It is my 26th birthday today, and I wrote an essay to reflect as I celebrate.

If you’d come across me a decade ago, you might have met a boy who was starting to see his dreams crack. At the time, I had not developed a framework for navigating ambiguity and uncertainties. It is not so much that I hadn’t known failure or disappointment before that time, but their effects hadn’t felt consequential. For the first time, I had to make decisions that would determine my life’s path and come up with backup plans if one fell through.

I now know that this cycle of decision-making and action never ends. Aspiring, exerting, failing, trying again until the results are good. Over time, I have come to appreciate how difficult and time-consuming it is to make things happen. Iteration can be painful yet necessary. This pain I now view not as a bad thing, but only as the cost of doing business.

Through boarding school, university, my freelancing days, and now graduate school, people have perceived me as overly ambitious; some have even tried to diagnose me with “workaholism.” They might signal truth, but perhaps those people do not know what love and care are. To have something overwhelm and consume you. To burn with passion as you work things out. To go to bed thinking about a problem and wake up with an aching desire to solve it.

This approach keeps me from breeding indifference in my life and work. Indifference is the enemy of meaningful creation. To create things that matter, one has to care. But it will be a lie to say that I do not feel occasional apathy and fatigue. Some days, I feel inundated by the weight of things I chose to carry and the things that want me to carry them. I have grown through many cycles of resentment and lethargy, continuously fighting the wind that kills bright flames.

Like many others, I am, in some ways, longing for an extraordinary life. I’m constantly chasing the next big thing, always looking towards the future. Perhaps this is the thing that keeps me excited and hopeful, seeing how ordinary and mundane most of life is. The same showers, the daily routine of brushing my teeth above the same sink as I stare at my face, the weekly task of cooking, cleaning, and preparing.

Novelty and surprise are rare. It is amid these mundane rituals that one attempts to build, make meaning, and solve problems that extend beyond oneself.

Sometimes, I reflect on this longing and my relationship with the world. If you come from a certain place, you get a feeling that the world sees you as small and incapable. You notice the surprise in people’s faces as you describe your expeditions and dreams. Sometimes, an unease that signals a certain discomfort with your position relative to theirs. There is also the group that assumes you arrived at your position out of luck or pity. That you did not deserve the many stars on your shoulder.

I remember a girl I once adored. She and I were engaged in conversation one evening when I told her about my desire to travel and do globally relevant work. She laughed and jokingly asked, “With your student visa?” I felt a certain chill inside of me that evening. Not so much because of the joke, but it occurred to me that she had chosen to see me through the eyes of people who believed they were inherently better than me because of how they look or the passport they carry. Like these people, she had not considered that I might be someone who dreams and is capable of doing things at scale. It felt as though she had not seen me as someone who could take a vision and run with it until it had manifested into something real.

Those kinds of encounters spark fires inside me. In fact, If you pointed out that my whole life’s expedition up to this point has been driven by spite and a desire to prove something, you wouldn’t be lying. It might not be healthy, but sometimes, one needs a vague reason to get out of bed, and it is this sort of thing that keeps me going. But beyond this spite, I know myself enough to develop natural motivations. I find that the things that matter most to me are people, craft, and purposeful work. I like to create space for boredom and have enough free time to cultivate my craft. I’m not big on other people deciding what I work on and how I work.

Of course, I wouldn’t paint my story as one only filled with striving, longing, and intense work. I have known joy in this world, like the joy of seeing my mother arrive from the market with loaded bags in her hands. Joy that sprang from seeing her and knowing that she had thought of her kids in that market, and those thoughts had manifested as little treats in the bags she held.

Joy from dancing with friends and laughing loudly without care. What I love is how little it takes to cultivate joy within myself: a good conversation, the feeling of a breeze on my skin, a walk around the neighborhood. Joy is essential because it sustains hope. It is this hope that feeds every single thing I do.

I have also found joy in traveling. Like the joy I experienced in San Diego, a city that makes you daydream, but unfortunately, doesn’t allow you to sleep. I would soon find this joy diluted by the paradox that has plagued me since I arrived in America. How could a place be so affluent and full of knowledge, yet people lie on the sidewalks with no homes? Two months later, I would find myself in New Orleans, experiencing a different type of paradox. You walk around the French Quarter, feeling history that is palpable from its architecture, music, and food. But just half a mile out are giant concrete and glass buildings, the defining styles of hospitality and corporate sensibilities. It is within those buildings that the design of everyday things and ways of life are decided.

Back in Chapel Hill, there is a construction site across the building from where I work. I often stare out the window when I’m stuck or tired, constantly blown away by the heavy-duty machines and by the strength of the men who operate them. They have worked outside on cold winter days, in heatwaves, under the rain, and on days that are considered holidays by everyone else. I think about them and how they feel. Sometimes I look at my desk and observe the convenience of having three screens, my ergonomic chair, and a nice little thermostat in the room. What makes my work more or less important than theirs? Who gets to decide what is skilled and unskilled work?

You see, I am not so different from the homeless man on the sidewalk. Our core needs are the same, and just like me he has dreams and hope for the future. Our stories converge on this basis. It is people who decide hierarchies and structures that have an undertone of inequity.

I detest the people who create this social divide. Those who promote inequality by the way they think, act, and talk. For these types of people, the feeling of being better or above someone else is what gives them joy. You can hear it when they speak. That air of dominance they love to dance in. I know a lot of these people, and must not become them. To see myself as above someone else and to think that I am inherently better than anyone. One has to borrow a different kind of sensibility, the type that champions everyone. The construction worker who builds the offices we work in. The barista who makes the coffee that aids my productivity. The truck driver who ensures my essentials arrive at my door safely. The men who clear my trash every week. The retail worker who ensures that the shelves contain what I need. The admin lady who helps with filing my paperwork.

These people make my life and yours easier. They’re not less deserving of recognition, admiration, and awards. They inspire and remind me of why I set out to solve scientific and technical problems. We must often remind ourselves who we solve problems for so that our solutions can be better aligned.

In the years I spent learning how to create technology, I was more obsessed with what many call “deep tech.” The type of technology that seems advanced, futuristic, and economically important. I developed an alternative view of the type of problems I view as urgent and important. The other day, I was listening to Jony Ive when he said something like “What we make is a testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. What we make describes our preoccupations.” These statements texturize what I’ve been thinking and feeling in the past year. There is now an obsession with creating things that help people feel seen. Things that bring people together and attempts to aid their need to touch grass. I am now drawn to a type of technology that connects and uplifts. I do not know what this looks like, but the best way I can describe it is as a type of “operating system for society and culture”.

Perhaps my version of an extraordinary life would be devoted to this sphere I described. It is hard to tease out what has brought me to this resolve. Even as I reflect, I do not see a clear path that has brought me here. It’s been a series of small experiments, serendipitous encounters, and helpful conversations. I also wouldn’t deny the small steps, many of them tentative, some even taken unknowingly.

I am not certain where I will be in a few years or what type of problems I will be working on. To be frank, I am not interested in knowing. My hope is that every day brings me closer to some type of truth, not the definitive kind, but something more modest. A glimmer. Enough to carry me forward.

Happy birthday to me.