A HEDGE AGAINST AN EARLY DEATH
August 2020

What if the true cost wasn't only the cash burn, not even just the time and the attention of the most brilliant minds, but the dehumanization of worlds that never made it into our periphery.

We were in the same elevator. I was carrying a suitcase, a dysfunctional lunch bag, and the coffee in my right hand was about to brim over and stain an otherwise perfectly sunny day. She was holding a bucket of cleaning supplies, and the Klorex bottles were in a precarious position. We nodded and acknowledged each other's efforts. I could see her smile under the mask.

We walked out of the elevator at the same time, and through the long and winding hallway, we were heading the same direction. We kept our six-feet distance until I arrived at the door, which was also her destination. I understood then that she was sent here to clean my room.

I was early to check in at my Airbnb in Marina del Rey. I wanted a quiet place, away from the city, with an oceanic view to reflect on my next venture. She put down the cleaning bucket, took out her phone from her pocket, and started typing. The mask couldn't hide the apologizing smile on her face.

Nice to meet you, can I go check if everything looks good?

Please wait outside. Thank you for your patience.

The message showed up on a Google Translate app, and I was distracted by the original language that I couldn't discern. It was up to this point, our realities had converged intimately and would soon diverge again. When she closed the door, what was inside the door and what was left outside formed a vast chasm that I couldn't cross.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, I was sitting at an outdoor bar in lower Manhattan with a friend, who told me that despite minor inconveniences like not being able to bench at a gym, he's been mostly enjoying the benefit of not having to go to the office. And less than forty-eight hours ago, I was on a call with a new grad, who could no longer sit comfortably with a prospective career in investment banking and wanted to do something more "impactful," but didn't know where to start looking.

These conversations spin vehemently around these chambers of ours, like a bag of old laundry in a washer. If we precociously press pause, we'd be caught in an abrupt silence and be forced to look at the mess in its rawest form. To fill such uncomfortable silence, we put on our noise-canceling Airpods Pro. With a tap, the rumbling of the protestors, the hopeless mumbling of the homeless, the chatter of the anxious moms are gone in an instant, like magic. Left in the appropriately filtered unworldly world of ours, we sometimes encounter hidden paths that lead to worlds larger than what we know, and we can choose to take the path or avert our gaze.

Schools don't show you the world. They just show you a bunch of careers.

Michelle Obama commented on her latest podcast with Barack. She was talking about her decision to leave a corporate law job to pursue community work. Her voice tingled my eardrums through my AirPods.

It was a selfish choice because I was happier. The 47th fancy law firm made her feel more lonely and isolated than ever from the community. Yet being in the dirt of helping people made her feel alive.

I never look back.

She stayed true to what makes her feel the most alive, seeing the world as it is and deeply engaging with it. She said it was an act of selfishness because that was a choice that made her happier, but how much courage does it take to acknowledge the very thing that makes us feel human and alive?

It's not new that the tech industry has been criticized for being far removed from the liveliness of the many worlds. Price was paid for innovation for the mere sake of novelty, but the upside seems to always justify the cost. But what if the true cost wasn't only the cash burn, not even just the time and the attention of the most brilliant minds, but the minimization, and oftentimes, dehumanization of worlds never made it into our periphery. There are justifications for such disengagement. The first principle thinking, the verticalization of horizontal disruption, the narrative violation rose to prominence as a shared secret in a cushy lounge that we wear proudly on our sleeves.

A potential danger of getting exposure to the scale beyond our reach as young, driven people is that anything less than that feels like suboptimal rational thinking. When "impact" has been abstracted away from our day-to-day operations, when"meaning" has been outsourced to the institutions, how much of the world is left to be truly experienced when the hardest answers have been figured out? As savvy decision-makers, the opportunity cost of teaching at a local school would be too high when we can make a mark on two billion users. But what if the opportunity cost is an illusion? What if hedging our potential to comfort isn't a hedge against early death, but is indeed an early death? As Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance:

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

What if getting close to the things that you pour your souls into would bring you closer to where you want to be? What if people remember you not by the impact you so eagerly desire, but by the souls you have touched?

Like calling someone else's API to build a company, or relying on Google to answer all the homework questions, or trusting invisible hands to align everyone's incentives efficiently, we can go a long way without having to answer the hardest questions. And one day, when stuff breaks, we are poorly equipped for the uncomfortable encounter with the messy fundamentals that have shaped our own realities all along. The confrontation with these fundamentals is not only a sobering awakening from our teenage naïveté but a debt we pay for being absent for way too long.

The room is ready. You can come in now. Thank you for your patience.

The Google Translate app was the first thing she showed me when she opened the door. I wanted to ask about her name, and the language she speaks, but she was in a rush to head to her next thing. She's got no time to waste, yet I chose to linger at the doorstep for a moment longer, until her footsteps completely faded, until I was sure that our paths won’t completely diverge.

Aerial View number 15, 2017, Shirley Wegner, 24 x 20 in