2025-10-08 15:56:18
Youth is no longer a descriptor of my identity. I can either mourn or celebrate that. Choosing the latter is what will open me up to the beauty this decade can yield.
Age is interesting because it’s both objective and subjective. Objective in the sense that it represents the number of times my physical frame has rotated around the sun. It’s quantifiable and governed by the law of entropy, which means that my body will show signs of this number that’s attached to my name. Shoulder pain, a few gray hairs, and some health issues are a few of the things that personally fall under this domain.
But on the other hand, there is a subjective definition as well. There is a psychological frame you can place around your age, which has the effect of making you feel like you’re younger or older than the number of orbits you’ve taken on this planet. This is common amongst adages like “40 is the new 30” or the belief that “you have an old soul.” While some use subjective age as a coping mechanism, the truth is that many people don’t feel like their objective age. There is something about the number that feels off to them, creating a gap between who they are and what they’re expected to be.
As I turn 40, I’ve been wondering if this is the case. Does the number 40 feel foreign, or does it feel like it’s exactly where I’m supposed to be? While I have an intuition as to what the answer is, the purpose of this essay is to help me understand that answer better through the avenue of reflection.
The first thing to consider is that by the time you hit 40, you’ve seen a good deal of hardship. While you may not have seen the most acute degrees of hardship you’ll ever experience, you will certainly understand why people say that life is hard. This is obvious for those that are struggling to survive, but even if you’ve achieved everything you’ve ever wanted, the ensuing boredom will become your new source of hardship. Straining our way through obstacles is a feature of life, and not the bug we mistakenly interpret it to be.
The beautiful tradeoff of facing obstacles, however, is that you learn valuable lessons. And the more lessons you learn, the less daunting each subsequent obstacle will be.
In economics, there is something called the law of diminishing marginal utility. Simply put, it states that for any commodity, you will derive lower levels of utility (or pleasure) with each additional unit you consume. For example, if you’re hungry and you buy a burger, that first one will be amazing. But if you buy another burger, then that one will be less pleasurable than the first. And by the 5th burger, you’ll hate yourself and won’t buy that burger again for the next month (at least).
When it comes to overcoming obstacles, however, I feel that there’s an inverse of this: a law of increasing marginal utility. With each obstacle you overcome, the utility comes in the form of a lesson you can import into the next obstacle you face. And once you overcome that one, the utility gained has a compounding effect that takes all the prior lessons into account as well.
This has the interesting effect of allowing calmness to be more of a baseline state as you’re introduced to various obstacles over time:
So while the first obstacle you faced in a given domain may have provoked a lot of anxiety, by the 30th one, you’ll know how to face it with equanimity.
I say all this because by the time you turn 40, you’ll definitely have had some experience with the above graph. You may not be at the uppermost part of the curve because that tends to be reserved for the elderly (many of whom have the ability to calmly face the greatest obstacle, which is death), but you’ll know what it’s like to roam around the middle of the arc. You will have faced trying times, but you also will have felt what it’s like to overcome them. This introduces a level of maturity that gives you more confidence to handle whatever may come next, knowing that in the long-run, disorder is inescapable.
Now, it may sound rather disheartening to hear that one’s exposure to hardship is a feature of aging. But like most things in life, it comes with a beautiful balance. And in the case of turning 40, that balance comes from knowing what roots you want to deepen to cultivate a life of meaning and love.
In The Inner Compass, I wrote:
Let’s consider the three main factors that will have an outsized impact on your life:
1. Where you live,
2. What you work on, and
3. Who you’re with.You can get many things wrong, but if you get the above three right, your well-being will be high.
Ultimately, these 3 things all represent deep investments of both attention and trust. And the wonderful thing about age is that it filters out the superfluous and amplifies the necessary.
I’ll give you a personal example of this using the lens of the 2nd point: what you work on.
My journey as a writer didn’t really start until I was in my mid-thirties. I was initially concerned that I was too late to the domain of writing online, and that I had too many responsibilities on my plate to dedicate my full attention to it. This fear of uncertainty kept me in a job I disliked, where I did mind-numbing tasks for the sake of earning a steady paycheck.
But slowly and steadily, I started publishing stories and sharing them with others. Some of them received a great response, while others dwelled in obscurity. While there was no clear path to a viable living doing this, it became obvious to me that I at least had to try. Most people stay in jobs they dislike because they don’t know what else they’d dedicate their attention to. But I had the privilege of knowing exactly what that would be, so it seemed irresponsible to turn my back on that truth and to continue living a lie.
Years after taking the leap, I can confidently say that this is a career now. And as I turn 40, I want to continue deepening my relationship with the craft. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of turning 40 is that you have a better understanding of what you want, which usually isn’t the case when you’re swimming in the fountain of youth. The fountain is a crowded one, and your desires are largely formed by whoever seems to be in its upper tiers. But as I begin to step outside of its waters, I’m understanding what it means to shape your own wants, which is largely downstream from your personal values and the few people you want to keep close to you. That discernment of the essential is the greatest lesson that age provides.
As I turn 40, I am also aware of the paradoxes of life. A big one is this: how much of my attention do I dedicate to breadth, and how much of it goes to depth? A meaningful life contains both, but one often comes at the expense of the other.
Generally speaking, breadth comes in the form of one’s career and work. Work is the domain where you make a wide impact, as the decisions you make and the way you actualize them will influence your colleagues, your students, your clients, your readers, etc. You provide value through your ability to solve problems, and that value will translate to impact and respect.
But depth is cultivated through relationships that are built outside the domain of your social value. My daughter loves me because I’m her dad, and not because I’ve created a popular blog. My (true) friends love me because I’m there for them in the same way they’re there for me. My parents love me because I’m their son, and that alone is sufficient.
In a perfect world, there is an unperturbed harmony between breadth and depth. But we do not live in such a world, which is why there are rich people with broken families and poor people with wholesome ones. Accomplishment may command respect but it cannot conjure love, and those that can’t see the difference will experience future regret.
As I turn 40, I’m more excited about my work than I’ve ever been. But at the same time, I’m more moved by my relationships than I’ve ever been. The other night, I had tears in my eyes as I looked at drawings that my daughter created of me and her holding hands. I thought to myself, Am I making the most of the time I have with her? And then moments later, I found myself thinking of different ways I could get the word out about my book. The desire for breadth is often found in the same thread of thought that understands the importance of depth.
The way I reconcile the two is to live in a way where one strengthens the other. For example, publishing this essay is my contribution to breadth, where people I don’t know will read these words. But writing this piece is a commitment to depth, as it’s making me reflect on my loved ones and just how important they are to my well-being. My work actually helps me be a more thoughtful and compassionate person, which has the benefit of making me be a better father, husband, son, brother, and friend.
As I turn 40, I’m learning that the great paradoxes of life can’t be solved. Rather, you can only you do your best to align the opposing ends as much as possible. In this sense, perhaps I am still young. Maybe I still have a youthful ignorance around ambition given that I want to leave an impact on people’s lives. Maybe I have a naive belief that it will also make me a better loved one in turn.
But it’s just as possible that I believe all this because of the wisdom that comes with age. That due to all the lessons I’ve learned so far, I’m left with the conclusion that I have to operate on both wider and narrower scales to live a meaningful life. After sifting through all of society’s expectations, what remains is the great work I want to do coupled with the few people I want to be around. With this framing, it’s the passage of years and its resulting lessons that has led to timeless wisdom.
Since I feel both younger and older than 40, perhaps I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Too young to be satisfied with my pursuits, and too old to be wasteful with my time. The ability to see this clearly is a hallmark of turning 40, and that clarity is something well worth celebrating.
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I’m coming to terms with the fact that this is the meaning of life:
A beautiful life is one where you get to choose the problems you want to solve:
Thankfully, Life Is Full of Problems
As you get older, it’s crucial to understand the difference between respect and love:
2025-09-20 14:46:09
A common question I get from readers is how I generate my ideas. Do they usually come from books? From articles? From conversations? From good ole contemplation?
The easy answer is that it comes from all of these things. It’s common knowledge that ideas come downstream from existing sources, all of which eventually find their way into your body of work. After all, originality is nothing more than the reframing of old ideas, done in a way that conjures the illusion of novelty.
With that said, the straight-forward answer is generally a sweeping one, discounting the nuances that lie underneath. So in today’s essay, I want to delve into a particular misconception that surrounds the topic of idea generation, and how I’ve shifted my perspective on it.
The misconception is the belief that your ideas precede the creative process. Or in other words, that you first have an idea, and then you work to bring that idea to life.
This mindset reminds me of an industrial complex, where employees are shown an image of what they’re all building toward, and then are sent to an assembly line to contribute their part to the vision. It’s deterministic in a sense, where they already know what the future ought to look like. In this setting, any deviation from that vision is an error, which means that the overarching idea takes precedence over any individual contribution.
This type of efficiency is great for producing standardized widgets, but does little for cultivating creative minds.
The best ideas are birthed during the creative process, and not before. That’s because creativity often contains a serendipitous element, where a train of thought takes unexpected turns throughout its journey. Even if you know that you have a specific conclusion you’re working toward, the way you’ll get there is going to be winding and, frankly, quite surprising.
A few years ago, my wife took up a ceramics apprenticeship in Korea. I visited the studio a few times during her stay, and had the privilege of watching her teacher and other students create vessels during the afternoons. The immediate thing that struck me was how no one had any clue what their creation would look like at the end of each session. All they knew was that they were starting with the same mound of clay, and that this would eventually become something after a few hours. There were no outlines, no mockups, nothing. Just their materials, their wheels, and their commitment to shaping the clay in front of them.
Over the next few hours, I periodically checked in to see how things were going. Two things were immediately clear each time I did: (1) everyone was so present with what they were doing, and (2) no two vessels were shaping up to look the same. There was something both thrilling and peaceful about the whole thing. Thrilling because the artists had no idea what was going to come about, and peaceful because they were okay with that (or it appeared that way, at least).
This whole scene reminded me that ideas take shape as you create. It’s the flow of the experience that causes another branch of thought to emerge, which you then incorporate to propel that experience in a new direction. Ideas generate through action, and not through a mind that tries to think its way to them. The process of moving your hands, shuffling your feet, writing your words… these are the things that allow ideas to arise without you forcing them to the surface.
So the way to build a playground of ideas isn’t to accumulate a bunch of information, but to regularly put yourself in that space to play. You can read great books or watch amazing films to inspire you, but the only way for that inspiration to give birth to a beautiful idea is when you’re actively engaged in the creative process. And what’s great is that you don’t require a vision of what you want to build beforehand; all you need is the desire to create and the commitment to make that happen.
In my case, I often don’t know what I’m going to write about until I sit down to do it. As you could guess, there’s a lot of creative resistance at first, primarily because we’re so conditioned to believe that you have to know what you’re going to write about before you start doing so. This is reinforced in high school English class, for example, where you’re taught that writing is merely a way of formalizing whatever ideas you’ve structured in advance (via an outline or a lengthy brainstorming session).
But it turns out that the writing itself is where the ideas come from. All you need is one thought to get you going, and once you’re moving, many other tributaries of thought begin to open up. Each session is like entering a laboratory of some sort, where the longer you write, the more personal experiences and external sources of inspiration you touch with each sentence. It’s this inertia that gives rise to your ability to reframe thoughts into ideas that exude originality.
The key takeaway is to unlearn the belief that a vision is required in order for you to start. It’s to dispel with the notion that everything needs to be plotted out in advance before a word is typed, a brushstroke is painted, or a dollop of clay is shaped. The simple yet powerful reality is that showing up and committing to the craft is what matters most, and that moving past the starting line will birth more ideas than any pre-planning ever will.
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Related Posts:
2025-09-03 09:46:29
On a day-to-day basis, the stresses of life can feel all-consuming. There are bills to pay, mouths to feed, work to do, people to please, places to go, and worries to fill in the space between it all. And this can make you wonder:
“Is there more to life than this?”
It’s a valid question, especially because the modern world contains no shortage of stories that idealize a life of glamour and excess. This isn’t just the case for celebrities and the filthy rich. I’ve seen cases of old friends acquaintances posting drone photos of themselves partying on yachts while drinking champagne amidst the setting sun. Others have recorded videos flaunting their status as millionaires as they travel around the world (in slow motion).
Now, I’m sure they have their reasons for doing things like this, but I’ve come to realize that one reason is to say some variant of the following:
“Hey, look at my life. Where are you at with yours?”
This may sound cynical, but it’s the truth. Embedded in every open display of wealth and status is an assumption that someone in a “lower” position will be viewing it. Think about it. If you just became a millionaire but knew that your entire audience were billionaires, would you make a post that exudes the level of your wealth? Of course not. The only reason you would is because you know that most people aren’t billionaires and just might desire what you’ve obtained.
When you find yourself wondering if there’s “more to life,” that’s because your expectations of what life should be has been set by other hands. Chances are, you’ve recently spent some time on social media. You’ve been thinking of how you feel so behind compared to other people. You’ve been wondering how your life has gone a certain direction when it could be so much more.
So to break this spell, I’d like to propose a thought experiment.
Imagine that you spent a whole day only focusing on the contents of your own life. You focus on your own work, you spend time with your own mind (by meditating or journaling), you share a meal with good friends (real ones, not acquaintances), and watch a film you’ve always wanted to watch. There’s no one to compare yourself against, no goal that someone else says you should be hitting, none of that. How do you think that day would feel? Pretty good, right? I’d dare to say that you’d feel quite peaceful by the end of it.
The truth is that it’s actually easy to be content. The problem is that there are so many forces that try to convince us not to be. After all, the wheel of discontentment is what keeps us buying things we don’t need, pleasing people we don’t care for, and paying attention to those that never think about us. But if we silence all that noise and direct our attention inward, then there is just your life and the things that matter most. It really is that simple.
But of course, life is nuanced and if you’ve chosen to live in a secular world like I have, then you’ll have to make some tradeoffs. You and I aren’t monks, which means that we have money to make, colleagues to interact with, and obligations to fulfill. With that said, you can still take the principles of the contemplative life and imbue them into your practical life to regularly produce a state of contentment.
For example, I’m a writer, and in today’s era, that means I’m also an entrepreneur. Aside from writing, I also teach storytelling, have a consulting practice, create products, interact with readers, and so much more. This requires me to have a readership, which means that I use social media to get the word out about what I’m doing.
But whenever I use social media, I keep in mind that it’s essentially a gigantic feed of, “Hey, look at my life. Where are you at with yours?” Sure, I may come across some helpful information in my feed, but it’s rare that I’ll walk away feeling good about myself after spending a prolonged period of time there.
Knowing this, I came up with the following solution: Use a third party service that schedules all my posts beforehand, then spend a maximum of 10 minutes each day checking out feedback, sending DMs, and replying to any comments. I may take a quick scroll through my feed to see if anything truly important has happened, but that’s about it. I have no social media apps on my phone and can’t even use my browser to access those sites. Everything is blocked, and my well-being has never been higher.
The result is that my social media following has grown substantially over the past year yet I’m rarely even on it. My focus goes toward creating things, yet I still leverage the power of the internet to distribute my work to people. The key is to use these platforms as means to your personal goals, instead of having you become a means to their corporate ones.
If you feel that your life could be so much more than what it is, then it’s worth asking yourself these 2 questions:
(1) Do I feel this way because I’m aware of my own potential?
Or…
(2) Do I feel this way because other people are making me feel inadequate?
If it’s #1, then that’s an important signal to listen to. If you know deep within that you could do so much more with your resilience and capabilities, then you need to pursue another path. After all, that’s what made me take a leap from my corporate career to my creative one. I knew that my mind was capable of more than building spreadsheets all day, and that I would put in the requisite effort to produce great art.
But if it’s #2, then be wary of the desire for more. Chances are, you read or watched something about someone’s life looking “better” than yours, and that inadequacy is driving your belief that life could be so much more. This is a trap, as any pursuit that doesn’t stem for your own volition is a borrowed desire. Even if you end up getting what you want, it’ll feel empty because you didn’t even want it yourself. You let a low sense of self-worth drive you, and no amount of external achievement will be able to make that up for you.
People will do everything in their power to make you believe that their life looks better than it actually is. The beautiful irony, however, is that your life is actually much better than what you’re led on to believe. The trick is to stop letting others convince you otherwise.
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Related Posts:
2025-07-23 05:42:19
When you’re sick, it feels like this is the case:
There’s a feeling of isolation that accompanies an illness of any kind, which only broadens the scope of your suffering. Since all physiological changes are localized to your body or mind, it often feels like no one is experiencing these mishaps but you. You start thinking that everyone else must be getting along just fine, and that you’re the lone exception in a world full of healthy and vibrant people.
But in reality, the landscape looks more like this:
The truth is that there are many, many people on that island of illness with you. You just don’t realize it because sick people tend to navigate their conditions quietly, speaking of it only with their caretakers and loved ones. People that you meet at the store or gym might be struggling with a chronic health issue, but the odds of you hearing about it are low. This doesn’t change the fact that they are on that island with you, but the absence of that knowledge leads to the assumption that they are in pristine health while you are not.
And it is this very assumption that makes you feel alone.
It is for this reason that I am creating this piece. I was initially hesitant to write about my personal health issues because they have always remained a private matter, but since having the above realization, I felt compelled to discuss them more openly. Readers of my work likely haven’t given any thought to my health, and that’s not due to some cold species of indifference. It’s because I’ve never publicly discussed it before, and when one’s health isn’t mentioned, the assumption is that everything is fine.
The truth, however, is that I dwell on the very island that you may also inhabit. And if knowing this helps you feel a little less alone, then it will have been worth it for me to disclose my struggles. While I have nothing to offer in the form of medical advice, I have learned a thing or two about what it takes to navigate this island with a sound mind. After all, managing the biological symptoms of illness is a big part of the picture, but the other part is about strengthening the psychological frame that is used to endure it. The latter is where I hope this essay finds its use.
My initial foray into chronic illness began on December 2019 when I was meditating in my room. It was nighttime, everything was dark, and it was just me, a cushion, and my mind. If anything, the reason I remember its onset so clearly was because how sparse my environment was at the time.
A few minutes into the session, I began to hear a high-pitched buzzing in my right ear. Imagine it sounding like the electrical interference that emanates from power lines, only pitched a few octaves higher. I first thought there was a loose wire in my room that was producing the noise, but I couldn’t find anything of the sort. This sound was all-consuming, and I was deeply distressed.
I somehow managed to fall asleep that night, but when I woke up, I was horrified to notice that it was still there. It didn’t matter what ear exercises I did or what remedies I tried, the noise wouldn’t dissipate. The next few weeks consisted of doctor’s visits, medication, herbs, acupuncture, and anything I felt would help alleviate this condition (known as tinnitus). Nothing worked, and as the weeks transitioned to months, it dawned on me that this wasn’t going away. Fast forward to today, and that high-pitched noise is just as present now as it was five years ago.
Tinnitus took away one of the things I appreciated most about life: silence. Every meditation session is now accompanied by oscillations in high-end frequencies, and every night before I sleep, I turn on a sound machine to mask it. When I write, I play music to help anchor my attention. When I read, I often do the same. To say that tinnitus has required adjustments is an understatement, but thanks to mental training and the passage of time, I’ve been able to cultivate equanimity alongside it.
My ears, however, would have other plans for me in store.
I go to Korea every year to visit my parents, and each visit is generally characterized by happy memories and abundant photos. So when my wife, daughter, brother, and I boarded the plane this past summer to Seoul, we didn’t anticipate that anything would be different.
But it sure would be.
About a week after we arrived, I started experiencing something that was more distressing than my tinnitus. For reasons that are still mysterious, I began to feel fullness in both of my ears, accompanied by piercing headaches that made me want to lay down whenever possible. The fullness also made my hearing muffled, which only added to the disorienting nature of my newfound predicament. These were sensations I’d never felt before, and my ears were the eye of the hurricane that was producing them.
As if this weren’t enough, a few days later I began to hear unpleasant crackling sounds whenever I would swallow or make certain movements with my jaw. In addition, my tinnitus seemed to be spiking in volume, which only amplified the stress that I was already under. This combination of ear fullness, headaches, crackling noises, and heightened tinnitus was all happening at once, and it made that initial week feel like an utter pit of despair.
Shortly after the onset of these symptoms, I began a treatment regimen in Korea from a doctor that specialized in hearing conditions. I had 6 weeks left in the country, and decided to dedicate 3 days each week to receiving treatment in the hopes that my symptoms would either reduce or retreat during that time. While the doctor tried his best, the results were mixed. The headaches abated and the crackling in my left ear decreased, but the sensations of fullness along with the crackling and tinnitus in my right ear remained. There was a slight ray of improvement, but the cloud of disappointment hovered over us as I embraced and waved goodbye to my parents at the end of my stay.
When I got back to Los Angeles, I knew that the prospect of a solution was even dimmer. Western medicine offers little in the way of ear-related symptoms, as the approach is localized entirely to what they can see in the ear canal itself.
As expected, I received a half-hearted diagnosis of Eustachian tube dysfunction (which is the first thing that pops up if you were to search my symptoms online), along with a recommendation for over-the-counter sinus medications to help clear it. While my sense of smell may have improved slightly, my ears have found little relief.
In these moments, it’s easy to feel frustrated and to grow increasingly frantic in the search for a cure. After all, this behavior is perfectly justifiable for anyone on the island of illness, as every inhabitant is unified by the desire to get off it. Every sick person attempts to build a bridge that will take them to the land of good health, and the question they ask themselves is a matter of when it’ll be built.
But having been on the island myself, I wonder if this is the right question to ask. Not because I don’t want to get better (that would certainly be nice), but because it ignores the reality of my day-to-day experience. If I’m so focused on the question of when I’ll be restored to pristine health, then my attention will be diverted away from what I’m currently experiencing. I will always be focused on some imagined future state, which will seem more favorable than whatever the present moment contains. The issue, however, is that today is the only day that matters because it’s the only day I’ll ever truly experience. Tomorrow is nothing but a projection of my hopes and fears, and fixating on it means that I’ll always be living within the confines of my own thoughts.
I understood this when I dealt with my tinnitus back in 2019, and I was forced to re-learn this lesson in the summer of 2024 as well. I couldn’t wait for contentment to arrive on some future date; I had to cultivate it now, even when my body was being gripped by precarious forces. The island may not be the most comfortable of all places, but there were still plenty of things worth celebrating here.
One thing I did since the onset of my symptoms was to continue my routine of meditating, journaling, and exercising each day. There were many days where this was incredibly difficult to do, but it was critical that I did it anyway. This is because these things have historically stabilized my mind, and I wanted to use that history to my advantage by applying it in the present moment. As a result, there were some mornings that felt peaceful despite the sensations in my ears, and this helped me realize that I was capable of accessing contentment, even if that contact was brief. As long as the capability was there, I knew that its duration could be extended over time.
Another thing was to continue engaging with my family and community. When you’re sick, the initial impulse is to shut yourself off from the world and retreat into your own mind. Being sick is both physically and emotionally draining, and the last thing you want is to present this depleted version of yourself to anybody. This is understandable, but you must remember that you are withdrawing access to contentment by doing this. No pill can make up for the warmth you’ll feel when you open yourself up to your loved ones, and this warmth is what you need most when you’re feeling unwell. Being in Korea during this time was a blessing because I was able to see my family everyday, whether I was feeling up to it or not.
And on the topic of community, I made it a point to continue working on my creative endeavors. For example, I had a number of consulting calls scheduled over the summer, and my initial thought was to cancel them all as I dwelled on the island. But then I asked myself why I would do this, and all roads pointed back to fear. I was worried that my condition made me a shell of myself, and that I might no longer be able to adequately help my clients.
When I realized this, I immediately did the opposite. I confirmed all the calls I had, reviewed my notes, and showed up for every single one like I always did. What’s interesting is that during one of the sessions, a long-standing client said it was one of the best sessions we’d ever had. This only confirmed what I already knew: that all the fears I had were driven by false assumptions, and that I would test it through experience to reveal their deceptive nature.
With that said, I’m fortunate that my condition isn’t life-threatening, and that I’m able to use my limbs and operate my mind. Not everyone on the island can say that, and I recognize the inequitable distribution of illnesses that pervade it. But if you happen to have access to your physical and mental faculties, then the way you frame your predicament is of utmost importance. You can either succumb to the winds of worry and fear, or you can build the confidence required to navigate whatever arises.
Ultimately, confidence is an exercise in weathering uncertainty, which happens to be the defining characteristic of this island. Everyday, you have to face the reality of a cold and unresponsive terrain. “Will my ear symptoms ever subside? Are they going to persist like my tinnitus? Is this just the beginning of a further decline in my ears?”
And to each of these inquiries, the answer is the same:
To be confident is to accept that sole answer, and to continue engaging in the meaningful activities of life. In my case, exercising each day adds to that edifice of confidence. Playing with my daughter despite my discomforts is yet another example. Writing this very essay also has a similar effect. The truth is, I don’t know what the next year holds for my condition (let alone the next hour), so it seems unhelpful for me to dwell on what the future has in store. All that matters is how I can make the most of the moment I currently inhabit, which has the effect of dissolving my concerns about what may happen later. And as the sharpness of worry dissipates, the breadth of equanimity has the space to take its place.
As someone who recently published a book on trusting yourself, I can confirm that this mindset has been incredibly helpful during this time. In fact, I found myself reading The Inner Compass at particularly challenging moments to remind myself of what it means to build confidence in the face of uncertainty. Authors often say they write the book they need to read, and this was no exception.
In one of the chapters, I describe my adventures with tinnitus, but wrote it months before the onset of last summer’s symptoms. Regardless, the central message of the chapter still stands, which is on the inevitability of pain and the way we respond to it.
Here’s a relevant excerpt:
Despite knowing that death is inevitable, we are somehow convinced that our bodies will remain healthy until that day. This is a product of subtle conditioning, whether it’s in the form of lofty promises or distorted beliefs that are dispensed by others. The truth, of course, is that all of nature follows a decay function, and none of us are immune. So the thing to consider is if you can accept the pain that accompanies the human body, while also reducing the suffering using the power of the human mind.
For some of you, the island may seem like a distant place. For others, it may seem closer. But in the end, it will one day be home for all of us.
The question is whether you can make it feel like home when that day arrives. Fortunately, you can prepare an answer long before that question is asked.
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When you’re unwell, the ability to beat worry is a superpower:
The ability to reframe fear is another asset as well:
Learning how to manage anxiety is a must. Here’s a huge post on that:
2025-07-15 11:30:19
When I was in college, I worked in an office for the first time. I wasn’t used to this setting, as none of my prior jobs required me to sit in a cubicle and produce tedious reports. But while I quickly acclimated to the reality of my boxed workspace, what I couldn’t get used to was something I observed amongst my colleagues:
The way their behavior changed depending on one’s social standing.
If Bob held a higher title than John, then Bob would speak with a nonchalantness (and oftentimes arrogance) that he would never exhibit to his boss, Jane. And while Jane would always show up early to meetings with her boss, she would casually show up 15 minutes late to meetings with other folks. This collective charade was everywhere, and while we have a term that localizes it to the workplace (“office politics”), the truth is that this dynamic permeates many of our interactions at large.
The force that drives this charade is status, and it’s our thirst for it that drives every game we play. It’s what makes people feel superior to others, which makes them also assume inferiority when it comes to people they admire. Status is always zero-sum in this way; your arrogance only stretches as far as your subservience. People that act like obedient dogs in the faces of their masters will be the first to bark orders in the faces of their servants. There are no equals in the mind of someone chasing status, which means that the world will look like a never-ending arena of competition and envy.
Now, some will attempt to justify our playing of status games by claiming that it incentivizes people to create great things. That if we didn’t shower people with money or recognition, they wouldn’t go on to produce the technological and cultural advancements that make this world a better place.
While this may make sense at first glance, you’ll realize just how flawed it is when you take a moment to sit with it.
If someone is incentivized by status to develop a technology, how plausible is it that the resulting product stems from the desire to increase the well-being of the world? Of course, that’s what the innovator may claim, but deep inside, the selfish attachment to one’s position will take precedence over everything.
Take social media for example. It’s been widely reported that social media has had disastrous effects on the population’s mental health, especially in our youth. If the people responsible for these tools were truly driven by the desire to create a better world, they would make sweeping reforms to ensure that their platforms never cause additional harm. But as you know, that rarely happens. Instead, they continue onward with their development, exploiting even more vulnerabilities in our psychology so they could maximize engagement and claim their place in the cultural zeitgeist. These people are not driven by the common good; they are driven by status.
The anthropologist Ernest Becker once wrote that we are “gods with anuses.” What he meant was that humans are equipped with godlike imaginations that can compose beautiful music, build towering skylines, and even send rockets into space. But at the same time, the biological container that houses this incredible mind has been inherited from our monkey ancestors. It is a body that defecates, secretes, and deteriorates until it ceases to function. The tension between what we’re capable of and what we’ve inherited is the core struggle of the human condition.
Status is one of those ugly things that we’ve inherited from our evolutionary ancestors, as the quest for dominance is seen throughout the animal kingdom. We all know this, yet our conditioning has convinced us to believe that it’s a worthy pursuit. It tells us that if you play the game right, you’ll get everything you desire. But of course, what you desire has also been planted by the game, ensuring that you’ll never be able to leave.
The solution is to do away with status, and to choose compassion instead. Compassion is the ability to extend full presence to people, regardless of who they are or what they’ve achieved. It’s to see that people are not defined by their proximity to your goals, but by the unity of the human experience. In the end, we all find our way to the soil or the sea, and that humbling fact makes you appreciate every person that accompanies you on this ride.
There are some that claim that viewing the world without the lens of status is impractical, and that you must play the game to achieve your goals. And to that I’d ask, “Who would you respect more: The person that strategically chooses who to appreciate, or the person that can do that for anyone?” The paradox of declining status is that there is a magnetism to it, and that manifests through the allocation of trust.
The people I admired most at the office weren’t the charismatic leaders that knew how to close deals. Rather, they were the few people that showed reverence for everyone, whether it was a potential client or the building custodian. They would know the names of all the cleaning staff and their family members, and would listen to them with the same presence they would have for their own boss. There were no motives to these dynamics other than being curious about the person in front of them, irrespective of who they were. That was my aspiration as well.
Krishnamurti said that “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” When you see that this sickness is caused by our justification of status, then you’ll see just how healthy our relationships can be once you remove it. The immediate effect is that there’s a full embrace of the person in front of you, and there’s nothing you expect other than sharing that moment together. The long-term effect, which is even more profound, is that you start to embrace yourself without condition as well.
If the inner critic is a reflection of how you view others, then what happens when you no longer care about one’s status? Well, then you stop using your own place in society to determine your self-worth. You understand the frivolity of it all, and see the utter hollowness of using achievement as a barometer for acceptance. You redirect any external attention back toward your inner compass, and use it as the primary force to guide you.
This is why self-understanding is a communal affair. If reflection is the principle that reveals why you think the way you do, then relationship is the principle that helps you put those revelations in action. There’s a constant feedback loop between the self and the world, and this helps to refine your intuition over time.
But as you’ll recall, there’s one final principle to go over.
That’s because as your intuition is refined, you learn so many lessons from each adjustment that is made. And what makes the self and the world feel fluid is when you share everything you’ve picked up along the way. By doing so, you dissolve the boundary between you and the other, and connect in a way that neither reason nor logic can quite explain.
The only way this happens is through the age-old principle of creation, which will reveal more about your capabilities than anything ever can.
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2025-06-25 06:20:34
When I was in elementary school, I often wrote in a notebook that looked like this:
I would scribble in it during class, during recess, and any other time where I had a moment to myself. I would write all kinds of things, from fictional tales about aliens to journal entries about my feelings. From a young age, I was quite enthralled with writing and viewed it as an avenue to express myself.
This was only possible, of course, because I also loved to read.
I had the privilege of having parents that allowed me to read whatever I wanted. While they would have preferred me to burrow my head into The Scarlett Letter and To Kill a Mockingbird, they settled for the fact that my tastes drew me to Animorphs and Goosebumps instead. R.L. Stine may not have been as “refined” as Harper Lee, but my parents figured that any curiosity for words should be cultivated. I’m grateful they thought that way.
This meant that bookstores and libraries were frequent destination spots for my family. I have fond memories of literally running into the nearby Barnes and Noble to get my hands on the latest Goosebumps release, which was on the children’s shelf at the far end of the store. By the time I ran back to the front register, I was out of breath but filled with joy. Pages excited me more than games, and while this made me an anomaly of sorts, it was a fact about myself I fully embraced.
Over time, my love for reading ventured into topics that orbited the human condition. Philosophy and psychology were the immediate subjects of interest, but this soon evolved into an appreciation for fiction, finance, history, and spirituality as well. While these areas may seem disparate at first glance, what you find when you delve into any subject is just how interconnected everything is. The lessons of one discipline can be found at the foundation of another, and that is because the tapestry of human nature is woven through it all.
In 2018, I decided to take this realization and imbue it with my creative voice. In March of that year, I launched More To That with the following description:
“A long-form, illustrated blog that dives deeper into the things that make us who we are.”
Now, a marketing guru would frown upon that tagline because it’s far too broad. They’d say, “What’s your niche? How can you narrow it down as much as possible?” But advice like this ignores the fact that everything is connected, and that by understanding the human condition, you’ll be able to gain insight into everything else. In the end, perhaps my niche is the small subset of people that believe in that statement.
What the internet reveals, however, is that what’s small in relative terms is large in absolute ones. Ever since this blog was launched, millions of readers from almost every country in the world have found their way here (the lone exception is North Korea), and over 38,000 people receive my email newsletter. Relative to the world’s population, these figures are negligible, but in the context of my work, they are enormous. I’m continually reminded that there’s an audience for a topic as broadly defined as what it means to live well.
Writing online allows you to cast a beacon for your ideas without the need for any gatekeepers. The moment I have an idea, I can put together a piece and publish it for anyone to see. The only requisite on the reader’s end is a screen that can display the very words I have written, which at this point, is ubiquitous.
But no benefit accrues without its associated tradeoff. And the tradeoff when it comes to publishing online is that much of it feels ephemeral.
When words are bits on a screen, they fly away at the slightest scroll of a finger. They may resonate in the moment, but this resonance fades the moment your attention is pulled elsewhere. Screens make your attention diffuse because there are so many places for it to roam: notifications, apps, and mentions ensure that your mind is preoccupied with endless choices. Inherent in any digital medium is a competition for attention, and essays face an uphill battle in that regard.
So after many years of publishing online, I began to reflect on what made a reading experience so great, and all roads pointed back to the medium that started it all:
Books.
Books encourage presence in a way that other mediums do not. When you sit with a book, you’re providing your undivided attention for a certain period of time. Whether it ends up lasting for a minute or an hour, you’re fully connecting with the mind of the author because there’s nowhere else to go. Oftentimes, constraints are what cultivate presence, and a book is a good example of this phenomenon.
When I think about the writing that has impacted me most, almost all of it was delivered through books. I can quickly think of 5 books that profoundly influenced me, but will find it difficult to think of 5 online essays that fit that category. It’s no coincidence that you likely feel this way too. Ultimately, there are two reasons for this:
(1) A book requests buy-in from the reader, and
(2) A book demands the best from the author.
#1 points to the fact that a book has both a fiscal and attentional cost for the reader. When you pay for a book, you are effectively saying, “Hey, I have a solid expectation for this to be either entertaining or insightful.” Perhaps this expectation exists for free media as well, but when you pay for it, you place greater value on it. And when you value something more, you’re open to investing your attention into it.
This ensures that when the book arrives at your doorstep, you know that you’ll sit down and start reading it at some point. The incentives are aligned in a way that encourages both excitement and presence on the part of the reader.
#2 points to the fact that books carry cultural significance, which makes the author of one take it seriously. When someone chooses to write a book, that’s because they feel like they have something important to say, and would like to dedicate an inordinate amount of effort to saying it. The difference between a blog post and a book isn’t necessarily the content of what is written, but the level of intention behind the creative process itself. Knowing that you’re writing a book results in a heightened sense of dedication to the words you’re entering on each page.
This has the effect of stretching an author’s capabilities, which is where you get the best of their gifts. Skills emerge at the intersection of doubt and confidence, and any author will tell you that they regularly switch between both domains in the course of writing a book.
Well, a little over a year ago, I started to think about writing a book because I wanted to immerse myself in a project that would test my capabilities. I’ve written long posts on this site before (some of which took me 100 hours to do), but I’ve never approached any of my writing with the intention of it being a book. After 5 years of publishing online, I knew that it was time to put some of my ideas into a format that I was unfamiliar with creating but all-too-familiar with consuming.
The question, of course, is what did I want it to be about?
Perhaps one of the liabilities about writing so broadly is that it’s hard to distill it succinctly. Here are just a few of the topics I’ve written about in great detail:
The list goes on.
Any one of these topics can warrant a book in itself, which didn’t help with my conundrum. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to choose “the right topic,” and that only made it harder to commit to any single one. We often think that the freedom of choice is liberating, but in the context of creative work, it often produces paralysis instead.
So instead of narrowing in on one specific thing, I decided to zoom out and see what narrative connects everything I write.
When I write about creativity, what am I really trying to say? When I write about money, what bigger point am I trying to make? When I write about status, what am I encouraging both myself and others to reflect on?
These aren’t questions that are isolated to choosing the topic of a book. They’re important to think about in the context of your entire creative life. That’s because if you don’t reflect on them regularly, you’ll end up writing for everybody but yourself. You’ll use external validation as the barometer for your thoughts, and will filter your ideas accordingly. But if you have clarity around the heart of your message, then you’ll know what anchors your work regardless of the topic you choose or the response it receives.
As I reflected on this, I realized that my struggle to start my book came down to one thing: fear. Fear that I was going to choose a topic that didn’t resonate with people. Fear that I wouldn’t be able to tackle such a big project. Fear that I was going to dedicate so much attention to the wrong thing. This fear emerged as a result of facing uncertainty, which prevented my intuition from surfacing and leading the way.
And it was this realization that changed everything for me.
I understood that the tension I was feeling then was also being felt by countless others. Not in the context of writing a book, but in the broader context of people silencing their intuition because they were conditioned to follow what they “should” do. People suffer when they suppress their curiosity, but we do it all the time because we cannot trust ourselves. We often look outside for the answers by chasing status, success, and prestige, only to ignore the fact that contentment resides within. We just need the courage to dive deeper into ourselves to understand the truth of that statement.
When this insight struck me, another one did as well.
I realized that much of what I naturally write about has to do with knowing yourself. In fact, if there was a single theme that connected my writing, it would be that of self-understanding and the importance of pursuing it. Whether I’m writing about money, meaning, creativity, or death, what unites these seemingly disparate topics is an exploration of identity and how it was constructed. Because in the end, everything we care about is an extension of the way we view ourselves, and that can’t come from the opinions of others. It needs to manifest through an inner exploration of the self, which gives rise to the confidence required to embrace the uncertainties you once feared.
As this insight shone in my mind, I began to look inward to see how it manifested in my own life. I studied the texture of events that carried me toward the peak of bliss, those that kept me on the plateau of contentment, and those that dragged me to the troughs of sorrow. I reflected on deep mental health struggles that I’ve rarely discussed in the past, on physical health issues that yielded hard-earned lessons, and the wisdom I’ve pulled from beautiful experiences that led me to a brighter path.
And instead of keeping it all in my mind, I wrote it all down with intention.
This was the book I wanted to write because it was the one I needed to read. This sentiment propelled me to write for hours each day as I compiled my thoughts into chapters and presented them as digestible ideas.
What started as a personal exploration turned into a greater narrative of why we deny our intuition and how we can trust it again. Because if you truly know yourself, many of the world’s ills instantly dissolve. Feelings like envy, contempt, anxiety, and discontent are so prevalent because we are conditioned to observe and emulate others, but once you have conviction in your own cadence, all that noise finally fades. What’s left is the labyrinth of your inner world, which is serene yet requires significant effort to navigate and understand.
To help guide you through this world, I have written a book. It’s called The Inner Compass, and it’ll be out on July 8th. I can confidently say that it features my best writing, and that it can create a positive change in people’s lives. Writing the book has done that for me, and I hope that reading it will do that for you.
In the meantime, you can join the waitlist for the book. If you haven’t signed up yet, feel free to join the hundreds of people that have already done so by entering your email here.
Instead of doing a typical pre-order campaign, I’m opening up a pop-up community for people on the waitlist where we’ll gather to discuss some of the ideas in the book. I will host 2 live readings and we can share reflections in a communal space as well. Think of it as an informal yet intentional book club full of thoughtful readers.
Because if there’s one word that comes to mind when interacting with More To That readers, it’s that.
The community opens next week, and the book goes live the week after that on July 8th. As long as you’re on the waitlist, you’ll receive invites and updates as they come.
Thank you for being such a supportive companion throughout this ride. I can only hope that you’ll feel just as supported when you read The Inner Compass as well.
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