Starting Again

I don’t really know how to start this.

Which is probably a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about writing something like this for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I didn’t know what the newsletter was supposed to be about.

Then I realized maybe it doesn’t need to be about anything.

Maybe I just want a place to write down what I’m thinking.

I’m 24, live in India, and work as an engineer. I managed to crack a remote job that probably puts me in the top 0.1% of people my age in India when it comes to how much I make. I’ve worked really hard for it, and I’m genuinely grateful for where I am.

And yet, lately, I’ve been thinking about something that feels almost absurd:

I want to go back to being a kid and solve math problems.

Not because I need to.

Not because it will make me more money.

Not because it will help my career.

I just miss it.

When I was younger, I could spend hours solving algebra, trigonometry, combinatorics, calculus whatever problem happened to be in front of me. I loved the feeling of being stuck for a while, trying different things, and then suddenly seeing it.

Oh.

That’s it.

I remember that feeling more vividly than I remember a lot of things I was supposed to care about.

Somewhere along the way, life got more serious.

Money mattered. Careers mattered. Independence mattered. I learned to code. I became obsessed with building things. I started thinking about startups and AI and becoming really, really good at what I do.

And I still love all of that.

I love coding. I love building things. I love working with people who are ridiculously good at what they do.

But recently I’ve started wondering whether I’ve left too little room for things that don’t need to be useful.

That’s a scary thought.

Because from the outside, my life looks pretty good.

And I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

I also don’t have some grand answer now. I don’t know what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.

I know I want to build something meaningful.

I know I want to become extremely capable.

I know I want enough money that I can have real freedom over my time.

But underneath all of that, there’s this much stranger desire that keeps coming back.

I want to discover something.

Something genuinely new.

When I was 14, our school had this little tradition. On your birthday, you could put your name down for a chance to speak in front of the entire school. If your name was picked, you’d get two or three minutes to introduce yourself and talk about what you wanted to do in life.

Most people said some version of the usual things: doctor, engineer, IAS officer--the paths that everyone around us admired.

When it was my turn, I said I wanted to invent a time machine.

Everyone laughed.

I was serious.

I still think about that sometimes.

Not necessarily the time machine itself, but the feeling behind it.

I think I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of doing something that seems impossible until someone actually does it.

A wormhole.

Abundant energy.

Interplanetary travel.

Understanding consciousness.

Understanding why we’re here in the first place.

Understanding who I am.

I don’t know whether any of those questions will ever become my life’s work.

Maybe none of them will.

But for the first time in a long time, I don’t want to immediately turn that curiosity into a career plan.

I want to follow it.

So next week, I’m starting with something very small.

I bought an algebra book.

I’m going to sit down and solve problems again, just because I want to see if that feeling is still there.

No career reason.

No productivity goal.

I just want to know whether I still love it.

Sometimes this newsletter might be about something I’m building.

Sometimes it might be about a book I’m reading.

Sometimes it might be about math.

Sometimes it might be an idea I can’t stop thinking about.

Sometimes it might just be me being confused.

I don’t really have an agenda for this.

I don’t know where it goes.

I just know that I’d like to remember what it felt like to be curious before I learned to ask whether curiosity was useful.

So, I guess this is me starting again.