Cleaning my fridge

You know how sometimes you clean out your fridge and find all these containers of things that have been sitting there for really long? Ideas can be like that too. They sit there in your mind, marinating and gathering flavor, deepening with time, but if you don’t unpack them in some form eventually, they just end up taking space.

That’s what this essay is. Me cleaning out my brain fridge, sharing all the ideas that have been sitting here and waiting for the perfect moment to be written. That perfect moment never came.

I’ve started to hate the term “hot takes” because it suggests that thoughts need to be immediate, reactive, fresh off the pan of whatever’s happening in the world. But some of the most interesting ideas need time to simmer.

That’s why this isn’t a list of hot takes. They’re room temperature observations, lukewarm wonderings, thoughts that have been sitting on the shelf long enough to reach whatever temperature they’re supposed to be.

Some of them might be past their prime, others might have aged surprisingly well, many sound whiny and cribby, but they’re all the essay-potential ideas that I had swirling around my mind.

Welcome to my seriously unstarted and unfinished conversations. Let’s begin.

• Candor is hard to come by these days. We struggle to say the things that actually matter, especially when they’re uncomfortable. We assume that being supportive means being agreeable. We hesitate to tell someone what they need to hear, and we stick to what’s easy. I think that sucks for everyone. Telling the truth can be amazing. We really overestimate the value of being likeable as friends. True friends have the courage to tell you what you need to hear with love.
  
  Let me qualify this by saying not all friendships need to be candid, but some definitely do. Just for fun, think of the people who can lovingly correct you when you’re going off track. Think of friends who have cautioned you when you were making an obviously bad decision, even if you didn’t want to hear their advice. Think of the last time you did that for someone else. If no names come up, that’s probably not great.
  
• Art doesn’t have to be relatable to matter. This insistence on seeing ourselves in every story has created a strange pressure for art to speak to everyone’s experience. This drastically shrinks its scope. As a result, a lot of culture feels smaller and safer. But the most powerful art isn’t about reflecting your boring world. It’s about opening a door to someone else’s, letting you feel something unfamiliar. That’s why art should provoke, challenge, even unsettle us. But I feel like we only seem to want our beliefs questioned when it’s on our terms. Watch how quickly “art should provoke!” turns into “this is problematic!” when the discomfort feels too personal. Real provocation isn’t a spa treatment for your existing beliefs. It’s good to feel read, watch, and learn stuff that makes you uncomfortable and shapes your perspective rather than just reinforcing what’s familiar. Pro tip: Follow IG accounts of people whose values you disagree with.
  
• Working in AI over the past year, I’ve realized that its biggest impact isn’t about job replacement. It’s about forcing us to rethink what we truly value in human work. So much of what we’ve labeled as “skilled” labor turns out to be just advanced pattern matching, things machines can do just as well, if not better. On the other hand, tasks we’ve dismissed as “unskilled” often rely on deeply nuanced human abilities. Empathy, connection, adaptability. An actual sense of humor. That stuff is far harder to replicate. It’s humbling to see how much we underestimated the value of those things.
  
• There’s an enormous, literally gigantic amount of love involved in feeding your friends. I’ve wasted money on plenty of dumb crap, but never once have I regretted buying groceries or nice things to cook for people I care about. Not ever. Host people, invite them to your home, show them you care by sending them home with a full tummy. Have people stay at your house or even sleep on your couch if they’re willing. It’s glorious.
  
• Work at being genuinely good at something that serves people. Not for Instagram, not for your resume, but just to make life better for the people around you. Be reliable. Be the person who always makes the plans or helps with logistics. Be the one to address the awkward situation first. Be the person who remembers details like birthdays or anniversaries. Be someone who always checks up on those going through a hard time. Be someone who always buys presents. Be someone others can count on. It’s good for them, and I promise it’s good for you too.
  
• Concerning movies, I hate remakes. I’ve literally stopped watching them. The whole thing is lazy, it’s actively hostile to new ideas. Every time I see the announcement of another remake, it’s framed like they’re doing us a favor by “updating it for modern audiences.” But you know what modern audiences might actually like? New things. Original stories. Fresh ideas. Companies are now using our memories as collateral for guaranteed box office returns and I don’t like it. Stories shouldn’t have to rely on pre-existing emotional investments to matter, but it’s like we’ve forgotten how to connect with things that stand entirely on their own.
  
• While we’re discussing art and media: I miss scene culture. The kind of local, tight-knit communities that shaped art and music in ways that felt distinct. Today, everything moves too fast and reaches too far. The moment something interesting emerges, it’s exposed to a global audience, quickly repackaged for mass appeal or overwhelmed by attention before it can develop its identity. And then just as soon, it’s discarded.
  
  Today, it’s hard to find something like the grunge movement. That happened when bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam grew alongside one another, playing the same venues, recording in the same studios, and building something through those experiences. Early 2000s hip-hop thrived in a similar way—local artists, producers, and clubs created a sound that reflected their environment. Those scenes allowed for growth and experimentation, creating something deeply tied to a specific time and place.
  
  Now, a song uploaded from someone’s bedroom can go viral on TikTok in hours, end up with dozens of imitations before the original artist has even had a chance to mature. What could have become something new and exciting is quickly templated and mass-produced. But good things take time. Many good artists need space to suck a little bit before they get really good. The pace of the algorithm leaves no room for creativity to take its time.
  
• You can actually make your life good wherever you are. Not perfect, but good. I used to think certain cities were inherently better, that life would suddenly become amazing if I just moved to a better place. But this year I tried something different–I decided to make things happen where I am. I didn’t need the “right people” or the perfect set of circumstances, in fact the irony is that in the absence of those things, you can sometimes find better opportunities than what’s right in front of your nose. A little challenge can be good for the soul.
  
  This isn’t some toxic positivity thing about blooming where you’re planted. Sometimes places really are wrong for you. But before you write somewhere off, try actually building something there first. The magic of places isn’t what they offer you, it’s what you create in them. A place becomes yours when you stop waiting for it to entertain you and start adding your own little contributions to it.
  
• There’s this fascinating disconnect in how we think about artificial intelligence and human intelligence. We spend all this time worried about AI inheriting human biases and flaws, but we rarely talk about how we’re currently using our own intelligence.
  
  Knowledge that once took years to compile is now available in seconds. And what do we do with it? We argue about celebrities online and fall for dumb scams. We don’t even use the intelligence we’re so eager to protect from being “replicated” by machines.
  
  The concern about AI replicating human biases is valid, but maybe we should be more concerned about what those biases say about us. If anything, AI is holding up a mirror to how we use (or waste) our own intellectual capabilities.
  
• The way we talk about “creator burnout” is so weird, like it’s some mysterious ailment and not the completely predictable result of turning every hobby into a content mine. Turns out doing things solely for invisible internet points isn’t great for the soul. Who would’ve thought?
  
• I like group chats, but I also don’t like group chats. They sometimes become these weird little friendship prisons we build for ourselves. Can’t leave without drama, you can’t mute one without some guilt, and you can’t build individual dynamics without being exclusionary. Is this what friendship building looks like now? I’m not really a fan. I have some group chats that I LOVE and have been a part of for years, but the majority are just fluff. Inside the group, it’s full of little inside jokes, but once you’re on the outside, you realize you might not know people as well as you thought. Dynamics feel so much more exciting when there are multiple people involved, but they’re also vapid for the exact same reasons.
  
• A lot of the tension in friendships isn’t about malice or bad intentions. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they don’t always notice. Once you see this, it’s easier to let go of the small stuff. 
  
  We’re quick to construct elaborate narratives about others’ bad intentions when the simpler truth is that most people are just stumbling through their days and wrapped up in their own worlds. I don’t think malevolence is the default state of human interaction, often it’s just ignorance.
  
• I think we all need to start looking up more. Not from our phones (but that too). I mean at buildings, at trees, at the sky. At our tall friends. Just up in general. There’s a whole world that exists above eye level. Engage with it. You’ll very quickly notice how dirty your walls are, but it’s otherwise mostly nice.
  
• Limerence is that feeling where someone new suddenly seems like the answer to everything wrong in your life.  When you find yourself rushing into intense connections. Constant texting, sharing everything, feeling like you’ve known them forever after a week, it’s worth asking what void they’re apparently filling.
  
  Because that’s what limerence really is: Your brain latching onto someone as a solution to your existing problems. If they seem to be the answer to everything, ask yourself what the questions were. Are you lonely? Bored? Trying to escape something? The answer usually has very little to do with the other person.
  
• Most “deep conversations” are just people taking turns rehearsing their pre-written monologues. I do this all the time too. We’ve all got our greatest hits: Our thoughts on consciousness, our theory about relationships, our take on where society’s headed. It’s not a bad thing. We all want to be understood, and rehearsing our thoughts is part of that. But the real deep conversations usually happen by accident, when you’re both too tired to maintain the performance and accidentally say something true.
  
• There’s something vital we’ve lost in our endless search for “community.” It’s the ability to exist alongside people we don’t completely agree with. Real communities weren’t built on everyone sharing the same opinions or lifestyle. That’s not what a community is. They’re built on the simple fact of shared space and time.
  
  The neighbor you disagree with politically but who always helps when the electricity goes off. The nutjobs in your building society meetings who have completely different ideas about how things should be run but still show up to figure it out together.
  
  Instead of seeking these genuine, friction-filled communities, we’ve created carefully curated bubbles where everyone thinks exactly like us and we call those communities. There’s something uniquely grounding about spending time with people whose views don’t align with yours and realizing that those differences don’t have to define your relationship.
  
• I’m getting comfortable with the fact that most of life happens in the in-between moments. Not the milestones. The Greeks had this concept of kairos––the right or opportune moment––versus chronos––just regular sequential time.
  
  We spend so much energy hunting for kairos moments that we miss the fact that life is mostly chronos. I want to pay more attention to the days that don’t stand out because that’s where living really happens. I want to stop treating 90% of my time like it’s just the loading screen before something important.
  
• A city or place that doesn’t align with who you are can wear you down, even if everything else in your life seems fine. It affects your habits, the people you meet, how you spend your time, and the opportunities that come your way.
  
  Some places fit effortlessly—they encourage the kind of life you want to live without you even trying. Others make you work for it, forcing you to push against the current just to feel okay. We’re taught to believe that if something isn’t working, the solution is to try harder, adapt more, or change ourselves. When you find yourself pushing against your environment every single day, the answer probably isn’t to push harder, it’s to go somewhere else.
  
• Mental health issues aren’t personality traits. They’re not quirky character development or interesting plot points. They’re just hard. And sure, they might shape how you see the world or make you more empathetic or give you a different perspective, but that’s not why they exist. They’re not there to make you deeper or more complex. They’re just expensive and inconvenient for you, and often, for those around you as well. And that’s hard enough without turning them into something they’re not.
  
• Every generation thinks they invented being tired of society’s bullshit. But when we read old books or letters, it’s just people throughout history complaining about how young people don’t read anymore, how technology is ruining everything, how no one knows their neighbors.
  
  The Greeks were complaining about how writing would destroy human memory. Every generation thinks they’re living through the end times. I think the real constant in history is just people being dramatically bad at handling change.
  
• Nostalgia isn’t about the past at all. It’s about the present feeling insufficient. We don’t miss the 90s because they were better, we miss them because we weren’t paying rent then and didn’t know about climate change. Every generation thinks the music was better when they were young, but that’s not because music peaked exactly when you were in high school. It’s because that’s when music meant something different to you.
  
• I’ve stopped judging people for doing exactly what I do but in a way I think is less refined. Oh, you’re playing video games? How basic. Now excuse me while I watch six hours of stimulating shows on Netflix.
  
• A sense of certainty, especially about complex issues, often signals something is off. The more someone insists they have all the answers, the less they seem to have truly grappled with the nuances of the subject. Real understanding involves curiosity and humility.
  
  In ancient skepticism, there was a principle called epoché: the suspension of judgment. This doesn’t mean you live in a permanent state of indecision, but you take a deliberate pause.
  
  The more I explore anything, whether it’s relationships, politics, or my own ideals, the more I see how much I don’t know. I start to notice contradictions, connections, and possibilities I’d miss if I were just focused on being right.
  
• I’m curious about society’s weird pendulum swing between “you’re completely responsible for everything that happens to you” and “you have no agency at all, everything is systems and structures.” Like most things, the truth is messier and less quotable.
  
  You’re both the protagonist of your own story and an extra in a massive system you barely understand. The challenge isn’t picking a side, it’s learning to live with that contradiction.
  
• Many of our political opinions are just emotional responses covered with a couple of choice facts. We like to think we build our worldview from careful research and rational thought, but I feel like sometimes we’re just reverse-engineering justifications for gut feelings.
  
  There’s a reason Hume said ‘reason is the slave of the passions’. The real work isn’t proving we’re right, it’s asking ourselves why we sooo desperately need certain things to be true.
  
• I’ve stopped apologizing for my apartment’s appearance when friends come over. Either I clean it or I shut up. No more “sorry it’s such a mess” thing. People coming over is a super intimate act. It’s literally: here’s everything I own and how I choose to arrange it. If someone is welcome in that space, they should appreciate it for what it is: a glimpse of your real life. Apologizing for that feels unnecessary.
  
• Lately, I’ve been paying attention to how much of what I want is shaped by mimetic desire: wanting things simply because other people want them. So many of our life goals, ideas of success, even what we think a good relationship should look like, are influenced by what we see others chasing. It’s easy to assume these desires are your own when, in reality, you’re just mirroring what’s around you.
  
  You can’t fully escape this obvs, but you can be more deliberate about it. Instead of passively adopting every aspiration or ideal you’re exposed to, ask yourself who you’re modeling your life after, and why? Are they people whose values align with yours, or are they just nearby and popular?

Okay that’s it. Brain fridge is clean!!! I’ll be back in 2025 when I have something worth saying. And until then, Happy New Year to all of us. What a bonkers year we’ve had. If you’ve read anything I’ve written this last year, thank you. So, so much.

And to my family, friends, clients, and employers, thanks for putting up with me.

I love you, bye.