A letter from Nov 12th, 2021

dear future me, sometimes I cant stop thinking about how I don't know what I want from life and if anything I am doing makes any sense, or if im just constantly laughing in the face of absurdity. for one, I think im a luddite, even though I am obviously a cs major at stanford who is heavily involved in tech and startup culture. like, when I try to think of startup ideas, I want to throw up at the idea of doing anything consumer social because there's no chance I want to make people look at their devices more than we already do. so then saas and b2b would make sense for me in theory- speed up processes so humans dont have to look at computers as much- but then im like, do I really care about making like when2meet for software updates across companies or like automating marketing to marginally increase some company's ad revenue? not particularly. what if we thought outside of the box for a moment, outside of the app store and the iOS framework and outside of phones and laptops and PCs altogether, what if we could leave the house carrying *no distractions* and could contact someone only if we needed to without so much as looking at a blue light screen with a million notifications- yeah my grand startup idea of the day is ... a flip phone! do I even like coding? I cant be bothered to understand Numpy or scipy functions besides like, append, or spend more than half a minute on any man page. its a miracle ive gotten jobs in tech. but I didn't really like my humanities classes that much either, even though I like reading and writing for myself. I dont think I need to exist for any like, deep higher purpose, but it does annoy me that with our current state of technology that I even need to have a job, instead of just automating everything so that I can frolick about in a field and do yoga in the sun and read Huysman in cafes and hand-write letters and watch art documentaries and bake focaccia and maybe even fall in love. speaking of love. that's absurd too. I sit around all day missing Jake and listening to My Heart is Buried in Venice even though he was actively a terrible boyfriend and we broke up four months ago, but I cant see a stupid red and yellow Wells Fargo ATM without thinking about those pictures of me smiling up at him and him smiling down at me with the neon red and yellow atm lights behind us. we looked so goofy and smiley and in love in our all black coordinating outfits, his arm swung around me casually but tight, holding onto me while I leaned into him. I felt so safe with him like that. which is funny because in reality, we fought immediately before and after that picture and throughout the whole night and our whole relationship, and somehow my undeveloped prefrontal cortex has got me convinced that our slightest touch of hand and sweet shared glance means that there was something to miss about our relationship. I just dont even think I know what real love is so how am I supposed to find it? what does it mean to just *know*? and im seeing some new guys but i feel like dating at this age is so fruitless. but I mean I at least get to use this one guy's peloton. I laughed the other day thinking about how my mom worked so hard to pull our entire family out of poverty for me to now speed around in my tesla and worry about if I should still talk to a guy for his peloton or get back with my ex who has 2 pelotons. but anyway, nobody wants anything real because we are in our early 20s and all graduating soon. but at the same time i dont derive any joy from just having *** with people. and friends with benefits isn't real because I dont want to have *** with anyone im friends with, and everyone I want to have *** with i'd want to have a serious relationship with. but also I think I shouldn't be in a serious relationship when it would probably end because of graduation/me not knowing what I'm doing with my life/being too young that it probably wouldn't last till marriage so whats the point anyway... a paradox! I love my friends right now. but sometimes I feel like I've become too introverted to be a good friend. I wish people liked to sit in silence together as much as I do. its hard being in a triple because I just want to talk only in very small bursts throughout the day. today I went to the native american sculpture meditation garden with jared. we looked up at the tall wooden pillars carved with very explicit female and male figures with their genitalia and organs all etched out with some holding babies and all looking super stern stacked on top of one another reaching towards the sky. if you didn't look closely, though, you might just think it was another tree. I though about how we never get to experience nature the way native american did. they definitely knew more about the earth than we do. and whats funny is that underneath this beautiful sculpture of humanity being intertwined with nature, jared and I vaguely discussed our dating app idea, literally called simp city, and wondered how much we could sell our idea to Match Group for in the future. ive been struggling to find housing in New York for the summer for my internship. suddenly, even though I spent my whole life wanting to go to New York, I want to spend more time in California instead! something about the remnants of counterculture in la Honda and Haight-Ashbury and the view of Big Sur through Henry Miller's eyes and the tennis courts overlooking the golden gate and highway 1 and the Dipsea Trail and Muir Woods and reading at Stinson beach and stacking pebbles at the black sand beach and eating clam chowder on the piers at Sausalito and Tahoe lake summers and weekend trips to White Fish, Bend, Telluride, etc, all make me want to stay west coast. I wonder where you'll be, what you'll be doing in 5 years when you get this. but not what you'll be doing for work, that's boring. but what you'll be really doing, what you'll be reading, writing, thinking about, where you'll be hiking, if you've gotten through your norcal hikes bucket list, if you'll be yoga certified, if you can do crow pose, or a headstand, if you're in love, if you've finally had an orgasm during ***, if you are thinking about kids, if you're still friends with my friends, if warren's made it big-time yet, if mom is still happy, if you ever learned how to paint, if you still dance, if you still like taylor swift, if you live in a big city or by the coast or in some hipster town, if you still like runs, if you have a better sense of style now, if you use cooler technology or if you've abandoned technology altogether, if you finally learned how to cook for yourself, if you have a new favorite painting, if Bieber has a kid, if people still care about NFTs, if we all use shiba inu coin now, if you know what you're supposed to do when they give you a little sample of wine at the restaurant, stuff like that. im happy right now and have been trying really hard to live in the present instead of reminiscing about the past or worrying about the future too much. I realized that I used to worry a lot about the future for someone who has never regretted anything in the past. I hope you are having a good day. but if you're not, its a telltale sign that tomorrow will be a good day, because I think that's just how the world works. <3 C