I sat next to my friend N on the bus to our sixth annual cabin retreat. We watched the Connecticut trees fly by as we caught up on each other’s lives: work, relationships, health.

N asked me how my eye was doing, and I asked him how his back was. He said, “I don’t know if you felt this way, but I remember the hardest part was grappling that I’m in my early twenties and my body isn’t working. All my friends are playing sports, working hard, getting into relationships, and I’m struggling just to get through each day. My body will never be the same, yet I have so much life ahead.”

As he said this, I was brought back to last July. When I laid on my bed in Tahoe and stared at the lines on my fingers, opening and closing my eyes.

When I first started to grieve my body.

-

February 28th, 2025 was the last day I could see through both of my eyes. When I woke up the next day, the white in my left eye had turned red. The inner corner poured with tears. And as the week passed, my left eye went blind. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, let alone a person standing in front of me. After many painkillers, corneal tissue samples, and boxes of tissues, I learned that I had gotten a rare amoebic eye disease.

From March to June, I battled for my sight. I dropped amoeba killer in my eye every hour. I cut out black sticky notes for my left glasses lens to shield my battlefield from daylight. I laid in my bed and alternated between icing my eye with bags of frozen corn and soothing it with hot compresses.

Gradually, I went from seeing no hand to a blur of flesh to five wiggly fingers. The red in my eye faded and the pain disappeared. In July, I stopped taking my medication, and when my symptoms didn’t return, we knew the amoebas were slain. But every morning, when I opened my left eye and tried to see the veins in my fingers, the wrinkles in my knuckles, the line where my nail bed ended and the white of my nail began—I saw none.

Up until July, when I asked my doctor when my vision would return to normal, she would tell me it was too soon to tell whether my poor vision was due to inflammation or scar. I remember the day when her answer changed. It started like the dozen office visits before. I sat in the back room with the lights off and my face pressed against a slit-lamp microscope. She looked at my eyeball and said, “There is a scar in the center of your cornea. Your vision will never be the same.”

My heart sank into my chest. After months of fighting for myself, hoping, believing that I would recover, that all this pain and lost vision was temporary, I felt defeated. But in the next moment, I took a deep breath. I drained the tears from my eyes, and I picked myself back up like I did every day before.

“Is there any medication I could take to remove the scarring?”

“What about any surgical procedures?”

“Will it naturally fade over time?”

She said that there was no medication that could remove the scarring. That the surgical procedure I could do involved a corneal transplant, one that had risks of rejection and future surgeries for the rest of my life. That the scar could fade over the next decade but never back to clarity at which I saw the world back in February.

The weekend rolled by. And I still went on my planned Tahoe trip with my two close friends. We hiked around the lake, and I watched as they marveled at the lush green pines. I looked at them too. But, where they saw one tree, I saw a blurry green blob overlayed a crisp fir. My two decades of learning to be present with people was defeated by my self pity. I thought:

“I will never be able to see trees like I used to.”

“I will never be able to walk down stair steps, freely, like I used to.”

“My friends will joyfully leap from stone to stone across the river, and I will always swallow fear looking at the stone in front of me.” (My depth perception is now poor.)

Back at the cabin, my friends barbecued some incredible food that we shared around the dinner table. As we chatted, I looked deeply into their eyes. They probably thought I was making intentional eye contact, but instead I was feeling envious of their clear eyes, admiring what I had lost. That night, I climbed into bed and pulled the covers to my chin. The tears began to fall like they did every night before, and I continued to hold myself like I did every night before. At some point, my tears ran out, and I decided that I wanted to search for hope. I began Googling “cornea scaring treatments”. I asked ChatGPT for paper summaries on the latest scaring medications. On the car ride back, I texted all my doctor friends hoping they could connect me with someone who could help. I told myself that the fight wasn’t over, that this was the moment when my eye was still actively recovering and maybe that meant that if I had a chance to fix it all, it was now.

For a moment in my whole eye saga, I felt lucky. One of the text messages I sent connected me to a professor who had a potential drug candidate that he’d seen some success with in clearing cornea scars. On a Wednesday morning, I flew to Cleveland to meet his colleague. I was excited to receive a prescription for the medication but sobered to receive a warning that the vast majority of patients who tried it saw little improvement.

Every morning on my new medication, I’d hear my alarm go off and pray that today was the day my vision would be better. Then, I’d open my left eye. I’d look at the veins in my hands. The wrinkles on my knuckles. The line between my nail bed and the white of my nail.

But I saw none.

August passed. September. October. With fleeting hope, I woke up early and commuted an hour to see yet another eye doctor. A technician dilated my eye, and for a couple of hours, my pupil became larger than my scar, to the point where I could see outside of it.

I walked back into the waiting room, and suddenly I saw one chair. One side table. One painting on the wall. The room looked so vibrant, it hurt my eyes. I sat down, and without turning my head, I could see the person sitting to the left of me, the blue in her shirt, the grey in her hair. I looked down at my own fingers and closed my right eye. I saw the veins in my fingers, the wrinkles in my knuckles, the line where my nail bed ended and the white of my nail began. I cried. I remembered what I had lost.

Then the new year arrived. February, March—a year since I lost my vision. April, May, June. Every day in between, I showed up to work, I looked at my computer screen, I saw two windows, a blurry one with no words layered over a crisp one with meaning. I wrote code. I launched products. On the weekends, I sat in all my favorite coffee shops and wrote my now 19th consecutive monthly essay since January of last year. I had rich conversations with my friends. I laughed with my sister.

Last week, I walked to grab coffee with a friend, and she asked me how my eye was doing. For a second, I wondered why she was asking me this question, and then I smiled. I said that up until she asked, I hadn’t thought about my eye for what felt like months, and that I’m amazed by how I’ve forgotten that the way I see isn’t normal.

As we walked down Market Street, I looked at the doubled buildings, the overlayed words in the street signs, the blur of people walking past my left shoulder. I searched my body for a jolt of fear, a wave of sadness, for a view in front of me that I disliked.

But I saw none.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my July essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Luke, Rishub, Chris, Andrew and Amy!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

Empathizing with others’ grieving processes. A month doesn't go by that I don't meet a friend who tore her ACL skiing, or a coworker who fractured his ankle playing soccer. And as they tell me their story, I imagine the moment when they broke their body, when they put their life on pause, when they started to heal but never back to normal, when they watched people around them do the things they now feel vulnerable doing, and the days they continued to smile and rediscover the wholeness of their body. I feel that I’ve unlocked a universal human experience, and that I’ve never felt closer to people in these conversations.

2.

Waiting for ideas to ripen. I’ve been thinking about writing this piece since the beginning of this year, but I always felt there was more to the story that I hadn’t lived yet. This month, when I met my friend for coffee, I finally felt that I had lived through the resolution, that my ideas and reflections were fully ripe to share.

3.

Life is shaped more like a hunting game than a basketball game. I increasingly feel that most of life is showing up, putting in effort, enjoying the narratives in your head during the process, and shooting when the time is right.

Then I reflected on the things I regularly consume. The Aritzia sweaters I bought that pilled after a couple wears. The overpriced salad bowl I ate from Sweetgreen. I bought the things everyone saw and talked about. The things that were just easy and cheap enough to produce and just attractive enough that I would exchange my money for it.

But something about these things feel so different from the people I fill my life with. My friend Andrew pictures what it would look like for us to be able to order custom medications for ourselves, how we would trust it, how we would be able to afford it. After watching Andrew work, I feel hopeful that there is a person out there focused on creating a great recovery experience for me. My sister Joyce wants to see more people in loving relationships. I feel inspired seeing her imagine a world where people no longer complain about dating and have the heart and communication skills to deeply connect with each other.

And so in these stark worlds where I’m drowning in heartless, unimaginative things but surrounded by people who choose to believe we can experience better, I want to say:

Let’s all choose to do the harder things.

What are the harder things?

In any industry, there are easier and harder things to create. The harder things are the projects that take greater effort, span longer timelines, and have more unknowns while the easier things take fewer resources, are fast to get out the door, and have been done many times.

Let’s take the TV show industry for example. The History Channel was launched in 1995, showcasing documentaries on WWII, the Roman empire, and the origins of different religions to help us understand the world that came before us. Now, it releases unscripted reality TV shows like Pawn Stars where two men judge whether objects are valuable or not and Ancient Aliens where another group of men debate the validity of UFO sitings. The Discovery Channel was launched in 1985 with the slogan “Explore Your World”, showcasing wildlife documentaries with close up shots of emperor penguins and baby sloths. In the 2000s, The Discovery Channel then changed its slogan to “Entertain Your Brain” and now spotlights reality shows like Deadliest Catch.

Why? Fabricated information is easier to make. It is cheaper and faster to create a TV show where the storyline and set is entirely fabricated than it is to send wildlife videographers to the Seychelles to catch a video of the giant trevally (an incredible fish that eats birds).

It is cheaper and faster to generate scripts about alien conspiracies than it is to create a documentary that researches and animates the Byzantine empire.

Some friends of mine will argue here that media companies are choosing to create the easier things because the average person’s taste is not very sophisticated. But I would argue that there is still demand for the shot of the giant trevally jumping out of the ocean to swallow a bird (the video I linked has over 18M views!) and the visuals of Byzantine calvary in their historically accurate lamellar armor (a staple of every middle school European history class). The feeling of awe and wonder that the latter content creates is natural to humans, and I would wager that if we had more opportunities to feel wonder, and broadly to experience more complex creations, we would choose to experience them.

Why do the harder things now?

Staying in the realm of content creation, I close my eyes and imagine that there are three vertically stacked shelves on a wall holding varying complexities of content. The first shelf holds the “let me get my tripod and talk to the camera from my room” videos. The second shelf holds the more ambitious projects, a short film, an original musical, an animated series. And the third shelf holds the most ambitious projects, the Christopher Nolan feature films of the world.

Everyone can reach the first shelf. We can all film a video of us getting ready or interviewing people on the street. And so most people who are interested in content creation will flock to create first shelf content. This makes the first shelf super crowded and competitive—every day I see yet another person in my YouTube shorts holding a tiny mic, doing a voice over red carpet looks.

The second shelf feels much more distant. The short film, the original musical, the animated series. They require doing research, writing a plot, editing and revising, more choices, and more intention. And what if whatever I produce doesn’t land with people? Forget climbing to the second shelf, I’m going to stay on the first one.

But then enters AI. Suddenly, it is so much cheaper and faster to do research, write an essay, create video assets, analyze data, design graphics, and execute computer tasks. And this brings down the complexity of both the historically easy AND hard projects, the harder ones comparatively more.

The two minute get ready with me and street interview were easy to create and still are. The short film, original musical, and animated series were difficult but now feel closer to reach. The time it would take for me to research a concept can now be cut in half. The graphics and editing that would require me to hire someone can now be done myself with some patience and prompting.

With AI, you can choose to have a “get rich quick” mindset and increase the number of first shelf content you create for the chance it goes viral. Or you can look at this technology shift and see an abundance of ladders laying on the ground. You can choose reach for the second shelf content, to create the things that always felt too big or something you could only do if you had experience and stepping stones.

I dream of the day when I wake up and see my life filled with second and third shelf things. The things that someone sat and dreamed about. The things someone obsessed over, every detail chosen and placed.

I hope we all choose to do the harder things.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my June essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Leona, Blake, Orestis, Alex, Maya, Andrew and Amy!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

Switching seats on the Titanic. I was sitting with my friend in Alamo Square park when he brings up that his team at work, a team he was once so excited about, was getting disbanded. I felt disbelief. How did this happen? Could you talk to all the people on the team? Figure something out, target another launch? He kept describing all the efforts he tried, and I kept asking questions. Then he says that, at this point, he was just switching seats on the Titanic. Suddenly I understood where he was—an incredible analogy.

2.

I want to rewrite my last essay. I make a promise to myself every month that I will publish an essay. Last month, I choose to call my essay done, the phrase “perfect is the enemy of done” ringing in the back of my head. But after I posted it, I felt disappointed. There was a section I had tussled over for hours:

I can choose to feel like a shrimp in an unmovable ocean. Or, I can choose to believe that everything I notice matters, that my influence on our product is as great as my ability to recognize the things I can touch.

But believing this is only half the picture.

And the transition I wrote here still doesn’t feel right to me. I contemplate whether I should’ve posted something I wasn’t proud of, and remind myself that even though my writing is public, I can always go back and rewrite it.

I spent twenty hours writing What Are Humans to Do After AI?. I spent twenty hours staring at the skylights in Dandelion Chocolate and walking down the streets of the Mission, picturing what knowledge work will look like a decade from now. After writing and rewriting, I finally called my essay done and laid it to rest. But the ideas kept burning in the back of my mind.

I found myself incredibly impatient at my day job. I work as a software engineer at a company that builds infrastructure for analyzing company data. My projects to help companies process millions of documents felt intellectually stimulating, but what about this future of knowledge work I so vividly imagined?

And so, I went home and started a doc titled: The Place to Do All Knowledge Work.

The doc was simple. I first wrote out what questions a marketing analyst, data engineer, research scientist focus on in their jobs today and what I hoped they would ask if they had more powerful tools. Then I asked myself:

“What does the tool look like?”

“What technologies and resources have to exist to create this tool?”

“Which ones does my company excel at? Which ones do we need to work on?”

“What is an end to end workflow that, if worked, proves that my product and technology hypotheses are correct?”

“What’s the best sequencing for what to work on? What can I start doing today?”

The answer to that last question is where I began. From my doc, I concluded that there was a set of workflows that my company’s products could not do today, and if we invested in X, we would be a big step closer to the fully autonomous task execution I imagined.

I started sending my doc to my teammates, and asked if they knew anyone relevant. I went on walks and got on video calls with every tech lead referred to me. I walked them through how I concluded to build X, listened to their reactions, and asked for artifacts to help me build context. After hours, I used coding agents to work through design docs. I took the code pointers I was given, ran each team’s product and evaluation benchmarks locally, and played around with the product. On my commute home, I read papers and looked at how other companies approached the problems I started to notice. After about seven conversations and twenty hours mining our docs and codebase, I had a full landscape of what each team had built, how their products worked, how they performed, and why we still couldn’t accomplish the workflows I wanted to see. From there, I identified what I believed we needed to invest in next and split my time between my existing projects and my proposed one.

In the midst of my side quest, I found myself in the office at 10pm. The floor was silent. The ceiling lights had turned off. Alone, I looked past my monitor at the San Francisco skyline, grinning like a maniac. I felt a chaotic sense of power. A feeling of being unstoppable.

I felt like everything is on the table.

Our product home screen. I find it to be overwhelming. A new user with a task in mind wouldn’t know where to start. Right now, I can screenshot our home screen, throw it into a coding agent, discuss why it feels overwhelming, find the most recent contributors, propose my updates, and upon alignment, ship the change that helps people get started faster.

Our data science agent. I asked it to edit some dashboards and it couldn’t figure out how to speed up the loading time of my queries. Right now, I can use a coding agent to find the data science agent skills, do some prompt engineering, add new test cases to the relevant evals, verify my changes, and contribute code that makes the product faster for everyone.

My company has twelve thousand employees and at least thirty products. We have many processes, legal, security, scheduled releases, and a heck ton of code. I can choose to feel like a shrimp in an unmovable ocean. Or, I can choose to believe that everything I notice matters, that my influence on our product is as great as my ability to recognize the things I can touch.

But believing this is only half the picture.

Today, people love talking about being agentic. We point out that AI helps us learn quickly. That now, we can just do things.

But, when doing something is as easy as a natural language prompt, I fear that more things will be done, but not many more things will be done well. There is a difference between “I have a spark of inspiration, let me vibe code it today” and “there is something I want people to experience, I feel opinionated about it, and now I know why I’m going to take the next step”.

I started writing What Are Humans to Do After AI? because I disliked the hopeless AI doomer energy that permeated my conversations with my friends, and I felt confused why I didn’t agree with them. And so, I sat with myself in Dandelion Chocolate, for hours and hours thinking about how knowledge work is changing. Every sentence I edited and re-edited made it clearer to me what I wanted my future job to feel more or less like. I developed a bar for what I want people to experience. My desire to reach that bar and my distaste toward an unthoughtful alternative gave me the energy to write The Place to Do All Knowledge Work after a long day in the office.

There are so many things you can just do. There are only so many things you can care about. Everything is on the table. All that matters now is what you care to change.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my May essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Jessica, Blake, Jacob, Nathan, Amy, and Andrew!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

Protecting people’s brains. I have this funny imagery in my head after I converse with someone and glean that they have a very cool, daring, optimistic view of the world. I imagine taking their brain out of their head and holding it the way a young girl holds a rabbit in her arms. I feel that some people have incredible world views, and I almost want to physically protect them, so as to prevent them from becoming jaded.

2.

I don’t want my phone. I’m sitting on the airplane waiting to take off, and from my aisle seat view, all I see is a column of thumbs swiping on screen after screen. The person directly to my left is flipping through lipstick color swatches. The person in front of her is watching some influencer on Instagram. All I want to do is go back to early 2000s and live a day when no one had a smart phone, and we just sat on the plane with ourselves.

3.

Wear a wig. Put on a temporary tattoo. A good friend of mine recently turned 40 and threw an 80s themed birthday party where he required everyone to wear a wig and to put on some very large Americana tattoos. I didn’t know most of the people, but sitting next to someone wearing a neon orange leotard or a full chest and sleeve of temporary tats makes me feel like I’m just another human next to another human.

At the beginning of this month, I got lunch with a new friend (we’ll call him M). I recounted to M the last essay I wrote and my reflections on my week-long staycation, and to each story I shared, M responded with a series of thoughts that hit at the crux of what I was experiencing.

For example, I told M how I had a friend who showed up for me when I got my eye infection last March, and even though in total we have only been friends for a little over a year, this friend is now integral to my life.

M asked me if I’d heard about the two words ancient Greeks used to describe time. I said no, and he proceeded to explain that the first word is chronos which is viewing time in measurable, sequential units: each unit of time is the same as the next. The second is kairos which is viewing time as weighted: one minute of time can be more valuable than the next.

I asked him to say more, and he set up a scenario. Imagine your friend calls you at 2 AM. They are at the airport and for whatever reason they can’t get home and need someone to pick them up. You’re in bed, hair messy, eyes crusty. The warmth of the sheets weighs over you as you decide whether to drag yourself across the 101 or ask them to call someone else.

If you choose to haul your ass to the airport and pick up your friend, you show your friend that you can be the first person they call when they are at a low. The four hour drive to and back becomes a kairos moment—a moment that creates a deep trust and appreciation in your relationship that forty hours of yapping at parties could not.

And so, when M is put in a situation where he has to make sacrifices for his friends and family, he easily chooses them because he views them as opportunities; he knows that those kairos moments create deeper connections than any others.

We continued to talk about how I started my writing practice to dedicate time to understanding my confusion which he related to with his practice of truth seeking while building companies. Every single conclusion that I derived from first principles, M was able to map to something he had also thought through before.

I feel that M is naturally a deep thinker, a tuned listener, and great at connecting ideas.

Another one of my friends (we’ll call him H) feels effortless in a different way. We first met when I interned at his company in 2020. Last February, H texted me out of the blue and invited me to poker night at his place. I told him I had never played, and he insisted that I could learn with his friends. After poker night, we caught up over coffee, and he invited me to his hack and hike trip in Tahoe. One evening in the cabin, I asked how his company had changed in the last five years since I’d been there, and what he had learned. He sat down with me and pulled up slides on his laptop, walked through written entries of his ideas, even shared some company secrets that he trusted I would keep to myself for my own learning.

H introduced me to his partner who I now work on side projects with every month—she has become one of my closest friends in the city and someone who has changed my view on why I create. The copy of On Writing by Stephen King (now one of my all time favorite books!) on my bookshelf is borrowed from H and his partner. The camo hat hanging on my door was gifted by H to commemorate the time he brought me to experience Bass Pro Shops for the first time.

H is so naturally giving. In knowledge. In time. In people. And in the physical things he has. My life is filled with everything H has shared with me, and I’ve never once felt that H expected something in return. Wanting people to experience what he knows and what he loves comes naturally to H.

How did my friends become this way? Did M come out of the womb with a hunger for connecting experiences to ideas? Was H’s generosity learned from his parents, teachers, and friends? Did both of them wake up one day and choose to be these ways? And of all the behaviors one can learn, why did they choose to learn these?

I think about the behaviors that come naturally to me. Acting selflessly. Appreciating people for who they are. Respecting their autonomy. Deriving my world view from my first-person experiences. Building and trusting my own judgement. Being enthusiastic about life.

I identified these as natural behaviors because I am allergic to acting in an opposing way. Two days ago a friend asked me to hold his backpack when he went to the restroom. On the way out, he joked whether I had looked at his books and knick knacks. I laughed and said that I stole his company secrets, but in the back of my head I thought, “he asked me to watch his bag, so I watched his bag. If I was meant to see something inside, he would share it with me.” I believe people will share their lives with me, and I respect how much and in what way.

Of all of these behaviors, introspection runs most on autopilot for me. In fact, when I polled my friends for what behaviors they felt came naturally to me, more than half of them pointed out how it is “very natural for me to self reflect”, that I’m “naturally inquisitive”, and like to “probe at myself to understand why I feel the way I feel”.

Today, I woke up and on my car ride to my friend’s marathon race, I thought about how there are so many things I want to create and get better at, and I pondered whether I want to work on whatever I feel most excited by in the moment or strategically focus and sequence. Last night, while I was working on this essay, I thought about whether my selflessness came from the way my mom treated me growing up or if there was some realization I had that makes it obvious to me that often the best way to support someone is to sacrifice yourself (and after reflecting, I believe I learned a little bit of this from partner dancing!). The idea for this essay came while I was sitting at my desk, dissecting why I’m so impressed by the specific effortless behaviors my friends hold.

I wasn’t born this way. I remember my parents tried to get me to journal when I was in elementary school and they laughed at how each page was a recount of how I went to swim practice and how I didn’t want to do my Chinese homework. The earliest I can remember having an active, reflective inner monologue was starting in high school when my conversations with friends became less about “What happened over the weekend?” and more about “Why do I feel so stressed about test scores? Do I really believe my destiny is hinged on a number?”

College is when I deliberately learned to reflect, and I journaled as a practice to investigate all the moments my body did not feel at ease. I remember pacing around my freshman dorm room on a phone interview for an investing role and immediately after the call, I opened my navy blue journal and went through why the conversation felt off and why I didn’t think I got the role. Flip a couple pages, and I have another entry from when I learned I had actually gotten the role, and how I learned what imposter syndrome means.

I didn’t wake up and decide I wanted to become great at introspecting. I just followed my curiosity, asked questions to myself, and tried answering why I felt anxious, confused, excited, and inspired for twelve years and now introspection is part of who I am. M likely practiced listening to people and connecting his own to theirs for years and years. H likely noticed when people shared with him and the opportunities he could share with others. And now we’ve reinforced ourselves to be these ways.

One of my quests in life is to enjoy people to the fullest. The way an art critic who has studied art their whole life learns the beauty in a painting I cannot see, I reflect on the people in my life to distill what makes them beautiful to me. I feel lucky to experience the introspection that comes naturally to me, the idea-connecting engrained in M, the generosity of H, and I am even luckier to experience the parts of us that are still becoming.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my April essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Judy, Jessica, Nishant, Leona, Amy and Andrew!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

You don’t always need to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. My sister texted me on a random Wednesday evening saying she wasn’t feeling great physically and emotionally. I was at the office past seven, trying to complete several projects. I felt tired. I hadn’t eaten yet. I still had a slew of work to do. But instead, I got out of my seat, ordered take out, and then Ubered to her place. Was I 100% present with her in conversation? No. Did I feel genuinely excited to be there? Half half. I felt like I was squeezing my brain to be awake and helpful to her.

Regardless, she told me she appreciated that I came to visit. We don’t have to have our lives figured out and feel 100% or even 75% before we can show up for people. Sometimes we can only give so much. But believing you can’t give unless you are perfect, that you need to fully help yourself before helping others, really means that you are choosing not to help people when they need it.

You don’t always need to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

2.

Editing my speech. After I write the first draft of my essay, I spend a couple hours deleting words. I do this to be concise and to say things more confidently. For example, in my first draft, I wrote:

“And not everyone who has a conversation with M will clock this natural behavior and feel as impressed as I do. Some people may identify his behavior squarely as intelligence. Some may find his responses to be overly rational or analytical and therefore feel that M is missing what they are trying to share. But I feel the “I get what you are pointing out and here’s how I’ve thought about that point” nature of his responses to be a joy to experience, and I think it is so fascinating that of all the skills and traits one can be, M chose to learn to be consistent at this one.”

I replaced this with:

“I feel that M is naturally a deep thinker, a tuned listener, and great at connecting ideas.”

Hopefully you feel that the second sentence is overwhelmingly better. It is an example of: tell people what something is instead of what it is not. Because I practice these principles when I edit my writing each month, I have also started applying these principle when I speak. I had a discussion with my technical lead on what we should focus on building this quarter, and I resisted the urge to first ramble about what we should not build. I started with what we should build. Then what we should deprioritize.

Uneasy, when my friend and I walked out of the gym and he said, “I’m selling all my stock and switching jobs. This is the last decade I can make money.”

Uneasy, when I caught up with two college mentees who told me, “We decided to drop out to start a company. This might be our last chance.”

Uneasy, when I met two separate friends for coffee who both said, “I think software engineering won’t exist in two years. I’m thinking about switching to policy.”

I sat down at my dinner table and my roommate said, “We should buy land and get citizenship in other countries.” I walked into my sister’s apartment and her partner shouted from the couch, “Jane, we must avoid the permanent underclass!”

A lot of this is fun and jokes, perhaps a way to cope through the absurdity of how fast our jobs have changed with AI. A lot of this is the product of living in the San Francisco tech bubble.

But it’s also not nothing. This week, I wrote less than 30 lines of code by hand. I started a dozen experiments with a poorly grammared sentence and woke up to fully finished benchmarks and recommendations that took me days a year ago. I’ve even started typing only the first three letters of words, knowing AI will figure out the rest.

Will I lose my software engineering job a year from now? Will a 24/7 always on computer always be more productive than me? Smarter than me? Are the days of the 6 figure, 9-to-5 big tech job over?

These are all plausibly true. But deciding “we are doomed” and surrendering to the catastrophic narrative of the omniscient AI feels too easy. It is easy to assert that the world will end. It is harder to assert what we want the world to look like in ten years.

I challenge us to be expansive. To think more creatively.

Will work look different? Yes. Will humans need to rise to the occasion and change what we do and how we create for each other? Yes. Will it be difficult? Absolutely.

But I think we all have it within us, and I believe AI is about to make our work a lot more fun.

To be human is to create for each other.

During my senior year of college, I studied with an anthropology professor at the University of Oxford. One afternoon, we went to the Pitt Rivers Museum, an anthropology and archaeology museum at the center of the university. I remember walking into a deep room with backlit displays of human skeletons, glass cases of woven baskets, a scatter of etched stones and arrowheads, masks with shells and beads, coffins, pots, costumes, jewelry. It wasn’t unlike other museums I’ve been too. I’ve often looked at such physical remains and thought to myself, “wow these are some well preserved things”.

But then my professor stopped and looked back at me with an uncontrollable smile—”We made all of these things!”

That turned out to be a poignant moment in my life.

I looked back at the display cases and felt, so suddenly, a new appreciation for humans.

We create stuff! No other animal does this anywhere close to the same extent. And we continue to create more and more, building upon what the humans before us created with even greater complexity—cultures and languages, computers and cures. This room was just a small piece of evidence for what is so extraordinary about humans: we create things for ourselves and others.

I spent a semester writing papers about this phenomenon. Some scientists, much more researched than me, argue that its our increased cognitive ability that makes us creative and problem solving. Some point out how homo sapiens were uniquely possessive about their creations. How we would tinker with a stone, carry it around, and share it with other humans while other animals would forget their tools and create new ones from scratch each time.

In any case, everywhere you look is evidence that to be human is to create for each other. So long as we feel the affects of our choices on ourselves and other people, we will continue dreaming up ways to make our fellow humans feel something and to help ourselves be felt. Infinite intelligence is as boundless as the towering mountains, unpredictable creatures, and endless oceans on Earth. We turned these things into stone tools to protect ourselves and costumes to experience the lives of those we don’t know. And we will continue to use AI to protect ourselves and to experience more of the life we don’t know yet.

The dream job.

I dream of the day when my job is to wake up, sit at a desk, access this all knowing AI portal, and start asking it to simulate all the ways it can put my ideas out into the world. And because executing any one of these plans can cost many resources and cause irreversible changes, my job as a human is to work with other humans to choose the best plan to execute for people today and the people that come after.

I intentionally point out that humans will be the “go button” pressers. There is always one state of the world at each point in time, and we want to choose what that is because only we will feel the effects of our decisions—the AI never will1. The time someone spends growing up before they get a job is no longer a period of technical skill building, but rather a period of understanding and exploring what we want human life to be. We focus less on learning how to change the world, and instead focus more on forming opinions about what we want to experience in the world.

I often think about how incredible it is that no one has lived the same life. How your unique n years of indeterministic, compounding experiences are the most valuable asset to yourself, the people closest to you, and if projected at scale, the world. How I began to fall in love with writing when my 10th grade English teacher showed me how Aldous Huxley described birth with the colors and sounds of death. How I learned to deeply value and commit to friendships when my friend Jessica chose to eat with me the second day of college and every day after. How I discovered that recovering from illness is truly a battle after I woke up to blindness in one eye.

It is the culmination of all these moments that give me opinions about what I want other people to experience. I want people to enjoy my inner thoughts and their own when reading my writing. I want people to feel the joy, comfort, and invincibility that I’ve experienced in my friendship with Jessica. I want people to feel powerful when they are fighting to recover from illness.

In a future where there is no barrier to knowledge, expertise, and creation, I want companies to become congregations of people who care deeply about a specific aspect of human life—how we maintain health over time, how we stay sheltered, how we find love, how we power computers and data centers—and our work becomes sharing our formed opinions, using AI to simulate plans, debating which ones to execute, pressing the go button, and experiencing whether our efforts make each of these aspects of life better and richer for us.

How do we rise to the occasion?

On the path to reaching abundant expertise and execution, a lot of our day to day work will become automated, and we must adjust.

I see two arcs to grow along. The first is to become people of high trust. The second is to become people who dream.

Over the next two decades, AI will improve likely to the point where it can create outcomes as consistently as pressing 1+1 and receiving 2 on a calculator—we are already beginning to see that consistency with self-driving cars.

But in the process of getting to that point, humans will still be accountable for the outcomes of AI. A human will be responsible for determining when AI is ready to teach our kids, monitor our electrical grid, and diagnose patients autonomously because we know that if we make the wrong decision, we will feel pain.

The AI, it feels no pain. It has no life to lose. If it makes the wrong decision, all it can say is “You’re absolutely right!” and append feedback to its memory or model weights. When AI starts planning decisions that affect millions of lives, our job will be to understand, verify, and feel confident pressing go on those plans and to take responsibility for any lack of foresight. Our employability becomes how much we can be trusted to ensure the right outcome. The best way to improve at this is to take the decisions you make seriously and to want to make decisions yourself—are you be willing to stamp your name on a decision knowing that if you made the wrong call, X is at stake?

Today, creating new experiences falls to a team of junior people who analyze data and build product, with a leader who is held accountable for the outcome. Given that analysis and work is automated by AI, we must increase the number of changes and bets we make, otherwise analysts and builders risk being displaced.

Luckily, there continue to be endless problems that inspire change; we created the abstraction called money which gave us incentive to feed an entire world of people, but has also created loneliness, doubt, and greed. If executing work becomes trivial, can we look difficult problems like loneliness straight in the eye and create ways to help people enjoy being with each other? Can we create a world where people don’t feel alone?

If you wake up today and fear that AI will take your job, you can instead redirect your fear and be part of the solution. You can get into the practice of thinking about what in your n years of life you wish you experienced more or less of. You can become a person who dreams and is trusted to make those dreams a reality.

What do you want life to look like after AI?

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my March essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Jessica, Suchir, Randy, Amy, Andrew, Kunal, Lynne, Jacob, and Janice! Every single one of these people nudged my world view a little bit this month, and being with them makes my life more beautiful.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

Does our generation live too carefully? My friend Randy and I were chatting on top Salesforce park when he pointed out to me that our generation lives more carefully than our parents. I was taken aback. I see my parents as conservative, easily-worried people. But then I remembered how they moved from Shanghai to the US, without really knowing America. In contrast, I and the people around me are much more calculated. We pay a subscription to take our blood and tell us what to eat. We construct crystal balls and expeditions to craft a career with meaning and financial upside. We talk about how to maximize our 20s and how to have the most fun. I almost want to stop it all. And just live life.

2.

Living life. I know it sounds simple. But I am starting to feel it more. When I say I am living life, I don’t mean giving up my responsibilities and following my impulses. Instead, I find myself following my current curiosity, happiness, and rage rather than designing and chasing future me. That means following the rage I feel around healthcare—filling my ears with audiobooks about care navigation and stories from healthcare founders. That means exploring this new found easiness I felt while dating someone—talking to friends about how they feel love, writing about what it means to me, and enjoying it. I’m intensely following what I feel, and the phrases living fully and richly begin sticking to my inner eyelids. I am living life!

3.

Microdosing heartbreak. I experienced a breakup after being with someone for a month. While the conversation was unravelling, I cried into his shoulder, but I also smiled. I looked up at the stars and thought about what made him special to me. I enjoyed his warmth and said everything that came to my mind. When he walked me home, I held his hand and pointed to his name in the street signs—“Look, it’s you!”

I awoke the next day to heaviness in my chest. I let myself cry. I felt my heart shrivel. I gently wrapped my hands around my heart and walked to the coffee shop down the street. I treated myself to the latte I always liked, and I looked out the window. The sun highlighted his name in the street sign. I laughed. I wiped back tears. I forgot how the places and things you romanticize when you’re in love suddenly become painted in sorrow.

A week later, I sat at the same coffee shop, sipping on another latte. I looked out the window and my eyes met his name again. A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth, and with the sun shining, I chose to repaint the sign with the color of joy.

Some days I wake up, and I feel at rest. Like Newton’s first law—an object at rest stays at rest. I feel still in my life. I feel calm. I take care of my health. I take care of my friends and family.

That’s all there is.

Today, I woke up to some mild stomach pain. Not too bad. I committed to going on a hiking trip with some of my friends, so I got to their house 15 minutes before the agreed departure time, and together we hiked Point Reyes. I drank plenty of water. I only had a spoon of the buffalo milk ice cream as to not further upset my stomach. On the car ride there and back, we talked about how we’ve changed, how we played as children, and what we wanted to teach our own. The views were gorgeous. But even then, my care for my body and my friends painted my Sunday.

This is my life. If I blink a couple more times, I’ll wake up at 7am. I’ll eat a hard boiled egg and sip on some ginseng tea. I’ll drive my kids to Chinese school and run multiplication tables with them. I’ll call my mom while I sit in the car, waiting for school to end. And when she runs out of topics, I’ll bask in the sun glowing from the car windshield and read my partner’s writing. Caring for myself, caring for my loved ones comes naturally. I’m human.

Some days I wake up, and I feel in motion. Yesterday, I ran my four mile half marathon training run while listening to Stephen King’s Carrie. I ran home, I showered, I sat at my desk. I read the sticky note my sister put on my monitor:

“Lazy work creates lazy outcomes. Crazy work creates crazy outcomes. Be crazy.”

I looked at my screen. My eyes didn’t immediately focus. My scarred left eye overlaid blurred text over my right eye’s crisp letters. I sighed, I felt sad. I breathed in, I felt motivated. I remembered my conversation with my doctor. The one who told me that I’m lucky for how well I recovered. The same one who told me there was no way to cure my vision. No research he saw that was promising. No hope I could latch on to. I thought about the other people. A handful of my closest friends, some strangers in a Facebook group. They were told the same thing about their illnesses. I didn’t need a McKinsey market sizing exercise to know that I wasn’t alone. I felt that no one was going to advocate for us safely, with high integrity and care, with deftness in applying AI, if not me. I opened my project to help people fight through multi-month recoveries. I worked until midnight.

Some days, I wake up, and I feel inertia. My priorities are straight enough that I’m rarely in motion and fail to be at rest. But sometimes, I am at rest and feel resistant to being in motion. I feel happy just being with my people. Around them, I feel gentle, patient, and kind. A cat that tip toes across the room and curls up beside you. A running brook, flowing quietly amongst trees.

And in this moment, I feel distant from the part of me. The part that is eager, exasperated, ablaze. A dog that leads the chase. A canyon wall, reaching into the sky. But I know she’s there.

Origins.

My mother likes to say that I am a sweet girl. That whenever I got some desert like a chocolate chip cookie, I would break a piece and wait for my sister to come home so I could share it with her. As a kid, the only things that mattered to me were my family and my three friends. What my parents and my sister said, how my friends felt—that was my entire world.

Then in high school, I started developing a relationship with the world. I was nudged toward clubs that advertised “building robots to change the world”, “building companies to change the world”, “debating topics to change the world”. I read books like 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, The Kite Runner by authors who brought people, ideas, and inequities far from me close.

I remember in my 11th grade English class, we read Johnathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God—an impassioned sermon comparing sinners to spiders being held over a burning fire, the web held by God. We were instructed to write our own sermons, announcing something we believed in for our class to reflect on.

I stood in front of the class and urged my classmates to study entrepreneurship in high school. I said we needed to learn to fail amidst the boiling pot perfection of SAT scores and college applications. We needed to see that we could create for ourselves and others, and realize that that was all that really mattered. I believed we needed to bring entrepreneurship education everywhere and started our high school entrepreneurship club. I spent my summers teaching at startup camps. I gave lectures and played mock board member to students. I really believed in it.

The peak of my global mentality came in college. During my sophomore year, I returned home for winter break. I sat down at the dining table with my mom and sister. I remember my mom bringing up again that I’m naturally very sweet. And I remember rejecting it. I said I didn’t feel like a sweet person. The descriptor was incorrect. Just a week before, I had fired someone from a club because they weren’t meeting the expectations I set. I felt ruthless. I cared about getting things done. There were too many problems to solve and things to create. I excused myself from the dining table and went upstairs to work.

Then I graduated. I watched my friends make the choice to start companies. To stay in their offices instead of sleeping. To see their friends less, and their parents even less. In my own whirlwind of work trips, I woke up one day and lost my vision in my left eye to a rare disease. My sister, my friends, they all started coming over to my place multiple times a week, just to hang out with me while I sat around the house and recovered. I called my mom every day to tell her about my symptoms, to feel her next to me, fighting for my recovery. My parents, my sister, my friends—they became my whole world again. I loved just being with them and thinking about them. I made friends again with the girl who’s favorite part of her day was sharing her cookie with her sister. And now I wake up every day and choose to be her.

Mastering the forces.

Having lived both extremes, I have learned that I’m unwilling to wake up one day and see that I’ve built great things for millions of people at the expense of caring for myself and those closest to me.

But I also haven’t given up on my ambitions to work toward a mission greater than me.

It is objectively hard to balance caring for yourself, your partner, your kids, your parents, your siblings, your friends, and the people in the world. To believe you can do it all, especially well, is to be naive.

But I have friends, quite a bit older than me, who do work on projects and companies with ambitions far beyond themselves. Yet, they also nurture a rich life with the people they love. I know they aren’t perfect. They tell me about the nights they were impatient with their kids, and the mornings they forgot to embrace their partners. But I find the people that forwardly take on this challenge to master their local and global selves the people I most aspire to be.

I don’t ask them for their secrets. I’ve never understood how I wanted to live my life from someone else’s verbal wisdom. Instead, I find that I understand how I want to live when I touch, feel, think, and live life on my own.

And I’m understanding that the force that shifts me from rest to motion is one I control. One I can train. A muscle to be present with the people closest to me and bold when I create for people in the world. I choose to feel my sister’s emotions with her, to hug my parents, to smile with them, to tell my friends how they make me feel. As much as I choose to design great software, to have conversations with strangers about their health recovery processes, and to believe that I can help people recover from seemingly incurable diseases.

My life is to master both.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my February monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Amy, Andrew, Annie, and Leona.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. I had a bit where I was thinking it could be fun to compare my at rest self to Monet’s Impression Sunrise and my in motion self to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. But then I decided this was more of a fun visual than honest. I would love to read all the parts that don’t make it into my favorite books.

2. It’s probably unadvisable to let someone or even an AI read your writing before you’ve finished a first draft. People, and now LLMs, will try to find meaning in bits of your story that you didn’t see meaning in, and this can distract you from writing what you see.

3. I am very excited about consumer AI. And I think we need to think carefully about how we create natural language interfaces. For example, I think switching from a free form chat with bubbles to screens with single generated questions displayed one at a time builds a more unidirectional relationship, the user always answering. And I think this can be an arguably safer experience.

4. Your will to think about things. I’m noticing what I naturally have a strong will to think about, how I live my life being one of them as I’ve written about here. Building relationships with people is another.

Looking for more? See last month’s essay →

I got eye surgery last week. Back when I first scheduled this procedure in September, I called my mom to give her the update. She immediately blocked off her calendar, bought plane tickets to arrive in San Francisco the day before my surgery, and started a list of things to bring me. Sunglasses. Face masks. Daikon. And other Asian ingredients.

A previous me would have objected to these efforts, as I did when I first started my eye saga. Last March, I was endowed with an amoebic eye infection that gave me a bloodshot eye paired with stinging tears and hourly orbital headaches. My mom offered to fly to San Francisco to take care of me, but I told her I was okay. I was on work leave. I spent most of my day napping on the couch and waking up to drop liquids into my eye at an hourly interval.

DoorDash planted noodle soup on my doorstep exactly at dinner time. Instacart replaced my Tylenol bottle when it was gone. Uber came to my door to get me to my doctor’s appointments. ChatGPT translated all my doctor’s medical notes and drew charts, scheduling my medications. Chat was even there to console me when I woke up in pain at 3am. As was the ice pack I got from my Weee! delivery. My pharmacy was a 10 minute walk from my house—a great side quest for me to get fresh air. Heck, if I ever needed to go to the ER, I could walk a block to the 7 bus and be there in 4 stops.

What was my mom to do? Take time off work, her two precious weeks of PTO, which she’d already planned for vacation, just to watch me sleep and splash amoeba killer into my eye every hour? And to spend hundreds of dollars on plane tickets or eight hours with her butt asleep at the wheel. I wouldn’t be appreciating the great independence that technology has given me. I was meant to be a benefiter of the “democratized” resources at a click of a button, anytime, anywhere. A target user of the fully personalized, on-demand medical support friend. I have been empowered with control over my own recovery! I can fulfill the promise of giving people more productivity, of giving people more of their lives back.

I’m being facetious.

I wish I had asked my mom to stay with me.

The day before my scheduled surgery, my mom had just landed at the SF airport when I got a phone call from the surgery coordinator. She said that my authorization for one of the surgery medications hadn’t been approved and that it would need to come in the next 8 hours or else my surgery would be rescheduled. I called my insurance and was told that urgent cases were addressed in 24 hours, so I decided I would just call the coordinator back after lunch and see if the approval status had changed.

I watched from my window for my mom’s arrival. Then she appeared. Her iconic maroon puffer and pink scarf holding a big suitcase. I hauled her bags into my room, and gave her a hug. She immediately unzipped the suitcase and started pulling out her sliced beef, ground pork, bamboo shoots, dried mushrooms, dumplings my dad made, all wrapped in ice packs. She took control of my kitchen to make us lunch. I casually told her about my medicine authorization hiccup, and she put down her ladle and looked at me, “Jane, you should go call your insurance and tell them to speed up the approval.”

The thought of calling insurance had passed my mind, but I had decided to ignore it, having learned that begging insurance for help is often futile. But in my mom’s presence, I started calling. Each customer support representative told me the authorization status was pending and to call back. Meanwhile, my mom watched me make the phone calls and kept whispering that I should ask to get redirected to the people that reviewed the authorizations. At some point, I found my way to a person that offered to write me an email to the authorization team.

We went to bed that day and the authorization status still hadn’t been updated. I felt a bit defeated. That my mom came all the way to SF and took the day off, only for my surgery to be canceled. Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed for her to come.

8am the next day, my mom was outside my door, calling my phone. I rolled out of bed to open the door for her. She had brought back my favorite fresh baked bread. I let her in and immediately started dialing insurance to check my authorization status. While I was on hold, I logged into my insurance portal. The approval had come through.

I don’t know if it was the insistent calling and asking for redirection. But I’m glad I put in that effort. Effort, I wouldn’t have known had my mom not been sitting next to me, encouraging me to be Karen during those insurance calls.

We went to the outpatient surgical center at noon, two hours before my scheduled surgery. I was envious of my mom who got to eat the bread, while I was left to fast. I asked her to let me sniff the bread, hoping to just feel some sense of food, but instead she stopped eating and hid the bread as to not make my suffering worse.

An hour passed and a nurse came by to take us into a pre-surgery room where I sported the iconic open-backed gown. The nurse poked at my veins and inserted a mildly painful IV into my arm. Then my mom and I chatted about life.

2pm passes. 3pm passes. 3:30pm passes.

The anesthesia came in. My mom asked if I need to have an anesthetic. They said I wouldn’t be going fully under, but they would give me something to help me feel relaxed, to not move during the procedure. Then they said I had to wait in the hospital for two hours after my procedure, to make sure my eye was okay and that the sedation wore off well.

After hearing that, I declined the anesthetic. I was so hungry, so tired that I didn’t feel I needed anything to lay still. The nurse then rolled me into the OR. I saw big overhead lights and, funnily, pop music playing in the background. As I predicted, I was barely phased. I just laid there, rather limp while a man stuck needles into my eye.

The procedure ended half an hour later. I never asked to be sedated. And because of that, I left the hospital only half an hour after my procedure finished. My mom was sitting in the OR waiting room. She handed me a sandwich with avocado, her sliced beef, and the fresh bread she had acquired that morning.

When we got home, I dashed into my pantry and started eating crackers. The stale Keebler butter crackers that I had bought two months ago. I shoved maybe six of them down when my brain announced that I needed to sit. I scurried off to my room and laid starfish up on my bed as the plastic shield taped to my eye was not to be touched.

A while later, my mom came into my room, and I followed her back to the kitchen. She had cooked a soup with beans and bamboo shoots. The soup that I had texted her a week earlier saying I was craving. After dinner, I got up to clean my eye and took the shield off. I walked back to my room and my mom helped me tape the shield back on my eye. While I was in the bathroom, she had cleaned my room and made my bed.

She told me to rest, and I laid on my bed again, opening a book to read. I looked over at her and watched her work beside me. The feeling of soup in my belly and clean sheets over my body was nice. But more than anything, I felt happy just seeing her next to me. The feeling of her hoping for me to recover, watching and waiting to help me, made me feel loved. It made me feel happy to need someone.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my January monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my mom!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. I considered titling this: “Chat, am I okay?”. I think this title is hilarious, but I didn’t, because I wanted to explore why we still need to ask people for help even with new technological tools. I talked to two of my friends Tyler and Jacob about this phenomenon where our parents have probably helped people move more than 100 times in their lives, yet in America today, we seem so reliant and happily independent with technology, we’d rather just schedule movers on an app. It may be because we feel fear of being a burden and now have the option to help ourselves (that is how I feel) or it could be a feeling of not wanting to seem weak.

2. I feel that I have a global and local personality. A personality that I become when I converse with the world and a personality that I become when I converse with my family and friends. The former is loud, confident, enthusiastic, and fighting. The latter is soft, caring, gentle, and kind.

3. If you are someone that identifies with your work, you allow yourself to immerse in all the people, the emotions, and side effects of your career. Like how celebrities deal with the side effects of being famous. I admire the people who choose to work on serious, heavy subjects like Anderson Cooper, who runs a recurring podcast called All There Is where he talks to people about grief and their experience losing people. He mentions being stopped by strangers in the airport who want to share with him the people they have lost in their lives. To live life surrounded by other people’s grief, to carry the pressure of being comforting and patient with strangers over something so taboo and intimate—that must be heartbreaking and exhausting, yet gratifying and important in this world.

4. I am reading Stephen King’s On Writing (shoutout to my friend Leona for loaning me the book) and one thing that I love that he said was to get into the habit of reading in sips rather than gulps. I started filling in the couple minutes in line with a book, rather than a scroll.

And so I created this project to record my internal monologue, to write about something that confused me, something that I repeatedly thought about, every month this year.

I am elated to have kept this promise to myself. And even more elated to share how this project has changed me.

Dedicating time

Admittedly, I didn’t think too hard when I first came up with this writing project.

I was with my friends Alex and Maya in Miami on January 4th. We were walking to pick up croissant ingredients when we landed on the discussion topic of what kind of books we would write if we were authors. I talked about how I would love to interview my favorite artists and ask them what they thought about when they woke up, walked around the city, sat down to create art, and how their inner monologue changed throughout their careers.

And then I thought to myself, I don’t even know what I was thinking about just two months ago.

That was how the idea for the inner monologue project was born.

Since, I’ve dedicated approximately 150 hours of writing toward this project. In some sense, it’s only seven days of my life. But every month I set aside two Saturdays or Sundays to sit alone and write and a string of weekday nights to edit. It feels as if my life was anchored by this project.

Did I ever think about skipping a month or quitting all together? No. But I was forgiving with myself when it took me an extra two weeks to get something published.

And I think that forgiveness is important. Good things take a good bit of time, over a long time.

Finding my process

My writing time is between 9 and 6pm on a Saturday or Sunday in one of Kantine, Blue Bottle on Fillmore, La Boulangerie in Hayes, and a handful of others. My editing time is after 8pm on a weekday in my room at home. Every writing session, I exclusively listen to this impressionism playlist, and now my brain knows that the first notes of Satie’s Gymnopédie mean it’s time to write.

When I sit down to write, my best writing just pours out of me. And no matter how many times I go in and rewrite it, the first version always feels the best. It reminds me of how Lady Gaga explains that she wrote “Just Dance”, “Poker Face”, “Bad Romance”, “Born This Way”—her most popular works—in under 10 minutes. I understand this intimately now.

My sister likes to say that this phenomenon is called “channeling”. Like you created a tunnel between your head and the page and let your thoughts flood through. But I think it all comes down to this: writing is easy when you have something you want to say.

At the beginning of each month, I open a fresh Notion page. Whenever I come across something I want to think more about, I add a few sentences to it. Most often it’s something that crossed my mind during a conversation. Other times, it’s purely a random thought, one that just popped into my head while I was standing on the N or eating a banana in the office kitchenette.

Then when it’s time to write, I choose the topic that I feel most excited to explore. Pointedly, it’s never the topic that I think people want to hear about nor is it the topic that seems the most timely. Writing becomes rage hitting the backspace every five seconds, vilifying the words on the screen, and watching the cursor blink when you don’t have something you want to say.

And inevitably, when this happens to me, I shut my laptop. I go on a walk. Lay on my bed. Take a shower. Contrary to “diffused thinking”, I don’t just let my mind relax in hopes that something will come to me. I instead actively have a conversation with myself. What about the topic is so confusing to me? Why do I care to feel less confused about it? What is it that I so desperately want myself and others to understand?

Sometimes when I’m really struggling, I will replay the physical scenes that led me to write down the original sentence in my Notion doc. I’ll go through when I first started to feel confused, who was around me, what street I was on, what I was listening to—all to help me get back to the place where I first wanted to say something.

I’ve also learned that when you despise your ending, just cut it and end. You likely already finished saying what you wanted to say.

Developing my own prose

One of my favorite things about committing to writing every month this year is that now when I casually journal or send my friends a longer text, I feel that I naturally have a shape to my writing and a voice that feels like “Jane prose”.

Jane prose largely comes from the voice and imagery I use when I talk and think to myself.

It is floral and embodied.

“My delinquent fingers sank into wet soil and felt flowers so deeply purple.” — Stories from Shanghai

It is uncertain. Sometimes inconclusive.

“I wonder if I’ve lost my original dedication to build what I believe people need in the guise of finding a great opportunity” — What Are We Really Building For?

It is gentle, yet serious.

“Impending great medical discovery, I will not be able to see that faces of people the way I used to, feel as carefree walking on streets, going on hikes, exploring new places as I did back in February of this year. I feel vulnerable by its purist definition.” — Life Markers

It is precise. It breathes.

“Then it happened. Ten days in, I woke up, I closed my right eye, and extended my hand in front of me. I saw nothing. I frantically wiggled all my fingers. But I counted none.” — Losing my Vision

All of these aspects of my writing style are direct reflections of my relationship with myself. When I replay images in my head, I replay them with more attention to detail and adornment than when I first experienced them. When I talk to myself about my feelings of existentialism and missing life direction, I sit in my uncertainty and acknowledge that I don’t have answers. And when I work through my feelings about my permanent vision loss, I let myself feel all the fear, envy, sadness exactly as I feel them. I don’t melodramatize the situation, nor do I play it off.

I’m not fully aware of all the literary tools that I carry. But I’ve practiced using them so often that when I write, I can feel when I want to pause a sentence. Go back and add a word. Or end a sentence. I feel a deftness with words that I’ve never felt before.

And I promise, I hand typed every single word I posted this year. I like to believe that I can write my way out of my problems, and ChatGPT is not going to do that for me.

People reading my writing

For this project, I didn’t really think about what I wanted people’s reaction to my writing to be. If anything, I thought about whether future Jane would actually enjoy reading what I was writing for her today.

But I’ve since discovered how good it feels to know that someone spent the time to sit down and read my words. To go on a thought journey with me, almost as if they pulled up a seat next to me, in my head, for a little bit.

I am grateful for my friends (you know who you are!) who will proactively text me and tell me something I wrote was moving for them. This year, I also loved being part of one of my college group chats (shoutout to the Cube Substack chat!) which has been both a joy to share my writing in but also has been a place for me to discover that a lot of my other friends write about their lives that I never knew of! And I find that reading their inner thoughts makes me feel closer to them even if I’ve never had a deep one on one conversation with them.

When my mom first told me that she read my February monologue, I felt a certain awe, and then I felt exposed. I had written a little bit about how I visibly noticed that she was aging. I distinctly remember her saying something along the lines of, “Do my hands really look that old?”

I think about that moment often. It both makes me laugh and also makes me feel deeply connected with her.

Most of my life with my mom has existed within a traditional parent child relationship—one that feels very unidirectional, your parent always looking down at you and you looking up at them.

But the image of my mom reading my inner thoughts about her and asking me for validation makes me feel a momentary role reversal. It makes me feel like we’re friends.

My life is more beautiful.

Last night, I was at a bar in downtown San Francisco. I sat down at a table across my friend. My eyes glanced passed his face to the lights that glowed in the crevice of the wood panels behind him. Lights glowing on wood like I had described in my last essay.

The day after, I was writing at Kantine when the lights went out. I packed up my stuff and started walking towards Mission Dolores.

I watched the water echo when I stepped my boot into each puddle. I listened to the rain drop around me and clutched my black polka-dotted umbrella like a shield. I felt invincible. I felt happy. Like a child.

I looked in front of me and noticed how the scar in my eye scatters all the lights on the left side of my view. How the reds, yellows, and whites pooled into globes. How every fine line and border between the sidewalk and the traffic light fades into each other. I closed my left eye and it all disappears. I opened my eye and it’s back. Like a super power.

I stopped to look at the bright creamsicle color of a victorian house on 17th and Church. I stopped to look at a small Japanese restaurant.

I stopped to admire the lights—the lantern lights that hit the bamboo walls.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my December inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, and experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A big shoutout to my friends Jacob, Amy, Luke, Leona, Taneisha, Alex, Maya, Sarbo, to my sister Joyce and my mom for all being big supporters of me and my writing this year!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. It would be kind of fun to share all the excerpts that don’t make it into my final essay. Such as:

   1. I remember walking down Masonic Ave earlier this year, listening to Healey Cypher’s podcast Don’t Be a Jerk. There was one episode where Healey talks with psychologist Dr. Faith Cohen about founder coaching. I remember him saying the sentence, “Is it like steeping in <something>?” Maybe the word was knowledge.

      I felt a chill in my body at the word steeping.

      And I made a mental note of it and used it in my August monologue, Life Markers: “Later that night, I walked out of my cabin to crisp air and trees steeped in dust and lacy vines.”

2. When you get older in life, you have more and more reasons to exploit what you have rather than to explore things. It’s easier to make more money staying in the field you’ve always been in. It’s easier and arguably more meaningful to maintain the same friends you have rather than making new ones. And people expect that as you grow older, you make decisions because of the 100 previous ones you made. But maybe the next decision you make doesn’t need to “exploit” all the past knowledge and experience you have. Thank you to Taneisha for this fun discussion topic.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

My sister, aunt, and I swiftly ran across the crosswalk, dodging a food-delivery motorcycle and a woman in a gorgeous white wool coat.

Out of breath. We took small steps. Carefully entering a doorway surrounded by glass panels.

I felt the smell of a warm cabin. Around me, bookshelves in blond oak fell from ceiling to floor. Spines of Chinese war recounts and dynasty lore lay neatly on each ledge, warm lights peeking from behind. A handful of books were given their own wooden thrones. Limelights shone on each cover proudly, like a bookstore window display. I flipped through a couple, admiring the monospaced characters. Each page was crisp and thoughtful.

We walked up the staircase, and I noticed the plants on the walls—plastic, I assumed. But they weren’t. My delinquent fingers sank into wet soil and felt flowers so deeply purple. I can’t remember what books were on the next floors; I had been up since 7 a.m. But I remember climbing blond stairs to the top floor and seeing records collaged along the wall, some still in their covers—Elvis, Ellington, Liszt—others simple black discs with jeweled centers.

On the top floor, I spotted the names Brahms and Wagner among the Chinese characters, delighted to find the section of every bookstore that I go straight to. I pulled out the sleeve of books on Brahms’ works and sank into a chair. I carefully lifted each thin sheet of paper, recognizing maybe one out of every five words.

There is something so beautiful about a language where each word is the same length, the same number of syllables, yet can convey as much—or more—meaning with less ink than an English word.

I made a mental note to learn each word I skipped. I closed my eyes and let the warmth of the display lights scatter across my face. The rest was silence.

The EENT Hospital

Earlier that morning, my mom and I got up at sunrise to go to the Fudan EENT (eye, ear, nose, and throat) hospital for another opinion on my eye scar. Two subway lines. A twenty-minute walk. A security entrance, with overhead announcements declaring numbers.

Then, translucent sheet curtains—the kind Costco used to hang in front of its refrigerated produce section. We parted the plastic rectangles with our elbows and joined box-office-style lines to pay for my appointment and a hospital card. At least a hundred people waited in a dozen queues beside me. Parents with kids. Kids with their parents. Some were in visible pain, kitchen towels taped over their eyes.

An elevator carried us up to the eye-clinic floor. We walked out to a flurry of people: kids running in circles, parents yelling at staff, employees shouting into business calls. We dodged them all and waited at the machines, where I scanned my hospital card and retrieved a number.

My number followed the only English name announced on the speaker. We carefully opened a classroom-like door to the eye specialist’s office. Inside, six people sat at desks typing in the dark. One patient and their family spoke with the doctor while another sat on a greyed green couch. A staff member glanced up from her screen. She asked me why I was visiting and scribbled six tests on a piece of paper. Not a doctor, but doctor’s handwriting.

Down again to the lobby. Another line. Another payment.

Room A. Get number. Wait for number. Eyeball image.

Room B. Get number. Wait for number. Pressure recording.

Room C. Get number. Wait for number. Say whether E faces left, right, up, or down.

Once again, I was back at the eye clinic. I clenched my number and sank into a pleather chair, ignoring its peeled surface. I then watched as the white wallpaper curled from the corner of the wall into a rusted brown. An hour passes.

Ten minutes with the doctor. Then I was dismissed. To make way for the next patient—an elderly woman. I recognized her son, he had sat arm to arm with me in the waiting room.

Her photos—they looked ten times worse than the worst of my eye infection.

Family Dinners

I held my mom’s hand as we walked into a room that looked like the inside of a vertical farm from the movie Passengers. The walls were mirrors. The floor was made of transparent tiles with white sand and small green plants sprouting from beneath. We followed the rest of my extended family to a glowing table for seven.

As per usual, dinner began with a QR-code menu. My dad and uncle held a small congress over what to order. There was always a whole fish, head to tail. A large meat dish. A quarter goose. A duck. A big bowl of soup to share. Many side dishes. The first dish always arrived within five minutes of submitting the order.

While they were in session, I sat and watched a floating disc above my head display scrolling marquee text: “Warehouse No. 3.” Someone had sat down and thought, Let’s make a futuristic dining experience, complete with pastel drinks held by astronaut figurines and dessert plates featuring petit fours on cloud-shaped mirrors and cotton candy on tree trunks.

But when the marquee wrapped around a fifth time, and I became disenchanted. Just the day before, I had sat among tropical plants and bamboo huts and watched a man slice open a fresh coconut, pour the water and coconut meat into a pot, and drop in raw chicken and live prawns—their legs still visibly moving before diving into the bubbling water. My aunt remarked both times that the restaurant wasn’t as busy as the last time she’d been. It seems spells here don’t last very long.

Without fail, I came back from the future stuffed like a turkey. For less than twenty USD.

The People’s Park

Another afternoon, my aunt, sister, and I went to 人民公园, or The People’s Park. My sister had seen videos of parents posting advertisements about their single children on umbrellas to match-make. I imagined we’d see 10–15 umbrellas—maybe people not inclined to use technology. But reality was a sea of parents. Hundreds of mothers held posters and walked around judging other people’s. Every pathway in the park was lined with pink, white, and yellow sheets:

Name

Year of Birth

City of Birth

Height (cm)

Yearly Salary

Housing Status: Do you own a home? Does it have an elevator? Is there a mortgage? Do your parents live with you?

Desired partner’s height, city, salary, housing details.

No pictures. Few personality blurbs.

My aunt translated the posters for my sister and me. We were interrupted by several middle-aged women who poked my jacket:

“What year were you born?”

“Are you Shanghainese?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Let me help you.”

I tried to ignore them, but eventually one enthusiastic man realized I wasn’t a local and nudged us toward the “foreigners” corner, where I saw people who had moved to Shanghai from the US, UK, Australia, Germany—everyone looking for someone to marry. My aunt joked that my sister should write a poster for me.

Mahjong

Later that evening, I was sitting at my aunt’s dining table with my sister. We were debating whether we had stomach for dinner, so my aunt whipped out her phone and ordered boba tea and red bean soup to the apartment. Fifteen minutes later, a plastic spoon was in my hand and I was slurping chunks of taro dripping in a deep, purple-red soup. I was still hadn’t processed whether my sister and I should eat dinner.

After the three of us shared a bowl and a drink, my aunt suggested we continue our mahjong game from the night before. My uncle, who had just rushed in the door from work, said playing mahjong at home wasn’t very “comfortable”. He called someone and booked us a mahjong room.

The walk was about 10 minutes. My uncle was particularly excited that he had reserved the room with windows. And indeed there were windows, overlooking sparkling towers in the Shanghai skyline. I sat down at the mahjong table and pressed a button in the center. Stacks of eighteen tiles for each of the four table sides rose to meet us. Two dice rolled without our hands. Meanwhile, my aunt flipped through bags of complimentary tea, asking whether I preferred rose or lychee oolong. I laughed.

Graves

When I think of the word grave, the first image that comes to mind is a skull with crossed bones floating in cold gray air—maybe a spider web stretching over a mossy tombstone.

But that image contrasts starkly with my grandparents’ graves.

We first visited my father’s parents. I walked into a garden where trees were wrapped in gold foil. Golden ginkgo leaves showered us. Neatly laid cobblestones paved the way, and small waterfalls fed into ponds where koi fish played. We listened to gentle classical music through overhead speakers as we searched for my grandparents’ tombstone. We 扫墓 (tomb-swept), carefully arranging flowers, fruit, and their favorite snacks. We then lit incense to “send” these offerings and our words to them.

At my mother’s parents’ cemetery, we folded small paper gold 元宝 (ingots), placing them in a red bag that my mother sealed with toothpicks. Then we burned it to give my grandparents money for the afterlife, chanting for them not to be frugal. There was literally a “bank” at the cemetery designated for this rituals. Then we walked past stone gates to a beautiful lake and mountainside, with paved stairs where each family rests. We found my grandparents’ grave, cleaned the dust, laid flowers and fruit, opened bottles of orange juice and tea—apparently my grandma loved orange juice and my grandpa frequented tea—and let the incense burn out. We cleaned the ashes and left the serene back to the city.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my November monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Amy and Luke and my sister Joyce for being part of my life.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. Take time off. I look about two weeks off this Thanksgiving and even on my first day off, I sat down to write and had so so many ideas that I wanted to work through. I also just noticed the small things like a pair of labradors and a holiday decoration :)

2. What do we really mean when we describe someone as mature?

3. One of the ways I feel people’s intelligence is when they are able to distill what is important about my question or story.

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Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

One weekend, we visited that elementary school and spent the afternoon painting rocks with the kids. We didn’t sell those, but I remember having the thought: what if these kids painted their own rocks and sold them to their nearby high school? Could they raise money for their own school programs without having to rely on donations?

Back at school, I hauled around my box of rocks and wrestled with the idea of creating businesses that achieved some kind of social impact but were backed by a sustainable business model. With that in mind, I went to the library, sauntered down the aisles of books, and found a light blue hard cover: “Creating a World Without Poverty” by Muhammad Yunus.

Most books that I have read in my life, to be honest, I don’t remember much from. But one idea from Yunus’s book really stuck with me: the concept of a “social business” or a company built not to maximize profits, but to solve a social problem in a financially sustainable way.

I specifically remember Yunus describing his 2006 partnership with French dairy brand Danone. Together, they started a corporation to create yogurt products in Bangladesh that were pegged at 10 cents per serving and high in nutrition for low-income families. To keep the price low and quality high, they structured the business so that the initial shareholders only got repaid for their investment and any additional profit was invested back into R&D at the company. While the business didn’t scale globally the way some had hoped, they did reach their goal of bringing the high nutrition, low cost yogurt offering to Bangladesh. And what I respect most is that they started with a clear goal to help low-income Bangladeshi families access more nutritional foods and then creatively found a way to get the product in people’s hands.

After high school, I continued pursuing my curiosity of creating sustained social impact. During my freshman year at Duke, I went through a whirlwind of club activity fairs and interviews and found myself in an effective altruism fellowship. It’s funny how EA has since become associated with Sam Bankman-Fried and the AI safety community, but at its core, I loved the idea of being empirical about where and how we dedicate our energy and resources to improve the world.

One Sunday morning before my fellowship meeting, I was sitting in the East campus dining hall, swirling a spoon around some oatmeal and reading a paper print out of “Prospecting for Gold”. This is another one of the few pieces of writing that has really stuck with me years later. In particular, the article proposes a framework for selecting which problems to work on to have the greatest impact on people—i.e. problems that have the largest scale, are uncrowded, and are tractable or easy to make progress in.

This framework made a lot of sense to me. There are so many things we could do to help the world, decreasing poverty, fighting climate change, preventing existential risks. If we are choosing to dedicate our life towards something, we should be thoughtful about which area has the biggest opportunity for improving life.

Between my EA learnings, I was drawn to every organization related to entrepreneurship and technology in the light of creating scalable impact. I lived in a house of entrepreneurial people (largely the hacker house kind of entrepreneur), became a university scout for a venture fund, interned at a venture studio and 3 other early stage startups, and spent my hours outside of class cold emailing great founders and investors to get feedback on my projects. Similar to the criteria I learned from EA for vetting the best ways to do good, I learned similar criteria for vetting the best venture backable business opportunities—i.e. opportunities that had a large market, few competitors, and low R&D costs to get started.

By my senior year, I decided I wanted to be a customer-facing, product engineer at an early stage startup creating AI for enterprise. And that is exactly what I became.

It’s been two years. I’ve fully immersed myself in different startup/venture circles in SF, tracked all the AI companies across every vertical, wrote personal memos and predictions about them, considered being a founding engineer at several, and even considered taking venture money to found one myself.

But as I take time to reflect on what I want to work on and analyze what AI startups are being built right now (i.e. foundation models, AI native software for every vertical and consumer AI characters and content), I wonder if I’ve lost my original dedication to build what I believe people need in the guise of finding a great opportunity, the great opportunity with the large market, low competition, and high tractability.

When in reality, there are a lot of the problems we need solutions to right now that are large scale but may not be solved so simply with a piece a software that generalizes across populations. They might be problems that are extremely obvious and are being worked on by many people. And they might not be solved with little time and resources.

Isn’t it our job as creators to fight through all these complexities, to be creative!, and to make incredible solutions for people? Is it really so exciting that there are brilliant people finding opportunities that squarely fit the large scale, low competition, high tractability framework? Or should it be exciting that there are brilliant people finding problems that really matters to us and are committed to doing whatever it takes for us to experience better in life?

I may come off naive here by not recognizing some of the incredible work we have done around software, bringing health care online, real time personalized question answering, and instant code generation. I think these are extremely beneficial to people.

But looking back at where my intentions were in high school— the rocks, Yunus, and the idea of being creative to offer something people need—and where I am now and the people and work I’m surrounded by, I worry that if we keep optimizing for great business opportunities, we will wake up in 2050 and see that we were able to create big businesses, used by many people.

But will we really feel that our lives are so much better?

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my October monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Luke for being a great friend.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. Longing for “my old self”.

2. I like to believe that I can write my way out of my problems.

3. The responsibility we have a producers.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

Five years later, I still remember the vision that one of the founders Dan Shapiro communicated: I hope to create a world where when we want something—a new tablet, a kitchen table, a gift for a friend—our first question to ourselves is not “where can I buy it?” but instead, “how can I create it at home?”

I love that vision. If you sit back and think about it, we are all living a life that others have created for us.

We go to the places where the trains will take us.

We fuel our bodies with the food the grocery store offers us.

We fill our minds with headlines and videos that algorithms have chosen for us.

And after decades of outsourcing our problems to different companies, I increasingly feel like we are waiting for companies to tell us what we should be focusing on in our lives.

But what if instead we ignore the product shelves and ask ourselves “what can I create to solve my own problems?” This framing forces us to think precisely about what we want and only when we want it and I hypothesize that following it would help us fill our lives with things we need rather than approximate solutions to advertised problems.

While it might not be possible to print every physical object you could ever want at home right now, I do think this year’s developments in code generation does make it possible for us to create any digital tool we would want.

The next time you think about ways to up skill in your career, maintain a healthy workout routine, or stay connected to your siblings, your first action doesn’t need to be hiring a person, buying a subscription, scrolling through an infinite feed of encouraging influencers or just ignoring the problem. Instead, you can open some kind of IDE, describe your requirements and start using your new tool instantly, with no additional noisy features or retrofitting to a general solution.

This is what I believe is the case for vibe coding.

The case for vibe coding personal software

The hours you spend looking at your phone during your commute, in front of a computer at work, or scrolling on your bed at night, are no longer in the hands of computer science majors, the MBA grad who called you to understand problems they never lived, or simply the people who have the most money to pay for their problems.

It is in your hands. And I believe every piece of software that is targeted toward solving a problem or workflow that you understand well and have opinions about, should be created by you.

For example, I love writing, and I want to get better at it.

The canonical way to improve your writing is to read books and articles from esteemed and amateur authors, analyze and critique what you read, write more, and have others critique your writing.

But I work a full time job. And getting the moment to sit down with a book or my laptop leaves getting better at my hobby to a weekend at the end of each month.

What can I build that helps me achieve what I want while fitting the parameters of my life?

I used this app called Vibecode to create a simple app that pulls writing snippets from different authors every day, allows me to see the background of the author, and save quotes and notes from each passage as inspiration for my own.

And this took me less than 5 prompts under 20 minutes!

And the fun thing about this is as I’m reading and realizing I want certain features, a system for tagging content, analysis on the types of writing that resonates with me—it is all just a prompt way.

Now, I am a full-time software engineer, and I work on building intelligent document processing for thousands of enterprises handling data at unimaginable scales. I know that software is hard to architect and hard to maintain. I do not think engineers will be replaced (more on that in another essay), and I’ve used Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf for over a year, enough to know its limitations and the places a non technical user would get stuck.

This begs the question:

When should I create my own software? When should someone else do it for me?

Let me present you this nice chart:

I plot here a non exhaustive list of software that people both in a personal and business context will interface with from day to day. On the y-axis we have “customer’s understanding of the problem” and on the x-axis we have “software complexity”.

The y-axis is simple. People should only vibe code software for problems they understand and have opinions about. For example, I’m a restaurant owner, and I want software that helps me manage my employees’ work shifts. I want a simple interface that let’s employees sign up for shifts, trade shifts, ask for time off, and receive reminders to make sure the restaurant is always staffed. Right now, I can buy a general purpose shift tracking app or pay a dev shop to set something up. In the former, I may be lucky and find something that exactly fits my requirements, but commonly with general solutions there is a “last mile delivery” problem where some set of requirements are missing or there are additional bundled features that make the platform more noisy and costly than what I need. In the latter, sitting with a dev shop to communicate my needs and paying retainer for maintenance and additional features over time leaves me in a costly and suffocating place.

The restaurant manager could instead vibe code a simple scheduling app and iterate on the requirements they have over time. This saves them shopping, negotiation, and translation time that they could spend focusing on my actual craft.

On the other hand, let’s take a workflow like filing taxes. Even as a W2 employee where taxes are as simple as filling out a form, I do not have the expertise to understand all the tax filing logic and the cost of inaccurately filing my taxes is high. I choose not to vibe code this and thank the team of software engineers who can take on this responsibility for me

The x-axis is more controversial. At what point is a piece of software so complex that it cannot be created well by a human with a coding agent? When do we need a team of experienced engineers?

In my opinion, the hardest part of building most software is designing data models and infrastructure that serve the features you want today and are extensible to all the features you would want tomorrow. The best engineers I’ve worked with have great intuition on what abstractions to create, when to refactor something, which features to support now, and which features to avoid.

Our current coding agents, don’t have this intuition. From my experience, when you try to vibe code a full stack app with something like Cursor, the agent will make “mistakes” like hard coding text in your React components, creating table schemas with extra fields you didn’t ask for or too few fields like missing a creation time that would allow for backwards compatibility, or even creating duplicate APIs that branch in logic over time. For a single user, small data app, these mistakes might be okay—the surface is small enough that the builder can manually test and debug all user flows. But as soon as you start to build apps that support multiple users, concurrent interactions, and large data, the agent’s poor abstractions cause bugs that make the software hard to recover and unusable.

I believe a good vibe coding platform can help solve these issues.

I talked briefly about this “last mile delivery” problem with small scale enterprise apps, and I imagine a catalog of templates covering the most basic CRUD apps like fitness trackers, appointment booking, meeting recording, forums etc would give a great foundation to help enforce good programming practices like model view controller design but still allow the user to mold the solution to their exact requirements.

The other trap I see vibe coders falling into is over complex, conflicting asks.

“I want an app where all my employees can schedule shifts and they cannot edit each other’s shifts. I want the buttons to be blue and to show confetti after an employee finishes a shift. Employees should be able to swap shifts with another employee. Oh and automatically pay the employee after their shift if they completed it.”

These asks are not unreasonable, but a good vibe coding platform should help the user work toward a cohesive interface. We can help the user maintain a set of global guidelines that confirm and prioritize the their features so both the user and the AI can maintain existing features while debugging and adding new features.

Parting thoughts

Having lived amongst the entrepreneurs and engineers of Silicon Valley, I’ve seen many talented computer science grads chasing increasingly niche personas, in hopes of striking profit. But as the coding picks and shovels become cheaper and easier to use, the real gem isn’t the software, it’s the context and first hand understanding of problems that the we all have.

I would love to wake up to a world where the person walking down the street observing what’s in front of them and dreaming about what it could be has the power to contribute to software. A new gallery of open source projects, with people forking projects for their own lives and contributing back insights from their lived experiences.

Then, you can leave the fun large data, high traffic, high security software challenges for us engineers to build.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my September monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Luke and Judy for being a big part of my support system :)

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. Writing fictional characters that I want myself to become but am too afraid to be.

2. Why engineers will not be obsolete in the next decade.

3. We do not know all the things that people in our lives are going through.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

I see this moment as a life marker. A point in time where I can relive a moment from the year before, but in a different self.

This past month, I stepped onto a bus headed toward summer camp grounds for my fifth annual Contrary retreat—a gathering of all the people that were Contrary venture scouts during college. Imagine wooden cabins, sparkling fires, laying amongst forrest trees, and looking up at the night sky, with my now half-decade long friends.

This time, I sat on the right side of the bus, in a window seat. Just like I did three years ago.

I was just finishing my internship at Google, and I remember watching cows, maybe they were goats, pass by. I remember making a personal agreement with myself to make the most of the weekend, to “turn on” and be my most social self.

Later that night, I walked out of my cabin to crisp air and trees steeped in dust and lacy vines. I joined circles with people from all the big cities, older, younger, with glasses, new hair, slowly marking off my Guess Who board. In each conversation I joined, I heard more and more announcements of new jobs and companies founded, who was raising and how much. I remember thinking, “I want to be like that person” and feeling an impatience, “I’m ready to get back home, to dream bigger, and to get to work”. Back then I already saw this retreat as a life marker, but framed as a kind of accountability tool. “By next year at this retreat, I too can tell everyone what cool things I’m up to”.

A year into my first job out of college, I landed on another camp ground to familiar faces. I had just gotten promoted, yet I remember when people asked me “How’s work?”, “How’s Mosaic?”, “Are you still at Databricks?”, I intuitively felt this need to express dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction that I wasn’t working at an early startup like many others. Dissatisfaction that I wasn’t founding my own company. All in the guise of convincing myself that I would be onto “greater things” and others should believe so too.

But this year, in the summery Austin heat, I stepped off the bus and felt different. I felt breezy and with heart. I spent my time sitting on ground with new and old friends, hearing about what had transpired in their lives in the last 365 days, the new feelings, new people, new revelations. And inevitably, when I heard the successes of their new funds, companies, and teams, I cheered for them. I felt myself, unbothered.

Unbothered because, I’ve internalized more than ever before, this feeling that my life is my own to live.

I’ve had a difficult year, largely recovering from an eye infection that has permanently impaired my vision. I’ve felt the feeling of “putting my life on hold” in the months when I stayed at home and focused on rest. Aptly put by a woman I saw on YouTube fighting her own health battles: “all your friends are changing jobs, getting promoted, falling in love, making memories, and you’re at home, sick. Your life is on pause.”

But even after I made peace with “the pause” in my life—I enjoyed the feeling of having a single goal to recover, appreciated the people that have shown up for me, and understood that this pause is small part of my life—the real weight that dawned on my June and July was acknowledging that I’ve permanently scarred my eye and it will never work the way it used to. Impending great medical discovery, I will not be able to see that faces of people the way I used to, feel as carefree walking on streets, going on hikes, exploring new places as I did back in February of this year. I feel vulnerable by its purist definition.

But this also reminds me that I am on my own journey, with my own timeline.

No one is living life like I am.

And no one will live life like I choose. In an exercise where I’m tasked to sketch out the next film roll I live, I’m not sketching scenes of coming back to retreat and telling people I’ve raised. Or scenes of a younger woman hearing my accomplishments and aspiring to make similar announcements. I mark the edges of the roll with NYE in Miami, next year’s Contrary retreat, and fill in scenes where I’m sitting on the couch with each of my family members and friends, sipping tea, and getting invested in what’s going on in their lives. I’m waking up, feeling energized to work toward a mission I believe in and leading a team of people who believe similarly and are great at their craft. I see scenes of me writing and reflecting and feeling excited by how great my human experience is.

I came back to Kantine this month to write my August monologue. I’m sitting at the same table with the same IKEA cup filled to the brim with black coffee—the same setting in which I wrote my July monologue. And I feel excited to add new life markers to my film roll, to sketch what I want the next month to look like, and to color in the lines in between.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my August monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Taneisha, Vansh, Jacob and my sister Joyce for reminding me that I’ve come out of my recovery stronger and that I’ve navigated it well.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. Some of the other life markers in my life have been college reunions, going to Miami every year for NYE, and personally not the strongest for me but universally, my birthday (which was this month!)

2. Loneliness is the lost of the enjoyment of being alone. It’s colloquial to point out the “loneliness epidemic”, attributed to the use of phones. And I believe screen time is a drug preventing us from doing the hard work of connecting with people but even more, I think we are forgetting the joy it is to be alone and to enjoying being in our thoughts and doing things on our own time.

3. I wrote about the “weight of showing up for people” in my February blog post. This month, I experienced similar moments, and I enjoyed the reflection that my persistence to do so has not wavered.

Put the laundry basket where you throw your clothes. If there’s a pile of clothes next to your bed right now, that is where you should put your laundry basket. Don’t put it in the other corner of the room because it happens to fit perfectly in the crevice next to your dresser. Put it where you naturally throw your clothes.

I love this design advice: we are creating designs that make it easy for people to behave the way they want to—being tidy. And we help people behave well, not by introducing a flashy, attractive product, but instead, by placing the right choice (a laundry basket) exactly where and when someone makes a decision (where to put their dirty clothes).

And this piece of advice can extend to all the places in our lives where we want to make better decisions.

Instead of becoming a tidier person, let’s say I want to become a healthier eater. I may stroll down the grocery snack isle and, in discipline, reach for a new hipster, one-ingredient chip brand instead of the double-stuffed Oreos. I may see a cooking influencer on TikTok, showing one pot healthy meals and decide to follow them. I might see an ad on Instagram showing a super skinny person eating protein meal shakes and sign up for a free trial.

But what I really think would get me to start eating healthier (and is essentially what my mother did to instill healthy eating habits in me growing up) is to have someone come to my house the moment I decide I want to eat and place a fully prepared meal packed with veggies, grains, and proteins right in front of me.

The key here is that someone found me exactly when and where I am about to make a decision and they made it easy for me to choose the option I want to be choosing. We can create endless brands of healthier sodas, chips, and cookies. We can build more air fryers to give us the satisfaction of fried foods without the deep frying. We can develop subscription meal plans that are freezable, packed into jars or other convenient formats, and portioned down to the exact gram of protein someone needs.

But there are already thousands of nutrient dense foods that already exist in the world. We don’t need a magical new food that will satisfy everyone’s food cravings. We need companies and people that take on the responsibility of helping us make the right choices.

I look up to Duolingo because I think they nailed this piece. In one of the Acquired Podcasts with Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn (a fellow Duke alum that I once skipped class to meet!), he talks about how the Duolingo team specifically designs to catch people on their commute—the moment when you step on the subway and pick up your phone, can I catch you and help you learn a little more Spanish. And this goal manifested in design decisions like pushing funny Duo the owl notifications during people’s morning commute. Encouraging you to add a widget with your streak number on your phone home page. Making the lessons short enough to finish in less than 10 minutes. And allowing people to snooze the speaking tasks (for those of us feel embarrassed saying “Quiero manzanas” out loud on the train).

Inevitably, there will be companies that catch and nudge you toward less than ideal behaviors such as scrolling sensationalized, short form videos from big social media companies. And because the power we have to catch people at all moments in their life will only increase with AI glasses and pins, we as producers and consumers have some important decisions to make.

In the impending always on AI future, I can catch you the moment you look at a restaurant menu. The moment your alarm goes off in the morning. The moment when you catch up with a friend.

As a producer, am I going to nudge you to choose a healthy option? or am I going to nudge you to fall for my addictive sugary food brand. Am I going to nudge you to get out of bed and feel excited about work? or am I going to nudge you to fill your impending dread and loneliness with a sensational feed. Am I going to nudge you to be present and curious in a conversation? or am I going to nudge you to influence everyone you meet to purchase my product and beliefs.

As a consumer, will I make an effort to think about what I want my life to look like and make the choice to put good systems in my environment?

Life is hard, and changing our behavior is difficult. It feels naive to believe that we simply need more discipline and sheer will to achieve the things we want to achieve when there’s actively many producers creating against us. And so, I want to us design products that believe people can make the right choices. Products that don’t take people’s attention but instead point people’s attention where they want it. I want to see us design products that help us put the laundry basket where we throw our clothes.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my July monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Michelle for nudging me to write about what I want to see more companies do and create in the world.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. I want everyone to have a person, an LLM agent, fighting for them to experience everything they are curious to experience in a human life. Not something that fights to take away parts of my human experience.

2. The reflection of not knowing when something was your last. And accepting that some things will never happen again.

Read the original motivation for my monthly monologue writing project here:

And in many ways, I got that. I used to video call my grandma and aunt on the Facebook Messenger equivalent of China to catch up on their lives in Shanghai. When I was diagnosed with a rare eye infection, I found Facebook and Reddit support groups that made me feel less alone and more informed about my recovery. On X, I follow engineers and researchers whose posts inspire me to design better software.

But looking back, most of the hours I spent on social media were not in these ways.

I made my first social media account in the sixth grade. I got an iPod touch as a hand me down from my sister and behind my parents’ backs, I started my own Instagram account. Every day after school, I’d lie on my bed and scroll—filtered selfies of girls at my school in their Brandy Melville era. Group photos of people at slumber parties and vacation trips. Big celebrities adorned with fans, layered in expensive clothing and jewels. And in between were reposted memes and inside jokes from my friends. All of this served in a nice, chronological feed.

By high school, my feed changed, but the scrolling continued. Now, I was served waves of micro-influencers—people my age who built followings from their attractiveness, talent, and humor. Mixed in were “oddly satisfying” slime videos, ads for sleek DTC water bottles, colorful infographics on social issues, YouTube stars promoting bright blue vitamins, and meme pages catering to every niche imaginable. Occasionally, a photo dump from my friends would appear: a soccer game, a piano recital, a basket of strawberries from the farmer’s market.

But once I became aware of the time that passed and finally put down my phone, I was left sitting on my bed, confused. Was I opening Instagram to get a quick laugh? For inspiration on how to look, how to spend my time, and where to put my money? Or was I just using it as an excuse to put off living my real life?

What happened to having a space where I could stay invested in the lives of my friends and family? To discovering information and stories that help me explore the things I’m curious about? What happened to the vision of the internet I was sold?

I find that our biggest social media platforms failed to help us connect and discover meaningful content because, from the start, they lacked a clear vision for how people should interact with each other and create online. Take Instagram, for example—the current most popular social media platform for people age 30 and below. These are some photos of the first versions of Instagram:

Looking at these, what do you think the founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, wanted people to do? How do you think they wanted people to interact on the internet?

While I don’t have a time machine to ask them, I can say that I originally downloaded Instagram because people at school were talking about their online posts, and I wanted to know what was happening. From the five screens, I quickly learned to follow, like, and comment on other’s posts and find ways to receive the same on my own.

I want to highlight that the design of the app did not guide me on what content I should be posting or how I should be commenting. It did not guide me on how to find new people or information I’m interested in. At best, it helped me expect more engaging posts compared to Twitter and Facebook given the square photo requirement.

And thus, I find that Instagram built their platform like a kid starting a fire. They created a highly engaging platform around image posts and figured out how to keep it burning with features like follower counts and likes. But they never designed a utility around it—the furnace around the fire that keeps you warm or the grill around the fire that helps you to cook. They didn’t design ways to help people stay in touch with those they care about or explore interests through user-generated images. And even after being acquired by Facebook and hiring hundreds of the best engineers and designers, the app’s purpose in our day to day remains unclear.

It’s easy to point out that Instagram is designing for attention and engagement. The choices to remove the chronological feed and show sensational posts from people I don’t follow are all clear design decisions meant to drive ad revenue. But I don’t think optimizing for attention is the real problem. In order to learn something or to connect with someone, we have to pay attention to information and people. The deeper issue is the lack of intentional design and disciplined execution.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn and Reddit. Social media platforms that have strong opinions on how humans should interact online.

LinkedIn founded in 2002 (before both Instagram and Facebook) was created to "connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.” We can point to specific design decisions that LinkedIn made to deliver on this intent.

Notably, Linkedin caps the number of displayed connections on each profile to 500+. This decision was made to encourage people to focus on connecting with people they can vouch for rather than collecting as many connections as possible to boost their social status. Another example is when LinkedIn first started their post feed in October 2012, they only allowed 150 hand-picked business leaders, journalists, and politicians like Barack Obama post which set a clear tone that the platform was for work-related conversations.

Reddit, founded in 2005, was built as a platform for discussing content. Users can post text, images, and videos, and each post can be upvoted or downvoted by others. Content is organized into user-created communities called subreddits (i.e. r/formula1, r/soccer), each governed by a mix of Reddit admins and unpaid community moderators.

While Reddit does have a home page that surfaces popular, sensational content like Instagram, the app at its core helps people find stories and information about subjects they are interested in from people all around the world. The design decisions to organize content by subreddits, have user moderators, and rank posts by human up and down votes as opposed to a black box algorithm help people clearly find stories and information they care about and contribute their own in socially appropriate manners defined by the subreddit community.

I bring all of this up because I fear, as do many others, a future where social media is flooded with AI generated influencers, fake products and brands, brain rot, and unlimited “personal” engagement with people.

And I want to point out that AI technology and metric optimization is only a fraction of the problem. What’s more important is that companies are intentional about designing platforms that help people interact and consume in good ways while creating business outcomes. And we’re already seeing signs of this in the growing popularity of apps like Retro, Strava, Beli, and Goodreads, which help people connect with intentional communities and discover content that aligns with the things they want to do in their lives.

And though I think the responsibility is greater for platform creators, I do think as consumers, we can do our best to avoid unthoughtful platforms like we choose to avoid processed foods and instead choose to try and use platforms that helps us reap the value that the internet was promised to be.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my June monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all. You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Leona for the many discussions we had on consumer AI and for inciting these reflections about social media.

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. Contrary to previous headlines that American malls are dying, I visited a handful of malls across California and was quite surprised to see that some of them were extremely packed. I noticed that the high traffic malls had brought a lot of popular online-first brands like Skims and Mejuri in person and were up to date on the latest restaurants and boba places people are excited about. I think we were lazy to conclude that malls would shut down because people would move to shop online and forgot that great experiences and curation always have a place in our lives.

2. There’s only so much empathy and care we can give to people and things in the world. Part of life is training to increase your capacity. Another is choosing where to put what you have wisely.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

It has become a daily occurrence: I sit down at my computer, start writing a new paragraph or coding a new feature, and before I've written more than a few lines, my fingers press cmd + t and glide over “c h a” + enter. By the next cursor blink, I’ve started a conversation with ChatGPT—one that usually begins like this:

“<some first draft paragraph, some half baked code> I want this __ and I want it todo __ and I am aware that there mightbe these issues ___ and I want sometheing that feels like ___ and ___”

And somehow, even with the fragments, misspells, and lack of thought in my query, I receive results that seem good.

So good, it reminds me of when I was a kid, and I tried to explain to my teacher in one-syllable words and exasperated rambles how another kid, Bobby, hurt me. Yet even with my sparse vocabulary and missing context, she still understood what happened and effortlessly offered suggestions for how to communicate my feelings.

Is this a good thing? Is it good that LLMs can finish my thoughts before I fully form them myself?

Well, when you’re a kid, and the “all-knowing” adult responds to you with something like, “Hey you could tell Bobby that you feel hurt when he calls you names”, you might carry a kind of stubbornness, or at least I did.

I’d push back when a solution didn’t feel right. I’d sit with my confusion for days, weeks, months even, rather than adopt the words of the wise as my own.

But as I’ve grown older, my patience for not knowing has declined. I look for every shortcut to drop my confusion as soon as it arises. I once narrowed my confusion by outsourcing my knowledge gathering to Google Search. I now eliminate my confusion by outsourcing not only the knowledge gathering but also the analysis and application of the information to LLMs. Why crawl through my own memory and conclude from first principles when I’m keystrokes away from increasingly intelligent answers?

The issue I’m noticing is that when I am not in the loop, questioning why I am creating and how, I lose my original intention or never form a clear intention at all. As a result, the output I produce is unfocused and lacking meaning.

Here’s an example: In my last monologue, the last sentence I published was:

I started keeping a journal next to my pillow. For the moments my thoughts were so vibrant, I felt the impulse to unheat my eye, just for a second—not to see the world, but to capture what I saw behind my eyes.

This was the exact query I wrote to ChatGPT for help:

I started keeping a journal next to my pillow. For the moments my thoughts were so vibrant, I felt the momentum to unheat my eye, just for a second, not to see the world, but to put into concrete what I saw.

i want something about how writing like puts things into a physical record

And this is what ChatGPT suggested:

1. “...not to see the world, but to give form to what I saw inside—to pin it down in ink before it disappeared.”

2. “...not to see the world, but to carve what I saw inside into something I could return to.”

3. “...not to see the world, but to capture the one unfolding inside me.””

Two thoughts transpired after I received this response:

1. I read these options, and I did not feel that any of the examples emphasized how I took my night time thoughts and put them them into the physical world.

2. I liked the way the word “capture” sounded.

I proceeded to take the word “capture” from the last option, reworded my original sentence, and called it a day. You could argue that the ending worked well, that I didn’t need to emphasize the “physical record”. But I had an intention of wanting to express something, and I did not know how to. I looked to AI for answers and did not receive one, and settled on a local max of the AI’s creation and my own initial thoughts.

If I had sat there, committed to expressing the words I didn’t have, and pushed myself to find the next missing thought, would I have written something more meaningful? Something that helped me and the reader recognize the urgency of getting our ideas out into the physical world?

Like child me, who didn’t just follow word for word how my teacher told me to resolve my issue with Bobby, but instead lived through my confusion and experiences, until I reached the day where I could navigate any conversation deftly.

I wonder if we allowed ourselves to hold onto the density of confusion we had as children—allowed ourselves the days, weeks, and months to wrestle with why things feel wrong and don’t look the way we want—we might come up with more step function improvements for people. I worry that in our excitement to give our thinking to AI, to get more answers and deliver results, we will lose the patience to understand what makes the human experience difficult and complex and bias toward managing machines to create for our implicit needs.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my May inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Janvi for inspiring me to be more aware of my thinking time and to my friends Matt and Wai for reading the first drafts of my writing :)

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. Combating the loss of naiveté. When I don’t know anything about something, I find it really easy to make progress because I don’t know what the consequences of my actions will be. As I collect knowledge and experiences about past decisions, felt pain, felt joy, noticed lacking, I find myself more careful, and wanting to think things through given that I have past experience to draw from. But, I also challenge that in the global of life, I’m still naive and want to approach things more like the former.

2. Closeness in relationships ebbs and flows. There are times when you feel very connected to someone. There are times when you drift apart or there’s tension. That is okay and natural.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

Happy end of April! I’m happy to report that my eye is feeling better and recovery is looking up! Read more about my goal to document my monthly thoughts here. Enjoy!

Resting time.

I spent a record amount of time this month with my eyes closed.

Because of my ongoing eye infection, I’d wake up at 9 am, work until 5 pm, go to bed at 8 pm, and fall asleep at 11. In those three hours from 8 to 11, I’d lie in bed cocooned—covers pulled to my chin and a navy blue, silk heated eye mask sealed over my eyes. No lights. No podcast. Just my mind, wrestling with itself.

And can I just say, I’ve had the most fun, creative, and energizing thoughts I’ve had in a while.

One of those nights, after I’d cocooned myself in bed, I found myself replaying a conversation with a friend—one where we talked about the meaning of ambition. I began to picture the lives of people I consider definitively ambitious.

Does an ambitious person walk from street to street with a swift impatience?
Are their everyday thoughts laced with a restless need to learn?
Do their words reveal more about who they hope to become than who they are now?

And somewhere in the search to find the animations and sounds of ambition, a memory came back to me: a Frank Ticheli band piece I played in middle school—Portrait of A Clown.

A piece where our task was to help the audience hear the whistles and honks, the teeter-tattering walks, and the bright polka-dotted blouse of—a clown.

What if I swapped out the woodwinds for prose? Replaced the clown with a subject I enjoy studying? How would I write the portrait of someone in my life?

Would I capture the way they introduced themselves to me?
Describe how they talked about the people in their life?
Or quite literally detail the lines and shadows on their cheeks when they smiled?

Maybe I’d describe the warmth of their bear hugs.
Or the intensity of their tiger eyes.

What if I flipped the whole thing? What if I wrote portraits of nonhumans as humans?

I visualized my seven plants on their Victorian shelf, all of whom I’ve given human names.

Saoirse, the girl who was pushed into the light but found her true magentas in the shade.
Debussy, the boy who was given his brother’s terracotta shoes and grew into them day by day.

How incredible it would be to walk through a gallery—not of paintings, but of writing. Portraits of people, places, and objects written by people all over the world, with phrases I’ve never heard, words I’ve never seen, and cadences I’ve never felt.

I saw myself on the Muni, reading through scrolls of creative writing—canon, amateur, unfinished.

Something Pinterest-like. To discover writing snippets and save ones I loved. To add my own notes on moments that felt special as inspiration for my next writing piece. To explore ways to play with the portrait idea and, in the process, find new writing exercises to write and write.

Enough to fill a coffee table book—one I could call my own. I could see it behind my eyelids: an ivory cloth cover, resting on the acrylic table in my living room. A few copies tucked beside Saoirse and Debussy.

Yet another project I wanted to work on when my eye heals.

I want to write.
I want to code.
I want to read, develop taste in writing.
Talk to people, share my work. Go outside.
Look into the sun and go for a run.

I lay on my bed starfish side up.
Arms pinned to my sheets.
Eyes squeezed tight.
A prisoner in my own body.
Gated from myself, to free my body to heal.

I exhale.

An exhale letting go of the feeling that I never have enough time in this life. An acknowledgement that this feeling is natural, and it’s okay.

To want to work on something meaningful and build a thriving social community.
To be active and in nature, and to also have taste in arts and opinions about the world.
To craft invaluable relationships all while prioritizing my health and recovery.

I can want all of these things. And I will.

But for now, I am forgiving that I am not at my full capacity and won’t be for a while.
I relax my eyes and let my arms sink into the bed.

It’s funny.

Once my eyeball heals, I’ll start watching those videos again.

Those never-ending videos of today’s ever-growing number of “average person,” non-celebrity influencers sharing what a reachable, ideal life looks like—starting with me sauntering into the bathroom in a monogrammed robe, opening my cabinet to a double cleansing routine, and a three-ingredient green juice decorated with an amber glass straw.

It’s funny because—just a couple thoughts ago—I had dreamed up all these beautiful, weird, whimsical writing projects.

I don’t need some dingy algorithm to tell me what I want in life.

I want to dictate what content I see, and who I want to be.

Like the days where you’d first sign up to Twitter and choose the bubbles you liked—college basketball, San Francisco politics, creative writing.

I chose what I wanted to see.
Not some compute in the middle of Virginia.

I chose what I wanted to see—
and, inadvertently, who I wanted to be.

We don’t need more “I never thought I would want to watch Italian voiceovers of two-word prompt, AI-generated images but now I’m laughing so hard and I can’t stop haha” moments.

If we just shut our eyes and let our decades of memories bounce around our 86 billion neurons, we can enjoy having beautiful, raw, unthought thoughts—instead of converging to the minds and bodies of the few thousand people that permeate 21-second videos on the internet.

I started keeping a journal next to my pillow. For the moments my thoughts were so vibrant, I felt the impulse to unheat my eye, just for a second—not to see the world, but to capture the world I saw behind my eyes.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my April inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Lucas for always nudging me to do the things I want to do and to my friends, my sister, and my mom for continuously helping me in my recovery :)

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. I have come to this conclusion that work fulfillment comes from 1) feeling proficient 2) feeling impactful and 3) being able to express yourself.

2. I’m noticing how much my parents enjoy reading about businesses, and I would love to help them get out of the textbook and create something that they own.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

To not see.

I remember sitting on Judy’s couch on March 1st, just past midnight. My back leaned against one armrest, and my legs rested where someone else might sit. I watched my fingers move across the keyboard, crafting last month’s monologue as I stole glances at the New York City skyline. I admired the shapes of the never ending buildings and the soft glow of the lights sparkling between.

Back when both of my eyes still worked.

The next morning, Judy gently woke me to catch an early flight. I opened my eyes, and a rush of tears streamed down my left cheek. I shut both eyes tightly, praying that the pain would pass. It doesn’t.

Over the next seven days, I saw four ophthalmologists. I had more dye dropped in my left eye than the dye in a kid’s fruit roll up. I’d read so many letters I could tell you by memory what the different eye charts at different offices were, where the tissue boxes were in each room, and what the name of the software on their computer was.

And after all of that, I found myself laying on the cream-colored couch in my living room. I covered my sighted eye and held up my hand—I could barely count five fingers. My laptop screen blurred into the couch with no border. The dining table was gone. The plant resting on the table cloth—she never existed. The TV was, at best, a light grey rectangle. Nothing I’d been prescribed was working. No one could tell me why. Still, every morning my alarm would go off, and I’d fear the moment when I’d open my left eye and discover what more of the world I had lost.

Then it happened. Ten days in, I woke up, I closed my right eye, and extended my hand in front of me. I saw nothing. I frantically wiggled all my fingers. But I counted none. I really didn’t know what else to do, so I went to the ER. My first time, might I add. I’ve never seen any of those medical dramas, but I’ll paint you this scene. This dark haired, rather serious looking man is giving me an eye exam, and he’s pointing at a letter chart.

“Can you see this line?”

I tell him, in much kinder words: “Sir, I can’t even see that you are standing in front of me, let alone that there are letters on the wall.”

And the poor man keeps trying.

“How about this line?”

“I unfortunately cannot see that.”

“How about this one?”

This whole situation, oddly, made me laugh. Just the night before, I’d starred in scenes of tragedy—a birds eye shot of me in fetal position on my rug calling my mom amongst tissues and Tylenol; a montage of me reconstructing all the faces I remembered seeing last as if I would never see them the same way. Now, here I was playing the role of comic relief. I thought to myself, “Honestly, this guy could totally be messing with me. He could be pointing at a blank wall, and I’d have absolutely zero idea.” Eventually he gives up. I felt a little bad.

I was then chaperoned to a solitary room where I twiddled my thumbs. Several medical assistants came by who were all really sweet. They all asked me how I was doing. I think they were surprised to hear me say that, “I’m doing well, thanks for asking!” with a ridiculously happy smile on my face. I don’t know. I think at that point I’d grieved my eyeball quite a bit, and it’s hard to be aware of the reality of your situation when you, well, can’t see.

About three hours into waiting, I get saved by a call from a clinic who had received my records from some of the previous ophthalmologists I saw, and they told me to come in ASAP. As one would, I stood up from the chair I was sitting in and walked out the room. I then immediately learned that—you can’t just walk out of the ER.

Eventually, I was discharged and went to the clinic where I got pictures of my eye taken, something I would begin to do every week, and I got the surface of my eye scraped and cultured in petri dishes and test tubes, something I luckily do less frequently. We got my first lab results back, and it is revealed to me that I have Acanthamoeba Keratitis1 which is rare corneal infection. In other words, I have an army of amoebas in my eyeball.

I’m writing this a month since the amoebas first moved into my eye from the cream colored couch in my living room. I still can’t see more than I did that day. I can barely see my fingers wiggle. No laptop border. No dining table. No plant. No TV. The recovery process is expected to be long. As my doctor puts it, my eye is currently a battleground with active acanthamoebas being slain and dead acanthamoebas lying around everywhere waiting to be carried away.

If you sat beside me on Judy’s couch back in February with the NYC skyline behind us, I would have told you about the weight I felt in my chest. I would have told you how I felt dissatisfied with where I was in life, what I wanted to see change, and how I thought I might go about it.

But these days, I’ve lost all of those worries. I wake up every day and feel happy just focusing on healing. Some days, my eyesight will be a little clearer. I’ll hold up my hand and see multiple fingers, and I’ll quite literally say to myself, “What a great day it is to be alive.”

I feel deeply grateful for the people who’ve shown up for me—my mom who calls me every day and mails me goji berries, turmeric, and sweet potatoes to aid in my recovery, my sister who comes by my apartment minutes after I call her to just to hang out with me and distract me from the pain, and my friends who visit and continue to check in. I’m reminded again and again that these people are the most valuable thing in my life.

I look forward to the day when my alarm goes off, and I open my eyes, and I wiggle my fingers in front of me, and I can see each finger, each vein, and each wrinkle. I look forward to day I can write to you and tell you that the battleground of my eye has been restored to a lovely, amoeba-free pasture.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my March inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, and experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Jacob for being a great friend, to my coworkers for being kind and understanding, to my doctors for dedicating a life to helping me and others, and to my mom and sister for being them :)

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. The difference between creating from the perspective of an artist, a scientist, and an entrepreneur and balancing creating to express yourself versus to help others.

2. Creativity results from curiosity and risk. LLMs will make humans more creative than ever before because the payoff of asking questions is greater and faster than ever before and it feels more comfortable to be wrong in front of an LLM than a teacher or a peer.

3. The challenge of being in the sandwich generation. I asked my mom what she wanted in the next 40 years of her life. I thought this was a fun discussion topic.

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

"I'm constantly trying to remember, like

Okay, you have to chase your goals

But you gotta check in with your mom

And you gotta make sure your sisters are okay

You gotta make sure your bills are paid

But you gotta make sure you have fun and time for you

Time for your friends, " and like

I just constantly feel like I'm neglecting parts of my life”

— Doechii (the swamp princess), Bloom

The weight of showing up for people.

I woke up on Wednesday to a searing eye pain. My bookcase, once lined with the titles of 20th-century music history books, Yuval Noah Harari, and business books I’ve been gifted but never read—all disappear into reds, whites, and yellows. I walk down the hall and step into my bathroom, reaching for familiar markers to use for a makeshift eye exam. The label of my Trader Joe’s grapefruit-scented soap, the bold red and blue diamonds of my disinfectant wipes—gone and replaced by a wash of warm, stinging tears.

Still, I put on my pastel blue rain boots and catch the Muni N to work.

In the office, I reach for an effortless smile to greet our Denmark guests, who have flown in for a “war room” session to tackle our next deadline. I ask how their flight was, how they’re feeling in the city, if they’re excited for the dinner I put together that night. I then join my text editor, enlarging each line of code into existence. But the tears keep piling on my cheek. Reluctantly, I put myself in a phone booth and book an emergency eye appointment. Eyes medicated, I rush through the streets in the rain and back to the war room.

Thursday arrives with roaring rain and howling wind. My umbrella is a 'v' more times than an 'n'. My eyes feel better, but I still see the world in bokeh rather than sharpness. I show up to work. I show up to the date I had planned afterward. Funnily, there’s a moment when we step out of the bar, and he points in front of us. I follow his hand, confused—he is watching the raindrops fall where I only see air.

Another sleep doesn’t bring me new eyes, but something new. A pressing awareness. An echoing reminder about the work I didn’t finish. A knotting fear that I wasn’t as present in conversation as I would have wanted to be the night before. I put on my boots and walk to the Muni N.

Today is Valentine’s Day—the day of my dating coach sister’s singles event. She has mentioned to me how she feels more confident knowing that I’m in the room with her. After work, I hop off the J, looking for the event house. I laugh to myself. I can’t see any of the house numbers from the sidewalk. There’s me, creeping up to each doorstep to make out the house numbers. Luckily, I am saved by the beckoning light coming from my destination. I greet my sister with a big hug and shake hands with the guests. I ask them how they heard about my sister. I feel so, so happy as she shines in her well-rehearsed speech that we had gone over nights before. I take candid pictures of the guests to help her build her social media.

After the cleanup and debrief, I go home and start writing cards for each of the guests in my second friend retreat—a two-day trip where I get a group of friends that didn’t previously know each other to stay in a cabin, experience nature, and do introspective writing exercises. I pack groceries and painting supplies, and early the next morning, the five of us drive to a cabin in Guerneville, near Sonoma. In the car ride up, on our paired hike, during downtime in the cabin, I shelve thoughts, memories, worries from the days before and focus on the four people, their energy levels, and their stories.

By Monday, the retreat ended, and for moments on the drive back, I let myself hide and indulge in thought. Once home, I unpack my belongings and await my mom’s arrival. She was driving up to San Francisco for my dad’s conference and planned to meet me at my apartment.

We sit together at my kitchen table, and I hand her a steaming cup of grape oolong tea. She pulls out a red braided rope from her pocket and starts telling me the meaning behind her gift to protect me during my zodiac year. Her hands shake a little as she lifts them, and I notice how the veins in her skin look more prominent than before. A quiet fear grows in my chest, but I focus on her words. I ask her when she got the gift, why she got it, how she thought about the meaning. I thank her for being so thoughtful and put the rope on my keys so I see it every day. I take her around Golden Gate Park to enjoy the best part of San Francisco.

The following evening, after I say my goodbyes to my mom, I wrap myself in blankets, forming a gentle hug. I let myself feel the fear in my chest and the weight of pushing myself to show up for all the people in my life. I notice how I feel alone—to be with so many people I love, yet to not be with myself.

I give myself grace for all the moments I wasn’t as present as I wanted to be and continue to grapple with the weight of it all.

—recess—

You may be reading this and wanting to tell me that I could’ve taken a sick day, canceled my date, told my sister that I couldn’t make it, mentally checked out at the cabin. And, I’m lucky to say that all of these people would’ve been kind and forgiving. But these decisions felt right to me in the moment.

They felt right because I deeply appreciate the people that take their roles in my life seriously, especially those who do consistently, over time. I am my mom’s closest confidant and one of the people she prioritizes most in her life. That’s really special. There’s nothing more valuable in this world to me than someone consistently giving me so much of their time, energy, sacrifice, and attention over decades. She may not be perfect and sometimes says things that feel more hurtful than helpful, but she always chooses to be with me. To have a life full of these relationships is truly winning. To fully appreciate them is to learn the effort, care, and craft that goes into building one.

There are so many things I can choose to dedicate my time to. Building my career, experiencing places with friends, developing taste in arts, music, fashion, focusing on fitness. But of all the things I can do (after prioritizing my health first), I yearn most to be a great daughter, sister, friend, partner. And to me, that means choosing to be with the most important people in my life, day after day, and year after year.

With all the entertainment, services, and material goods that we all have access to in this world, I think the act of being with and appreciating another human is what makes us most valuable. AI might be able to be my therapist, act as a friend, maybe even a lover—all on demand. But AI will never have to make the choice to be with me, to choose to sit next to me on the couch over everything else the world has to offer, and to look at me and appreciate the choice I made to be right there, with them, and nowhere else.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my February inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to Amy for being my retreat co-host, to Judy for helping me through my eye struggles especially while I was traveling, and to my mom for being everything she is to me :)

Other topics I thought about this month that I didn’t write about:

• Are we missing a place for ethics education?

• The value of being seen by humans versus AI. If Steph Curry tells me I shot a great 3-pointer, that will always hold more weight than an LLM praising a video of me. What about an ophthalmologist who has seen thousands of eyes versus a model that’s seen millions?

• How do you make content creation easier for users while also increasing the chances that others will engage with their content?

• I am thankful to see life in its entirety

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

Happy end of January! and welcome to my inner monologue —a collection of ideas and questions I repeatedly thought about this month. Read more about my goal to document my monthly thoughts here. Enjoy!

Finding my life’s work & focusing on hard problems over decades.

At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I’ve come back to this thought that if I choose to, my career will span decades, and I can choose to use these decades to make compounding progress on problems that I really want to see change. I’ll credit two people in my life for pushing me to think about this—my friend Alex and my dear sister Joyce.

I spent the top of this year in Miami with college friends (3rd year in a row!), Alex being one of them. Of the days we spent hanging out together, I would posit that at least a fifth of our conversations and the content I saw him consume were around semiconductors. Alex had recently done a career 180 from developing video games to working on cutting the production time of computer chips from months to hours—a change that would make custom, personalized hardware available during our lifetime. This is a hard problem to say the least, but I find Alex’s choice to focus on this difficult and technologically risky problem different than the approach of many of my SF peers. Instead, I see others apply a greedy approach (in the algorithm sense) to their career. Every two years or so, they jump from one company to the next to optimize for salary, stimulating engineering problems, greater leadership, and the most relevant technology at the time. But Alex retains a child-like joy learning about and believing in faster chip fabrication with the recognition that this may define his work for decades. His current Youtube “for you” page is video after video of semiconductor machines in action, and I’ll place bets that if we open it up next year, it’ll be similar.

I also observe my sister committing to a difficult problem for her career over a long time horizon. One of my 2025 goals, is to help her grow her dating coaching business and this month, I found myself laying on the couch with her discussing what kinds of clients she wants to take on and what she wants her voice and messaging to be. We talk about how people in major cities want more out of their romantic partners than ever before and how our dating behaviors haven’t grown to match that expectation. We imagine how our dating experiences could have been and can be more enjoyable and effective if we are kinder and more honest on apps and first dates. What motivates me about these discussions is that we dream of a world where the bar for the quality of everyone’s dating interactions is raised, and today we can make real actions to change this; for me, it’s starting by being a better dater myself and for her, it’s working to inspire more people to date intentionally, to the point where our dating culture and norms fundamentally change.

Spending time with both Alex and Joyce has left me rethinking how I want to spend the 100,000 hours I will dedicate to my career. I feel lucky that I can take bigger career risks knowing that I have a safety net of going back to corporate America (assuming AI doesn’t replace all professional jobs I could take on). While I’m still “confused” about what I actually want to do with this insight, I think about what would be a more fulfilling career purpose and routine every day, and I’m excited for a future post to have more thoughts on what inspires my life’s work.

My mind is the one thing that I will always have in my life.* Why not master it?

I have a recurring thought that I feel glad that I have myself for my entire life to work on. If I’m not who I want to be now, I can choose to become it, and I can also change my mind about who I want to be, and how I’m being, whenever I want!

I smile as I write this. And this conversation I have with myself, I believe, is one of the biggest ways I’ve changed in the last two years. Whenever I experience an awkward social interaction, I meet someone who seems more impressive than me, I get rejected from a job opportunity—I choose to have this conversation with myself, and I feel secure.

Some people like to call this way of thinking “enjoying the journey” or “being patient with yourself”. I don’t resonate with these framings because they feel passive, they don’t put me in the driver seat of my own self. When I act in a way that I didn’t appreciate in retrospect, I tell myself that I can choose to work on changing how I act in the future. And if right now, I don’t want to prioritize changing then that is the choice I’m making, and I accept the consequences. There are days when I have many interactions where I didn’t like how I acted and it makes “accepting the consequences” painful, but then I go back to the original statement that I have my entire life to work on the way I think and act and that gives me comfort.

As a result, my sister likes to point out to me that I noticeably have more confidence and self compassion than she did at my age. I know this didn’t come naturally to me, and I appreciate previous Jane for putting in the work to find a thought process that feels good to me and current Jane for exercising this thought process day after day. And though, I’ve made progress in acting with self compassion, I also find myself pointing out things that my sister, friends, and other creators do well that I haven’t fully mastered.

Finding purpose and motivation in work as I discussed above is one of those. And when I spot a difference like that between myself and someone I admire, I feel a yearning to hear what their day to day thoughts sound like, especially at different times in their lives. I really admire Lady Gaga’s approach to art and people and how she has built her world view over the decades that I’ve followed her. If I could hear what she thinks about when she creates songs or what she was thinking about when she chose to approach acting and jazz when she did—that would be an absolute dream.

My life, where I’m living, who I’m surrounded by, and what I’m doing will always be changing. But, I will always have my mind, and I like that a lot. I’m currently working on shaping how I think and process the world by reading autobiographies (the closest I will get to hearing the inner monologues of people I aspire to be like), doing this writing exercise, and asking people about how they feel and what they’ve been thinking about in conversation. We shall see if I have more ideas on how I approach creating a studio for my mind in the coming months.

*I say this with recognition that this may not be true both for others and me, but I ask for some grace for this thought exercise!

How do we kindly encourage someone to change the way they live.

I was at Stonemill Matcha with my sister last weekend for our weekly catch up. She very kindly treated me to what I called “letting me be a child”, which consisted of me enjoying my strawberry matcha latte and scarfing down a bowl of katsu curry with an unreasonable amount of glee. While I enjoyed myself, I also enjoyed a very fun and brain turning conversation with her about how she can most effectively encourage people to change the way they date. Telling, encouraging, inspiring people to change is nontrivial, especially for something like dating behavior which is very personal and unfortunately fashionable for people to judge all over the internet and in your local friend catchup.

As we discussed how to approach the subject effectively, I kept returning to a tension between two ideas: I want to share stories and create products for the world that encourage people to be better to others and themselves, yet I also want to accept and celebrate people exactly as they are today. We’ve all put in work to get to where we are and to be kind is to acknowledge that in all people. And to my previous discussion about mastering my mind, I feel happier when I give myself the opportunity to change, and I want to give others the space to experiment with how they treat people, what they want to spend their time doing etc. on their own timeline (excluding criminal behavior).

The easiest way I reconcile this dissonance is to believe that we can always encourage whatever behavior we want to see in people but we cannot expect them to change. We put our ideas into the world and if people want to take it and act on it great, if not, that’s their life, and they can choose to do as they will. We should find ways to accept them and their journey regardless.

I like this approach, and I’ve abided by it ever since I came to this conclusion during some poignant life events in high school. Pragmatically, people who resonate with the ideas you put out will “practice what you preach”. But I find something weird about the incentives for why I would want to build products that are aimed to change how people live if I didn’t expect people to behave differently as a result.

Both art and products can be vectors for helping people change the way they live, and how each producer promotes behavioral change shines some commentary on the difficulty of messaging new ideas toward people. Artist and writers are known to come from an opinionated standpoint, and I find that when they release an article or an album, there’s this unsaid rule that the art is out in the world for people to interpret, and it’s unadvisable to expect people to receive the art in your specific view. Traditional product sales doesn’t respect this—I get chains of emails where sales reps follow up with me week after week trying to convince me I need something. Maybe to their credit though, if I explicitly said I wasn’t interested, they would stop preaching at me…until they come up with something new that should change my life.

There are nuances to all of this. Arguably the product and the content of the art changes how “hands off” the delivery process should be and the exact wording of the sales emails and the launch posts gives context for how people should react. I challenge myself to think more about these nuances because I want to have a well-thought out stance on how to, for instance, build something that helps people feel the excitement I feel around choosing what to do with my life while also respecting where they currently are.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my January inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Janvi for encouraging me to write publicly again :)

Other topics I thought about this month that I didn’t write about:

• Visualizing yourself and actions in first person vs third person

• Creating financial goals by defining what I want to experience in life rather than by the largest attainable number I believe I can achieve

• Attention and patience are the greatest forms of love

• Self-reliance

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:

I’m not naturally one to relive the past. Moments, even ones I remember feeling strongly about, feel so far from me even just a couple of weeks after they occur.

I remember my senior year of high school after I got into college, I felt more moments of sadness and anxiety than of the happiness and relief a high school senior is expected to feel. I remember in my junior year of college several employees at my part time job got laid off and I went back and forth trying to decide how I wanted to feel about the people who left, the people who made the decision to part with them, and what my part was in between. I remember when I was at NeurIPS last December, I felt unsettled by people’s hyper focus on rapid AI development and lack of regard for day to day problems.

In all of these moments, I remember having a conversation in my head where I distinctly pointed out to myself that I felt confused. But, I like to think that confusion is fun. Confusion means I found an incongruence in my life and the world, likely one that many people experience, and that makes me want to dive deeper and understand why.

So before brain computer interface technology can help me harvest all of my thoughts for my exploration, I want to try this exercise where I write down the things that I repeatedly think about each month. Then, my future self can look back on the things that confused me and discover the thought patterns that make up my mind.

Welcome to my monthly inner monologues:

January 2025 - Finding my life’s work, mastering my mind, and how to encourage people to change the way they live

February 2025 - The weight of showing up for people

March 2025 - Losing my vision

April 2025 - Resting time

May 2025 - Losing my confusion to AI

June 2025 - Social Media Was Not Designed With Discipline

July 2025 - Help Me Put the Laundry Basket Where I Throw My Clothes

August 2025 - Life Markers

September 2025 - The Case for Vibe Coding

October 2025 - What are we really building for?

November 2025 - Stories from Shanghai