Yes, I’m breaking my rules from post #1 again, which at this point means the rule is probably just gone. This is another personal one, and like the last personal one, I’m writing it mostly because I’m scared of what happens if I don’t.

I haven’t written here since the spring, which is the longest this blog has ever gone quiet. I spent the summer in Berlin on Georgia Tech’s faculty-led study abroad program, taking classes and working in a lab I found on my own, and I got back three days ago. I’m still on the wrong sleep schedule. I’ve been carrying a bunch of half-formed thoughts around for weeks and I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t write them down while they’re still messy, they flatten into clean little anecdotes I tell at parties, and whatever was actually in them is gone.

I’m not totally sure what I’m trying to say with this one. But before anything else: none of it happens without the people I fell into over there. Shoutout to my friend group, the fataßes, who spent three months teaching me how to live. I’ve written a lot on this website about progress and legacy and the friction of building things, and almost nothing about people, and looking back that’s a pretty glaring hole.

Man is by nature a social animal. - Aristotle, Greek philosopher

background#

I got on the plane in May as a blank slate, which had never happened to me before and at first, which I did not enjoy.

Over the spring I’d wrapped up my initial Cobweb work, which had drifted almost entirely into applications and away from theory, and when it was finished there was nothing queued behind it. Nothing. I’ve had a research agenda continuously since I was in my junior year of high school and suddenly there was no next direction. I have a thesis coming next year on compositionality and what it donates to human performance, so the plan, loosely, was to spend the summer poking at theory to prepare for that, but “poking at theory” is not a plan, it’s a mood. For the first two weeks the emptiness genuinely scared me. I kept opening my laptop looking for the thing I was behind on and not finding it.

So I did what I always do when I don’t know what I’m doing, which is build a system around it. I am extremely Type A about planning. Before every trip I made itineraries, cross-referenced train schedules, priced routes down to the euro, and built spreadsheets that I’m now fairly confident nobody else ever opened. If I could not control the research, I was going to control the continent.

I should say here that this instinct isn’t new and it isn’t really about travel. I’ve been the person who books the thing and tracks the budget and notices what nobody else noticed yet since I first moved schools in my sophomore year. It’s a role I took on, and I took it on for a specific reason I’ll get to later, and by this point in my life it’s less a habit than a reflex. I landed in Berlin fully expecting to run this summer the way I’ve run every other group thing I’ve ever been part of, which is to say from about a step behind everybody, holding the map.

chasing it#

That lasted maybe three weeks.

The first thing that broke was the itinerary, and it broke in the best possible way. It turns out I’m Type A in planning and Type B in execution, and I’d never noticed because I’d never let the two run separately. What I figured out somewhere in June is that the entire value of all that spreadsheet work is that it buys you the right to stop. Once you’re actually standing where you meant to be standing, the plan has done its job, and gripping it any harder just costs you the thing you flew there for. Our best days, without exception, were the ones where the schedule survived about ninety minutes and then dissolved into whatever everyone felt like.

The second thing that broke was me, in a good way, on the first real night out. We went clubbing and I lost myself in techno for hours. Nothing waiting on the other side of it, nobody to be responsible for, no version of me in the corner of the room keeping track. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything more purely in my life, and I remember walking back genuinely shocked at myself, like I’d found a room in my own house I didn’t know about.

So naturally, I went back. The next weekend I wanted it again, and the weekend after that, and each time the same night gave back a little less than it had the time before. I’m not making a moral point, and I know this is not a new observation, it’s just that I’d only ever encountered it as a sentence in a book. The thrill of adrenaline can seldom be satiated. It’s an incredible thing to be visited by and I don’t think you can build anything on top of it, and by early July I had a low, hard-to-name feeling that I was doing this summer at very high volume and still somehow doing it alone. I had the clubs and the trips and the spreadsheets and I could not have told you a single thing about the interior life of anyone I was doing them with.

the u3 into the u8#

What actually changed things was, of all things, my commute.

My apartment was Circus Living, and getting back to it meant taking the U3 into the U8. I made that transfer more times than I can count, and it was almost always late, almost always alone, almost always past the point where I had the energy to look at my phone. It’s dead time. It’s the part of the day nothing happens in.

I own the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and I’ve read it thoroughly, so the word was already sitting in my head. Sonder, John Koenig’s word: the realization that every random person going past you is living a life as vivid and complicated as your own, and that you appear in it exactly once, in the background, as a blur through a window. I’d read that definition probably three separate times, thought it was beautiful, and gone about my day.

Reading it and having a train car hand it to you are not the same thing. Somewhere around eleven at night on the U8, sitting across from a car full of people who were each on their way to something I was never going to learn one single fact about, it stopped being a nice definition and became a plain fact about the room I was in. There was a woman asleep against the window. There was a guy with a bike who’d clearly had a much worse day than me. And I remember, with a kind of quiet bittersweetness I still haven’t fully shaken, noticing that I had ridden that train forty times assuming I was the only person on it with a whole day behind them.

I don’t really know how to describe what shifted. But I stopped narrating.

the mountains and the cards#

The back half of the summer was mountains, and the mountains were where it all actually landed.

I did a hike in Innsbruck and a stretch of the Tour du Mont Blanc, and I have never gotten so much clarity out of anything, ever. Before this summer I would have told you sincerely that “I think better when I’m physically wrecked” was a thing other people said about themselves. But there’s a point in a long hike where you no longer have the spare capacity to curate yourself, and the conversation just changes on its own. We talked about compositionality. We talked about what actually makes a robotics team successful, which anyone who’s read this blog knows I have a lot of feelings about. We talked about personal desire, and about why any of us are still studying computer science in a field people keep loudly announcing the death of. I said things on those trails I had never said to anybody, and heard things back, and I don’t think the exhaustion was incidental to any of it. Being too tired to perform is apparently the same thing as being honest.

And here’s the part I did not see coming at all: that’s where the research came from. Almost every good idea I had this summer showed up in a conversation, in some spontaneous place, with somebody who had zero obligation to be thinking about my problem. On trains, on trails, in kitchens at two in the morning. The blank slate that had terrified me in May turned out to be the whole point, because a wild idea has to compete with your existing agenda for attention and it loses that fight basically every time. I had no agenda and a lot of long walks with people who were willing to think out loud with me, and I got more usable direction for my thesis out of that than out of any month I’ve ever spent alone in front of a monitor.

The other half of it was cards, which are so unbelievably PEAK. The game that took over the summer was Fish, also called Literature, which I liked so much I ended up writing an entire paper on it. Fish is made almost completely of hidden information: every question you ask broadcasts something true about your own hand to the whole table, and whether you win has much less to do with your cards than with how well you’ve modeled everyone else’s. Which, in hindsight, is an extremely convenient thing for me to have fallen in love with during this specific summer.

But the paper is honestly the smaller half. Cards are mostly just a socially acceptable excuse to sit in a room with people for three hours with nothing riding on it, no outcome, nothing to optimize. Some of the best nights of the entire trip cost zero euros and left behind no evidence that they happened.

spiderman#

Big spoiler warning for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which I watched in a Berlin theater this summer and have not stopped thinking about since.

The movie opens on a Peter Parker who’s been erased from everyone’s memory and has decided not to fix it, because he’s sure his absence is the only thing keeping MJ and Ned safe. Four years go by. He protects the city anonymously, he’s celebrated for it, he visits May’s grave on a schedule, and his life is completely hollow. Then his grief finally comes out sideways as powers he can’t control, and his instinct is not to tell a single person. It’s to go find Bruce Banner, learn how the inhibitor that suppresses the Hulk works, and build one for himself so he can turn the feeling down.

I want to be fair to the movie about how patient it is. For most of the runtime it lets you read all of that as love. His isolation looks like the mature call, the sacrifice a decent man makes, and it genuinely is how he’s coping with a life that has taken everything from him. He isn’t even wrong that he’s protecting them. And then it takes that reading apart so gently you barely notice it happening, until you’re sitting there realizing that every single escalation in the film came from him holding something alone that he should have handed to somebody.

His rebirth, when it finally comes, isn’t that he gets stronger or smarter or wins. It’s that he takes the inhibitor off and lets Jean Grey into his head, and what she finds in there is a memory of May telling him she loves him for who he is. Neither of them beats the other. They just recognize each other. He ends the movie standing at May’s grave promising to stop doing everything alone, then letting a detective handle a robbery without him, then walking up to Ned and reintroducing himself with their old handshake.

I sat in that theater a little wrecked, and it took me a while to work out why. Peter is about as singular as a person can be. Chosen, cursed, irreplaceable, actually the main character of his universe in a way that none of us are. And none of it buys him a single day of not needing anybody.

q.e.d.#

I named this post “sonderous experiences” because that word ended up being the whole summer for me, and because I think it points at something I’ve had backwards for a long time.

We are not the center of the universe. And I’ve come around to thinking that acknowledging that is the closest any of us ever gets to being it.

If you believe you’re the protagonist, then every burden defaults to you by design, and asking anybody for help starts to feel like an admission that you weren’t enough by yourself. The word “sonder” points the other way - that person across from you on the U8 is carrying something roughly as heavy as whatever you’re carrying, which means the carrying is just what everybody is doing, everywhere, constantly, and the only reason any of it works is that we’re able to hand pieces of it to each other.

My whole life, I’ve felt like I had to do everything alone since I moved high schools. That’s where the map-holding started. When you show up somewhere new, the fastest way to become necessary is to make yourself useful, so I made myself useful, and then I held that job so long that I mistook it for a personality, and then I spent years quietly resenting a position I had never once asked a single person to take off me.

Berlin gave me three months of evidence against that. Somebody else booked the hostel. Somebody else knew which train. Somebody else noticed I was off before I did. And nothing fell apart. For the first time in a very long time I got to be inside my own summer instead of managing it from a step behind my own shoulder, and it turns out I like good company and great experiences a whole lot more when I’m not the one on the hook for producing them.

Lastly, this is a video that John Koenig developed about the word sonder. I found it quite refreshing in its cinematography, and would highly recommend it, as well as the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in its entirety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkoML0_FiV4&t=1s

As always, if you’d like to chat, I am always available.

- Karthik