summer update v

i didn’t think i would end up making 5 summer update posts, but here we are

• i read order without design! it was a good introduction to the relationship between markets and cities, discussing how different approaches to urban planning often fail because they don’t align with market forces, eg. regulating maximum building height or minimum apartment size or attempts at fixing congestion and housing affordability. most people agree that we have done a bad job of solving these problems, but few people actually understand the mechanisms that have caused this to be the case, and i thought the book had decent explanations. it is a bit long and gets repetitive, but i think it’s pretty good if you’re interested in learning more about cities and urban policy
• now i am reading beyond good and evil. this text has taken me way too long to get to (people started recommending it to me in high school). excited to finally read some nietzsche!
• i spent august 25th and 26th in new york, as nyc is on the way from dallas to boston and i didn’t have access to mit housing until the 27th. i stayed at hack lodge for several hours each day, which was super fun! i mostly just helped people test their projects and also worked on a song lyrics project i’d been thinking about for a few weeks. overall it seemed like a very wholesome community (it helped that i already knew around half the people) and i felt at home there 🙂 
• back at school in boston now. the hotel will be up and running for a second year, starting later this week!
• i’ve been confused lately, so a lot of my posts (including the next few paragraphs) have been about opinions i’m very uncertain of and want feedback on. so if you think what i’m writing is stupid you’re probably right and should tell me
• thinking about post-college plans again:
  • assuming i get a regular full-time job, the job will probably be in a field i care about but not in the field i care the most about. there are two reasons for this: a) i have a lot of interests but no clear-cut favorite b) whatever i end up caring most about seems likely to be something experimental and not very profitable (maybe adjacent to psych or art?), so a full-time role is unlikely. in that case the plan would be to do interesting work at my job and passion projects in my free time, so it becomes extremely important to get a job where i can actually pursue those projects. namely, the job can’t leave me so tired that i’m unable to do serious work on other stuff
  • one of my friends accomplishes this by working a west coast job remotely from the east coast. the idea is that he sleeps on east coast schedule, so every morning after waking up he has three hours to work on personal projects before starting his job, and the first three hours of the morning are the most productive ones of the day anyway so this is an optimal allocation of time. i think this is a pretty good schedule to have
  • two posts ago i mentioned working remotely from somewhere like kansas city; i no longer think this is a good idea. large cities are simply too efficient for meeting new people and discovering new things, and ar/metaverse don’t come close to being able to replicate this yet. i was worried about the distractions presented by living in a large city, but i think i will just have to get better at saying “no” often
  • how many years do i have? how long am i willing to spend working for other people? i am thinking about this seneca interview again (i will keep referencing this until it is drilled into my head): Life is long enough for you to achieve your wildest dreams; you’re just so busy wasting it that you get to the end without living much of it. The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable. deferring plans indefinitely doesn’t make any sense; deferring plans for a few years is more defensible but still feels quite risky
  • i’m wondering how much of a consideration “learning from the job” should actually be. i’ve learned a lot from each of my jobs so far, but they’ve all been for only a few months at a time, and i think learning rate decreases significantly after ~6 months unless your role is constantly changing, which is rare. is learning a lot from a job actually sustainable over multiple years, or is it propaganda used by corporations to ensnare employees? does it even make sense to entrust your learning to an external boss / job when learning is inherently a personal quest that you should be pursuing with your own efforts?
  • of course, the other option is to not have a job and to instead work on whatever i feel like working on, analogous to independent research. if i saw a path forward that made sense i would consider it pretty seriously, but nothing comes to mind yet. by “path forward” i mean a sequence of projects that i’d be happy spending the foreseeable future on, which also implies having some confidence in their success. i will spend a lot of time this school year brainstorming and exploring potential paths
  • what if this entire line of reasoning is approaching the question from the wrong perspective? what if i should be thinking about the future through a different framework that i’m not seeing? i often feel like i’m trying to find the least bad choice rather than the best choice, and i think that distortion is confusing me but i don’t see how to get out of it yet