The hapless cycle of trial and error and the wearisome vacillation between starting and quitting isn't a rite of passage. Not everything has to be learned the hard way. Where our distinct paths in this uncertain life converge, we can—and should—help each other along the way.
Rejection
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
I’ve drawn parallels between job interviews and online dating in the past. Fundamentally, to achieve broad success in either of these endeavors, it comes down to your ability to market yourself and to give a convincing sales pitch before our date or our interviewer’s attention span or patience is depleted.
This quickly becomes problematic when you realize that for many individuals, this type of staged social interaction is an incredibly unnatural and unnerving ordeal; it could be that you don’t possess a baseline level of confidence, charisma, or social skills, but I would argue that this is often not the case. First dates and traditional job interviews do not simulate anything you’ll actually do while navigating the specific challenges you’ll encounter in your work or the nitty-gritty aspects to maintain long term relationships. All they do is test your ability to:
Force yourself to socialize and maintain a smooth flow of small talk with complete strangers
Monologue about yourself for an extended period of time
Conjure up unnatural answers to equally unnatural questions that you will very rarely get asked outside this context—Tell me about yourself. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Tell me about your typical day. What are your friends like?
Why is it that we never challenge the efficacy of this process? If we understand that there’s little to no correlation between interview performance and job performance, or impressions of a first date and the health of a relationship, why do we continue to implement systems that clearly aren’t measuring what we care about and what we do?
When we haven’t clearly defined the purpose of these methods, the lines quickly become blurred. For almost everyone, the instinct is to feel shame, regret, or embarrassment in the face of rejection. The instinct is to hastily draw the conclusion that we’re irrevocably inadequate, that we could’ve done better, and that we just aren’t good enough. This all boils down to our presumption that these systems are valid ways of determining our individual competence.
But if we operate on the premise that you’ve been fairly judged, why is there so much shame in this act of rejection or separation, when it’s clearly beneficial for both parties involved?
When an employer rejects a job applicant,
When we decide to quit a job,
When we deny the possibility of a second or third date,
When we gather the courage to break up,
It’s just a way of saying, “it’s not for me.”
There’s no reason to remain in an unhealthy relationship if you and your partner have come to that conclusion together already.
There’s no reason to keep an employee that isn’t productive or motivated and has no more room to grow as an individual.
There’s no reason to fret over a lost job opportunity if both you and the company have discovered together that you likely wouldn’t enjoy the job or be able to contribute in a meaningful way.
The issue, then, rests on our ability to fairly judge. But is that the very point of these social filters—to weed out those that lack perseverance? The design and intention matters when we want to determine the efficacy of these social norms. Here are some questions worth asking:
Is this process of artificial selection—the superficial exchanges that are characteristic of dating apps, the archetypal “let’s sit in my office and chat” job interview—effectively designed to seek the best of the best?
Are one or two awkward dates enough? What types of interactions constitute the most effective methods to break the ice between two individuals?
Does the forced process of probing candidates by going down a list of stilted, hackneyed questions measure anything that is actually relevant to succeeding in the position we’re hiring for?
Do we recognize the cost of expunging so many individuals to the rejection bin and thus the cost of consigning both them and ourselves to an often exhausting, wearisome journey to find the right match?
Is the shame and awkwardness truly too much to overcome? Is ghosting—the consequence of letting that shame and awkwardness consume our compassion and empathy—truly a necessary evil? Or is it just laziness, selfishness, or a lack of self-awareness on our part?
Can we be more supportive when we reject others? Can we offer constructive feedback and the patience to aid another human being in their journey? Don’t we have a duty to guide one another, especially when we have the resources to do so?
Because there's so much shame, we are so inclined to walk away, even if we know a friend who might be a better match. Most recruiters give up on us even if they can be given the capacity to direct us towards other companies that are hiring for the same position. If we choose to pay it forward by having the patience and commitment to understand others in this journey—the very attitude that dissolves this social norm—do we acknowledge how much we have to gain when they’re that much more willing to help us in return down the line?
If we cannot change the process, we can at least change our mindset.
We can together acknowledge that the average date and the average job interview is often a zero-sum game.
We can together acknowledge that finding just the right working environment and just the right level of challenge within a job is a painstaking, yet exigent ordeal.
We can together acknowledge that for virtually all of us, life is an unending, arduous, brute force process of trial and error to find out what works and what doesn't.
We walk a daunting path inundated with an endless torrent of possibility, but at the same time, it is what blinds us; it is what causes us to falter as we stumble over and over again in search of an elusive treasure—a grand outcome when we’ve finally discovered our counterpart and the place we belong amidst an uncertain world.
The least we can do for each other is walk alongside them while we still can, before we become distraught and lose sight of what the world needs us to do. It is about having the patience to understand who we are as individuals and where we each need to go; this is the only means by which we can fairly judge. It is about having the courage, not merely to point them in the right direction, but to lead them along into that path together.
We have no right to be complacent when countless individuals ceaselessly wander our world—often in desperation, often in despair—in search of a true love, in search of a meaningful contribution they can make in the places we live, in search of a reason to live.
We can choose to do better.
Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2023
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Posted on Saturday, January 14, 2023
The Spirit of Jazz
Posted on Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
For the majority of my life, the music I listened to was consistent. It was consistent in the sense that for a given song, whether through recording or live performance, there was more or less one version of it; the primary components of the music—the lyrics, the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, textures, and structure—were relatively the same across multiple renditions, if not completely identical.. And I found that this trend would span across a variety of genres; whether it was a Coldplay, Rush, or Yerin Baek concert, no matter which performance the footage was sourced from, there would be little to no deviation from the versions that they recorded on their past album. Sure, there might have been some stylistic alterations in the tempo, the dynamics, and the articulation of certain phrases, but it was never to the point where one couldn’t effortlessly sing along to the lyrics or be unable to predict when the chorus or the bridge was coming up. Being an avid fan of these artists, it was incredibly easy to memorize nearly every song, whose melodies, rhythms, and form were already so deeply internalized within me that I, merely in thought, could play it out in my mind on repeat with ease.
To a large extent, I believe that we’ve been conditioned to listen to music with a certain univocality and with an expectation of a kind of auditory consistency that taps into a uniquely specific emotional memory for each of us. We expect that a certain song makes us feel a certain way, where the integral elements of the music we hear are equally integral parts of our reminiscences.
It was only when I started listening to jazz in 2015 that I would gradually learn to decouple these expectations from the listening experience. When I began listening to jazz, I listened to it with the same expectation of consistency that was characteristic of all the previous musical genres I had already accustomed myself to. Upon discovering the plethora of jazz content online, ranging from live performances recorded by phone, to live streams hosted by jazz clubs themselves, to entire libraries of jazz albums available on Spotify, I listened to a particular video or a specific recording dozens, if not hundreds of times over the course of years. I began to deeply internalize each of those individual iterations, just as I did with all the music I had listened to before—memorizing them down to a note and bridging those vivid memories of the music with concurrent life events to create profound emotional associations with those songs.
But as I listened more and more, as I began to listen to three, four, or five renditions of a given song, sometimes even going to see live performances in person, I inevitably realized something—I never felt the same way listening to one version as I did another. The tempo was much faster or much slower; sometimes they would play the tune in a different key; sometimes the head (the main theme of a tune) had an altered rhythmic or melodic composition. The lineup of musicians was different each time—sometimes a completely different lineup compared to that of the original recording. The solos played by each of those musicians were almost never the same, not even remotely, despite constituting the majority of any jazz tune. They can play a song dozens, if not hundreds, of times and are able to hear beyond the echoes of the past, whereas I so desperately and selfishly clung onto a beloved memory. While my mind, having heard only one version hundreds of times, so eagerly expected to hear a song one way and consequently feel a certain way, the reality was that the auditory experience of each performance inexorably evoked different feelings. I eventually realized that it wasn’t only a new genre of music that I had discovered; I had been exposed to an entirely different art form.
I slowly began to realize that jazz, by design and by tradition, often deviated from musical convention. Being so fundamentally rooted in the spirit of improvisation and the spontaneity that can only be truly achieved within a live performance, it was incredibly unlikely to find jazz musicians that played a song exactly the same way every single time. In the mind of a jazz musician, a particular sentence or phrase is evanescent; it is ephemeral and fleeting emotion in the heat of the moment, one unable to be ever replicated. They abhor the scarcity mindset of pop culture, exemplified by the countless numbers of music copyright cases, wherein one party accuses another of purportedly “stealing” a melody or other elements of an ostensibly original musical composition Unlike many of these mainstream artists that become emotionally attached to the magic and exhilaration of a hit record, of a seemingly “perfect” composition able to connect with the masses, jazz artists have no reason to hoard their successes. They know they have so much else to say, so many other emotions they can convey, so many other stories they can tell through their unique voice; they have no real reason to become so intimately attached to one iteration of themselves out of thousands in their lifetime.
Jazz musicians implicitly understand that it’s not worthwhile to burden themselves to rehearse every specific note of a piece thousands of times, to achieve an impeccable degree of “perfection,” because perfection is a meaningless concept in a world of imperfect judgment. This performance of July by Ben Wendel is undoubtedly one of my favorite pieces of music, but I can’t quite say the same for the studio version, another performance, or the version I saw live just last week at the Village Vanguard—not because any of those other renditions are inferior in my view or the artist’s view, but merely because I retain specific memories associated with that particular version. And while that version ends up being perfect for me, the irony is that they never sought to create the perfect performance in the first place; rather, they acknowledge that they only need to put their heart and soul into the music, and by doing so they will inevitably create a version that will end up being perfect for someone. Because we all hear the music differently, they don’t waste their time haplessly obsessing over the details to create one flawless, ideal version of a song They neither specifically cater to the majority nor to a specific subset of individuals, but rather, they let freedom and faith in their artistic vision to determine the pathway to success, and not the other way around.
All this is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with consistency or this internalization of what constitutes a song in memory; it is undeniably a powerful tool to aid us in understanding and thus emotionally connecting with our past selves. However, as Kierkegaard puts it, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” While reminiscing has incredible value in keeping us grounded and conscious of what ultimately led us to where we are today, it is evident, whether through our experience of music, our relationships, or our work, that we have an inimical predisposition to cling onto this idealized conception of what seems right—not what actually is right. We so desperately want things to be familiar, to always follow a familiar pattern or shape, and to be as we expected them to be. The method by which jazz musicians approach their art—their freedom within this brave cycle of iteration, improvisation, and generosity—can serve to remind us:
to iterate—by embracing the ephemeral, by enabling ourselves, even despite external criticism, to be proud of our story that constantly changes because we ourselves constantly change.
to improvise—by allowing ourselves to truly listen, to denude ourselves of our self-absorbed expectations on what something should sound like, on what something should be, but simply what is.
to be generous—by saying something meaningful, by constantly sharing something made with passion, care, and commitment to the art, not by the selfish confines of a quid pro quo, and not by a romanticization of the ideal and the perfect.
Posted on Wednesday, March 15, 2023
The Fear of Missing Out
Posted on Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
The mainstream notion of “the fear of missing out” is fundamentally flawed. When we truly take time to think about it—when we consider the staggering scale and complexity associated with absolutely everything that we could ever do in our entire life—we actually accomplish very little in our lives. Irrespective of the degree of ambition or initiative we have to cross off every item on our bucket lists, we nonetheless exhaust an infinitesimally small fraction of this daunting, infinite realm of possibility. The far more profound realization that we can make is that we all “miss out” equally.
“The fear of missing out” makes no real distinction between variety of activity and uniqueness of life experience; it is predicated on a spurious assumption that having more types of activities is inherently good, as it purportedly allows for more variation in our actual unique experience of life itself. But what if the nature of our experience of life is as much about what we don’t experience versus what we do experience? We are primarily defined by the interconnected sum of all the moments in our lives—regardless if they were moments of happiness or sadness, of pride or shame, of momentous importance or stark inconsequentiality, of abundant joy or woeful oppression—not the moments themselves; this ultimately means that the present act of interposing more variety of activity—by way of sparse and loosely related activities, at that—barely affects that collective sum. We are who we are only because of the incredibly specific set of circumstances that belong only to ourselves.
Virtually every individual who did anything remotely important in this world only did what they did because of the very specific way by which they chose to go about their lives. If we truly believe in a “fear of missing out,” all the success stories we learn about are actually failure stories. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a failure; why didn’t he feel obligated to travel the world, go to more festivities, or get involved in more hobbies, when he instead consigned himself to the strife associated with leading and advocating for the civil rights of his people? Steve Jobs would be a failure; ninety hours of work per week is certainly going to increase his chances of missing out on all the joy and entertainment he could have going out with his friends or family.
If it doesn’t consume much of our time, it will still consume our attention. However minute and however significant, whatever the aggregate amount of mental energy spent must be less than our total mental capacity. Regardless of how resilient we think we are, for everyone there is an absolute limit; not only do we have to avoid reaching that absolute limit to circumvent the possibility of mental breakdown, but we must be perhaps even more mindful of the complex and dynamic interplay between all that preoccupies us. The mentality behind the “fear of missing out” presupposes that there is no limit to our attention and our energy—that simply cramming our lives with ceaselessly more variety is inherently beneficial. But whether they are larger questions in life—whether to engage with social media, to take on a side hustle or a second job, to get into a relationship—or something as insignificant as worrying about what brand of soap we use, what we will eat for dinner today, or what we will wear to a party, almost everything in our lives has an unforeseeable and incalculable cascading effect that impacts the outcome of our lives and the formation of our character far more than we might presume.
Not only is it that the quality of our work—what we originally set out to do in this world—can degrade depending on what clutters our information space and our perception, but it is also that the things that we decide belong within the realm of our consciousness can shape our character, whether for better or for worse. Indeed, there is great truth to be told in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations—“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts”—as well as in the Bible, in Matthew 6:21—”for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It is a mistake to construe ourselves as distinct, immutable entities navigating through time and space to find our way, when time, space, our corporeal being, and our consciousness are all one and the same—all essential, inseparable components of our universe that warp one another in inconceivable, endlessly complex ways. And to repeat one in a billion of those interactions amidst this incomprehensible chaos—at the same exact time, in the same exact place, in the same exact arrangement of atoms of all the molecules of our body, and all the exact sequences of chemical reactions occurring at every one of our neurotransmitters that constitute our experience of consciousness—would be an impossible task.
Mindfulness matters because it is the only means by which we can take control of this peculiar existence we’ve all been hurled into. If we choose to operate solely based on our capricious, unpredictable emotions, we have no choice but to accept our fate. ”Providence or atoms,” divine will or this incomprehensible chaotic entropy of the universe regardless, we cannot erase the indelible, reverse the irreversible, and change the unchangeable. If we’re not satisfied with the life we’ve wrought for ourselves, that if we’re not happy with the person that we’ve become, that if we’re not content with the product of the circumstances that we’ve been given, there is no one to blame but ourselves, nothing at fault but our own ignorance.
It isn’t about a variety of activities. It isn’t about “missing out,” because we all “miss out” on the opportunity to live out someone else’s unique experience of life, however banal or sensational they seem on the surface. It’s about embracing the vastly different walks of life we each possess. It’s about recognizing that while we don’t necessarily have to be proud of everything we experience and don’t experience alike, it will nevertheless ultimately define who we are and what we achieve.
Posted on Wednesday, June 7, 2023
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- Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen…Epictetus
- Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.Marcus Aurelius
- It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.Seneca
- The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them.…Marcus Aurelius
- You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never…Albert Camus
- Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise an…Marcus Aurelius
- Coloran essay
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Posted on Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Everything’s going to be okay.
Posted on Thursday, January 5, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
Until it isn’t.
Until "okay" just isn't sufficient anymore.
There's seemingly nothing wrong with this self-assurance; if it calms you, if it brings you peace, if it’s enough to save your life, and you can think of nothing better to say, then let it help you. Because the truth is, things will be "okay" most of the time. Despite what we might perceive as tumultuous life circumstances, we always find a way to stabilize, to return to or find a new status quo.
But in some way, are we deluding ourselves? Do we subconsciously lower our standards for our lives by settling for “okay”?
An optimist believes that things will be great, not just okay.
A pessimist believes that things will go south, because that's how most things in life go.
A realist believes that we are unable to discern any outcome as more likely than the other.
We’re none of these when we say things will be okay. We instead become stranded in limbo, suspended in an uncertain state of being where all we want is the pain to go away, and we’ll settle for any outcome where we just don’t have to bear the suffering any longer.
It's "okay" for the people that somehow manage to figure things out.
It's not "okay" for everyone else who didn't.
It allows us to hide from the reality of the fact that we have to make hard decisions. But the relief always quickly fades. And every time something bad happens to us, we can't keep trying to hide. When things are very clearly not going to be okay, we can’t be in denial.
We have to learn to say something else. We have to learn to tell ourselves the truth.
"Everything's going to be okay" is a phrase that shields us from being resolute in our approach to confronting the unknown. We're settling for any outcome our life will throw at us. It is but a temporary relief as we continue to drift across a merciless ocean in search of solid ground—a brief respite from a seemingly relentless storm that will inevitably descend upon the horizon, dragging us back towards the currents. It’s a concession to the winds and the tides to wrest control of our lives.
For anyone who has been afflicted by suffering over and over and over again, these become repulsive, traumatic words of an empty, vain promise of a vague, uncertain future where the best outcome is merely being "fine,” “alright,” or “okay.” For those who have lost the battle, there couldn't have been worse words to have been betrayed by.
Until we decide to be firm and unwavering in our attitude,
until we understand the cause and purpose of the affliction and suffering,
nothing will change,
and we will have no say in our fate.
“Everything will be okay” is the mantra of the survivor
and was an empty promise to the fallen.
Posted on Thursday, January 5, 2023
Appears in
- the blizzard covers us all the sameBoth triumph and tragedy occur in our world, often without rhyme nor reason. A defining aspect of the human condition that almost all of us can understand is that while we have the agency to change our conditions and improve our chances of success, the world we live in is ultimately indiscriminate; the notion of "deserving," whether in our present life circumstances or our posthumous legacy, is a concept farfetched from the reality of our wayward universe.
- wayfinding—for yourself, and for othersThe hapless cycle of trial and error and the wearisome vacillation between starting and quitting isn't a rite of passage. Not everything has to be learned the hard way. Where our distinct paths in this uncertain life converge, we can—and should—help each other along the way.
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- For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.Ecclesiastes 1:18
- I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behi…Ocean Vuong
Posted on Thursday, January 5, 2023
Criticism
Posted on Monday, February 27, 2023
Last updated on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 4:27 PM
The act of criticizing someone undeniably carries a hefty negative connotation.
Many of our preconceived notions of criticism entail personal feuds or grudges, scolding, chastising, humiliation, ridicule, and the shame, embarrassment, fear, or resentment that these actions inevitably precipitate.
But why is this? If we think about it, offering constructive feedback to others is perhaps one of the greatest, most generous contributions we can make in someone else’s life. It is the act of sharing our wisdom, of connecting the lessons learned from our own experiences with those of others, of implicitly declaring our belief in the value of each of our individual perspectives of life.
When we criticize with a sense of interpersonal resentment, when we seek to belittle or disparage others because of who they are or what they represent, what are we really doing? When the criticism becomes personal, when it becomes about teaching someone a lesson, when we predispose ourselves to hate someone—the very essence of someone’s existence and being—and not what they did, what is it that we’re trying to do? No one consciously and actively chose in their childhood precisely which personality traits and characteristics they would take and ultimately what type of person they would become. So are we leading a crusade against the circumstances of their upbringing? Their family members and friends? Their parents? The parents of their parents? Are we shaking our fist at God or the universe because they conspired to create such a flawed being capable of making such terrible mistakes? When we’re all a work in progress as imperfect, flawed, and defective beings, what grounds do we have to hold negative feelings against anyone without being hypocritical?
And when we receive criticism, why are we so inclined to feel fear, shame, or often resentment in return, when it is precisely what we need to improve as human beings? Why do we not merely judge the criticism based on the validity of its points and not on the person saying it or how they are saying it? If it’s not useful based on our analysis, then we can simply let go and move on. And if it is useful, we have all the more to gain.
There is nothing rational about assigning negative emotion to the giving or the receiving of criticism. So the question I wish to posit today is this: what is the ultimate social function of this interconnectedness between emotion and criticism? Do we need to be scolded, humiliated, ridiculed, or chastised—causing us to feel shame, fear, or resentment in the process—to learn the important lessons of life? Is there something about the inherent nature of heated conversations and deep-seated grudges, something about the shame and embarrassment we inflict that enables progress in and of itself, thus rationalizing a seemingly irrational, shortsighted, impulsive act? To what extent are these tendencies innately built into our psyche, and to what extent are they cultural?
Should you scold and potentially hit your child to teach them a lesson after they tried playing with fire?
Should you hold a grudge against coworkers that don’t do their fair share of the work?
Should you be angry at your spouse if they cheated on you?
Should you send angry tweets to a divisive public figure that propagates toxic ideologies that you vehemently disagree with?
Should we publicly decry and humiliate child predators, war criminals, or human traffickers?
There are no easy answers to these questions—no way to circumvent the need to understand the minute nuances of each and every significant or insignificant situation we will encounter in our day-to-day life. No—I don’t believe that it is feasible to fully depersonalize criticism; as humans, the constraints of our psychological design make it nearly impossible to extricate the feelings from both the criticism we give and receive alike. But what we can do is ask ourselves how to better criticize, how to evoke the emotions we want to evoke, and how to stimulate positive change while working within the confines of the human psyche. The first step is to empathize with the people who are on the receiving end of these forms of derisive criticism—to ask ourselves if the amount of suffering and mental distress we will inflict is worth the apparent value of teaching them a lesson.
It is when we neglect to ask ourselves these questions—when we impulsively and indiscriminately criticize according to our own whim—that we risk degrading our relationships with one another in an already chaotic, uncertain world. We have the potential to devolve from productive civil discourse into senseless and angry banter, from teaching your child to be an upright, respectable human being into inflicting lifelong childhood trauma that will sap them of countless opportunities in life, from offering a helping hand to someone in need into pushing them to the brink of depression or suicide.
Posted on Monday, February 27, 2023
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- right thing, right nowIn every moment, we fight a constant battle against complacency. Things are not okay, and we should never pretend that they are.
- wayfinding—for yourself, and for othersThe hapless cycle of trial and error and the wearisome vacillation between starting and quitting isn't a rite of passage. Not everything has to be learned the hard way. Where our distinct paths in this uncertain life converge, we can—and should—help each other along the way.
Along the same lines
Posted on Monday, February 27, 2023
Pathfinding is at the core of creating with significance, and finding the path is largely the work of finding non-paths until the path is evident.
That doesn’t mean that we’re sloppy. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite.
There’s a rigor to this exploration, a nonrandom way to explore the possible.And that doesn’t mean we ship junk. We can make mistakes together, in private often, testing and measuring and improving.
And then we can ship the work. Work we’re proud of. Deliver it to people who care and begin again.
Added in 2026
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Added in 2026
If you do not know what port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable.
When the ending is unknown, and the distance is unknown, that’s when you know who the fuck you are.
Added in 2026
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- Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.James Baldwin
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- The golden rule—treat others as you would treat yourself.\ The internal golden rule—treat yours…unattributed
- Well being is good luck, or good character.Marcus Aurelius
- The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with you…Heraclitus
Added in 2026