Growing up in suburban PA without a car but with a bike but still many unbikeable roads meant that I spent a lot of time on the internet. Somehow one day I stumbled upon this article some Harvard Business professor wrote about optionality. It was about how people go into business and do the safe well-trodden professional path in the pursuit of increasing their optionality, or the amount of available options they have at any stage in life. But he argued that by doing so, they lose sight of their dreams, and it takes them longer to get to where they want.1
When I read this article I scoffed, I was going to be different and follow my dreams of finding the intersection of art and technology, which I had then believed to be UX Design. To be fair, no one in my immediate circles at the time knew what that was so I had thought it was a magical intersection of art, which I enjoyed, with some practicality of a stable job and real-world applicability (tech? maybe this also meant I could positively impact the world?).
But years later, I realized that I had fallen into the trap of optionality. I did exactly what he said I’d do. I maximized all my options. I joined as many clubs as possible on campus. I filled all my weekends and weekdays up. I maximized the classes I could take. I met as many people as possible and did as much as I possibly could. I think there was a purpose to every hour of my day.
Partially it was because I was terrible at deciding. Every opportunity I didn’t experience could have been life-changing. I saw so many futures in front of me that I wanted to choose them all. I wanted to be a product designer, I wanted to be a researcher, I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to do things that I had never experienced before.
In a way, it was very unsustainable. I never really did that many artistic things after high school and during college and now, trying to do it again, I find it very hard. It was hard doing research and school at the same time and I struggled to fully focus on the concepts I was learning. I ended up still doing product design which was something I enjoyed and am happy things worked out that way, but whatever my crazy artistic dream was, it was still cooking.
In New York, I still do the same thing. I say yes to a lot of things. I don’t know how to choose, I don’t know what compass drives my path in life. I’m okay with meandering to figure it out, but I think I want to commit to some sort of dream even if it turns out to be not what I thought it would be. There’s a fallacy to think I can optimize for the safest, happiest, best path, so much so that I do too much and decide very little. For once, instead of accumulating choices, what if I just chose?
Placing constraints is a very scary thing. But it’s also wonderful. I still love slow summers, a constant cycle of the same things and same people, the same jokes and same sunsets, gently blending together until I can’t tell the difference between the days. Before you know it, it’s another day, and the sun has risen again.
I tried to code a word art thing in javascript yesterday.2 It’s cooking.
notes:
shower thought: I feel like both doing random stuff is yolo but also committing to something even if it might fail is yolo. sorry i’m like this… genz…
I’ve been trying to read - I really liked reading Stay True
initially this newsletter was an accountability thing a year ago for me to make things purely for myself with no end goal of becoming famous but little things I have actually made so I’m going to dump all my anime drawings here
pls text me any thoughts ab this idk I am trying to connect my thoughts
lowkey I find writing my thoughts semi publicly to be a bit stressful disclaimer as usual down here tbh there’s nothing wrong with choosing optionality and am incredibly grateful for the way my life has gone and the opportunities I was able to do, there is some dramatization in here for the sake of the point which is I’m going to try and do art/tech/experimental related things instead of thinking of doing them
I speed read this idk if that’s what he really said
i have a mental block with non HTML CSS related things ok this was really hard
when i was like 14, i wrote a blog post about this, how i wanted to experience everything (although the example i gave was wanting to be not only taylor swift, but her backup dancer and her manager and her stylist all at the same time). also, fig tree metaphor always gets me (check out the post i have behind the name of my sub stack) 💜
real af