We go through a phase in our adolescence where struggle to find our identity. We flit through the giant warehouses of the world, trying on these different masks and costumes, playing dress up and seeing how people react to our new selves, combining pieces from one outfit with accessories of another in a quest to forge our own unique identities. And we use these costumes to play and experiment, but also to impress people and to hide our scars which we’re too embarrassed to expose. And every time we put a costume on or take it off, it leaves a bit of its hue on our body, a smudge which marks us forever.

In the modern world, our choices have exploded and we can spend our lives trying on different pieces, hoping one will display the perfect, essential you that we so want to express to the world. We think we’re changing and growing and evolving but really, all we did was move over to a different aisle, eternally.

Eventually, there is the realization that identity derives from within, you become grounded, centered. And you realize that this emotional clothing is a mask to stop people getting close to the true you. And so you embrace nakedness, you embrace your multi-hued, scarred and bruised body as who you are. Every action, every thought comes from your center, it draws from common roots. There is no more artifice, no more manipulation, there’s nothing in the world that you want anymore, merely things you would be happy to accept, freely given. You make peace with your identity and you make peace with the other.

Editors

• Lucent

Exploring what it is to be real. The key to being really real is that you develop a commitment to saying and doing the first thing that comes into your head.

In it's manufacturing plants, Toyota has developed a system called Jidoka. Whenever there is a defect detected, a signal is sent out and the entire production line stops and comes to inspect the problem. When it was first introduced, it was a bloodbath. The line virtually never moved and Toyota was losing millions. But the psychological effect was powerful, it forced the workers to confront the roots of their problem rather than just patching up surface defects. It drained the river so that all the submerged problems became visible.

Being real is the same thing. For so many guys, the first thought when they meet a pretty girl is "I want to sleep with you". Merely not saying it didn't address the root issues. It wasn't until I stopped thinking it that I was able to become really real.

Introspection. That is my center. For me, introspection is not an isolating process of sitting in a dark room trying to figure out how I feel, introspection is an active process, pushing me to get out into the world.

In order to understand anything about myself, I've become fascinated in psychology, history, economics, biology, anthropology, politics... because they all have something to say about the human condition.

I've learned humility and empathy because they gave me a clearer view of who I am. I've learned to care for others and become invested in their lives and I've learned what it is that makes me truly happy in life and how to go about achieving it.

Editors

• Lucent

That I'm open. That I've made the conscious decision to leave myself absolutely vulnerable to the world because this is important to me.

Editors

• Lucent

Books: Even though I am a voracious reader, I’ve been horribly lax at cracking open honest to god ink on paper books in the last year as a steady streak of blog snacks has ruined my intellectual diet. The Economist is about the closest thing I get to weighty writing any more. This is a habit which I have been slowly reversing but here’s a hodgepodge list of books I have enjoyed in the past: Stand up on Zanzibar, The Shockwave Rider, Guns, Germs & Steel, The Timeless Way of Building, Freakonomics, Ender's Game, Design of Everyday Things, The Stranger, I am David, The Origin of Virtue, Lolita, Flow, Jocks & Burnouts, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The French Laundry Cookbook

Movies: Man Bites Dog, Memento, Primer, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fight Club, Sideways, Run Lola Run, City of God, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Foods: I am a serious foodie. Lots of people say they love to cook and are really into cooking but they pale into mere amateurism compared to me. I’m probably one of the most dedicated foodies you will meet who’s not directly involved in the food industry. I don’t really know what attracts me so much to cooking and I sometimes get the feeling that it’s merely a convenient conduit for my interests in obsessions in general. Part of it is that I feel cooking and programming are so alike in that they involve this raw creative process where you fashion this tangible product which you get to later point to as something birthed directly from your hands. Part of it is what the French call métier for which I guess the best English translation is “craftsmanship” where cooking is has this notion of refinement and incremental improvement which I find is missing from much of programming. Part of it is that cooking, more than even programming, brings me into what Csikszentmihalyi called the state of flow where time just seems to stop and you become completely shutoff from the outside world and absorbed with the task at hand. What I can say is that I bring the same level of dedication and commitment to cooking as I do to my research work and I can quite confidently say that what I put out is pretty fucking special.

Music: I seem to have a rare cognitive disorder that disables the part of my brain that lets me connect with music on an emotional level. I know it seems weird and I’ve never met someone else who is like me but I just totally don’t get what music is all about. On the downside, it sucks not being able to appreciate what seems to be a fundamental part of the human experience and the only way I can really comprehend how much I’m missing out on is by imagining what my life would be like if I didn’t care a whit about food. On the plus side, I can totally one-up any myspace emo jerk on their musical obscurity.

1. My Creative Force: It feels like everything I do in my life from programming to cooking to conversation stems from this drive to create something and be able to point to it and say “I did that”. The idea that I could start with this blank slate of raw materials and fashion something that is of genuine value to the world taps into something deep inside of me.

2. Intellectual Curiosity: The idea that 90% of everything there is to know could be boring to someone is a concept that is totally alien to me. How could you be a engineer who is not interested in linguistics or a painter who isn’t fascinated by game theory? I acknowledge that there are people who have their own, narrowly defined sphere of interest and everything outside of that might as well be Urdu Tax Procedures but I could never live that life.

3. Humility: Humility may not be the best word to describe this but it’s being open to the possibility that other people hold equally legitimate viewpoints as you and that, when they disagree with you, it could be you who is wrong on some of your most cherished beliefs. Humility seems like one of those things which everybody is sure they have but I’ve found it deceptively difficult to accomplish and it has been a real struggle for me to develop true humility.

4. Acceptance of the unavoidably essential nature of reality: There is the world and it is real. And there is our conception of the world and it is fluid. The world has a certain amount of give, you can push at reality to a certain extent and it will hold. But if you start believing too far outside the real, reality will inevitably push back at you. Once you accept that reality is inevitable and unavoidable, you can figure out how to come to terms with it.

5. My Privilege: I’m enormously thankful that I grew up in a time and culture that allowed me to develop my potential. It’s only really been within the lifetimes of our generation that all but the elite had the opportunity to work on what they were passionate about and be provided with the tools that allowed them to accomplish it. To see so much potential being squandered in the world today due to unfortunate circumstances breaks my heart and I don’t see how people can stand idly by and just let this happen. This is the only willing concession I will make to my acceptance of reality.

6. Facebook: I know this sounds like a attempt at lightheartedness at the end of this rather heavy list but I mean it in all seriousness. I rant about how retarded most modern social software is but the guys at Facebook seem to have their heads screwed on pretty straight and they’ve really produced an amazing piece of software from a sociological perspective. It’s not to say it doesn’t have its flaws but it’s a fascinating place to explore as a researcher and I definitely would not have been set on the path that I am now without it.

My friend has put me onto this idea that there are certain “magic sentences” which can crisply encapsulate some phenomena so clearly that they stick with you forever. I think that’s too much of a reductionist view for me but I do think that there is a certain skill into being able to put the obvious into words. There’s this notion in Architecture pioneered by Christopher Alexander that there exist certain universal patterns in the design of buildings and that all great architecture was built upon a “pattern language” which drew together these individual components and weaved them into a seamless whole. I guess the “magic sentence” here is that I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to build a pattern language for living.

Right now, I'm pondering an experiment which might be provably the most evil art project in the world, but only for non-devoutly religious people.

Discovering people, discovering life and reveling in the absurdity of it all.

I can prove that I'm crazy, but then I realize that my proof is invalid because I don't have the requisite sanity to evaluate the legitimacy of the proof. The above was not an attempt at lightheartedness.

If the above resonated with you.