so, for a while, my method was to spam reality: move somewhere, meet someone, build something, apply somewhere, get rejected, change the model, repeat. something closer to hill-climbing. make a move, receive information, update, make the next move.
there was still a problem with this mode. it assumed that the person doing all the climbing had to be me. i always thought that if i became smarter, if i understood everything, eventually i would be able to do everything. but the point was never becoming intelligent enough myself. i wanted to do great things, and in order to do things that are greater than me, i need other people.
this became strangely palpable around early june. i had an opportunity to gather with some founders and investors in berkeley. amid people with velocity, i was still struggling to explain what i wanted to do with high resolution. most likely because, i was also still straying around trying to figure out what i wanted to build.
at some point, i was strolling with a guy i had lunch with, when he told me that someone was looking for me. i met an investor with a colorful look who had seen some of my previous work and remembered one or two clean phrases, things like free muni. that led into a deeper conversation about government versus the private sector and influence. i assume he found some integrity in it interesting. he took me and a few other folks to a separate sushi place.
they were quite far outside the world i had thought i had access to, but somehow they wanted to help me even though i could barely explain clearly what i wanted to do, and they definitely did not fully understand it. we were all friends for a few hours. not only me, but we all were also trying to guide ourselves somewhere. things were not really purposeful. i was not purposeful either.
a couple of investors, people in the fund, offered me a few grand, basically telling me they wanted to support me, that we could walk through things together, that they could coach me through navigating investment. i did not accept. at the time, i did not understand. i thought i should suffer more and figure things out myself, which, to be fair, i did for the next couple of months. i dont really think they understood the concept of my startup anyway. i think he saw something in me, believed in that thing, and maybe thought it would be fun building something together.
but i did not understand what was happening to me then. something had already shifted and i was in a place where i did not know i was. after i rejected his offer, he kept pushing me. he told me i was not confident. he seemed almost mad. we argued for a while. eventually other people joined and the conversation faded into something else.
i stood with them for a while, honestly did not fully catch up, topics swaying across drones, bombs, biotech, ai, neuroscience, and art. somehow i got invited again along the flow for more conversations i probably could not fully be present for. at some point i realized i was already inside an uber xl going to one investors house back in san francisco.
i was tired. but more than anything i was curious about how these people lived. maybe after thirty minutes, i decided to head back home. as i was leaving, the angel investor who had offered me money earlier hugged saying bye, telling me something very quickly that i spent the next months chewing on. eventually the entire summer.
maybe in the past, he said, you were in groups where you were better than the people around you, so accepting help from them felt pointless. but now you are with peers who are actually capable. you have to learn how to accept that other people can help you, and that it can mutually benefit both of you.
it sounds obvious now. it did not feel obvious to me at all. it had never occurred to me that i needed help.
of course i understood delegation. i could pay someone to do something i did not want to do. that was cleaner. a transaction had clear boundaries. my world was already complicated and stressful enough, so i did not want other people to feel the same stress that i was going through. more than that, i did not want everyones future becoming entangled with mine. depending on someone felt irresponsible. being depended on felt frightening. entanglement seemed exactly like the thing independence was supposed to protect me from.
it took me the whole summer to understand that i had it almost backwards. maybe i have to let people help me. maybe i have to let people entangle themselves with me if they want to. there was something arrogant in deciding in advance that somebody else should not carry my problems because i had concluded it would be bad for them.
i was doing exactly the thing i hated most. letting someone else decide what i like or do not like had always infuriated me, yet i was doing the same thing to other people: deciding what kind of risk they were allowed to take, deciding whether becoming involved with me was worth it, deciding whether helping me would burden them too much. if another person understands the situation and still chooses it, then my job is not to protect them from their own choice. my job is to take their choice seriously and try my best to make the future we chose together real.
i honestly dont think i would have understood it intellectually. i had to meet someone who understood me, believed in me, could help me, and beneath all of those things could simply love me.
my experience with my boyfriend made the problem impossible to keep abstract. after choosing each other, i slowly started uncovering more honest versions of myself with him. not the versions that would make the relationship easiest to defend, and not necessarily the versions that looked most independent or impressive. just: this is what i want, this is what you want, this is what scares me, this is what scares you. can these two lives actually fit? what would we have to change? what are we unwilling to change? what kind of life could we build if we actually took both peoples desires seriously?
there was intuition first, love, attraction, some kind of strange certainty, and then an ongoing process of updating our reasoning around that intuition, which is often challenging. i also just had to accept that i am very much needy and nosy and clingy. fine. i increasingly think people treat neediness as lame partly because it is terrifying to admit that you actually need anything.
if you dont want something very badly, you never have to do whatever it takes to get it. you dont have to risk rejection, negotiate, become dependent, or give another person enough importance that they could hurt you. for a long time i was not even courageous enough to want something.
wanting nothing is not freedom.
a person who refuses to need anything cannot be disappointed very much, but they also cannot build very much. building a company requires employees, users, investors, collaborators. love requires another person. politics requires other people. culture requires an audience. even thought itself develops through other minds.
so independence cannot mean eliminating dependence. it has to mean choosing your dependencies consciously.
this distinction has become much more important to me. there are obviously dependencies that destroy agency, but chosen dependence can increase agency. you can need somebody without surrendering yourself to them. you can depend on someone and still remain the author of your life. actually, intimacy requires something more frightening than independence: you have to expose what you want, discover what the other person wants, allow both of you to affect the future, and nevertheless continue choosing. that is much harder than needing nobody, and maybe much more powerful.
and so independence, after all, no longer feels like having every resource i need and being capable of executing everything the right way to get what i want. at any given point, everyone lacks something. everyone has some hole in their model of the world.
the solution to feeling that you lack something is also not to eliminate those deficiencies one by one. become smarter, richer, more capable, understand more, need less. these gaps are actually partly the pressure point. a gap gives you somewhere to move.
another person can possess something you do not. another culture can make your assumptions suddenly visible. another mind can give language to something you have only felt. comparison can objectify you for a moment, giving you a rough idea of where you stand and forcing you to ask whether that is actually where you want to be.
the outside world gives us contrast, and contrast creates shape. you have to throw yourself out there, feel where you want to go, face your pores, find the gaps between your model and reality, fill some of them, decide others do not need filling, and walk along the way somewhat nervous but firmly enough that the path becomes yours.
this is why social, collisions precisely, matters so much to me. other people are not merely coexistent. they are one of the primary ways reality becomes available to us.
without, you can remain internally coherent forever. you can also remain completely wrong.
