Raised by a Constellation

I was raised by a constellation.
Not the kind that hangs in the night sky, but the kind made of people—brilliant, flawed, luminous in ways I still struggle to name.

Their light has warmed me as it bent the arc of my life, and everything I write and everything I am is, in some way, an echo of theirs.

Lessons and Inheritances

  • From Tim Kreider - “I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.”
    Kreider’s special mix of witty, moody, and pessimistic cynicism is a poorly concealed fake-out for the lesson he teaches by coating each and every noun in real, relentless empathy - and the knowledge that it is what we owe it to everyone. Inside unspeakable heartbreak he hides a lesson in real love, and what it means, and the how gorgeous it is to do the “messy work of understanding” each other, in all of our ridiculousness.

    Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating: making the same obvious mistakes over and over, dating imbeciles, endlessly relapsing into their dumb addictions and self-defeating habits, blind to their own hilarious flaws and blatant contradictions and fiercely devoted to whatever keeps them miserable. It’s out of that ridiculousness and absurdity that he reminds you of the strange beauty and boundless potential inside all of us - even him. Even you. Even me. From him, I learned that to know is to love, and to love is to know. And that giving each other understanding is the only thing really worth doing in life - everything is, really, just bullshit. This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are.

  • From Neil Gaiman - “I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.” I was raised by a constellation.
    Not the kind that hangs in the night sky, but the kind made of people—brilliant, flawed, luminous in ways I still struggle to name.

Their light has bent the arc of my life, and everything I write and everything I am is, in some way, an echo of theirs.
Worlds can be spun out of shadow and wonder, surreal yet tethered to the heart. There is comfort to be found in good madness, and fairy tales exist to teach us that every dragon - every challenge - can be beaten. That inside of every person is a whole world of both Delirium and Delight - who, it turns out, is the same person, just at different times. From Neil Gaiman, I learned that every else is so terribly wonderful and strange, that I might as well be exactly myself, and no more, and no less - and that sometimes the best thing to do is just lie back and enjoy the ride.

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

  • Michael Lewis and George R.R. Martin - “If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.”
    The sly magic of hiding a cathedral of ideas inside a story of characters and drama so colorful you don’t notice the architecture until it has you surrounded. In their writing I see the truth lived out that people will never remember what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel. I will never be able to smuggle a structuralist intellectual masterpiece, Trojan-horse style, into a story so engrossing you can’t seem to put it down. From them, I have learned that it will never matter how brilliant or clever you are, if you are boring.

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it. ~ Michael Lewis

Power is a trick - it resides where we believe it resides, no more, not less. Some battles are won with swords and spears, others with quills and ravens. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. George R.R. Martin

  • From Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Hannah Arendt, and John Rawls - “Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.”
    That moral clarity is not a gift, but a discipline. That if you do want to find wisdom is this world, and to figure out how to do something good, The Right Thing, instead of just enjoying the ride, you have to fight for it, with rigor, and dedication, and reflect it in the choices you make in your own life, not just in the abstract philosphy you write about. From them, I learned that knowing The Right Thing to Do is non-trivial, and an essential element of a life well lived. I also learned that the closed systems of reason and logic and mathematics are not sufficient, despite their descriptive power; to temper thoose insights by respecting human emotions as legitimate, intelligent responses to our perception of the world and it’s value is essential. I’ve always had a obsessed with the aesthetically quality of sound logical argument, but when you get into the ontology of human language, I cannot help but appreciate Arendt’s insight that “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility. ~ Martha Nussbaum

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it. ~ Amartya Sen

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. ~ Hannah Arendt

The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind. A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place ~ John Rawls

Inspirations - The people who I work to be as good as they think I am.

I will never be as kind—or as unshakably, earnestly good—as my three brothers; never be as strong as my mother; never match the generosity and mentorship of Brian Day, Phillip Jones, or Julie Hardwick. I will never be as brilliant as Eric Wright, Upasana Kaul, Teresa Asma, or Diana Chang. And no one—no one—will ever be as funny as Sumedh Joshi.

  • Kindness — I will never be as genuinely kind or as unshakably, earnestly good as all three of my brothers have always been. I am proud of each of you every single day.
  • Strength — I will never be as strong as my mother, even though from her I learned to be as tough as nails.
  • Generosity & Mentorship — I was so incredibly privileged to start my career under the wings of Brian Day, Phillip Jones, Suba Vasudevan, and Julie Hardwick - you have all inspired me in different ways, and you will always be the examples I think of and aspire to when I think about generosity, genuine care, and effectiveness in mentorship.
  • Brilliance — from Eric Wright, Eric Rowe, Upasana Kaul, Chandra Shrivastava, Teresa Asma, Sukrit Silas and Diana Chang. How did I ever get so lucky as to meet each of you so young? Through osmosis and late-night documentary marathons, and sitting through white board sessions I didn’t understand at all, and overly-nerdy conversations over too much wine, I learned so much from each of you about how to recognize my own weaknesses, think more clearly, and that, even though there’s no real source of truth for most problems…we can probably round up in the case of Eric Wright and Brian Day.
  • Everything — No one - no one - will ever approach being as funny as Sumedh Joshi. But I’ve carried your sense of humor with me through every day of my life, even after I lost your light in mine. I’m writing this entire blog as an homage to the one you wrote (2013-2014)[https://www.sumedhmjoshi.com/] when you were, theoretically, supposed to be working on your dissertation. Which you wrote in over 20 days, but really only put in 3 full days of work. You are ridiculous, and absurd, and you will never be matched. I still hear your voice in my head - including every time single I brush my teeth or microwave soup or start to doubt myself. There is no part of me, in one way or another, that wasn’t shaped by you, and I hope that never changes. I know that creating an homage to your old blog isn’t much, but 15 days from now it will have been 9 years since I heard your voice. Getting your old blog back up and running, and writing follow-ups to some of your posts with current data with a website designed in the same aesthetic style makes me feel somehow like I’m extending your voice into 2025. Like I’m talking to you through a very data-limited time maching (yes, yes, I know that’s not an accurate physics-based description, and I can hear your objecting and requests for corrections). And even if it’s not true, it feels true. And I’ll lean on Martha Nussbaum for this one: emotions are legitimate, intelligent responses to our perception of the world. So I’m going to round up, and take it.

Love you all. Always.

My North Star

These people and ideals make up my north star: an eclectic constellation of inspirations, friends, collaborators, and family.

They may not have made me who I am—but they have shown me the shape of who I will always wake up everyday, still trying to become.

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