- The Pursuit
- Posts
- The Pursuit, Vol. 3
Intro: I got a job!
Hi friends — long time no see. Since my last letter, I graduated from Harvard, moved, and have been working full-time for exactly 3 months. I will be posting much more consistently (every Sunday) now because: 1) I’ve finally settled into a good routine, and 2) I have a backlog of content from the past few months. This particular letter was written during my last few weeks of undergrad in December.
Please note that subsequent letters will be much shorter, as I want this newsletter to be about consistency and recording my weekly thoughts. I just had too much time to write during finals week because I had no exams.
Also: I got a job! I’m now a VC investor based in Charleston, South Carolina, but I travel often, so please let me know where you are living now & I’ll reach out whenever I’m in town. For anyone who wants to know more about the firm I work at, I’ll put it at the end of this letter.
Readings
"He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”
I just thought this was beautiful.
Inaction and “Academic Depression”
“I would like to think of my ‘ignorance’ less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes pro-active, a political statement. Our collective norm.”
This excerpt comes from Ruth Ozeki’s 1998 novel My Year of Meats, which centers around Jane, a half-Japanese documentarian who slowly discovers that the American meat industry is rife with damaging chemicals that may have made her unable to have children. At the end of the novel, after she quits her job and makes her own documentary about the dangers she’s discovered, Jane is reckoning with the likelihood that no one will watch or care about what she’s found.
I highlight this quote because it touches on a concept I’ve been thinking about recently: How inactivity leads to a unique form of sadness.
I started thinking about this during “Reading Period” at the end of the Fall semester. For those unfamiliar, it is a week with no classes or exams that comes directly before finals begin. While it sounds like ideal partying time, Reading Period is probably the most academic Harvard is all semester. Nearly everyone is holed up in libraries or their rooms catching up or getting ahead on readings, lectures, and essays.
As such, despite my best attempts to be social as a final-semester senior, I went entire days without seeing or speaking to anyone for more than a few seconds. And, sitting alone in spaces usually filled with laughter and procrastinating shenanigans, I felt intensely sad.
After a semester of bittersweet “lasts,” Reading Week was a definitive reminder that I was ready to move on from college. While my last undergraduate term was filled with tremendous highs that reminded me why I would miss being a student, Reading Week reminded me of personal lows that came along with the college experience, too. And I think it helped me get to the bottom of why academia is not for me.
I think there’s a unique form of “academic depression” that can happen from inactivity on a campus. I love reading, writing, and developing new ideas. But if I can’t share these ideas or theories with other people, I become unmotivated and sluggish. At the end of the day, I don’t think I’m cut out to grind in a library or laboratory for years on end. When people necessarily buckle down in an academic environment and silo themselves to study or research, I wither like a flower without water. It took me awhile to realize this because I love to read alone and in silence. But I can’t do it for weeks at a time.
This is why I love my current job: I’m learning, but in a team context. I take hours at a time to read new research papers or news articles, but I can always discuss how they relate to our portfolio companies or overall investment strategy, for which each of my co-workers has a different perspective and area of expertise. In short, I love to learn, but I do it better in a group.
Convos
Hobbies
I had coffee with a friend a few weeks ago who is in his last year at school. Largely removed from college life after time abroad and a gap year, he said he’s devoting a significant amount of time this year to finding hobbies he enjoys. I realized that I have few hobbies that aren’t in some way productivity-related. I love collecting sports cards, for example, but it’s turned into a for-profit exercise as well as a collecting one.
Recently, I’ve spoken to many friends who graduated college between six months and two years ago. Because of this conversation, I’ve asked them about hobbies. Nearly every single one of them has realized that they did not have any hobbies when they left school.
That is not to say these people weren’t doing exciting, stimulating things. Many of them continued to exercise regularly, keep up with some kind of non-work news, and do Instagrammable things like eating at nice restaurants.
However, many have become aware of a sense of routine-based stress embedded in these activities. Most of them are working incredibly long hours and feel like they are “always on,” even when participating in an activity that is on its face leisurely. So when given the rare free 12 hours to do whatever they want, they would rather sit on their phones and scroll than engage in any one of their “hobbies.” One friend told me that even dating feels like work.
Discovering this preference for inaction has, obviously, freaked them all out. They are now trying to find their “real” hobbies, things they do just because they enjoy the act of doing them. They said it’s been freeing but deliberate. On the one hand, they are giving themselves permission to be bad at something again. But there is always the possibility that they don’t enjoy what they start.
At first, this seemed counterintuitive: They are thinking harder to find things that make them think less. Shouldn’t they just rest when they feel like resting? I don’t think so, and I think it relates to academic depression. I think it is intensely useful to have an active habit that is relaxing because it resists the inertia of academic depression. Whether that’s pilates, pottery, or doing puzzles, light stimulation is something that I think our brains need just as much or more than rest and intense exertion. I think that’s why my friends found themselves defaulting to scrolling on their phones: It got their brains firing in a low-effort way. But scrolling on a phone involves a historically–unprecedented motion-to-stimulation ratio; hence, feeling like a sad potato after an hourlong TikTok marathon.
I think a common denominator here is that the physical actions are easy enough that, once the hobby is a habit, the brain does not have to think particularly hard about the motor functions it is performing. This clears your head and allows you to think more clearly than normal. I think this is why so many adults I know love going on walks. I also think it’s why I love going to the movies alone: Watching a film on the big screen gives me just enough stimulation such that the voices in my head quiet down, and I often do my best thinking before, during, and after films.
What is your go-to active hobby? I’m sincerely asking, because I want one that doesn’t tempt me to eat popcorn and sip an ICEE.
Over-Glorifying Acts of Service/”Every day is a new day.”
I caught up with an old friend a few weeks ago. The focus of her recent work as a screenwriter has been female friendship and, by extension, female loneliness. I asked her if she had any surprising insights from thinking about relationships so deliberately. The main one, she told me, is that most men glorify acts of service, often to the detriment of their relationships.
She said that, when asked about their friendships or romantic relationships, her male friends would often emphasize the quantifiable “what” of their actions, saying things like “I drove so far,” “We spent so much time together,” or “I paid so much money” when discussing how they showed care. A more common, domestic example was saying they cut fruit, which has become an iconic symbol of Asian-American parental love. Implicit in those actions was the understanding that they care for their loved ones, at least in the men’s minds. However, she noticed that their girlfriends or mothers were often left wanting for smaller, more consistent (often verbal) demonstrations of care.
Speaking personally about her relationship, she (paraphrased) said, “I really want to hear that my boyfriend thinks I’m pretty. I really can’t hear it enough. I know he may have said it yesterday, but every day is a new day. Saying it more often doesn’t make it any less amazing to hear.”
A strong argument can be made that this has more to do with differences in love languages rather than gender, but I think there is more truth to it than can be explained by applying that framework. Here’s my best shot at articulating why:
Insecurities, likes, and dislikes don’t really go away, and they can’t be logically vanquished. In fact, I would argue the whole point is that they are illogical. I can’t rationally explain why I prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate, nor can any argument I make convince you to change your preference. No matter how well Quentin Tarantino can articulate his well-documented foot fetish, he can’t convince you or me to feel pleasure from having our toes licked. Maybe I can diagnose my insecurities by playing armchair psychologist, but we all know that pinpointing the origins of our problems doesn’t make them disappear. Put simply, ignoring or working around these feelings doesn’t make them go away. As such, my friend wanting to hear that she looks pretty isn’t so much a preference as it is a vulnerability, one that she is quite brave to articulate.
This got me thinking about an episode of Bojack Horseman, Free Churro. In this episode, the titular character, Bojack, delivers a eulogy for his mother, with whom he had a poor relationship.
“All I know about being good, I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so… hard.
When you’re a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture could be enough, that even though your parents aren’t what you need them to be over and over and over again, at any moment, they might surprise you with something… wonderful. I kept waiting for that, the proof that even though my mother was a hard woman, deep down, she loved me and cared about me and wanted me to know that I made her life a little bit brighter. Even now, I find myself waiting.”
I think what I’m saying is: Being dependably good for someone you love is about them more than it is about you. Why would you not try to love them in ways that support them where they feel weakest?
I’m also wondering if this seemingly-gendered difference in love languages really points to the gendered ways we are made to feel inadequate.
About my job
I’m working for a venture capital firm out of Charleston, SC. We’re a family office, which means we have no outside LPs (investors) and thus no rules or restrictions on what we can invest in. There are 6 people at the firm: 4 partners, 1 associate and myself. We deploy about $150 MM per year, and we have ~$1 BN AUM (assets under management) between our Charleston and London offices.
We invest in differentiated technology. That usually manifests in 3 main areas: data center hardware, novel access to or use of data, and non-molecular life sciences. We’ve led investment rounds from Seed to Series C. The team is highly technical, with the team’s background including 2 MIT graduates, a Gerogia Tech engineering grad turned M&A lawyer for Berkshire Hathaway by way of UChicago law, a Moody’s banker, a CalTech bioengineering post doc, a quant trading firm founder (the firm is still around 30 years later), a former information warfare and manufacturing division head for the Navy that designed and flew fighter jets, etc.
If you or anyone you know if starting an interesting company or interested in ~AI~, shoot me a message!
Thank you all for reading this and being great friends. It means the world to me.
My Best,
Sam