I also started working with my doctor to titrate down meds after remaining at this load for the past three years — in an ideal world I would have gotten here before starting job search, before picking up a quick nicotine habit that I had to drop again, and before getting off my hard-earned hiking and gymming habit that I’d kept going for the earlier half of last year.

But hey my boys down in OC dragged me to the gym last week so at least I’m back in there, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of good as they say, which I am only now remembering.

The only job I ever fought for was my first job at Microsoft.

I was rejected for a PM internship two summers in a row, and upon my second rejection (Year Three of university), I went up to the recruiter at a Microsoft event and said I felt they made the wrong decision. He was like “wtf lmao” and said “prove it” and invited me to a Microsoft-sponsored quiz bowl that evening.

I got there and my friend Matt happened to see me and waved me over so we could partner up on the event. That turned out to be good because out of the 20 questions, I am pretty sure I only knew one of the answers convincingly:

• “Who created C++?”

• “Bjarne Stroustrup, of course”

And I answered another question pretty badly:

• “How much profit did Microsoft make last year?”

• [with absolute confidence and zero hesitation] “Zero!”

• “If Microsoft made zero dollars last year, we wouldn’t be here hosting this event…”

However, my boy Matt knocked quite a few out of the park himself and together we each correctly guessed a couple more apiece, and outscored the field by a wide margin. We went up to collect our prizes, the recruiter told me to come by the career center the next morning, and the rest was history — with plenty of help from others along the way of course.

Crazy enough though, I hadn’t applied to nor interviewed at a single other company that entire year. I told everyone I was going to intern at Microsoft and that’s what happened. The summer before was also a breeze, where I’d gotten a human factors internship at Northrop Grumman on the strength of my research advisor’s word alone and didn’t even have to apply anywhere.

And at Microsoft, I was blessed to intern and then work full-time over six years with a wonderful family of people who took care of me even though I was a clueless shithead.

And even after that team came to an end, on my first reach-out I again found another highly-capable team at Microsoft which while not really being my forte taught me a lot — nobody does enterprise better than Microsoft, but it is exhausting on an individual level being beholden to the customer when your customers are every major financial institution and most governments of the world.

When I needed a change, the process of finding a new job took about 30 days from first recruiter contact to final rounds to hiring panel to leveling to team-matching on my second call with the most unique, best team of contemporaries I could have imagined working with at Google. And Google was the second company I talked to; my first week of searching I did a first round with DoorDash and was rejected and depressed for about a day before I messaged an old recruiter at Google on a chance and she connected me to the PM recruiter. And this whole process is while working at the time seventy-hour weeks (not a flex, the engineers were working eighty).

Other than those companies, I have interviewed at Meta two times and at Zillow once, and that’s about it. Basically, in my whole decade-plus career I’ve applied to a handful of companies and had a roughly even success rate.

This time, I’ve done a full round, several first rounds, and several recruiter screens, and nothing. Granted, I’m not looking very hard yet, as I’ve been slowly ramping up, but this is already harder than I’ve had to ever look.

So, maybe it’s not news to you, but it is news to me… job searching is exhausting.

The main difference between then and now is that before I was drinking, and now I’m not drinking.

As last reported, I haven’t drank since June 22, 2025, and before then I hadn’t drank since March 26, 2024, and before then, since I quit drinking on August 16, 2023 until now, I have had a total of 34.5 standard drinks, which is fewer than what I was averaging per week over half a decade.

So, when I was drinking, everything was easy, and now that I’m not drinking, everything is hard.

The moral of the story is that drinking is awesome and cool, based, epic, and goated and leads to unlimited employment and bountiful paychecks; whereas not drinking like a gay, retarded (we are encouraged to say that now) loser means getting ZERO jobs and ZERO pussy (last part is not true).

Unfortunately, this gay retard (me) is still not drinking, and frankly I’m surprised and happy that this time I haven’t been tempted to drink as a coping mechanism despite deciding to pick up the stress of working again (and now having done both employment and unemployed-job-seeking, I can tell you for a fact that job-seeking is ten times more high-capacity, undirected knowledge-work than any job).

You know what is a tempting coping mechanism though? Nicotine, which I decided to start using again last month to cope with the stress of job searching even though I’d kicked it for a year.

Oh well, you win some you lose some. I will have to quit nicotine again. I’m going to look into replacing it with a caffeine and sweets addiction.

As my dear friend Emran told me two months ago on my first week of job-searching, “Perseverance makes the man.”

• 2.5 four-ounce pours of wine

• A quarter flute of champagne

• A third of a typical cocktail

It has been 366 days since my last drink.

It has been 589 days since I decided to quit drinking for a year (now indefinitely).

As a fun bonus, it has also been 117 days since I quit nicotine, which is apparently long enough for my brain to be somewhat unaddicted.

Since I do not use other recreational drugs — even my caffeine intake rarely ventures above 100 mg per day — this means that I have recently had the opportunity to experience life without random shit in my brain for the first time since I was 18, which also means for the first time ever as an adult. Mind-boggling.

Thank you to everybody for your support, yes including those of you I haven’t spoken to in over a year. I know I have benefited from and continue to benefit from much Grace without my knowledge, a great deal of which which I may never know — as is the typical experience of each human lifetime. However, I hope you believe me when I say I spend a lot of time thinking about all the Kindness I both witness and personally receive from all of you.

So, thank you, every one. On we go.

August 16, 2024 is rapidly approaching, a date that is significant because it is one year after I decided to quit drinking for one year on August 16, 2023.

Good one lol, because as I recall, you haven’t exactly been “sober”

That’s true, as previously chronicled, during my “sobriety” I in fact have had 30.5 drinks. (The year’s still not over so I’ve still got time to run those numbers up!)

While opportunistically I’ve had informal, but important conversations with a handful of you about:

1. My plan for a plan to begin drinking again after one year

2. Whether or not this past year in fact constitutes sobriety, which if not would render point (1.) moot for the time being

— neither of the above has been resolved.

Get to the point!

My promise is and remains to not drink until such time that 100% of you have approved a plan for me to try drinking again.

Corollaries

• Until you have all approved of me drinking again, which may be never, I will not drink.

• By napkin math, you will hear from me minimum 3–Infinity months before a target date to begin drinking:

  • 1 month to work with my doctor and my therapist to create a draft proposal.

  • 2–Infinity months to submit my proposal to each of you to incorporate your feedback and make revisions toward the goal of convincing you to sign off on said plan.

Constraints

I’ve decided that my first plan that I submit for your approval will be time-bound to a probationary period of three months, after which I would revert to no drinking until a subsequent (possibly time-bound again) proposal is approved.

In conclusion: I will continue to not drink, and by the time I decide to begin seeking your approval to drink again, you will find out well in advance.

As those of you I’m not ghosting (I’m genuinely sorry that I suck, I really want to talk to each and every one of you who I love and miss, but I’m trying to take care of myself and even just reconnect with my family first) have been doing, please continue to give me your feedback offline.

For context, between August 2022 – August 2023, I was consuming on average 45 standard units per week, equivalent to 6.5 beers per day, every single day.

My Drinking History

It’s also no secret that since turning 21, I’ve always had a preference for drinking. What that meant in practice the last 10 years of my life:

• For 1-2 years consecutively between 2015-2017, 45 drinks per week.

• As I made progress in therapy and with medication management, for years consecutively, 15 or fewer drinks per week as per the American Medical Association’s upper limit for men.

• For at least one if not two of those years consecutively (2018-early 2020), naturally without effort, 7 or fewer drinks per week with median and mean of 3.

• From mid-2020 to mid-2021, creeping slowly back to 15, then 20, then 30 drinks per week.

• As I became more and more concerned about my drinking and as I switched psychiatrists while continuing to work with my psychologist, I was able to bring my drinking back under control to 15 or fewer per week with median and mean of 7.

• Between August 2022 and August 2023, I dove straight back into 45 drinks per week.

Post-Sobriety

On August 16, 2024, I will work with my primary care doctor and my psychologist to create a plan to titrate alcohol back into my life. I will circulate that plan amongst the stakeholders in my no-drinking journey, which will include the many loved ones who have supported me in my sobriety, from family to coworkers to comrades to childhood friends.

When I’m not busy feeling like an autistic piece of shit, I sometimes feel like I possess the glibness of a narcissistic sociopath, so let’s put it to the test and see if I can gaslight each of my stakeholders into agreeing to let me drink again. I will need to, because if a single loved one is not happy with my plan, I will iterate until they are.

I view trust as a privilege in general (which implies trust is always unearned, seeing as if we’d earned the trust it wouldn’t really be trust anymore, it’d be ontological).

On the matter of my future with alcohol, if any loved one is willing to remain in my life without the presence of alcohol, but is not willing to extend me their trust otherwise, then I will simply have to accept that I have no future with alcohol. I think objectivity is a fucking joke, so I’m subjected to my loved ones’ subjectivities. And as nice as it can be to have an occasional beer, I’d rather not die sad and alone.

Do you trust me?

You shouldn’t. Other than to my psychologist and to my physician, I have lied explicitly or by omission to every one of you since I returned from China.

I either denied or underplayed the extent to which I drank while I was in China. As an extra cherry-on-top “fuck you” to all of you, a few weeks after getting back I decided to have a champagne with one of you despite your urging me not to.

My premise before China had been that my promised goal is 0 drinks, and I will naturally be incentivized to keep that promise because I will always be transparent with the people to whom I made the promise, which means they will have full transparency of information to decide their preference or lack thereof toward our relationship.

That premise is violated the minute I stop being transparent.

Before China, folks already knew I’d had my lapses. My transparency made it a lot easier for me to stay sober.

During and after China, I stopped being transparent, and I’ve had to fight myself every single day, if not to stay sober, then to stay sane.

I sincerely apologize to all of you for lying to you this past two months.

Here is my delayed report:

Drinks since August 16, 2023 :: 30.5 total

Prior to China

• [10] Sep 16: Kevin/Lydia wedding

• [0.5] Oct 3: SEA → KEF flight

• [1] Nov 20: SEA → SNA flight Thanksgiving

• [1] Jan 28: SEA → SNA flight en route to China

Total: 12.5 drinks

China (Feb 2023)

• [3] Feb ?: Dinner at family friend’s house

• [0.5] Feb ?: Lunch at mom’s student reunion

• [1] Feb ?: BBQ restaurant dinner with family friends

• [1.5] Feb 20: AYCE buffet

• [5] Feb 24: New year week dinner at family friend’s house

• [3] Feb ?: New year week dinner with family friends

• [3] Feb 27: Dinner at my friend’s house

Total: 17 drinks

After China

• [1] Mar 26: Wine Bar

Total: 1 drink

Does it count?

I'll be asking for your feedback. I hate the “all or nothing” rule of zero-or-bust, and while I don’t hate the “on/off the wagon” model – and in fact I credit the fine gentlemen at Alcoholics Anonymous those first two weeks from Day 0 with giving me the strength and wisdom and humility to even begin this journey – I think that personally I have a hard time with that metric because, genuinely no disrespect intended, I may hate statistics but I’ve studied enough of it that I can’t convince myself that “Days since last accident” is a meaningful metric no matter how hard I’ve tried. My model is the closest that I've gotten to meaningful, what feels like sustainable, sobriety, so I have a strong incentive to blindly believe that my model is correct, and a strong incentive to not explore any alternatives.

Now that I am no longer hiding any information (to the extent you believe that’s true — I’m not going to give you the Jack Barsky bullshit of “this is the truth as I know it”; this is the truth as I’ve documented and now reported it, and while I would be surprised if any of you trusted me to not drink, I’ll be the one offended if any of you accuse me of either not having meticulous records or of telling a >1,000 wordcount lie), at least I can ask you for your feedback, so that I may improve my model to better serve myself, which ultimately must involve some measure of serving those of you who would give me your feedback.

I am sorry for lying.

It is the most counter-intuitive problem that I have encountered in my life.

The Easy Problem of Consciousness

Here is a list of less counter-intuitive problems, along with humankind’s nascent solutions:

1. Why does anything exist? Don’t care.

2. Assuming things exist, what existed before the observable universe? By (most-likely incorrect) induction, a single point containing all the information in the observable universe to come.

3. Whence came this information? Split this problem into two parts: the source(s) of the information, and the apparatus which configured the information.

   1. The apparatus by which given information from given sources may reach a given configuration, while a fun computer science problem, is much less interesting than Problem 1, for which the answer is “Don’t care.”.

   2. The source of the information is an interesting cosmological problem, and humans have much ground to cover to answer this question. An intuitive (thus very likely wrong but also very possibly right) hypothesis is that information is neither created nor destroyed, but rather continuously recycled, which would make this a homologous problem to Problem 6.

4. How did our observable universe begin? Assuming that logical conclusion by the collective human consciousness can be trusted (it can’t; and I’m not being edgy, it is logically true that humankind cannot attest logic grounded on humankind’s own perception, if you’re the sort of person who believes in logic), and that we understand the thing we are measuring enough to measure it correctly (we don’t), then based on observation, very likely the Big Bang.

5. How will the universe end? Possibly depends on the shape of our universe, its density of dark matter, and its cosmological constant(s).

6. What happens after the end of the universe? Intuitively, this problem is best approached in tandem with Problems 2, 3.b, and 5.

7. How did life come to be? Big Bang → gravity, matter, and some other forces nobody gives a shit about → energy gradients → groups of matter form → groups of matter form → groups of matter form → the way that forces work results in a tendency for groups of matter to coalesce into ellipsoidal objects → the Earth exists → Hot Soup with yummy elements and energy gradients → molecules → there can exist molecules that take less energy to form and are more durable than others, so naturally these molecules better “compete” for elements and energy and become abundant → there can exist molecules that are compounds of other molecules → organic compounds → Human, the apex predator, the Pinnacle of Life, and all our attendant cognitive complications.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

So now that we’ve solved why humans exist and why we’re so dang smart, we can see why those were much easier problems than the one of “Why do we perceive?”.

This question was formulated and named in 1994 by the philosopher David Chalmers.

Now that I actually write it out though, I fear us circa 1994-2024 humans will sound a tad like Aristotle when he describes the human brain as pneumatic tubes, or Freud when he describes the human brain as a steam engine, or AI researchers today who describe the brain as an artificial neural network. This is because I’m tempted to index on Harald Atmanspacher’s 2004 (rev. 2020) review on quantum approaches to consciousness, wherein the cool kids on the block (e.g. my mom since 2009) know that quantum is the new hotness, and that neural networks are 90s tech (literally, here’s my dad’s 1994 paper). Certainly it’s an intuitive and tempting avenue of study if we are to (as we can only do) probe the material bases of consciousness (and I believe that perceivable dimensions require one more dimension to experience perception and not merely exist within those dimensions). But isn’t this just history repeating itself?

I don’t mean to mock Aristotle by the way, nor mental models. Firstly, I’d guess he’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever met (including myself by far). Secondly and lastly, our apex mental models in a given era are collaboratively-built, highly-efficient encapsulations of collective human effort to arrange information, belying simplicity because of countless successive hidden layers below arranged by successive generations. Right or wrong, drivel or not, my novel arrangement of deranged words that flow onto your computer screen right this moment glide off a knife’s edge honed by 50,000 hours of conversation and connection with beautiful human beings who each themselves have had 10,000-150,000 hours of conversation with and connection with their own beautiful human beings. The mental model is our workbench, and our frontier, at which we labor so the next generation can think us foolish.

So, yes, this is history repeating, but in a good way IMO.

So, can I ever be good enough?

Oh fuck I forgot that’s what this essay was about. You know what, I just realized I don’t care anymore! I’m good enough. And, so are you.

Either we all are, or we all are not. I choose to believe the former, and I hope many of you choose to, too.

When police arrived at the house, officers found the husband covered in blood and standing near Yu’s body. “She had severe blunt force injuries to her head and there was significant blood spatter on the floor, wall, and the back of the bedroom door where she was found,” […]

In addition to the murder charge, prosecutors filed special allegations that Chen targeted a vulnerable victim, took advantage of a position of trust, and used violence with a “high degree of cruelty, viciousness, or callousness,” a felony criminal complaint states.

Yu Xuanyi’s husband is alleged to have punched Yu Xuanyi to death with his bare fists.

Who was Yu Xuanyi?

Yu Xuanyi lived in Santa Clara, California. She was a Software Engineer at Google. She began her life in China, where she survived a grueling measurement-based education system that culminates in the ultimate measurement, the 高考 (abbr. the Nationwide Unified Examination for Admissions to General Universities and Colleges).

Yu Xuanyi was rewarded for her survival and her excellence by receiving a berth at 清华大学 (Tsinghua University).

The History of 高考

For my United Statesian friends, the 高考 is not to be confused with our SAT.

高考 is as Chinese as KPI I meant apple pie is American. Mythologically it predates the 商 (Shang, 1600 BCE), attestably it was a feature of the 周 (Zhou, 1000 BCE), philosophically it was described by 孔子 (Confucius, 500 BCE) as rationalist lynchpin to his ideal society by providing an objective measure of knowledge and intelligence to select meritorious (male) rulers, and formally it was implemented by the 隋 (Sui, 581 CE) as the 科举 (multi-disciplinary aptitude discriminator).

Chinese people paradoxically believe that the 高考 reflects simultaneously unquestionable merit and untouchable 缘分 (Buddhist: fated pre-ordination).

(Aside: this is a different shape of belief than the United States’ belief that financial success is a direct function of hard work and nepotism. I will analyze this another day, but I believe this comparative analysis would teach my Chinese friends a lot about who I am as a USian, and my USian friends who I am as a Chinese person.)

My dad studied computer science at Tsinghua University. In his youth he was a 学霸 (academic prodigy). My maternal grandfather had been admitted there prior to the Cultural Revolution, but in his youth while he was a 学霸 he did not have 缘分 on his side, so he was a 农民 (peasant, I meant farmer). My mom, despite being smarter than my dad in many respects and very much being a 学霸 (which also means scholar-tyrant), did not have 缘分 on her side when it came to the day of the 高考 (and to be fair, unlike her father but very much like myself, was also lazy as fuck).

Yu Xuanyi and 缘分

Excellence and destiny served as the wind in Yu Xuanyi’s sails. She studied at Tsinghua University, then did her graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, not far from my hometown of Irvine, and went on to work as Software Engineer at Amazon, followed by Google.

Why write about Yu Xuanyi?

I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about Yu Xuanyi ever since I learned about her in early-February when I was in China visiting family. I normally don’t follow the news, so if my family hadn’t told me, it’s possible I would have never learned of her brutal murder at the hands of her husband.

There are four more topics I plan to write about in the next month:

• Money and financial trauma

• The paradoxical beauty of the selfishness of love

• Education

• How I love and yearn for, yet hate and cry for my first home China — a topic my friend serendipitously reminded me of when last night she texted me an iCloud Note from 5 years ago.

Perhaps in exploring those topics, I will understand what it is I want to say about Yu Xuanyi.

When I was a child I wrote because I wanted to publish my fiction. When I was in high school and college I wrote to show off how smart I was. After I graduated, I have seldom written, but when I have, my audience has been my closest loved ones, and there is a clear selfish intentionality to my writing, which is to emit and promote some projection of my ego that I want to be absorbed by my loved ones so that they update their mental models of who I am in a way that best suits my needs (and insofar as my two values in life are: do all I can so my loved ones can live the lives they want, and do everything with integrity to myself; then, incidentally and purely as side-effect, what suits my needs may happen to suit the needs of my loved ones, too).

So, right this moment, why do I write?

1. There are things that I want to communicate to all my loved ones, and I have many loved ones. Here, I define “loved ones” as the humans who are important to me. Writing on a public channel decreases the activation energy to communicate updates to my loved ones. (The reason I want to communicate to my loved ones, i.e. ego and machinations thereof, is captured in the prior paragraph.)

2. There are things that I want to communicate to those who I don’t know nearly as well (yet) as I would like to, and I hope a one-sided fire-and-forget channel allows me to emit information to those people, which is valuable because { cost function lol, do the math yourself }.

3. There are or are not (don’t care) things that I want to communicate to my enemies, the class of whom is empty. The great thing about having no enemies is that I don’t even have to worry about wasting energy on enemies, because I ontologically have none. (While there are those who may view me as an enemy, that is both out of my control and irrelevant to whether I have enemies — as with friendships, it takes two to tango, and I’m a bad dancer).

4. There are things that I want to communicate to complete strangers. To the extent that my values in life moderately extend to the loved ones of my loved ones, and weakly extend to the entire world, my desire to project my ego to total strangers extends thus. (I have closed the loop and thus completed the tautology from the prior paragraph, you are welcome.)

Back to the topic of this essay as indicated by the title, why write?

Writing ≡ desire to communicate with some audience ≡ human relationship ≡ selfish drive ≡ ego.

We write as with all art (painting, fashion, sensuality) to express ourselves. I’ve had three or more close friends confide in me recently about their discomfort and self-dislike regarding their desire to project some brand into the world. These three or more friends happen to each identify (and generally be relegated whoops I meant designated by society) as women, and there’s a lot of gender discourse I don’t want to get into right now but just know that their self-dislike is absolutely valid and expected, as it’s the learned response we as men (yay, men!) have worked hard to train I meant engender in them. But this is not an essay about gender.

This essay is purely pointless and masturbatory, because I can, and because I am egotistic and selfish, and because I care about my brand in the ways delineated in points 1–4 of *So, right at this moment, why do I write?*.

The conclusion of this essay is: my dear three or more friends who are generally identified by society as women, yes you are totally branding whores — so am I, and so can all of us!