granularity matters for self understanding

this year is for understanding how to feel and how i like

You might relate to the hopeless “don’t seem particularly obsessed about anything, can kinda do everything?” thing.

I have spent my 27 years being, on average, good at whatever happened. I wrote lyrics that came second in a middle school national competition, I wrote a nice blog at 17, I take nice pictures, and did well in my startup life. To a certain extent, I kinda like everything. For sure, to the extent I wished I simply wanted to be a doctor, or an architect, or an engineer. Just one, tho.

All else being equal, when deciding what to do for a living, the only way through seems to be a top-down approach. The “what does make the most sense?” thing.

I am quite certain a huge number of people go for startups for cloudy reasons. If you ask what makes the most sense, having an impact sounds pretty good. Best scenario you change the world, standard scenario nothing happens, worst scenario you work for a 10-minute grocery delivery with enough economic surplus to live a great life. Thought it was reasonable, in fact, it’s what I did. I then launched my startup, did EF, physiologically crashed down, and went into hiatus mode to reassess.

I now ask, now what?

if i like everything, why bother

Most important things in life are heavy-tailed and a few percentage points increase in the structure of how you build a happy life compounds exponentially. Ben Kuhn (Member of the Technical Staff at Anthropic) expands this very well (slightly edited for conciseness):

There are thousands of scenarios where I am sufficiently happy, but a lot happens between the 90th and the 99th percentile.

On the lower bound, happiness in suboptimal conditions requires extra effort. The room I had rented during EF was filthy with an unpleasant commute so I slept countless times at WeWork, barricading in private meeting rooms, closing the curtains, and hiding behind the legs of the table. Suboptimal, but using WeWork as a free hotel with actually great facilities was enough of a gratitude boost to compensate.On the upper bound, you graciously fall into self-reinforcing dynamics. If your best friends live within a 20-minute walk, you meet more often, have fewer organization overheads, can have more deep conversations, do more things together, and run into serendipities more often, which will strengthen the friendship, so you meet more often, have fewer organization overheads often, etc.

The same goes for work: it’s self-reinforcing, as long as you like it, as long as you have a genuine and truthful relationship with it.I didn’t have that during my years at Habyt. I would tell myself that yes, there was a difference between how I liked business development and how I liked fundraising, but not more than 8/10 vs 9.5/10.I later faced the truth that I liked business development more like 6.5/10, which actually means “rather not do it, can do it, maybe enjoy doing it 5 hours per week, if it’s really important i’d rather step in, also guess i am good with people so why not”.

I have never spent reading business development stuff out of fun, but I would lose myself behind the storytelling for fundraising.

wtf does liking mean anyway

“What do you like to do?”, like all general questions, is a horrible question. What are we talking about?

• the natural inclination: “I like written information”

• the atomic principle: “I like organizing complex information”

• the mid-level action: “I like creating long essays”

• the high-level action: “I like sharing my thoughts online”

• the driving force: “I like crafting something elegant and beautiful”

• the curiosity: “I like digging into the granularity of emotions”

• the passion: “I like writing”

• the mission: “I like tasting as much of life as possible”

• the desire: “I want to make money with my thoughts”

Without differentiating the minutiae we are unknowingly having different conversations.

There is a whole concept that you don’t fall in love with a passion, it emerges from doing something over and over and triggering a positive loop.That’s quite certainly how most passions come about by definition. We don’t realize it because as kids we don’t have philosophical conversations with friends saying “learning how to draw at school these days, not bad, in fact, i am quite confident that if i keep on doing it i am gonna love it as soon as i turn 13, thinking of making a career out of that”.Yet, the concept is empirically limited and often fails to materialize.

Photography was my adult version of this. I wasn’t drawn to it by curiosity, I simply wanted to travel for free. Eventually, I indeed became good at it and I genuinely like it, but not at the level I want to pursue it. For God’s sake, I am even colorblind.

Just kidding, so many great colorblind photographers out there.

understanding how you feel and how you like

Understanding what you like means properly discerning what you feel, and properly discerning what you feel is hard.

I had this persistent, thick substrate of anxiety from morning to night. A feeling of anguish, something is off, but it seemingly flees as I look for it, making itself ungraspable. It gets tighter and tighter, while the mind collapses deeper and deeper, caving in, not going anywhere. Intellectually I justified that I didn’t know what path to take, there were so many things I liked. I kinda like everything. I wrote in my diary:

Alexithymia, also called emotional blindness, is a neuropsychological phenomenon characterized by significant challenges in recognizing, expressing, sourcing, and articulating one's emotional experiences. In its literal sense, alexithymia signifies "no words for emotions". Anxiety was a complex system of notifications from the body, and I didn’t know how to discern the underlying problems. Everything was simply labeled anxiety.

Everything can also be labeled “I like it”. But do you feel the enjoyment? Or do you only do it intellectually? Do you perhaps like the version of you liking x? And do you follow along, masquerading the truth?

deep dive into your body

Slow down, breathe, notice, see the patterns, and feel.The only way you can trust yourself is by allowing yourself to trust your body.

Understanding your body, your senses, and your intuition is learning a new language. After half a year you can’t discuss Seneca, but the basics are enough for that warm, homey feeling around you.

It’s helpful not to give up on the motions. Instead, slow down, accept, detach, and feel. A pigeon enters your window, if you feel and attach, you gonna go crazy and run behind the animal, which will bump wall to wall even more, creating a big mess.A pigeon enters your window, if you feel and detach, you gonna let the animal do its thing. Fly around, walk here and there, and eventually leave. In the meantime, notice. Are you frightened? Worried it will defecate all over? Overwhelmed cause you have a call now? Do you feel the urge to make something? Are you sweating? From your hands or arms? Have you accelerated your breath? Or are you not breathing at all?

I didn’t know many negative emotions, I had to fine-tune myself by guessing that what I was feeling was maybe guilt, or disappointment, or hopelessness. Whenever I felt something I could not name if not with anxiety, I’d notice what was happening in my body and tag it with my best guess:

Ok I am feeling anxiety. My body is extremely warm. I need to move around. My hands are super tense. I am extremely focused. What I am doing? I am doing stuff that was supposed to take 1 hour and it’s gonna take at least 8 hours. Is it anger? My best guess is that I am simply pissed that this is taking way longer than expected. Let’s call it being stressed?

After a couple of times I had it, not anxiety, but this “Pissed and stressed, also afraid of being unintelligent, also impatient”. Not elegant, but quite specific.

see the patterns

I rarely overwork, because my coping mechanism is sleeping. I would have a great night of sleep and take a 3-hour nap after lunch for many days a week for many consecutive weeks. I noticed that the difference between a food coma and this coping mechanism was that the food coma was pure unplugged energy from my brain. While this felt like withdrawal, almost wanting to hide from something.

Boredom can be confused with tiredness. When I am physically tired and I sit down, I feel relief. I need to stop, and my body muscles melt, almost enjoyably. When I am bored, I want to sit and as soon as I do it, I take the phone and scroll.

A cool pattern I recently noticed is about procrastination.If I don’t want to do something because I don’t have the right energy (either physical, mental, or spiritual), then I am immediately rejected, aversed, almost disgusted by it. I’d rather sit still and do nothing.If I have to do something that I am perfectly fine with, it’s pure procrastination when I am looking proactively for other things to do.If I have been working on something super hard and I am meeting an even harder point, I feel a square-shaped, dry sensation in my chest, and I have the urge to walk around looking to talk to someone.If there is something that must be done, I don’t procrastinate.

The catch is that it’s very easy to find a reason why something doesn’t necessarily have to be done right now.

granularity matters

When I started interpreting my body, I had to expand my vocabulary with the Atlas of Emotions. I rarely had used words like nervousness, annoyance, frustration, disappointment, discouragement, grief, and distress, especially to describe my life.

Without discerning the granularity of my feelings, I was missing the translation matrix between the inner and the outer world. I couldn’t accurately describe what I wanted or not wanted, and I couldn’t properly pursue or avoid it.

I almost didn’t go to the Buildspace graduation in SF, it felt odd, already unpleasant, and not for me. Going in circles with my coach, I realized my underlying assumption was that it was going to be full of tech bros talking hustle 24/7. But I was instead very excited to meet multidisciplinary builders. As soon as I realized that, it clicked, I went, and it was a blast.

I tried for months to convince myself that building in biotech longevity made sense and that I had nothing to lose. Turns out, it simply didn’t feel right. I was then anxious about entrepreneurship, which was confusing. Turns out, it simply was not wanting to work 70 hours per week. I was then anxious because I didn’t want to work 70 hours per week. Turns out, it simply was fear of having become a lazy person and therefore a bad person.

Describing who I am through imprecise words draws a shallow astrological truth. True, but true to the person regardless of who reads it. It doesn’t help that aspirational, yet general descriptions are often not untrue, and it feels nice to associate with them.

A friend of mine loves to teach, change the direction of someone’s life, and talk to experts regardless of their field. I shallowly recognize myself in such things too, because they are not untrue, and it feels good to be that person.That’s not completely me, but I can see that being me.The truth is that I enjoy teaching as long as it’s about going from good to very good, I appreciate changing people’s lives but it’s not in my top priorities, and I love talking to experts, as long as they are specific fields.Yet, I’d jump around if I were to organize a full-immersion retreat in Costa Rica, where experts teach one another and change their life direction. The truth is that I crave traveling, community, and deep conversations flowing past midnight.

All of our life choices are the product of multiple assumptions of the inner and outer world, and the more each factor deviates from its core truth, the bigger the deviation from what you truly want.

Optimizing granularity is not maximizing it, it’s the minimum effective emotional workload to get to the core truth of yourself, without intellectualizing. You're allowed to have preferences without needing to have a complicated scientific explanation of why your preferences are the true absolute good. There's a limit to how much you can change your preferences, and so if you push too hard, you end up inventing reasons for why every single thing you prefer is actually objectively best at serving general human flourishing.

Feeling you love cooking is enough, don’t need to discover that you like the dopamine feedback you receive when cutting onions very thinly because when you did it for the first time at 8 you received a good compliment from your mom.Just accept you like cooking, but feel it, trust it, and hold it with confidence all the way up.