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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Related Posts:
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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2025-05-08 07:16:33
When my daughter was a newborn baby, all that mattered was her physical survival.
When she became a toddler, the “survival” part still mattered, but her ability to play became important as well.
And now that she’s 4 years old, the “survival” and “play” parts still matter, but her social awareness and capacity to sustain friendships are crucial as well.
Whenever I go to school events, I notice all the hilarious and awkward exchanges between the kids that make each event so memorable. Friends will giddily gather around one another and literally stumble over in excitement. Acquaintances will give each other a shy “hello” and then proceed to scream in joy when they realize they’re wearing a similar color shirt.
And then, of course, there are moments where kids get into heated exchanges and end up crying over something you could only pretend to understand.
The most interesting part of these latter moments is not the behavior of the children, but the behavior of the parents. When two kids get into a conflict, their parents will rush over to see what happened, and then encourage their children to make peace or to apologize for whatever occurred. There’s a cordial rush to the land of compassion that leads to a quick and satisfying resolution.
I find it fascinating that as parents, we are quick to suggest the virtues of patience and understanding to resolve conflicts between children. But when it comes to conflicts that we have with other adults, we often resort to the vices of grudges and spite. There’s a deep asymmetry between the standards we hold our children to, and the standards we hold ourselves to.
Maybe it’s because it’s easier to give advice than it is to take your own. Or that when you’re a parent, you have to act as a moral exemplar knowing that you have a being that is observing you all the time.
But I think the actual reason is more troubling in nature. Ultimately, it has to do with the fact that in the modern world, the incentives are such that being in conflict with one another is socially rewarded. It’s something that doesn’t take away from your status, but rather adds to it.
And the force that’s driving this is what I call the Anger Economy.
Whenever you see a disparaging remark getting 30,000 likes, that’s the Anger Economy. Whenever you see a video insulting someone with an ad inserted in the middle, that’s the Anger Economy. Anytime you see spite or distaste being praised and amplified, that’s when you know that wrath has enraptured our values.
We like to wonder how things got this way, and we’ll often explain it through the lens of psychology and sociology. We tend to point to what social media has done to our brains, how political partisanship has polarized everything, the loneliness epidemic, and so much more.
But I think a stronger frame to view this problem through is that of economics, and more specifically, the economics of anger.
This is because human behavior is governed by the puppet string of incentives. People will adapt their behavior (and even their morals) according to what is socially rewarded, which is why good people can end up doing terrible things. If a certain type of conduct is incentivized within a population, then the laws of economics will ensure that this behavior is heralded within that group.
To illustrate this, let’s view anger through the only graph we remember from economics class:
Thankfully, this is all we’ll need to understand the Anger Economy, so you can rest assured that Econ 101 will be enough.
As a quick refresher, these two lines represent the supply and demand of a given good (which is referred to as a “widget”), where there’s an equilibrium price and quantity that has been set by the market. All widgets are governed by the law of supply and demand, but I’ve found that this doesn’t just apply to goods and services.
It applies to the economics of anger as well.
To illustrate this, let’s substitute the axes of price and quantity with labels that treat anger as a commodity instead:
The first thing to note is that anger is always a response to an event. You won’t feel it unless something provokes it, which means that if you’re a monk in a cave somewhere, there won’t be much that could trigger that response. That sounds awfully nice, but the tradeoff is that there’s not much of anything else going on either, which is why you and I would rather live in an angry world than renounce it entirely.
The reality, of course, is that events happen everyday that piss us off to no end. The pernicious combination of politics and social media ensures that a steady stream of events increase our cortisol levels at scale, and this is one of the primary culprits of the Anger Economy. In fact, this is the very example I’ll use to illustrate how it all works.
Let’s say that the current administration issues a policy that you find disgraceful. This event finds its way to you via the news or social media, and in that moment, you feel angry.
The thing is that millions of people are also feeling that anger around the same time, and when this happens, people rush to find solidarity in that anger. This is an important point. When we feel angry about something, inherent in that feeling is the belief that an injustice has been committed, and wherever there is injustice, there is the desire for a community to bond over it. To fight against it.
In other words, there is a huge increase in demand for angry content to help rally around this emotion. This is reflected in your own behavior whenever you hear about an upsetting event. You don’t just say “oh, that happened” and then proceed to go about your day; instead, you go on social media to find other people that are also angry so you can engage with an opinion that you may also share.
Multiply this by however many millions of people are doing the same thing, and the demand curve shifts to reveal a new equilibrium.
Now here’s where it gets especially troublesome.
When people see angry posts go viral (which is exemplified by the higher “engagement with anger” equilibrium point), they also want to create content that can help them do the same. Both the algorithm and public opinion incentivizes people to post angry content, so the supply of anger also increases to match that increase in demand.
This leads to a situation where the quantity of angry content explodes, resulting in a new equilibrium:
This explains why a few hours after any triggering event, any social media timeline will be completely inundated with anger from all directions. The incentives are such so that people are encouraged to add to this storm instead of stepping away from it, and we see that reflected in public opinion right away.
The balance to this is that after some time, the engagement with that content decreases because the market becomes saturated. People can only handle enough “hot takes” on a subject for a given period of time before they tire of it, and eventually the event itself becomes part of an old news cycle.
When this happens, the demand curve returns to its baseline state, bringing the equilibrium point to a lower (and calmer) level.
But when the Anger Economy is in full force, there isn’t enough time for the demand curve to move down like this again.
When political instability is high, news cycles become shorter as the events that provoke rage increase in frequency. One day, it’s the economy. The next, it’s a human rights violation. The next, it’s the threat of global war. The events that kickstart yet another cycle of anger are endless, which means that the demand for angry content never has the chance to settle down.
Instead, it grows yet again.
If this results in a continuous pattern where supply and demand keep edging upward, we reach an untenable place where the Anger Economy has a hold on everything. Anger becomes something we encourage because it’s a commodity we value and incentivize. It no longer becomes the vice we want our children to avoid; it becomes a virtue that we seek to enshrine.
I’ve since realized that the most effective way to push back against this pattern isn’t to treat anger as a moral problem. It’s to treat it as an economics problem. And the way to actualize this is to neutralize your demand for angry content as much as possible.
This is because the Anger Economy is completely dependent upon demand increasing once an event happens. It lives in the moment where you put on the news knowing that it’ll just leave you more anxious and frustrated. It manifests in the subsequent moment where you then rush to social media to post something snide or to amplify a seething opinion.
But what if, in these moments, you ask yourself these 2 questions:
(1) Is there anything I can do about this event right now to make a change?
or…
(2) Am I just going to get angry about it and go online?
The first question is about real action that can make a difference. Perhaps you can find a protest to join or you can sign a petition to be sent to a government official. Regardless of how effective the end result may be, what matters is that there’s something concrete you can do that is a form of action to fight a particular injustice.
But chances are, you’re going to fall in the camp of the second question. You’re going to go online to find an angry opinion you agree with and simply click a digital heart to express your rage. Or you’re going to add a snide comment that gets lost in an algorithmic storm. These behaviors not only detract from your mood, but they also strip you of agency. In the end, they’re empty actions that only serve to push up demand for the Anger Economy by leaving you enraged without a healthy release.
To be clear, it’s okay to be angry at something you find reprehensible. That’s how we fight against injustice, tyranny, and all the other vices of the sort. But the real question is if you can convert that anger to concrete action through the lens of Question 1. And if your answer that is “no,” then I encourage you to also say “no” to Question 2 and refuse to contribute to the Anger Economy.
In my case, whenever I hear news about turmoil or upheaval, I’ll discuss it amongst my close circle of friends and family to decompress and see if there’s anything concrete I can do about it. For example, with the recent LA fires, my wife and I donated a bunch of goods to a nearby community center and she chose a number of GoFundMe accounts to donate to. Instead of being angry at local government officials and posting my discontent about them, I wanted to direct my attention to what I can act upon to make a small yet substantive difference.
But if I come across enraging news that I can’t do much about, I choose to opt out of the Anger Economy. Instead of going on social media and spending hours ingesting random people’s hot takes, I’ll focus on what I have agency over: my creative work, my family, and my community. This is my way of refusing to push the demand curve up by keeping my attention anchored to what’s most productive for it.
The way to end the Anger Economy is to first end your personal involvement in it. It’s to stop treating it as a commodity that flares up and subsides based on the forces of supply and demand. It’s to ask yourself if you’re going to take real action to fight injustice, or if you’re going to do it by clicking hearts and reposting snide comments behind a glimmering screen.
Ultimately, it’s to understand that the values we teach to our children are the ones we should espouse as well. And given that we don’t want them to be spiteful to those they don’t know, perhaps we need to reflect on whether we operate according to that same principle ourselves.
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Anxiety and anger are close cousins, so it’s worth taming that too:
So much of anger stems from focusing on the opinions of others:
The Problem of What Others Think
Anger is most useful when it acts as a much-needed form of dissent:
2025-04-10 06:36:24
As someone who thinks a lot about creativity and what it means for humanity, AI is both a source of awe and worry.
You’ve likely felt a combination of both too, and it’s the resulting blend that can make our relationship with AI a bit confusing. Is it going to unlock our creative potential in ways we can’t imagine? Or is it going to make a mockery of our potential by showing us how limited we are? Which of the two poles are we headed toward?
To start my response, I’d like to lay out a quick primer on how we tend to respond to technological revolutions of any sort.
When Copernicus revealed that the Earth orbited the Sun (and not the other way around), this idea was met with a ton of resistance because it showed that we weren’t the center of the universe. And if we weren’t the center of the universe, that meant that God had bigger things to care about than us. The Church wasn’t too happy with that idea, so they spent a bulk of their energy trying to suppress it.
But in the end, the idea prevailed.
Similarly, when Darwin revealed that human beings were a byproduct of evolution, this idea was met with a ton of resistance because it showed that we were just smarter apes. And if we were simply smarter apes, then there didn’t seem to be anything especially divine or supernatural about us. This theory was detested by many people (and still is), but in the end, the idea prevailed.
You can see this pattern of insight -> denial -> resistance -> acceptance throughout almost all great scientific revolutions. And we are seeing it play out with AI.
What AI is revealing is that the supposed last moat of humanity—intelligence—may not be all that special either. This was met with deep denial at first, but as LLMs and reasoning models have improved over the years, it’s becoming harder to deny that deep intelligence can indeed be embodied in cold silicon.
So what, then, remains?
The tempting answer would be to say “creativity,” but even that seems like it can fall under the domain of AI. For example, I’ve already heard AI-generated music that sounds just as good as the beats I’m listening to right now. The key here is to get a bit more specific here.
Ultimately, I think we have two remaining moats: (1) context and (2) personality.
Let’s start with context.
The thing about AI is that it’s completely dependent upon context, as it doesn’t have any of its own. It needs to first be prompted in order to make use of the limitless expanse of information it can draw upon. In other words, without knowing where to go, it’s functionally useless.
In fact, all of technology falls under this rule. The coolest car in the world will just sit there if there’s no human being that needs to go somewhere. An elaborate oil drill will be a useless hunk of metal if there’s no human being that desires what lives beneath the soil. Technology is only as good as the function we assign it.
AI has no lived experience of its own, so it needs to borrow ours to know what to do next. It lacks the richness of experience to determine its own desires, its own pursuits, and its own curiosities. So it outsources that agency to us because it’s reliant upon that human curiosity for its very existence. The mere fact that we have the rich context of life (in the form of memories, emotions, and sensations) is what differentiates us in the long-run.
The second is about personality.
I wrote about this here already, but there’s a reason why people continue to care about Magnus Carlsen despite knowing that an AI can beat him at any time. That’s because there’s no soul in watching two AI’s play chess against each other. We crave a person’s journey through a game, sport, craft, etc. because it connects to the shared context of human experience, and that’s what we love following.
Personalities matter because they cultivate trust. This is why the domain of relationships still seem impervious to the encroachment of AI. I doubt that having an AI priest at the pulpit will do any wonders for a church’s membership, nor will having your therapist replaced by a ChatGPT prompt make you jump for joy because of the money you’ll save. We place a high premium on trust, and that is built when you connect to the personality of the person you’re interacting with.
Knowing this, it’s important to lean further into your personality as the AI revolution continues. Creativity will become less about what works, and more about what makes you unique. That’s because the moment a trend develops, AI will make it easier for everyone to detect it, jump on it, and attempt to capitalize on it (which will then make the whole trend die). But what helps you cultivate trust is when you stick to the rhythm of your own pace and allow the integrity of that cadence to resonate with others. That is a magnetizing force that can stay with you for a lifetime.
With those 2 moats in mind, I want to share some practical tips that will help you navigate the waves of AI. These will be specific to those who want to share their ideas through writing or storytelling, but the principles will apply to many domains.
(1) Use more personal stories in your work.
Using personal anecdotes in your stories build an immediate connection with your audience. When you discuss something you’ve experienced yourself, that act of vulnerability acts as a magnet of courage that attracts people to your work.
This ability to lean into your personal life will become even more relevant now.
Given that AI has no personal experiences of its own, the fact that you have a treasure trove of them is your distinct advantage. So use these anecdotes often, as no language model will be able to communicate them with the nuance and richness that you can. That life context is uniquely yours, and your ability to recall it at the right moment is something that only you can do.
This is why memoirs and personal essays will be one of the last bastions of writing to be disrupted by AI. I’m not saying that you have to exclusively write about your own life now, but rather to draw from the well of personal experience whenever you can.
(2) Build simple frameworks and diagrams around your ideas.
One of the reasons why I encourage people to include simple diagrams in their stories (2-axis graphs, spectrums, etc.) is because it humanizes your work. Even something simple as drawing a graph by hand, taking a picture of it, and uploading the resulting image in your post makes it a clear indication that you took the time to create it.
There is an interesting paradox about AI in that the simplest things are the hardest for it to do. For example, once my 4-year-old daughter sees a toy ball, she will always recognize that ball regardless of what angle it’s viewed from or the lighting that falls on it. AI still has trouble doing that, as it needs continuous training to recognize the various ways the same ball can be viewed.
I’ve found that to be the case even with creativity. While AI does a good job creating elaborate images, it often has a hard time creating very simple diagrams and images. More often than not, it overcomplicates it. For example, this is what it generated after I asked it to create an illustration in my style:
And this is a 2-axis graph I asked it to make in my style:
Both look nothing like my work, and I’ve found this to the case every single time I prompt it. That will also be the case for you.
Also, there is a level of human abstraction involved when you convey emotions as spectrums or problems as graphs. It represents a simple understanding of a complex phenomenon, and this kind of abstraction is hard for AI to do. By building and drawing these frameworks out, you put yourself in a position where your creative spirit can still be differentiated.
(3) Spend time on ideation with AI.
I am not an AI doomsayer. I think that in the end, AI will augment our creative capabilities and help us in that regard. But in order to do this, you have to learn how to use it and spend time understanding it in the context of your creative life.
The mistake people make is to associate AI with replacing creative work in its entirety. That it’ll write better posts, novels, screenplays, and scripts than any human ever can. I think this is false. While it may be able to write the next Marvel movie, I don’t think it can write, for example, a script for an episode of Severance (the best show on TV right now!).
AI lacks the human experience required to make an emotionally rich piece of work, but it can act as a creative partner for you as you create it. It can sort through your highlights, find the ones that may act as great ideas for your story, and help you think through a solid theme for your work.
I’ve been spending a few hours each week using AI and experimenting with it when it comes to ideation. Prompting it to learn more about a specific problem, asking it to summarize some prominent thinkers in that field, and including what I find in my Idea Playground (or where I store my ideas and notes). It’s quite incredible to have a creative partner like this helping me sort through the potential ideas of a story.
With that said, when it comes to the writing and storytelling itself, that’s where your creativity takes center stage. Don’t take an AI’s output and simply publish the result, as that will just fall under the “AI slop” category. Rather, find ways to connect it to a personal story, build a small world, or try out any of the other tools in the Thinking In Stories toolkit or The Examined Writer framework to create something that’s uniquely yours. This process of making something is where the real growth happens, and that’s reserved for the human being that is you.
In the end, AI is there to assist your creative potential, not to replace it. Learn how to tell great stories and lean into the skills that emphasize your unique identity, as that’s where the best parts of your creative spirit will shine.
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Related Posts:
The Ultimate Guide to Visual Storytelling
The Economics of Writing (And Why Now Is the Best Time to Do It)
2025-03-05 05:04:24
A few weeks ago, I had a bad accident that brought me to the emergency room.
I was playing outside with my daughter when in a moment, I lost consciousness and collapsed onto the ground. I woke up not knowing what happened, only to see my daughter next to me while there was blood all over my clothes.
It turns out that I fainted and my head struck concrete (along with a gardening bed and sharp metal mesh), which led to deep cuts, hazy vision, bad bruising, and intense pain across the left side of my face. This is the first time I’ve fainted like this, but I somehow mustered enough composure to call 911, had an ambulance pick me up, and had my daughter be with a next-door neighbor while I went to the hospital (my wife was teaching at the time so she wasn’t home).
When I got to the emergency room, I was immediately taken to get my head scanned due to the nature of my injuries. Fortunately, the CT scan revealed that there was no internal bleeding or facial fractures, which meant that my body would ultimately heal on its own. So even though I looked like a complete wreck, I knew that the medicinal power of time would orchestrate wonders underneath my lacerated skin.
After my wounds were cleaned and a physician stitched up my cheek, I was discharged and my brother took me back home. It was close to 10 PM when I arrived so the streets were silent, but the fervor of my thoughts amplified the volume of everything.
My daughter must have been so scared. Is she going to be all right?
I see a big blurry spot out of my left eye. Is that going to continue?
It looks like it’s been mauled by a rabid animal. Is everything going to heal?
This was a completely unexpected accident. Does that mean it could happen again?
I managed to get a few hours of sleep that night, but woke up the next morning feeling defeated. Each look in the mirror made me feel hopeless, and each pounding headache made me worry about the state of my mind. This pattern of feeling a sensation in the present and extrapolating it to a dark future governed so much of my thoughts.
But one thing about a having young child is that they help you question these patterns when you need it most.
When I saw my daughter the next morning, the first thing she asked was:
She didn’t care about the puss oozing out of my wounds or the fact that my face looked like a massive balloon. All she knew was that I fell the day before, and that I was now back home. Even though I didn’t look like the dad she saw each day, she knew that I was the same dad that she cared so deeply for.
In that moment, I straightened my back and told her, “Appa got hurt pretty badly, and it’s been pretty rough. But it’s going to be okay.”
It’s going to be okay.
When she heard that, she nodded and flashed her innocent smile. And in that moment, I found myself smiling as well.
The Buddha once broke down the distinction between pain and suffering through the analogy of two arrows. When we experience a setback or negative event, we are struck by the first arrow, which is pain. But shortly thereafter, we are then struck by a second arrow, which is our emotional reaction to that pain. This second arrow is where suffering is born, and while we can’t avoid the inevitably of pain, we have more control over whether we want to suffer as a result.
I’ve since realized that this second arrow strikes when we don’t believe that things are going to be okay. In fact, I think almost all suffering comes down to an inability to believe that.
When I first returned home from my accident, the source of my distress wasn’t necessarily the pain itself (even though it was very intense), but more so the questioning of whether everything would be all right. For example, when I kept noticing that the vision from my left eye was blurry, my next thought was, “Is this going to be the state of my eyesight now? If so, how in the world am I going to deal with this?”
Implicit in these questions is the belief in a grim future, and the assumption that helplessness will be your default response. That you won’t know what to do if your fears came true, and that you will spiral into chaos if that were the case.
But this is not how life works.
If you were to think back on all the moments where you thought everything collapsed, how do you explain the fact that you’re still here standing today? Even if you did experience the worst of your worries, what led you here to read this very piece you’re reading right now?
There’s a great irony to thinking that your life is unbearable because your very existence means that you are already bearing it. The very fact that you’re here right now is proof that you have what it takes to endure and overcome your hardships. You are here despite everything, and that alone is sufficient proof of your resilience.
I’ve found that the most practical way to embody this resilience is to assert that things will be okay. Even if the present moment feels distant from that belief, the faster you can internalize this, the quicker you can escape the trough of sorrow that accompanies any negative event.
I like to visualize this dynamic through a movement along this graph:
The moment you experience a significant setback or tragedy, you tend to plummet into a mental space where the future looks incredibly dark. You’re uncertain of your abilities, you picture the worst-case scenario, and you isolate yourself because the world seems like a scary place.
In short, you believe that things won’t be okay, and you have no reason to believe otherwise.
Now, this is a perfectly natural response to any form of shock or trauma, so the goal isn’t to pretend like things will resolve right away. You need time to process these events, and most importantly, to also monitor any progress on your end. Time and rest truly are the greatest forms of medicine, and they’re crucial to giving you the confidence that you’ll be all right.
But the danger here is when you refuse to see any daylight and you continue in this darkened state, regardless of where things are going:
This is where feelings of self-hatred, shame, and depression become prevalent because if you don’t think things will be okay, then you lose your ability to trust yourself. Self-confidence stems from your ability to lean into life instead of shrinking from it, and you have to believe in a future worth living for to feel that sense of conviction in your days.
So even if things don’t feel like they’ll be okay, you have to do the work of convincing yourself of it. Reach out to your loved ones, read books that inspire you, go outside and get some exercise. Anything that helps you dislodge the second arrow of suffering is a worthy pursuit, and interacting with the world is the most reliable way of going about it.
Once you enter the top half of the graph, it’s only inevitable that progress will be made. When you start to believe that everything will be okay, the future becomes an ally of the present. You understand that whatever you’re going through now is a natural part of the healing process, and that there’s a state you’re actively working toward. Purpose becomes a part of the picture here, and that does wonders for accelerating you to an equanimous baseline.
The truth is that I’ve gone through many health issues over the past few years, some of which have been more distressing than others. Time and time again, I’ve found that so much of the healing process is about how quickly I can understand that things will be okay. Even though some of these issues have persisted to this day, what’s been true is that I’ve been able to handle each of them. At first, I didn’t know if I could, but given enough time and resilience, I’ve found that to be true.
Ultimately, I’ve found that the ideal graph looks something like this:
You get shaken up by the event, question everything for a brief moment, then quickly find a way to tell yourself that it’ll be okay. I call it an “ideal” because it’s just that, an ideal. It’s not easy for me to follow either, but seeing it visually laid out like that helps to serve as an aspiration. And given that I’ve been able to endure everything that’s come at me so far (just like you have), perhaps the wisest thing to do is to accept that strength sooner than later whenever the next challenge arises.
Because the truth is that one day, we will all experience the most challenging day of our lives.
In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi details his harrowing yet heartening account of living with terminal cancer. What I learned reading this memoir is that even when you know that death is near, you can still believe that everything will be all right and live the final years of your life accordingly.
After Paul’s final words in the manuscript, the book concludes with a beautiful epilogue written by his wife, Lucy. She discussed how determined and focused Paul was to write his book while he still could, and lived his final years with a sense of purpose and meaning that made her fall in love with him all over again.
As she writes in the epilogue:
Paul’s decision to look death in the eye was a testament not just to who he was in the final hours of his life but who he had always been. For much of his life, Paul wondered about death – and whether he could face it with integrity. In the end, the answer was yes.
I think we all have that superpower that Paul had. In fact, it’s a central part of the human condition. We are all capable of bearing the unbearable, as our very existence ensures that we do so.
And that is how I know that everything will be okay.
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Knowing that everything will be okay requires you to fight Resistance:
Writing down your struggles is a great first step to overcoming them:
Write for Yourself, and Wisdom Will Follow
Even a difficult sensation like anxiety can also be tempered with practice:
