Rocket Ship Futures

1/2

The original start to this post was this:

There is reality; and there is what we tell ourselves on top of it.

Ironically, writing at this higher level of abstraction was impossible. Instead, I will tell you some things about recent realities, operating below what I could tell you on top of it, and maybe we will get somewhere.

~

I’m in an empty office building in London, where everything is white and sterile. Vestiges of life have been intentionally stripped to the professionally relevant: black and white wires of assorted shapes; treats that are just unhealthy enough for one to spike their dopamine, but without sacrificing afternoon productivity.1 The average American does not pay for AI, I remind myself, as I smell the smoke of rapid-fire Claude prompts that lingers in the common working area.

I associate college with weekly flowers from Whole Foods and freshly ground espresso, and these both make me think of students of all types running carefree. Now, I live amongst plastic plants and individually packaged coffee pods. London has made me feel as though I am standing in the shadow of a large mass looming over me, staring up while my hands hang lifelessly. My computer cursor has continued blinking, waiting for me to wrap my hands around the monster and take control. Overwhelmed, I turned and ran instead of wrestling. Here is what I’ve come up with instead.

My mom and I walked the Camino a few months ago. For a few weeks, there was nothing bigger than the ground beneath our feet, as the Pyrenees mountains and beautiful Spanish villages flitted by throughout some extended conversations with one of the most important people in my life. This, however, is only half true, because we did let in bigger forces. We believed in the significance of the walk and we were aware of the total number of kilometers. It seems humans insist on expanding whatever activity we are doing to whatever meaning it can contain, in a kind of perverse Parkinson’s Law. And people — particularly my age, I think — also insist on everyone else understanding how much meaning these things contain. Unfortunately, the walk didn’t hold much meaning for me.2

There’s similarly nothing special about London to me. Walking the (much shorter) distance between the office and the bed I sleep in,3 I think about Rohan thinking about “what a crazy time it is to be alive”, and I try to muster equally profound thoughts, and all that comes to mind is the cool night air. The weather is supposed to be bad in London; it doesn’t feel real, how perfect the weather is. I’m not meant to find the weather pleasant, yet I do. I’m not meant to find some activities unfulfilling, yet I do. Where do we go from here?

Since beginning at UNC, responsibility had slowly accrued with each month of my life, at least up until recently, when I landed in a parallel society where everyone looked like me and nothing I did mattered. For a few months, I lived an unreal life in the literal sense, doing activities that didn’t feel like anything. When people asked me how study abroad was going, I smiled and said I couldn’t complain — because nothing was going badly, and nothing was going well either. Life was entertaining and time passed. I gradually grew more comfortable under red LEDs and 7/11 neon lights. I fake-worked in the library and somehow didn’t have time for anything. I did study abroad at the right time, in the right place. Maybe I did it wrong, because I didn’t have a job going into it. Escaping reality is more fun when you know you’re returning to something solid.

Still, shortly after returning from Hong Kong, I got a job. I smiled at the memory of sitting on dirty steps, surrounded by beer cans and drunk expats, and anxiously making noises just thinking about the application process. I recalled frantically refreshing my email, doing -12 and -15 in my head over and over again in a hazy Shenzhen nightclub, trying to guess when a recruiter would typically send an offer based on all the possible timezones they could be in, trying not to think it might be a rejection all along. I said goodbye (to these moments; to this doubt) and faced the other way, preparing to welcome the new reality that I had once envisioned.

~

A few weeks of work have endeavoured to teach me that reality doesn’t last. Everyone in this industry imagines the next decade will be far more confusing than the previous one. Building such predictive models of the world demands that we think bigger than the ground beneath their feet and the text outputs on a screen, and instead see into the abyss of what could happen next. On some level, thinking forward requires deprioritising the present, the one we once dreamed of. And maybe that is why I feel overwhelmed, as I thrash in currents rapidly moving forward, when I had previously enjoyed imagining the water & waiting for my turn to jump in.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I worked for a few weeks from Toronto, where life could not have been better on paper. I lived in a comfortable home and commuted conveniently to an office that provided lunch. I would plug into the good monitor and pick up whatever coffee, whatever snack, whatever item I really wanted on the way to and from downtown. After complaining loudly how I just wanted an extended form of my carefree Toronto life for two years, I finally got a chance, and instead only two weeks passed before I started choosing the same things each day & feeling the bubble of privileged routines might pop & so I booked an outbound to get closer to reality.

Hence, London.

Human beings are excellent at dopamine regulation: the more reasons I have to stay in reality, the more my thoughts drift to reasons I don’t have yet. Life only seems to have gotten more complex now that I have more figured out. Before, I had too much time and too much opportunity for fun. I took flights instead of working and I could tell you more about the collar construction of my t-shirts than what was happening in the world. I filled the days with coffee runs and restaurants and things that weren’t real. The advantage of these trivial concerns is you know they expire on their own, and that eventually you will get started. The difficulty of figuring things out is that there’s always something else to figure out; otherwise, you get stuck on an automatic, lateral path, one where each successive life step is good & plausible & socially acceptable & the default & impersonal & meaningless. Getting off this path requires going into the backcountry, where the reality of things is the leaves and sticks around you. People can tell you what their journey was like, and by extension, what your journey is supposed to be, but the comfort of secondhand accounts is a poor substitute for the difficulty of experience; nothing can replace your two feet forging ahead in the bush.

In SpaceX’s new Starship launch video, someone talks dreamily about the company’s collective ability to absorb pain. Elon Musk has repeated, many times, that designing rockets is perhaps the closest one can get to reality and all its details. Many days feel as though I’m attached to a rocket ship and I have no idea how the details work. The pain comes when we return to the ground — when we return to reality. And maybe the thing to do is to absorb the pain upfront, grabbing at the ground beneath me before liftoff.

Writing has become harder because I’ve lost touch with reality. Staring at the incomplete document is like staring into the abyss. On the other side of a lot of pain is the future (thing) I’ve written. I’m scared, truth be told, of this pain; but the more time I spend, the better and better the document gets, and the closer I get to the future. Pain, much like reality, follows the law of conservation of mass: for it to disappear, it must be absorbed. And at times, like the cool night air in England, it overwhelms me.

You can read 2/2 here. Many thanks to TW, RSR, JH, AOB, and SS for reading drafts.

Footnotes

  1. Because there is nothing worse for the world than an afternoon slump; although, to be fair, fig bars are quite good. ↩

  2. Spending a long period of time, with my mom, etc, sure. ↩

  3. Which I say because I’ve been doing, well, all other things at the office. It’s absurd that an office can have a shower, by the way. Church and state. Not that I’m complaining (that would be total hypocrisy). ↩