warning: I’m running on 4 hours of sleep today, so this week’s edition will probably be far more rambly and unstructured than usual.
things i…
did:
hosted my first dinner party
Among the things I’m interested in, two of them are hosting and cooking, which conveniently go very hand in hand. On hosting, I love creating spaces where people feel comfortable to form new connections or deepen existing ones. On cooking, I love using it as a creative outlet to experiment with different flavor or structural combinations, and to, again, use it as a vehicle for facilitating relationships.
I’ve been wanting to host an at-home restaurant for a while now, where I’d be able to get creative with my menu curation but also force encourage my friends to talk to new people over dinner by bringing guests. Conveniently, my previously long-distance partner had just moved into SF and was independently thinking of conducting a similar setup, so we very quickly launched into executing our scheme.
I’ll leave the rest of the elaboration of this to my subpage on hosting dinner parties, but I certainly intend on making this a regular occurrence - some with my partner in SF and some without in South Bay. If you’d like to come to one of them, please reach out! I’d love to have you :)
went to a 1950s dance-off murder mystery party
I went to my first ever murder mystery party in October and did … uh … quite miserably. I don’t think I completed any of my objectives and I was completely oblivious to any of the subplots going on, let alone who the murderer was. But I had a splendid time dressing up, playing pretend, and talking to a bunch of people, so I was looking forward to going again especially because this time it was 1950s dance-off themed!! Guys there was a literal dance-off and people actually went up and performed and everyone was cheering and it was genuinely the most heart-warming experience ever.
Side thought on murder mystery parties: I realize that going to these events a lot probably gets you really good at social navigation. It’s kind of like how I’d imagine taking improv classes would make you more relaxed and charismatic, playing murder mystery games could make you better at managing relationships where each party has their own complementary or conflicting motives. Of course, ethically abstracted out of getting away with murder, having this skill could be useful in situations of asymmetric knowledge where having positive relations are of disproportionate value (I’m mostly thinking about work tbh).
thought about:
response to my question on work-life balance
I’ve recently entered an era of exploration. One where I follow the whims of my curiosity to see where interest turns into passion. Fundamentally, I think what I crave more than anything is passion. This is especially true given my background as an ex-dancer, when I’d spend most of my waking hours obsessing over the singular objective of being the best dancer I could be. Some might see that as restrictive, but I see it as freeing. Decision fatigue is real. Both empirically from research and also anecdotally, I’ve often found myself more distressed the more decisions and constant realignments I had to make. Since leaving dance, I feel that my biggest growing pain has been the absense of that singular burning passion, and much of my search for meaning has been a search to fill that hole.
Because I consider myself to be a diligent person, my search has been habitually tainted by a sense of duty to stay committed to whatever I started with. It’s been especially potent since spending more time in SF as I’ve been befriending so many people who work at tech startups and finding my LinkedIn DMs filled with recruiters asking me to join [insert AI startup here]. I seriously considered them, because I’m a software engineer. If I want to progress in my career, what better opportunity to do so than to put myself in a situation where I’m learning and building for survival?1. But there’s a voice holding me back from doing that, because I know what passion feels like and what I feel for software engineering is not that.
My question to my future self about work-life balance mostly came out of my struggle in figuring out the tradeoff between responsibly pushing harder on my current career versus courageously exploring extraneous interests in pursuit of finding deeper meaning. Tangibly, this dichotomy turned into: do I join a startup or not? Because joining a startup would be full-sending the development of my tech career, with little time to explore outside of work. This week I spent some time pondering on this and decided that for the time-being, while I have the privilege of being young, I’m choosing to prioritize exploration.
As much as I’d like to say the decision spawned from a surge of bravery, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge my safety net of working at Netflix, where I’ve been granted the precious optionality to have an abundance of growth opportunities at work, but also have my personal time protected and respected in a way I likely wouldn’t get at a startup. So equipped with this fortunate positioning, I get to spend my life time entertaining my threads of curiosity and meaning-seeking, knowing that I have the room to invest more in work if/when that feels right.
other thoughts
- What I’m thinking about right this moment is how much my physical state is my mental state. My brain is actually functioning at 10% capacity and that includes my emotional patience. I can definitely tell I’m more irritable and sensitive. Update: it’s now a few hours later and I’m feeling much better after a hefty nap and hearty meal. Friends remember to take care of yourself <3
Footnotes
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I have the tendency and delusional pride to choose whatever is the most challenging option most of the time. (Yet another addition to my growing list of topics to write about) ↩