During Natura Care Program’s retreat two years in the making, it was the peak of the rainy season in Costa Rica. In hindsight, white pants were a preposterous idea, final ayahuasca ceremony or not. The bottoms of my trousers were caked with mud, still damp from a night of wetness. I was tired, but not uncomfortable. As the birds sang their sweet morning songs, I sighed, watching green plants dangling in the early light, flora weighed down by a night of rainfall.
One sturdy grandfather log remained in the fire, burning elegantly around red embers. As I peered into its tiny flames, I watched one of the participants meditating in peace. His eyes were closed, and although the man was someone I’ve worked with for a while now, even before our interdisciplinary addiction program began, I’d never seen him appear so at rest in the presence of others. With his eyes still closed, I watched the corners of his lips rise from mere contentment to a shit-eating grin.
I thought about how hard this man had worked these past six weeks, just how bad he wanted to heal. I felt a fierce warmth traversing my chest, a surge of tears rising within me. For as much therapeutic and healing work I’ve had to do over the years, the tears still sock me each time they come. I am the dude who spent a lifetime avoiding feelings, especially the ones that come so quickly there is no time to suppress them, this truth of confronting fragility at the heart of change.
Through years of practicing somatic psychotherapy, I’ve learned that when our needs are finally met, we often feel tremendous regret for all the times we didn’t allow ourselves to have those needs met in the first place. After spending two decades careening from one hustle and startup gig reaching for the next shiny thing, in that moment by the fire, for the first time I knew I was doing meaningful work that couldn’t be defined by timelines, pay stubs, or public accolades.
Watching those flames dance, I thought back to my early recovery, when everything outside was the same—same distant wife, a new Silicon Valley job that was just more of the same, and then, as ever, the same part of myself that I’d been so set on hiding from the rest of the world. At the recommendation of my addiction therapist, I began attending a workshop in the Mission District on attachment styles, but from a Buddhist lens. It was an 8-week course, taught by a skinny bald man who commuted from his LA sangha to the Against the Stream center in San Francisco. He taught us how to meditate, attune ourselves to the needs and energies others, and pay attention to our thought patterns, throwing out terms like mirror neurons, limbic resonance, and other fancy neuroscientific words that made everyday existence feel that much more elusive and easy to take for granted.
He explained that who we are is shaped by our relationship with our caregivers. No matter how great they might have been in our memories, they weren’t enough for meeting our deepest needs; they could never be. This seems to be the fundamental problem with life. It’s simultaneously overwhelming and yet, tragically, and inevitably, inextricably linked to our human search to be enough just as we are.
While I understood his Buddhist teachings, at the time I was perplexed. If all of this fundamental life shit was true, how was it that I was just learning about it now? Why didn’t they teach meditation in grade school? I felt so much rage against the Machine then.
Back then, the Bart train only took ten minutes to bolt from the Financial District to 16th Street in the heart of the Mission. A part of town that still reminds me of the tricks I used to play against others, myself too. Walking those streets in those days, I wondered why I was wasting my time paying for workshops with money I didn’t have, adding to my secret mountain of debt despite a glamorous job title and admittedly enviable Bay Area lifestyle. Why even spend time investing in an extracurricular like mindfulness that would never lead to a tenable career capable of rivaling the one I’d worked so hard to build thus far?
I think either Lao Tzu or Tony Robbins said that the meaning of life is to figure out your gifts, and then that the purpose of life is to give those gifts away. But at that time, this simplification haunted me like a mirage in the desert. The concept that I might have unique “gifts” that I could monetize was so foreign to me, it felt insulting. Like one of those pithy billboards on the 101 flashing the Valley’s latest SaaS-based analytics tool—worthless to 99.99% of commuters.
My body only bears one tattoo to this day, which felt particularly insufficient for securing entry to those Dharma punk recovery rooms. It’d been so long since I’d visited my childhood home in Maryland, that when we meditated to revisit our youth, I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to be in a humid east coast suburb, let alone pinpoint the smells and tastes of my surroundings like our meditation leader prompted us to do. The creeks I used to splash in, the kickball games in the streets, the wild adventures on BMX bikes were all but distant impressions in my unreliable memory.
All I knew was that fall will *always* be the best season in San Francisco. Anyone who tells you differently hasn’t lived in the city long enough. Well, at least, it used to be, before the fires became so much of a seasonal staple that now it’s become the worst time of year.
On those magnificently warm autumn days, I used to enjoy strolling to the Ferry Building with some co-workers and procure a mandarin salad from Out the Door, an overpriced Asian-fusion restaurant. We ate outside until our foreheads were sunburned, and then on our walk back, we sweat like animals, dirtying our unimaginative v-necks and jeans. The street was usually littered with scooters, unicorns that have been slain by now.
One afternoon, on my way back in the office, which devastatingly didn’t have AC, I took refuge in one of the conference rooms next to a fan, windows open. Once there, hiding my screen from the team that reported to me, I opened LinkedIn, narrowing my search window to “Sales leadership” + “mindfulness” + “mission-driven” as a primary attempt to harmonize the career I’d spent a decade scaling with my newfound interest in Buddhist psychology. Suddenly, I had a master plan: take my existing skillset and bring it to a company that I believed in, I mean really believed in. I told myself that because a startup might IPO down the road, or was in a hot space with fancy investors, that wasn’t enough for finding purpose and fulfillment in this life.
Calm, Headspace—Theravāda Buddhism on demand! I interviewed for the head of sales roles at both companies. I told the recruiter: “I cannot tell you how important meditation is to me now. It saved my life. I walk the damn walk, yo.”
Of course, I did not tell the recruiter why meditation saved my life, or that I’d just had my heart ripped out of my chest by a failed marriage. Maybe it would have been a stronger interviewing tactic to say so, I’m pretty sure every person in tech has seen Brené Brown’s TED Talk on vulnerability. But I was already sick of all the bullshit on the job market, so instead, I insisted that all the short stints on my resume were just minor setbacks, that I was back and ready to crush it, baby.
Nietzsche once claimed that he who has a why can bear almost any how, and at that time I thought, why not just take someone else’s why and make it your own? I don’t think that’s what he meant, but damn, soul-suffering is surprisingly easy to compartmentalize and ignore when you put your mind to it. The lack of sacred work seems to be one of the greatest plights to the millennial generation, along with all the confusing messaging we’ve received from boomers, and each other, for that matter. You can be anything you want to be, my precious snowflake, an old voice is apt to tell us, just so long as you hustle for it. But sometimes, work sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And so, naturally, at that time, the only way for me to quell my low-grade existential crisis was to help a mindfulness startup 10x their revenue. That was something I was capable of. My track record said so. When you only know corporate measures of achievement, it makes perfect sense to transform a process-oriented religion and spiritual path like Buddhism into an exponential revenue forecast. Right?
Or maybe I should just do a coding boot camp and pivot roles, I thought. Yeah, that could be it. Someday I’ll marry my revenue-building prowess with something more strategic and technical, the divine union.
Have you seen the movie Closer? It’s a highly underrated and unflinchingly honest film. There’s a scene when Jude Law asks Natalie Portman—who plays an enigmatic stripper—how she finally quit smoking cigarettes. “Deep inner strength,” she says as she rolled over half-naked on the bed. That’s right, I thought, channeling her. Look how strong I am, how much I’ve overcome. I can bear a mind-numbing and soul-depleting life in Google Workspace because I want to be great, and greatness settles for nothing less than inbox zero. It’s not internalized capitalism, it’s willpower.
What’s more, my new morning routine was enough to make the most extreme bio-hacking bros in San Francisco look like cowards. It was the type rightfully mocked: wake up at 4:30 am, cold shower, bend in yoga, chant devotional mantras, meditate, journal, write 500 words in the Next Great American Novel. I did this all before work, when I’d leave my apartment and skip to the Bart station, finding a scooter on my way if I could. When you don’t find meaning in an acronym like “VP,” despite hounding after it for a decade, you must find It elsewhere—ideally in a heroic morning routine. Because that’s how you hustle.
Deep inner strength.
My morning routine in fact propelled me through several years of psychic dissociation from my tech career. I spent all my PTO on retreats, seeking and single-pointedly praying that I could quell the first-world pain of working on something I did not wholeheartedly believe in. And then, in the early days of the pandemic, I fled Oakland for Nevada City with my now partner Grace in ways that I guess, in retrospect, allowed for a more permanent radical shift. It was time to get out of town, liquidate my feeble assets, move to the desert, and buy a few cartons of Marlboro reds and a 9 milli, because who the fuck knows what’s coming.
On this exodus, Grace rode shotgun, her thick hair braided on her shoulder, her tireless smile doing its thing. She is my partner in crime who, unlike me, has never committed a crime. Sometimes, I feel colossal remorse that the only lawbreaking she’s seen me do is driving in the HOV lane with less than three occupants, because I met her in the good years of my recovery, already on my way to heaven. “You’ve got nothing to prove to me, baby,” she said the first time I admitted my fear of relapse.
Interstate 80 was so barren, the trip-hop music we were playing in the background so otherworldly, it felt like the apocalypse had already happened. My eyes scanned the horizon, my right hand rested atop the gear shifter. At one point, Grace placed her hand atop mine and told me, “If any part of you wants to walk away from the money and write this book you keep speaking about, now’s the time.” We talked and talked and laughed and I felt a glimmer of hope around my work for the first time in years. Maybe for the first time ever.
David Graeber described a bullshit job as a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. I still find this triggering to read …
A benefit of being a dude who studied the Intellectual Dark Web and other weird internet shit was that, prior to Covid, I was already quite familiar with existential risk—the cascading set of dangers our society faces from climate to AGI to nuclear war. When you study history, you learn that every single civilization, without exception, has collapsed.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that on that drive with Grace, I knew it was time to forget who I’d been. I remembered the other Lao Tzu/Tony Robins cliché, that your greatest problem is your greatest gift. The theologian Frederick Buechner said it more elegantly, that your calling is where your deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet. I’d already solved the addiction problem for myself, but what about the meaningful work bit—really, the lack thereof eating away at my spirit? There was no job posting for this one. I swear, I’d looked everywhere.
Yet the more I grappled with these questions, the more I realized, oh yeah, of course our consumer culture wants to keep me hooked on more—the singular word at the crux of all addictions. The more dependent we are on the Machine’s systems, the more we buy and use and hurt ourselves until there is nothing left. For as much as I wanted to relapse back into the modes of thinking that had propelled me up until that point, I knew that if I risked going back to sleep again—reentering the virtual haze of existence that, until then, had felt safe and affirming—I might never come back.
When I sat by the fire in Costa Rica, there was nothing to do but sit still and listen to the cricket symphony and the crackle of the coals. To feel the heat and breathe the crisp rainforest air. To silently watch that man’s shit-eating grin without looking away. It’s a look I know well by now, despite my cynicism, and all I’ve been through. For it comes after God reveals herself inside of you, in all her explosive glory, brighter than ten thousand suns. Afterward, there is no unseeing, no going back, once you bear witness to the truth that was always there waiting. It’s the terrifying human experience of not having any answers to the mystery of life, but only love and the task of following it until we no longer conceal who we are for the sake of climbing ladders. That morning by the fire pit, I saw something—a man—an archetype of the human spirit that defied every box to be checked off or clicked on. He was enough, drifting with his eyes closed.
Not that u need validation but best post so far 😊
One of my faves to date, bro! ❤️