35

Saul Steinberg gets it.

Read These Instead

Kevin Kelly popularized the birthday advice listicle.

Each year, I dabble only succumb to the fraudulent weight of imitation. Our models define our standards, and these confines can sometimes be suffocating.

Another year of abstaining. So if you’ve never read it, do that (above). Or, imbibe one of these:

• Wear Sunscreen 🧴
• This is water 🎏

Any of those will have more insight. Not because I’m a chump. More so because game respects game; and they got a lot of it.

If you’re still here, then your Choice

At 35, I woke up in Korea (below the Parallel, shucks) to the following thought:

Life is a sunken cost we call a story

Happy Birthday…

The idea didn’t feel bleak as much as accurate. The maturing of a few nascent principles:

1. We are our networks
2. The world is complex, not complicated
3. Determinism of the Sapolsky variety is probably true, and my Ego/self-attribution bias won’t let me believe I’m undeserving of my trophies.

At my best, I channel Martinez - recognizing the world is chaotic and my influence paltry. However, my thoughts and deeds are all I have. So insert another mentor I’ve never met, Mr. Viktor Frankl.

Man’s Search for Meaning coincided with my time as a CORO Fellow.

• The former taught me that freedom exists between stimulus and response, which Buddhism would later reinforce.
• The latter named that acknowledgement a ‘Wedge of Consciousness’ (WOC)

I have little to no control of the stimuli stream confronting me daily. And I choose to believe I have total control in how I characterize and respond to them.

Here it’s worth indulging Sapolsky who would say something like, “Well, you happen to be the kind of person (disposition, traits, genes, etc.) who can think like this.”

Sure, I’m inclined to believe this at a Macro level, which has system-specific considerations (what criminal justice, school, etc. means in such a world). Conversation for another time.

At a micro level, that belief won’t fill the gap. I’m still culpable in a world averse to Sapolsky.

"It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."

– Epictetus

So Choice reigns supreme, and I should be far more mindful of mine.

Evolution more than…

Michael sorting trash: “To do that efficiently which need not be done at all”

STOP HERE

We're all hypocrties... and that's not all our fault. Our hardware wasn't fashoined for this software (enviornemnt).

The erroneous story from preimier under Mao is right even if erroneous. We don't know yet.. 'we'll see' we prize the seen over the unseen (Bastiat). And we also forget inaction is action.

Cold air at the window. The soft cadence of buses starting their routes. The gate scanner’s polite beep. Coffee that tastes slightly different this far from home.

This peninsula teaches a particular kind of time. The Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace. The grammar here is “ceasefire,” not “closure”—a reminder that history doesn’t always resolve; sometimes it simply stabilizes.

And this week the news carried another conflagration—strikes and retaliation involving Iran. The world, for a moment, became what the internet loves most: a clean map of arrows.

But foreign policy is rarely clean.

From a distance, it looks like decisions and slogans. Up close, it’s more like constraint-management: imperfect information, pride, domestic politics, deterrence, alliance obligations, logistics, misread signals, and civilians who will pay for the portion of the plan that doesn’t survive contact with reality. The rhetoric is simple; the consequences are not.

A line attributed to Talleyrand comes to mind in moments like this: surtout, pas trop de zèle—above all, not too much zeal. It’s a reminder that escalation often begins as moral performance.

George Eliot said it better than most analysts ever will: “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.” I’ve found that especially true when talking about conflict. It’s easy to narrate. It’s harder to describe tradeoffs without performing certainty.

Birthdays tempt you into pattern-making: Korea in 1951; Iran in 1979; Iran today. Put the dates near each other and the brain starts insisting it has discovered a law.

But proximity is not parallel.

If aging has given me anything worth keeping, it’s a lowered appetite for the clean story. I’m less interested in being clever and more interested in being accurate—emotionally accurate, morally accurate. To leave room for the possibility that the world is mixed, entangled, and resistant to our preferred plots.

I say that as someone who has spent enough time moving through airports and foreign cities to recognize a strange truth about “global” life: it’s both astonishingly diverse and shockingly ordinary. Everywhere you go, people are trying to make Tuesday work. They’re buying fruit, arguing with spouses, taking care of parents, laughing with friends, worrying about rent. The flags are loud; the human needs are louder.

Travel doesn’t make you wise by itself. But it does rub the shine off your certainties. You start to notice how often your own country’s vocabulary—freedom, security, strength—gets used as incense rather than instrument. You begin to understand that most nations live inside their own interior logic, and that what looks like a headline to you is someone else’s neighborhood.

That’s where the “middle virtues” start to matter—virtues that don’t photograph well.

In Adam Bede, Eliot keeps dragging the moral camera away from the grand stage and back toward the household, the workshop, the ordinary bargain between ideals and life. She offers a line that I think about every time I hear an immaculate political sermon: “It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.”

It’s not cynicism. It’s calibration.

Compromise, in Eliot’s world, isn’t spinelessness. It’s the craft of choosing a workable good over a perfect pose—of living inside limits without becoming bitter. The moral life is built less from declarations than from what you do when there is no clean option, only the next responsible step.

Foreign policy is often that kind of moral weather. It doesn’t reward purity; it punishes naïveté. And yet it still demands standards: the discipline to tell the truth, to count civilian cost, to resist the easy thrill of righteous stories.

Reinhold Niebuhr called it “the sad duty of politics to establish justice in a sinful world.” That sentence isn’t an excuse; it’s a warning label. It tells you what you’re dealing with: flawed actors, partial knowledge, irreversible consequences.

At thirty-five, I’m less enchanted by big self-images and more persuaded by small, repeatable forms of service. Not small as in timid—small as in real. Small as in you can keep it.

Smallness is the scale at which you can become reliable.

It’s the scale at which you can do one thing well enough that another person can depend on it: write the hard email, ask the honest question, show up on time, train when you said you would, apologize cleanly, keep a promise, keep it again.

That is not separate from the world’s crises; it’s how you resist becoming another spectator with a strong opinion and no obligations.

Thirty-five isn’t a coronation. It’s a checkpoint.

I’m eager for what comes next. I’m also newly aware of how little I control.

And I keep returning to one of Eliot’s cleanest lines—useful in personal life and public life alike: “When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

If I can carry anything into this next year, let it be that: less severity disguised as clarity; more tenderness disciplined by truth; and the quiet courage to choose the workable good when the perfect is unavailable.