in and a sense of responsibility to leave it better than I found it. 

As Aristotle clearly understood eons ago, there’s something undeniably romantic about responsibility — a fact that blindly optimizing for Rousseau’s freedom might make you forget but you’ll still feel if you lack grounding ties. After all, even free birds return to their nests at night. This is why our definition of freedom matters — freedom in a purely rights-based sense alone will never grant a feeling of a life well-lived. When I'm looking back from my deathbed, I doubt I’ll have anything to say for the freedom I felt — instead I’ll be reminiscing on the pride I earned from the commitments I made.

That’s my answer as to why I’ve been so wimpy. I’ve been chasing after a framing of freedom that directly rejected responsibility to the people, places, and projects I now know provide the sense of purpose I was craving all along.

What I’m trying to say is that committing to stuff is cool — and a potent personal-scale antidote to wimpiness. I have high aspirations for human beings and think we can all do and be better — I’m just still trying to figure out how, exactly. I’ll be the metaphorically winged test subject and let you know what I learn.

I’m an extremely critical person. I’m not proud of that, but I’m also not trying particularly hard to change it. I think it’s one of my core strengths and definitely my greatest weakness — I’m able to dissect precisely what makes a thing work and what’s holding it back. I want things to feel pure, unabashed, and clear in their convictions.

Which is great — except for the fact that it’s nearly impossible not to wear this hyper-critical lens while looking at myself too. Framed positively, this is the most potent “growth mindset” imaginable. Framed negatively, this is being fucking brutal towards myself. And unfortunately, the latter is a much stronger motivator: self-flagellation and withholding satisfaction are addictive in the way that they produce consistent results. 

My critical voices go something like this:

1. I’m a fraud and don’t deserve the opportunities I’ve been given

2. I can’t commit or stick to things

3. I’m a disappointment to all of the people that I respect

Now, none of these voices have particularly strong evidence to back themselves up — and yet they persist, relentlessly. They’re the product of an acutely critical eye, an intense upbringing that I internalized, and a high dose of naturally-occurring conscientiousness. The voices find immense pleasure in discovering evidence that proves them “right.” They go something like “yeah, I knew it! This is exactly why you should always listen to me.”

For better or worse, almost all of my accomplishments have been made possible by self-hatred. It’s hard to push past mediocrity without sacrificing a certain degree of safety — and that’s easiest done by pulling from your card catalog of reasons why you don’t deserve the luxury of comfort. But relishing in self-hatred is a slippery slope towards self-destruction — whether that be from action or inaction. The inactive form is especially pernicious: it feels excruciatingly difficult to ship things when your standard is nothing less than excellence in the eyes of the people you most respect.

Despite all this, I still believe being critical is good. Relentlessly examining all the ways that things could be better allows you to recognize and replicate quality while developing a taste for objective truth. The only bug is that these same benefits get short-circuited in the case of your internal criticisms — your ear is positioned simply way too close to your voices to see them fully enough to critique them.

This wouldn’t be a problem if they were based in fact. But they usually aren’t — critical voices are mostly built of feelings. Visceral feelings, to be sure, but entirely subjective and unrooted in reality all the same. Why does that matter? It matters because if you want to hate yourself less, it’s crucial you find ways to step back and evaluate your voices objectively.

This is the part I think most people get wrong when trying to help critically-inclined people feel more satisfaction: reciting affirmations or “being nicer towards yourself” is basically bullshit advice because it’s asking us to go against our entire nature — the very nature that has been both rewarded and refined into one of our most valuable assets out in the external world.

Instead, I think we need to be just as critical of our voices as they are of us. Don’t let them get away with flimsy arguments for why you suck simply because those arguments feel “right.” That’s bullshit too — something you’ll realize the more you cultivate an internal taste for truth and see how fast that “right” feeling fades. The voices were never “right” in any meaningful way, they just felt comfortable to you because they were familiar.

Backing away from your voices allows you to piece out the kernels of truth embedded in each of their undertones. In my case:

1. I haven’t achieved anything I’m proud of yet and want to feel like I’ve earned my spot

2. I want to commit to something and hold myself to it

3. I want to do something worthy of respect from the people whom I respect

Which feels… much more manageable. And maybe that’s the hidden gem of being extremely critical: it gives you a lot of signal on what you want out of life — or at least to start, a lot of signal on what you don’t want. High standards are an essential ingredient to excellence and to be completely honest, I’m quite uninterested in doing anything less than excellent.

The way I see it, modern American society is a lot like a massive multilevel video game designed by our parents, managers, and government — all without any pre-planning, principles, or plot coordination between parties.

It’s no wonder the game’s plot feels weak and unsatisfactory. Where’s the hero arc? The ultimate salvation? The clear metrics in the corner that tell us if we’re winning the game or not? Instead, all we get is second-hand backstory and form-filled talk tracks. “Meaningless” is how some people put it. It’s just too easy to peek under the hood and realize there’s no master plan or final destination. 

And maybe there never was. But at least we maintained the illusion better before. We used to be told how to live, provided lore that outlined where the lines were drawn between right and wrong, and granted something resembling safety and stability in exchange. Yes, I’m talking about the glue of society: religion. “Literally false but metaphorically true,” as Bret Weinstein puts it. In our dramatic pendulum swing away from collectivism towards the most extreme form of individualism that we’ve ever experienced, we’re now forcing ourselves to come up with all our own answers to the existential questions that have plagued humankind since forever. What is our purpose on this planet? Do we have a responsibility to one another? Who even are we?

Answering those questions alone is asking a lot of a person. The easier option is to choose from the platter of social-strata-acceptable possibilities we’re presented with for education, occupation, geographical location, personality, etc, and call it a day. In contrast to the tightly-knit choice architecture that religion used to provide, each of our choices now has to stand separately — it’s on you to narrate any cohesion to your existence.

There are a lot of benefits to being good at that narration. Describe your “calling” convincingly and you've defined a new game that others want to watch and play. But it’s a catch-22: if you spend all your time constantly sketching (probably quickly outdated) pictures of your thinking on the bigger questions we’ve all been tasked with answering, you neglect the actual doing that would reveal answers with richer hues. It’s too easy to confuse playing the “performing yourself” game with figuring out who that self really is.

This is what growing up very visibly online is like. It’s hard not to internalize the sense that you’re constantly being watched and thus everything you do demands a defensible explanation. Granted, there are many benefits to this — incredible opportunities are unlocked by constructing a digitally consumable caricature of yourself that makes you legible to literally anyone in the world. It’s probably the most far-ranging bat signal possible to find people who think and feel similarly to you.

But spending too much time as a character also comes with a lot of unforeseen consequences. Anecdotally, my digital tracks followed the natural evolution of a girl online: starting on Tumblr when I was 12, traversing to Instagram in my teens, and finally arriving at Twitter in my twenties. Being given this dopamine firehose at such a young age has shaped my brain’s choice calculus in difficult-to-define ways. My mind’s decision-making process doesn’t default to what I’d find most satisfying — it instead filters for which options would be both respected and easily understood by my audience.

The pressure to perform and live up to the expectations of others is not a new social phenomenon — nor a bad one. But the way it manifests at the internet’s global scale increases its intensity tenfold — especially for young people. The goal is no longer to simply live up to the high expectations of your parents and peers — online you could be striving to appease the CEO of the company you most admire’s ambient interest in “your trajectory.” The potential to be believed in by so many people you don’t even know is both a uniquely internet-enabled blessing and a surprisingly heavy burden to bear.

The funny thing is that the nature of the internet means that even if you do happen to garner the attention of interesting and important people, their belief in you will always be passive by default. There’s simply so much friction in the process of turning belief into action online — meaning that most of the time all you actually get from internet attention is internalized impossible-to-attain expectations for yourself and an extremely confused ego. Why do these people believe in me? Who do they think I am? What do I even want to do? Having some of the most extraordinary people alive watching and commenting on your every move makes you feel like doing anything less than extraordinary would make you a catastrophic disappointment.

The effect this has on a young person with a lot of “potential” and opportunities available to them but not a lot of pulse on what they find meaningful yet is too often paralysis. With infinite options on the table and your entire professional reputation and future prospects in your hands, you’re forced to ask yourself: what am I going to do with my time and how do I make sure I don’t mess this up?

Let’s break down the options.

If you opt for an off-the-shelf game like becoming a PM or going back to school, you’ll quickly discover that these paths have been expressly designed to minimize downside. Sounds great, right? Sure, until you realize that they’re only minimizing one very specific type of downside: status. While these “safe routes” safeguard how low your status can go by nature of their title carrying clout, they don’t necessarily impart any sense of meaning. And more importantly: each of these games’ upside is capped. Even if you do end up shipping the product or graduating from the best school, you’re still doomed to hit the ceiling of the game some other person designed for people like you to play.

So maybe it isn’t so safe to play those stock games after all. Or at least, it depends on what you consider “safe.” If you care about personally choosing the shape, scale, and direction of your impact on the world, you might find that playing off-the-shelf games turns out to be a remarkably risky bet. There’s just no money/time-back guarantee that any of the off-the-shelf options will continue to fit you as your desires evolve. And maybe that’s ok — but continually reinventing yourself is a tiring and time-consuming task that too often leads you away from the real “calling”-finding-and-defining work.

This is why optimizing for satisfaction is almost always the most meaning-making and longest-lasting option. In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes. That isn’t a selfish question, by the way. Instead, it ensures sustainability. Continuing to play games that only feel rewarding when other people are watching is a trap that too many never crawl out of — resulting in so many people’s short shelf life working on important problems. 

Nonetheless, there is still value in playing off-the-shelf games — even if just for a brief bit. First off, the legibility granted by success within these games is not to be underestimated — after all, there’s a reason we respect successful scientists and (sometimes) politicians. The power in winning pre-packaged games is the ability to influence people now. If that matters to you, my question is this: how much are you constraining yourself to your local maxima’s platter of present-day status games? Are you really considering all the games — including historical, status, and geographic-agnostic ones? After all, what happened to archetypes like the instigator? The inventor? The polymath?

I see us as always having two distinct options: you either 1) consider all possible games and then use your won influence wisely, or 2) design a custom game for you alone to play that shamelessly follows the nose of your satisfaction. Don’t try to play both at the same time or you’re bound to feel frustrated by failing to achieve influence or satisfaction. If you opt for satisfaction: realize that while the plot’s shape will likely only be revealed in retrospect, defining your game’s guiding principles might be a good place to start. In my case: “I solemnly swear I will not be boring.”

Someone special asked me a question a couple of months back that’s been ringing in my ears ever since. We were killing time walking around the empty streets of downtown Berkeley before a concert when he turned to me and asked “do you think you’re going to explore or exploit?” I did a double-take. “Exploit?” I said. “Who do you think I am??”

He explained. “Exploit” was more about accumulating compounding returns — not committing a criminal offense. Did I see myself doubling down on something for a very long time, or did I want to continue following my curiosity from project to project forever? I’ve been thinking about this question more or less ever since.

Now, this is a touchy subject for me. This line of questioning has historically been leveled at me as a pointed critique. I taste-tested a lot of different career paths in college and while that’s completely normal, the intensity with which I did it wasn’t. I threw myself into each new direction with all of my being, giving the people that loved me whiplash as they struggled to keep up with what I was doing and why I needed them to believe it was the perfect fit for me. They wanted to root for me, they just didn’t know what exactly they were rooting for. I got a lot of frustrating feedback during this time. “You’re just exploring!” “I look forward to seeing you double down on something!” “Everyone goes through this!” “Who knows, maybe you’ll stay in this space, maybe you’ll end up somewhere else!” and my worst fear: “Don’t worry, this is just the path of an artist!” 

I hated each and every one of these responses, for different reasons. I disliked the idea that others didn’t fully believe that my current thing was the right thing for me. I resented that they thought I was just like everyone else. But most of all — I vehemently despised being called an artist. Whether true or not, to me that meant all they thought I was capable of was making pretty things.

I’ve always known I could do more than that. But while I wanted to be able to neatly introduce myself with a respectable title or two, none of the roles I tried on lasted long. I outgrew them just as quickly as I collected them — leaving me disoriented, confused, and concerned about my ability to commit to things.

Once I started being honest with myself I realized that I was and still am, indeed, exploring. It took a while to accept that — mostly because it sure doesn’t feel like it at all. In my head, there’s a strong throughline connecting all of my work: my curiosity. I get high off the process of learning and articulating and making sense of the world around me and that high has been steady since I was small.

The interesting thing about following your curiosity is that it usually turns you into a pretty generally competent person. In many ways this is great. Generalism enables you to independently actualize incredible things — for me taking the form of film, writing, design, product, investing, etc. 

But it can also be a curse — or at least wildly confusing career-wise. Generally competent people tend to have endless optionality. It’s difficult to settle on any one thing when so many other tempting opportunities keep tugging at your sleeve. Most people in this position end up doubling down on the thing they receive the most praise for — mistaking external validation for internal satisfaction. But squeezing yourself into a small, easily explainable cage you know you’ll quickly outgrow just to avoid the pain of struggling to explain who you are to other people is, in my opinion, just avoidance of facing your full potential.

For me, following my curiosity currently looks like helping companies tell their stories (with the wonderful Brie), investing in people I believe in, and obviously: writing. My happy place is what I call “manic writing mode” — a state of intense concentration where my brain ceases to remember any trace of my identity as I whittle words into a point and chisel sentences so they string together seamlessly. 

But following this feeling doesn’t lead me towards anything resembling “exploitation.” How does one compound curiosity? This is why I stumble so much when asked the adjacent question “how ambitious are you?” My ambition simply isn’t a static object — it instead takes the form of an insatiable hunger for understanding in order to voice truth and (hopefully) scoot the world in a direction I believe in. 

This type of ambient ambition is something I see crushing the souls of far too many currently caged curious people. It’s too easy to feel like you’re falling short when you compare your amalgamation of accomplishments to the narratives of people with literal mission statements to define and tie together their body of work with a bow. But it’s worth remembering that people only become legible when reflecting in retrospect. Steve Jobs encapsulates this well: "You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward.” 

I never gave a satisfactory answer to the explore vs. exploit question. I hemmed and hawed for a while and while the question asker seemed accepting of the fact that I didn’t know, I’m still not — even five months later. I don’t think any cocktail party-sized description of myself will ever feel fitting and I doubt that will ever change.

But maybe you don’t need to be explainable. Maybe the most interesting perspectives come from being willing to occupy a difficult-to-define place, even if it means sacrificing others' understanding of you. The challenge then becomes committing to occupy that place far longer than most feel comfortable — long enough to cultivate a voice out of your curiosity that is confident enough in its own continuity to tell you exactly what’s worth committing to when the time comes.

This past year I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why we as humans have become so wimpy.

I’m not going to preface that statement with a preamble. Why? Because I think it’s true and I’m sick of protecting people’s feelings. If you look at history, we as humans behave remarkably more wimpily than we used to — the status quo is that we seem to have become almost universally deficient in courage.

While courage is about speaking our minds, aligning our actions with our values, and aiming our aspirations really, really high, wimpiness is the opposite. Wimpiness is cynicism, insecurity, self-victimization, and an utter unseriousness of purpose. And lately, this specific strain of wimpiness seems to constantly be winning the cultural fight.

This highlights the fact that as a culture, strength no longer garners our utmost respect — vulnerability does. We value protecting the weak much more than we do admiring the strong. To a certain extent this has always been true — glorification of the victim, or what Nietzsche calls “slave morality,” is arguably as old as human nature itself.

But the intense polarization of politics today has pushed this to new extremes. Victimizing oneself is no longer reserved as a last resort — it has instead become the most popular multitool to accrue political power.

I think this is bad. At a macro-scale it drowns out the voices of real victims. On a micro-scale it has massive negative repercussions on how a person sees themself. This is because identifying as a victim isn’t typesafe: it quickly spills out into all areas of your life as a cheap and impervious justification for anything you do. And it doesn’t stop there: adopting a victim mindset also encourages you to base your worldview around negative experiences in your past that “proved” the world to be beyond your control. In practice, this quickly robs you of your sense of security, purpose, and most consequentially — it eats away at your agency. From my vantage point, valorization of victimhood is one of the most pervasive culprits for widespread wimpiness today. 

Now, I make no claim to be particularly courageous myself. I’ve always been a tad sad and prone to overthinking — leading me to languish in the modern psychiatry industrial complex for years. While my sample size = 1, I’ll say that I started to shed my wimpy layer when I decided to stop seeing myself as a victim. None of the meds, treatments, or stupid advice like “smiling more will trick your brain into thinking you’re happy!” worked for me. 

What worked was not letting myself wallow on things in the past and instead focusing on my dreams for the future — and crucially, actually making those dreams come true. This wasn’t a therapy-born realization — it was a realization reached by hitting rock bottom and then choosing to re-engage with the real world.

My problem with therapy is that for people like myself who didn’t really need it (i.e. generally emotionally-intelligent people that are just experiencing garden variety neurosis1) therapy transactionalizes an experience we were designed to receive through our relationships. This would be fine, except that it often makes you dependent on this highly-individualistic practice by delivering a cheap imitation of the experience you’d get given you were receiving this support through real relationships. When used wisely, therapy can be a terrific tool to solve specific issues. But it wasn’t designed to deliver meaning or replace religion — despite what the cultural consensus today would have you believe. At the end of the day, we forget that therapy is a business. The incentives are anything but aligned to help you move on: once you’re in the system they have every reason to keep you there for as long as they can.

Leaving therapy marked a distinct turning point in my life. I didn’t want to be seen as a victim anymore, so I started acting out what the opposite might look like: I presented myself like I belonged. I got good at reading environments and tailoring myself to their ideal archetype. I was an amoeba: nimbly navigating each conversation to avoid exposing my lack of expertise, quickly calibrating my ratio of agreeableness to disagreeableness to stockpile respect points, speaking quickly and concisely to mimic their conception of intelligence, and nodding with warmth and knowingness at all the right moments. When I managed to play the part perfectly, I was rewarded — with jobs, friends, invitations, acceptance. But it felt like I was playing with fire. When existing is a performance, your whole life starts to feel like a stage that you can only fall off of. 

Gone Girl’s “Cool Girl” monologue explains this well. I think a general rule of thumb is that if a person seems too perfectly suited to an environment to be real, they’re probably playing a part. People don’t normally slot into neat boxes. Being able to perceive and mold yourself into exactly what others need is a skill — but it also requires you relinquish a certain amount of ownership over your life. As your costume grows heavier with decisions and responsibility, your act starts to fray around the seams.

When it inevitably does, you might look around without your stage makeup and see who stuck around. That’s what I did, at least. What I found was that the people by my side also happened to have historically been huge sources of motivation for me to do courageous things. And maybe, just maybe, there was something to that.

A pattern started to emerge: the courage created by my focusing on contribution (“what can I do to support the people and things I love”) over identity (“I am not a wimp, how can I prove that”) was 10x more concentrated in strength. That’s my answer to why I was so wimpy: I was searching for meaning facing the wrong direction. It’s hard not to start feeling sorry for yourself when your palette of motivation methods consists only of a couple unflattering shades of your identity and a few quickly fading images of your experiences.

Neither therapy nor the parts I played for other people granted me a sense of purpose. Instead, it came from contribution. Society’s prevailing narrative today will tell you to look inside yourself for the courage to continue. This is, in my view, utterly incomplete. I’m unconvinced any of us possess purely internally-created reasons to be brave (and if you do, plz tell me). To speak our minds, align our beliefs with our actions, and aim really, really high, we need reasons outside of ourselves. Not flimsy award or accolade-shaped reasons — but sturdy, deep-rooted, grounding reasons like relationships and responsibility.

These realizations are what got me so interested in wimpiness. With my sense of purpose now firmly rooted in the people, places, and projects around me, I resolve to ask more risky questions — and to feel ok performing the act of asking them imperfectly. I’m unconvinced there’s any other way to make sense of the world.

Which is why I’m still wondering why we’re so wimpy. And not just me personally, but us as a society and culture at large. Why are we so universally deficient in courage? What led us here? How could we not be this way?

So I’m planning to get to the bottom of it2. Starting by untangling the web of wimpiness, I will then put each strain of symptoms under a microscope: individualism, loss of religion, therapy culture, self-created conflict, and much more. If you happen to have thoughts on the topic, I’d love to hear from you: m@mollymielke.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about this scene from one of my favorite films by Wong Kar-Wai called In the Mood for Love. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, excruciatingly slow, and almost nothing actually happens. It is, quite literally, two and a half minutes of two people being people — only crossing paths and exchanging a long lingering glance in the last 15 seconds. But the friction-filled punch those 15 seconds pack is apparently potent enough for some of us to want to write an essay about it.

Admittedly, it’s a cheap shot1. Anyone can put romantic music over muted footage of peoples’ small interactions and immediately hotwire the human brain to ascribe a deeper meaning. But I still think there’s something interesting to unpack here about how people exchange acknowledgments of each other’s existence.

The little things you do for others that remind you both of who you are, matter. They’re what define the thread count of the human experience. It’s micro gestures like small smiles, arm squeezes, and “hey you”s that root us in our sense of self without committing to the relationship’s definition beyond momentary shared space. As Philippe Rochat puts it in Others in Mind, “such simple, yet constant social acknowledgment amounts to the experience of tremendous relief.”

Providing this acknowledgment for the people you love is something that I think we could all get better at. Validating the other person’s perspective, reacting and explaining your own, maybe sending a smile. Just like the silence in Wong Kar-Wai’s corridor scene, it’s not just about what is said, it’s about what is unsaid: I see you, I’m here for you, I love you. This is something that for the most part, I don’t think technology can ever fully satisfy — it’s just too frictionless. Acknowledging existence requires real, personalized effort — something that tapping your screen to heart react will never fulfill.

I come to these realizations from a perhaps uncommon perspective. Having grown up in an environment that required extreme attentiveness to others and then rejecting anything that resembled that duty once I escaped, I have since come full circle to see the value in reinventing this practice for myself. As the sheer number of people I love has dramatically expanded in the past year, I keep finding myself looking around asking, “isn’t it insane how much acknowledgment we all need and how great it is to give it?” For the most part, people do not find it insane. In fact, most have no idea what I’m talking about. In conversation, love is often tiptoed around and treated like a scarce resource. But it doesn’t really matter because my revelation remains the same: I’ve found a deep sense of purpose in dedicating myself to bettering the lives of the people I love.

This is… a very explicit manifestation of femininity. It’s also something I’ve come to realize makes me stand out in the world because I simply refuse to have different modes of operation in work and life. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry has made me very aware that this culture is sorely lacking something I am naturally able to provide in spades. Not in a way that saps me of energy or makes me feel like a martyr, but in a way that feels fulfilling and grounding in my sense of self.

Should women have to do this emotional work? Absolutely not — and most don’t have the capacity to. But my decade of being pushed to the extreme in this regard has enabled me to feel fully comfortable setting boundaries to the support I provide. In defining my own capacity, I am able to shape this skill into something that serves me.

But this leaves me wondering: why is this so rare? How did we get to a place where genuinely caring for those around you is perceived as "special"? Why do we starve each other of compassion and support?

The answer is, of course, complicated. One way of looking at it is that our society exists in a patriarchal gridlock where emotionality and connection are only socially acceptable in certain settings — for most men, that’s just with their single romantic partner. To make matters worse, compassionate “effort” is emotional labor that our society has neither the self-awareness nor vocabulary to value. Whose job is it to take care of the tribe in 2022 and what words would we even use to describe that work? Compounding this issue is that the scarce resource theory of love runs deep. People are taught at a young age that love is limited — giving it away is relinquishing power and withholding love keeps you in control.

I deeply dislike this zero-sum approach to love and intend to devote my life to disproving it. I’m willing to bet good money (or support) that if you try giving those you love the acknowledgment that they clearly need, you’ll find that you probably possess a lot more love to give than you thought. And perhaps more personally, you’ll uncover a secret — that being your best for others is the easiest way to discover a deep sense of acknowledgement and meaning for yourself.

One of my most long-standing beliefs is that I am miles behind everyone else in all areas of my life. Whether true or not, this belief is the fuel that has propelled me far and fast. It made me determined to get ahead, determined to achieve all of my constantly creeping goals, and ultimately, determined to become the perfect version of myself.

I’ve always been a pretty goal-oriented person — but mostly because I frame my goals on a salvation scale. It’s not enough for achieving a thing to offer me exactly what I want — my brain craves anything I aim for to hold the key to everything that I need. As diabolical as this sounds, it’s extremely effective. With stakes that high, I’m willing to pull out all the stops. Failure just doesn’t feel like an option. By telling myself that whatever I’m reaching for will essentially allow me to achieve nirvana, I guarantee that motivation will never be in short supply.

I think a lot of terminally intellectual-brained high achievers do the same thing. And why wouldn’t they? It’s a fast fix to motivation and provides an easy answer to the age-old question of how a person might measure their self-worth: why not by your speed of growth? But with that comes the feeling that anything but progressing through life at warp speed is probably proof that you’re doing something deeply wrong.

In my case, I want things to feel hard. How else will I know that I’m making progress? In practice, this sentiment easily leads to self-sabotage. It encourages me to pick projects and people that give my overactive brain a silly sudoku-like game to play while matching my mind’s stock image of “meaningfulness.”

I’m not alone. How many times have you watched someone you consider to be generally quite smart chase after and attain a thing, only to realize that they don’t actually want the thing after all. It’s a true testament to the power of the mind how long people get stuck in this cycle; continually disproving their this-thing-is-my-savior theory and yet still somehow coming to the conclusion that it’s this next thing that they truly need and not that their savior theory is fundamentally flawed.

This is synthetic certainty in action — straight from your mental lab. It’s an intellectually-formulated feeling designed to simulate the organic farm-to-table certainty that only your heart can produce. But comparing the two reveals the difference is stark: a brain dressed as a heart will never beat the same way, no matter how hard it thinks about it. 

I know this from finally getting a full serving of organic made-in-the-heart certainty through relationships. There’s something about looking over at a person and feeling an overwhelming sense of rightness that makes you reconsider how you ever made decisions any other way. The realization goes something like: “ohhhhh, so this feeling is what I was searching for all those years???”

Admittedly, a person can run on synthetic certainty for a very, very long time — but it’s like building a castle on top of a faulty foundation. Eventually, the over-intellectualized structure will crumble. This is because the human heart will simply always beat the brain in a fight. Your brain might be able to whip up a five-page single-spaced essay outlining exactly what you want and need in extensive detail, but your heart will always have the last word (and trust me, they will fit on a post-it).

This is my realization: that all those years when my mind was in the driver's seat flooring it towards the most momentous milestone it could conceive of, I actually had no idea what my heart wanted. I was optimizing for speed when what I was really craving was certainty.

There’s something deeply grounding about unequivocally knowing in your heart that something is right. Certainty requires no lengthy explanation. All of this is easy to agree with in theory, but in practice people are fast to forget that this principle applies far beyond relationships. By which I mean: maybe the best job / city / friend group for you is the one that literally just feels right almost all the time (hint hint: it’s probably because of the people). Feeling right is the opposite of ambivalence — and it’s a beautiful thing. 

It’s odd how obvious yet radical that sounds to say. Uncertainty has become something of a virtue these days. We seem to be afraid brevity might make us look unintelligent or uninformed. Over-intellectualizing our decisions to signal we understand the complexity of the world is now the new norm.

I think this is a shame — and love is my shining example. Call me crazy, but maybe it’s a good sign when things feel remarkably simple and wordlessly right. And when they do, it’s interesting to look around and notice how incredibly irrelevant speed is. Certainty means you’re moving at the speed of trust — a personal pace that ultimately has no record to beat or even road to follow.

Hi! Molly here. I want to write more because it makes me happy and helps me understand myself. This is me doing that :)

I’ve been hearing “you should talk more” for… forever. From the very beginning, communication was clearly my strong suit: I’d growl and glare at other kids when they did something I didn't like. Once I got a little older and started going to parties, I discovered that my soft voice would simply dissolve into the baseline hum of human voices. Instead of shouting, I shut up.

When I did speak, I picked my words carefully. Anything that left my mouth had to have survived my numerous mental filters — each one simulating a different person’s perspective to predict how my message would be perceived. In practice, this meant that any opinion that managed to make it through all the filters was polished to perfection and playing it incredibly safe.

As you can probably guess, my quietness massively stifled my social life — leading me to the logical conclusion that I was incredibly and incurable socially awkward. Every interaction felt like a test. If I didn’t vibe with a person immediately, I failed. Instead of fact-checking this belief, I stubbornly clung to my quiet honor and collected citations to defend my silence. “Being ok with yourself when no one else is around is the truest test of character,” I would retort defensively. “Silence is a choice,” I’d scribble in all-caps. Both are kinda true, but my silence itself wasn’t valiant: it was purely because I was terrified of exposing my imperfections.

The thing to understand about being quiet is that when you do talk, people tend to listen. The first time, at least. If what you say is interesting, they’ll keep listening. “You’re so thoughtful” is how most people frame it. Naturally, they want more. But what they don't understand is that those opinions are like lotus flowers. They’re surrounded by mud, not more blossoms. I promise I’m not cherry-picking from a sea of perfectly thought-through opinions — I'm just spending more time polishing each one that does spring up to perfection.

The funny thing is that close friendship cracks this opinion curation complex right open. It did for me, anyway. Up until recently, I had zero desire to be anything but quiet. In fact, I viewed quietness as a virtue — I thought it was everyone else that should be more discerning about what they shared.

But man oh man, wanting to be understood by the people you love sure turns this opinion upside down. Probably because feeling seen requires airing your mud: by which I mean continually attempting to articulate the shameful and confusing inner workings of your mind — not just a curated selection of its greatest hits. Suddenly you're finding yourself fumbling with words and forming vague questions and feeling like every one of your imperfections is on full display.

But you do it because it’s the only way for your people to understand you. And being understood is kinda the whole point of life, no? The cool thing is that all this communicating pays off. It unlocks the gates to a new state of being together where none of you need to explain. It's kinda like being on the free plan of quiet and then switching to premium: your baseline level of contentment just got massively upgraded by feeling so ambiently understood.

Beyond the upgrade, I think airing your mud is also the only way to stop buying your own bullshit. See, we need other people to help us spot our bullshit beliefs. And once they’re identified, we also need a reason to change. If your only motivation to update your internal OS is your own long-term benefit, I wish you luck. It sucks, but we’re just not wired to value our future selves anywhere near as highly as we value our present comfort.

But herein lies the loophole: what might feel like moving a mental mountain to change purely for the sake of you often feels like no big deal to change for the sake of people you love. Maybe this is why people learn so much from love — you’re maximally motivated and receptive to changing yourself in order to experience life with your people.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m changing my tune. I no longer believe that I’m fundamentally quiet or incurably awkward. The truth is that we as human beings are ridiculously capable of updating our beliefs at any time and in turn, transforming ourselves into the people we want to be. And maybe the lesser-known side note is how much easier and more meaningful it feels when we don't have to do it alone.

I mention all of this as the first example of what I'm calling ‘rescripting.’ That’s what this Substack is going to be about. We all hold beliefs about ourselves that fundamentally really, really don’t serve us, and yet we let them define our decisions and understanding of the world. But we can update them, kinda like a changelog. This is the first of my self script release notes.