On luck
While luck often only becomes possible and meaningful when met with effort and dedication, looking back makes it impossible to deny how large a role chance plays in how our lives unfold.
Is life an optimization problem?
There’s a version of regret that curdles into something less useful: a grief for a past that can’t be changed and a hypothetical present that will never exist. I’ve felt that version lately, and I’ve been trying to find my way out of it.
For the love of the game
The phrase ‘love of the game’ is often employed in the context of sports, used to describe the player who would play for free, who needs no contract to give everything. I think it applies just as well to the games of life.
I, too, am dying
Whatever I accumulate, achieve, or protect in this lifetime — regardless of how safe a bank it is in or the insurance I have on it — none of it will come with me when I die. I will leave as I came: with nothing.
On belonging
We live on a floating orb somewhere in the middle of who-knows-where, with no context for any of it. Is it really so surprising if we feel a little lost sometimes?
My metric for living
I aspire to think of ‘more life’ not as an extra hour added to the 24-hour clock, but as experiencing more vitality and meaning in the same 16 waking hours we already have — to not only have a beating heart, but to actually feel alive.
What four years at MIT taught me about life
My time here has revealed that happiness is a byproduct of looking beyond ourselves — empathizing with others and doing what we can, however small, to alleviate pain and bolster wellness in those around us.