32 Things I Know (And One Thing I Don’t)

I turned 32 this month

I stole this from

Sasha Chapin

(50 things I know) who apparently stole it from

Mari Andrew

(100 things I know). Each thief does their own little twist on the template, so here goes mine.

My additions are the one thing I don’t know and a bunch of links to my Substack essays and notes. It’s half self-promo, half reference sheet. I’ll look back on this to see what occupied my thoughts through 2024/5, enough to put them in writing.

And since I dislike celebrating my birthday, this is the most reasonable way for me to acknowledge its passing.

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Tao Te Ching / Laozi, 4th century B.C.

1. I know how to enjoy contradictions. Life is a series of contradictions and we are lucky to experience it. Some variation of this tagline has lived in my online bios for 7 years because I feel it to be foundationally true. And even if it’s not true, I’m naturally attracted to people, places, and events that embody this (like Bankers for Bernie).

2. I know the world is a two way interview. It’s easy to forget when I show up—whether it’s for a potential job, date, or gathering—that I am also there to evaluate them.

3. I know in business, you shouldn’t take no for an answer. TSMC wouldn’t have opened factories in Arizona had the delegates accepted the first no, which I learned first hand from one of the delegates. (But if someone says “no thanks,” isn’t the two way interview over? A real contradiction for me.)

4. I know life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Since my life is a tragicomedy, dark humor is how I deal with topics like suicide and the UHC health insurance shooter. I like consuming dark humor too. One of my favorite shows of all time is Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, a dark slapstick romcom dressed up as horror. So many cannibal puns, you’ll be eating for weeks.

5. I know gratitude when I pass a car crash. Sure, I’m late to my appointment now, but that could’ve been me. Negative visualizations work amazingly well; I’ve never been able to gaslight myself with positivity. I prefer Cormac McCarthyisms: “You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from.” Now that’s inspiring.

6. “I” know “I” am made up of multiple “I”s. Eckhart Tolle taught me this first, then IFS therapy.¹ Now I’m interested in Jungian psychoanalysis, as I’ve recognized that my shadow self keeps “me” from doing things “I” want to do (because secretly, “I” like it).

   

   “It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow” / “The shadow cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness” - Carl Jung

7. I know I’m smart enough to see just how much smarter other people can be. It kills me sometimes. There are days I fantasize about being a savant, like my ex. I think about and discuss this with friends quite a bit. I know the messiness of life isn’t governed by equations, but I also know too many people with the high fluid intelligence + traumatic background = antifragility combo to not feel like I got dealt a shorthand.

8. I know I would never swap places with anyone else, not even a savant. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).² Even awful parts of my life, like losing life savings to a scam, I wouldn't trade. The story alone was worth the price (though I would’ve accepted a discount on the $162,000 lesson). I remind myself that I don’t just get to pick and choose the good parts from someone’s life. I’d have to swap for the whole package, warts and all. So I rarely feel jealousy or envy anymore. But don’t admire me yet. You should know that I’m still envious of happy children from “good enough” families.³ Yep, I’m a troll scowling at giggling kids.

9. I know the environment can box you in. Changing habitats is the best precursor to changing habits. Otherwise let reading be the gateway drug to all possibilities. If material reality is fixed, shift mental reality. I’ve written about material class constraints, but I think the real difficulty is shedding an impoverished mindset. Even today, I catch myself with scarcity beliefs learned from my family.

10. I know how to change. It’s easier to replace a bad habit than to drop it entirely, unless you make a big identity shift. I replaced bedtime doomscrolling with reading. I stopped smoking when I declared “I am not a smoker.” It also helped that Californians hate smokers. As mentioned above, the habitat helps or hinders.

11. I know beauty is more art than science. Misunderstanding this is why people get bogged pursuing plastic surgery. Looksmaxxing is a classic local-maximum problem,⁴ where hyper-optimizing isolated features eventually destroys overall facial harmony. Maybe I’m extra sensitive to aesthetic nuances, being an ~Artiste at heart. Certainly when I think of great artists, plastic surgeons rarely make the cut. Nor are they incentivized to stop you from the ruinous pursuit of Instagram face. But let’s assume plastic surgeons can always craft a conventionally beautiful face. Failos to halos, guaranteed. Do you really want a face approved by looksmaxxers who think Anne Hathaway’s negative canthal tilts make her ugly?

    

    The Bogdanoff twins is where the term “bogged” comes from. RIP.

12. I know you are terminally online if #11 made sense without Googling/chatGPTing.

13. I know elitism and hierarchy are uncomfortable truths. Plato was right when he said “Beauty is natural superiority.” I know I know, I just said not to care about beauty. But Plato spoke beyond superficial aesthetics. Beauty is a higher, universal ideal. It is truth and excellence, harmony and virtue. In other words, perfection. We are predisposed to recognizing the perfect, which implies the existence of the imperfect, which implies hierarchy.

14. I know why I appreciate puns. The pun is mightier than the sword. At their best, puns are language at its peak—playful, clever, witty, elegant, beautiful. Landing on a pun like my Substack name Furniture Coins tickles my brain the way beauty does. I’ll take wordplay over swordplay any day.

15. I know technology is applied philosophy. Technology is applied science. Science is applied mathematics. Mathematics is natural philosophy. The ancient Greeks saw numbers as the language of the universe, providing the foundation that would bloom into formal mathematics and scientific empiricism.

16. I know I survey “the experts” before trusting my own intuition. My great editor

    CansaFis Foote
    from Write of Passage unearthed this particular defense mechanism. Now that I’m aware of it, I aim to write more personally. But wait, you say. Aren’t I doing the surveying thing right now, citing McCarthy and Jung and Plato? Yeah, you’ve caught me. So it goes.

17. I know that grief is love with nowhere to go. They’re gone and you’re still here.

    There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming “ghum-khaur” —grief eaters—who take in the mourner's sorrow.

    Would you like me to be in English or Urdu right now?

    —Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

18. I know how to stop crying when cutting onions: oil the knife blade. I hear that sharpening the knife and freezing the onion helps too.

19. I know to stop punishing people for behavior you want to see more of. My mom mocked me for wanting a little egg cooker—in her words, a “useless gadget”— even though she insisted I eat two eggs a day. I asked her “Do you want me to eat eggs or do you want to keep making fun of me?” so she shut up. Now I use Dash daily to make two jammy eggs. Joke’s on my mom too, because she loves the useless gadget so much that she bought one for herself.

    

    Dash is cute, aqua, and sings. Haters gonna hate, then convert.

20. I know what happened to me was not my fault, but it is my responsibility to integrate the bad experiences. Otherwise I run the risk of projecting my bad experiences on everyone. Speaking of which…

21. I know all about projection. I used to project my misery everywhere and blame the world for problems that were really my own. Now I experience being projected upon with anything I write online, which is expected. It’s fascinating how some people interpret my points in the opposite way, insert politics into neutral topics, or veer into really random tangents.

22. I know without health, I have nothing. At 18, I was hospitalized over an autoimmune disease. I’ve continued to struggle with the healthcare system, which made me realize that while in pain, the only thing that matters is escaping it. A lot of negative internet discourse comes from people lashing out in pain, so I keep that in mind when I read an angry comment directed at me. (Remember: it’s all projection).

23. I know I would never survive an apocalypse. Pharmacies are dead on day one and unfortunately, I’m dependent on daily medication to live. I’m still begrudging but no longer despondent about this fact.

24. I know it sucks to lose friends, especially if it’s because they think you’re an evil person. I learned the hard way that someone’s politics has nothing to do with how well they treat you. It might even be negatively correlated; the more someone declares themselves to be a good person, the more likely it is they’re a bad friend.

25. I know money reveals your true character. It certainly did for my ex-friend. I was never convinced that money changes you, because money is a flow of energy.⁵ Money moves through people like water and carries our characteristics with it. Two things about money: 1) Step into the stream and 2) Don’t stopper it, lest it stagnates and rots. Like many techies in the Bay Area, I fell into the FIRE—Financial Independence, Retire Early— movement pretty hardcore. So I used to hoard money like a tiny Smaug, petrified of losing it. All that revealed was my lack of self-belief. If I trusted in my future, I would’ve invested in myself.⁶ Nowadays, I’m much more generous with me. (Coincidentally, I’ve also left the Bay.)

    

    Me through 2020, except my treasure stockpile was 1/100000 the size

26. I know changing someone’s mind through facts and logic usually fails. People change through how you make them feel. I certainly changed; I grew a spine when I became sick and tired of feeling unworthy around so-called friends.

27. I know that I value authenticity, which is why politics can feel horrible to me. Ironically, I still dive in to the point of mania e.g. I fundraised so hard for Andrew Yang that I met Sam Altman. For a long time, I thought I hated politics, but I’ve realized it’s really the kayfabe I despise: the performative outrage and tribalistic thinking. Now that I’ve taken a chill pill and become content on my own island, I can actually enjoy the thoughtful parts of politics.

28. I know the news is propaganda. News outlets rely on noisy sensationalism for advertising dollars and must curry favor with powerful institutions for leads, creating a filter for what is allowed to be reported.⁷ So I stopped watching the news years ago. Anything important still notifies me, whether through friends or the million Substack newsletters I subscribe to.

29. I know alternative media can also be propaganda, whether it be a limited hangout or a social media PR battle between celebrities. Just because someone on Substack rails against mainstream media doesn’t make them automatically more trustworthy.

30. I know Artificial Intelligence is to the 21st century as nuclear was to the 20th century. The battleground has now moved beyond atoms and into bits; AI is waging a war against reality. Truth is no longer just distorted, its very foundations are under attack. Will blockchain cameras be necessary to prove events actually happened? No more Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake. We need Proof of Reality.

31. I know consciousness precedes matter. Science has grappled with the “hard problem of consciousness” for decades, yet the truth is we’ve made zero progress on explaining how consciousness arises. We default to assuming matter makes up the brain from which consciousness somehow emerges—an assumption that Albert Einstein once called his “religion.” But if we apply first principles thinking and start from what we know, we’d flip the model upside down. We are conscious, and our consciousness affects matter.⁸

32. I know why longevity matters. In the past, I never understood why people cared about longevity. That’s because I was struggling with “a sense of foreshortened future,”⁹ convinced that I would die by the time I was 30. Here I am, exceeding expectations. Now I care about living well and longer because I’m desperately playing catch up. I wasted a lot of time.

Finally, there are many things I don’t know, but the most agonizing one:

I don’t know whether or not to have children.

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Thank you for the feedback:

Matthew Beebe

,

John Min

,

Radical Radha

,

Matt Joass

,

Brandon Lee Weaver

,

Kat Koh

,

Rose

,

Alivia Duran

,

Michael Dean

,

Becky Isjwara

And thank you to

Eddy

for his article on intelligence,

Luke Dougherty

for discussing Greek natural philosophy with me, and

Michael Dean

for his expanded thoughts on consciousness

1. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and IFS (Internal Family Systems) taught me about parts

2. Song of Myself, 51 by Walt Whitman

3. “Good enough family” is a term I first heard from therapist Patrick Teahan

4. A certain conventional beauty/a local maximum can be reached with surgical help, but I find that it can quickly veer into being disproportionate/a local minimum and then slide into the uncanny valley/global minimum really fast. See math definitions, which are central to machine learning algorithms

5. An idea I stole from a Twitter thread by

Tom Morgan

6. I learned this from Peter Thiel in his debate against Eric Schmidt of Google in 2012

7. I first heard of this concept circa 2012 from Rolf Dobelli, who might have stolen it from Nassim Taleb. The final nail in the coffin for me was reading Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. As Chomsky says, “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media”

8. Consciousness causes matter to collapse from a wave to a particle in the double slit experiment. I’m citing An End to Upside Down Thinking by Mark Gober, a book I’m working through on rethinking consciousness

9. Trauma can cause a sense of not having any future or milestones like marriage, kids etc to look forward to