Scattering dust
The seed of a new year; preparing the ground; an introduction
My father is in a tupperware container.
I cross Columbus Ave. as gently as I can, holding him out in the open in front of me. I hope my plaintive pace makes up for the janky apparatus—for the lack of protocol or proper rite—as if someone is checking—as if Dad is nitpicking from Heaven.
Reaching the corner, I step aside. I pull off the single strand of Scotch tape left loose along the lid, chary, willing the sacredness of the moment to stay unspoiled by my method—since carrying the whole urn seemed too risky—since this is how he would’ve done it too, probably.
Cutting the futile old thought loop there, I tune my awareness back outward. I pace around his old campus, searching for a good first spot.
This being the anniversary of my Dad’s death, I’d already planned on coming here tonight. But an extra element of meaning has emerged. It feels now like a continuation of the “sidewalk study” I just left, where a group of us nerds, skeptics, optimists discussed Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower on a reflective walk across Harlem.
We attended to the change happening around us—the worries we carried about politics, Big Tech, healthcare, et al. We discussed how we could manage it all better in new year—what change we could create ourselves. Our exit task was to plant a seed for 2025 somewhere, whatever that meant to each of us.
This is mine.
My Dad’s ashes mark the base of a tree trunk, a patch of grass before two statues, the edge of a garden behind a bench. Some have disappeared already.
I follow the vanishing points—the roots beating under concrete, fractal and pulmonary—the barren branches, bending like bones against the somber sky, the cold buds teething at the promise of spring.
I hope he feels the relief I do. I ask him in something of a silent prayer. ✹
This is the day I tend to measure time by. December 30—six years since Dad passed.
It took me until three months ago to start freeing his remains.
But what a perfect way to end 2024—symbolic of how I’ve grown, accepted, become unstuck—of how I’m ready at last to take a bigger step forward, into a road steeped in scattered dust.
Last December 30, I was sick to my stomach, bent in bed, rare tears in my eyes. I threw up for the second time in a decade after my grandpa’s funeral, two days prior, as generations of grief compounded.
Between throes of fear, I told myself I’d make both men proud. But I didn’t know how yet.
Like a clear majority of my peers, work often felt at odds with my values; relationships were aloof; countless hours were spent moving my cursor around a MacBook screen in a cramped apartment bedroom. I foraged in the dark for a sense of purpose. (We will dig into this a lot more in subsequent posts.)
Today, I am filled with immense hope, a clarity I’ve lacked, honestly, since 2018. And I’m grateful to share this with so many people, new and old.
Here’s one line from Butler that stood out to me, part of a diary entry written in the very-much-not-so-distant future. The protagonist who penned it believes that, even as we work to make it through today, bearing our heavy, present burdens, we still need to create the conditions for a better tomorrow:
Saturday, March 25th, 2025
… It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse.
To change the status quo, people need to step out of it.
What makes such action so scarce, radical even, is how immensely daunting it appears. Every field is mired in collective action problems, as common parlance puts it—how can you bite the hand that feeds you?—all sorts of ubiquitous and real concerns.
Hence the visceral, viral reactions when someone does seem to break free of the matrix, in whatever fashion. This may remind you of responses to the CEO murder, and even more so to the release of Luigi Mangione’s identity. Or think about the curious death of the OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, another 26-year-old tech professional who challenged the system, in of course a more humane manner.
But “business as usual” need not—cannot—only be defied at this public scale, with these silver-bullet, hail-Mary methods.
I’ve realized (or re-learned) this year that it starts with us, our daily behaviors, the practices we inhabit.
We can choose to just survive—thinking good thoughts as we spin around bad loops—keeping our values tucked in, precious, pure dream substance. Or we can get our hands dirty—gradually and consistently tweaking our long-term trajectory.
The novel invokes the biblical Parable of the Sower at its end, which frames this effort as something like gardening the soul:
And others fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit an hundredfold (Luke 8:8).
What are our days worth without this “good ground,” without fertile soil, a safe foothold to further oneself, one’s ideals? How can we come anywhere near a more just, more functional, more positive-adjective-packed society without first making sure we’re nourished, actually capable of moving there?
Alright, well, at least now you can tell I went to Catholic school.
2024 was one of retreat. Burnt out and displeased, I began to prioritize this interior gardening. How? Shifting my attention to different pieces of my life, ones not incentivized by institutional forces—but pieces that must be tended to for healthy growth.
This work became more intentional over time. Some key checkpoints:
Creating physical space. I love my roommates. When two friends and I moved to Brooklyn in March, we quickly identified shared struggles: lack of strong WFH routines, poor mental stimulation, longings for deeper friendships and third places, etc. So we’re tackling these together: e.g., we have a pact to wake up by 6:30 a.m. every morning lest we incur a “late fee”; we have covered our place in books that we read together; we critique each other’s thinking and writing regularly. Oh, and our living room now has a podium smack in the middle for discussion groups and other gatherings of the sort.
We are done with the desultory days that blurred the past for each of us.
Catching the tech-criticism zeitgeist. Again, a failure to feed the soil is not typically our own fault at first. Our current society overwhelmingly promotes the opposite.
Jonathan Haidt had just published The Anxious Generation when we moved in. Finally, more people were uniting against the harms we’ve so obviously borne from social media, quietly, for years. I’ll hold off on the scientific debates about the text for now. The key here is the way it’s galvanized readers across all types of borders, giving them more confidence to express their experiences—and a more sustainable hope.
This and subsequent reading shed light on a web of scholars, artists, operators, activists already giving themselves to this movement—so much beautiful, inspiring spirit. I began to participate in events with the Sustainable Media Center and All Tech Is Human. I started using my Light Phone more regularly. I began to better understand the place of digital devices in my life, to inch toward more value-aligned use.
Leaving my job. A couple months ago, I moved on from a marketing role at a high-growth startup. Fending pressures from all sorts of directions to find the next safe and shiny position, I doubled down on myself. I knew that, at least for now, I had to stay clear of environments that risked more mental blocks. This was the best I’d felt in a very long time, and my optimism couldn’t go to waste.
I found freelance work as I spent more time reading, learning, writing, connecting—leaning deep into the power of poetry, philosophy, psychology to fill me with meaning.
As of today, I lost my health insurance. It’s unclear quite how long this arrangement can last, or what exactly it will lead to. But I know that it’s incredibly important.
Expanding community. At the beginning of December, I traveled down to D.C. to help Design It for Us with their advocacy to regulate social media, especially to protect the youth more effectively. A handful of leaders there were recently named in Forbes 30 Under 30. They are amazing.
I have been participating in sessions run by the School of Radical Attention here in NYC. This is the group who organized the Octavia Butler sidewalk study this week. If my glowing endorsement of the experience wasn’t clear enough, here it is again.
Such groups—led by my generation—will not limp along as the world accelerates away.
I come to you now, alongside God-knows how many other Substack users who are posting for the first time on New Years, to invite you to join me in the garden.
Above all, I want us to explore what we can do together to reimagine “business as usual”—and to act on it.
We will discuss the psych of tech use, Gen Z experiences at work and in relationships; we will disarm bad assumptions about young people, negative “nothing-ever-happens” attitudes.
And we may even slip into poetic verse on here at times.
So consider this post my second seed of the new year, an offering of solidarity, an invitation to get on with our hard work, together.
If you have been part of this process, thank you, with great gratitude and excitement.
I’m glad I rushed myself to post something today—I can’t wait to dig in deeper. Alas, off to the Poetry Project marathon on no sleep—
Glad I could have the honor of being your first subscriber. I love you more than life in itself. Write in every color of the rainbow and give hell when you can.