August 2024
The plan was simple: meditate, lift, and code. This summer, I was hired as an intern to work on self-driving cars. When I found out the job was in Ann Arbor, MI I knew it was the perfect opportunity to go monk-mode for a couple months and focus on my interests. I love my life in Austin, but you don’t always get the chance to temporarily move to a quiet place, with zero distractions, great weather, and an interesting job. Here is a bit of what I learned, and my thoughts on why disappearing for a bit can be so valuable — particularly if you’re like me: in your 20s and trying to figure it all out.
2024 has been the wildest year of my life so far and a fun exercise in finding what my real interests are when I’m not worried about who I should be. This has involved taking a break from cycling (wow, I never thought I’d say this), leaving most social media, some friends, and even a relationship. Instead, I’ve found myself drawn towards coding, running, weightlifting, and meditation.
Nothing has affected how I relate to the world as much as meditation. I started in 2020, but my practice was inconsistent until last year, and this summer I decided to step it up. As I settled into a routine of 30-60’ of sitting a day (I wrote a bit about it here), one of the first things I found was a ton of physical tension. My face, shoulders, and neck were a compacted mess of knots that began to release as I got better at noting them. Some knots were “easy”: merely noting how I held my forehead, eyes, and jaw immediately relaxed them. Some took more time, like the one on my neck I’ve had since February which slowly relaxed over 10-20 hours of meditation.
I also spent a bunch of time learning about how I typically relate to (and sometimes avoid) uncomfortable emotions like anger and sadness. If I’ve learned anything from meditation, therapy, and a self-help books is that most emotional knots unravel when you face any accompanying emotions. Emotions show up for a reason, and avoiding them stagnates them and gives them more energy. So, “I made my mind my friend” and used the emotions as the focus, rather than the reason, of my meditation. I found that most of my “bad” habits, like excessive phone use or anxious eating came from a place of avoidance. That made sense: they’re immediate hits of stimulation that distract me from whatever I don’t like. But what I found very surprising was that even some healthy activities, like exercise, sex, close relationships, and even meditation, could also be used to avoid hard emotions. There’s definitely an optimal point somewhere: I’m not trying to live in perpetual self-flagellation because “I need to face hard things”, but spending time noting when the balance teetered towards avoidance was a really great idea. Many bad habits disappeared and I was able to be more present for the healthy ones.
I also found that I had lots of stuck anger and sadness. In meditation, anger typically showed up in bitter thoughts, physical tension, an elevated heartrate, and even profuse sweating. The angry thoughts were sometimes directed towards others, but mostly towards myself: “be better!”, “work harder!”, “wow how are you so dumb?!”, “what you just did was so cringe!”, “feeling like this is only slowing you down, suck it up, buttercup!” Much time was spent learning how to skillfully let the anger flow, noting when pride made me hold on to it, and gently letting it go. Learning how to be more gentle, both with myself and with others, was a big theme of the summer.
Sadness typically showed up in the mornings and evenings. There’s something special about a slow, quiet morning before the sun is up, or a cool night where the only sound is the soft rustling of leaves. These are thin places that consistently blossom any unexpressed sadness. In the past, my first reaction to sadness would’ve been to immediately drown it out with a podcast, scrolling on my phone, or even some kinds of meditation. This time I decided to welcome any feelings, no matter how uncomfortable they were. This was made much easier by some wonderful guided meditations like Tara Brach’s RAIN, Jayasāra’s loving-kindness meditations, or Jitindriyā’s Meeting Things As They Are. Another great way of feeling stuck emotions was to lay on the floor, set a 30’ timer, and stare at the ceiling — a bit of Shinzen Young’s “Do Nothing” meditation. Some of these moments of stillness made me feel something that is best described as melting into the immensity of life1. And they also produced some seriously cathartic experiences.
For example, on a quiet June night I had an intense emotional release where I learned it’s possible to forgive and love those that have hurt you the most.2 For a couple minutes, I felt like I was channeling a divine forgiveness that was completely out of my control. It was a bit scary, but it also left me in a warm and fuzzy state of understanding and love that I can still feel today. I wrote a lot about this moment, maybe one day I’ll share it on here.
I also spent quite a bit of time making friends with my fear of failure. A common theme the past year has been making an effort to leave my local bubble and expose myself to the most talented people in my field. This initially led to a ton of heartbreak as I found out just how much of my identity and self-worth was wrapped up around feeling like the smartest person in the room. Once I got past that though, I found myself doing some really interesting and really hard things, where failing at some point was inevitable. Who would’ve thought a PhD in robotics and AI is hard? Or that self-driving cars don’t work on the first try? And that’s where I learned just how much I hate failing and how much struggle and energy I spent on avoiding it at all costs. Unfortunately, as David Deutsch writes in the Beginning of Infinity: errors are inevitable. The trick is not to aim for perfection, and instead, to focus on maximizing how well you correct and learn from errors.3 So I re-framed failure as a practice in error-correction, made friends with it, and even trained myself to enjoy it: seeing at as a sign that I was trying interesting things AND I was also learning from them.
This summer I found myself at an interesting point in life: I’m single, AND I feel pretty comfortable with who I am. Unfortunately, these two situations have never happened at the same time before. So, I decided to shoot my shot, and approached women I would’ve never had the confidence to talk to before — curious about and even welcoming rejection. At the start I found it hilarious how my body would go into full fight-or-flight mode when talking to a beautiful girl. Sweaty palms, heart pounding, and even shaking legs, all because I was talking to an attractive human being. There’s so much I could write about here.
For example, I’ve gained a whole new level of appreciation and respect for women and femininity. As a guy, I’m largely rewarded for being confident and competent, which is great because I love getting better at skills I care about. But life has lots of ups and downs, and once in a while, it’s nice to feel safe enough to be vulnerable about my feelings, concerns, hopes, and dreams. Opening up is so scary, and I’ve been hurt when doing it before, but I’ve found it’s always worth it.4
Recently, I met a beautiful girl who changed how I view relationships. She showed me how it’s okay to drop the mask and be vulnerable. In these moments of tenderness — in the warm and loving embrace of someone who cares for you — I felt masculine and feminine energy falling perfectly into place like two pieces of a puzzle. The yin and the yang. Thank you, R.
Tender moments are nice, but another cool thing I found was that the drive a women will give you is nothing short of a weapons-grade stimulant. Nothing will wake you up, make you stand straighter, and give you confidence like knowing your hard work is part of a mission to build something with a woman you love. Naval Ravikant has this old tweet I think about a lot: “Men are the means; women are the motive.” Now I understand why the Greeks fucked up Troy over Helen.
Apart from any romance, I’ve also opened up to the wisdom of the women in my life, like my mom. I’m still very confused about what goes on inside women’s brains, but their warmth and wisdom is extremely valuable, and I feel very grateful it’s part of my life.
Here are some nice numbers:
- 3 months
- 60 days in the office
- ~60 hours of meditation
- ~40 runs
- ~30 hours of meditation talks
- ~30 lifts
- 12 books
- Many thousands of lines of code.
How was my summer? It was joyful, it was lonely, it was beautiful, it was sad, it was scary, it was angry, it was exciting, it was inspiring. It was very special. Here’s a playlist with a bunch of songs that reflect how it felt.
I discovered that in the silence of solitude you glimpse who you are and what you’re meant to do. I still don’t have it completely figured out, but I have enough to get by with a sense of confidence and calm that I’ve never felt before. I think we’re social animals and spiritual growth also happens in a community. But a period of peace and isolation will teach you a lot. Try it out and report back — I promise it’s worth it.
What’s next? I think I’m done with the self-help stuff for a bit. There are still so many books I want to read, but I’m finding myself more drawn towards technical stuff. I’ve never been more excited about my work and soon enough I’ll have some cool stuff to share.
Thank you for reading.
Fernando Palafox
fortitudine vincimus
Footnotes
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There’s a future post describing exactly what I feel in these sessions of do nothing meditation, but I don’t have language to describe it quite yet. ↩
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Even cooler is the fact that you can do all this AND still have healthy boundaries with them. ↩
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If this sounds interesting, I highly suggest reading Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. Shameless plug to my notes here. You might also like the OODA loop. ↩
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My friend and mentor Henry Beer sent me this quote by C.S. Lewis I loved: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ↩