24% Full
Reflections after 24 Revolutions Around the Sun
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What’s Up in Anime?
MFINDA (an AFRIME → Afro-anime) is under development, telling the story of a young girl Odi whose transported into the past where she confronts evil spirits to find her way home. Glad to see a greater diversity of cultures being explored by the industry.
I’ve got my eye on Bartender: Kami no Glass (Bartender: Glass of God) Peep the description: …Throughout his period at Eden Hall, customers from all walks of life, carrying all sorts of burdens, arrive for a godly glass at the Hall and a kind word with Ryu, both of which assist in clearing their problems up and reviving them for another go at life. Sounds like my kind of anime. 😎
Masshuru (Mashle: Magic and Muscles) is a story of a boy with no magic in a world where the magicless are persecuted. How does he survive then? With his muscles of course. Big One Punch Man vibes 💪
Long piece coming your way!
Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see, something that could be done better or just to say Hi!👋 Email me at kiran@animebuff.co or leave a comment below.
Now to today’s piece 🤝
I’ve been on this Earth for 24 years; 24 revolutions around the sun.
In the past year, I’ve interviewed like crazy for jobs, accepted an offer, graduated college, got out of a relationship, joined the workforce, became 25 lbs lighter, made new friendships, and started my writing journey that has evolved to be this newsletter.
Here are the 24 takeaways from my journey so far.
1) A life centered around family is incredibly grounding.
Developing a close relationship with your family is a sobering and illuminating experience, especially in your early 20s.
While your peers are working out relationships with their parents and many times, distancing themselves, being close to yours can leave a sensation of being at a later, more mature point in life.
Everyone’s relationship with their parents is different; mine was/is certainly influenced by the health concerns of one of my parents. It forced me to look into the mirror, face the omniscient, undercurrent of mortality, and ask myself, “What kind of son do I want to be?”.
Out of this emerged a deeper appreciation for the finitude of life and a sincere desire to step up & take care of them as a son. I realized that the small differences of opinions and disagreements when placed within a wider context of love, appreciation, and finitude of life are insignificant.
When the people who have known you your whole life, from your highs and lows, acknowledge you as a full adult through their leaning on you in their time of need, there is no greater reward nor higher honor that you could have.
No amount of money, status, fame, or achievement can replace or mimic that.
I’m experiencing life in the leftmost bottom two.
2) The most valuable things in life are not advertised and the least important things are over-advertised.
Put another way, the most valuable things in life cannot be bought but must be earned.
While money is pretty awesome, its benefits taper beyond a certain point. If you do not have a car, getting a car is phenomenal. You can now get to places far away w/o having to rely on schedules & constraints of public transportation.
But would buying a Porsche bring measurable improvement to your life?
Likely not but capitalism doesn’t exist to maximize overall value in your life merely overall value made available to you.
This is why you will see ads bombarding you with fast cars, the newest gadgets, and the hottest fashion trends, but none telling you to work on your relationships with your family or to look inwards & ask yourself, “What do I want out of my life?”.
After all, you cannot sell fulfillment.
“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self”
This is Water - David Foster Wallace
3) A connection with people is necessary for each of us to varying degrees.
In a world of hustle culture productivity, I’ve been guilty of looking at my calendar and thinking, “Yeah I’d love to hang out, but…. I do want to read that book, go to the gym, work on my writing, etc.”
While each of these is perfectly valid, when overused, you push out the social time in your life. When I catch myself thinking this way and act against it & spend time with friends, I’ve noticed that I feel more alive, more energized & engaged with the world.
Don’t fool yourself into believing that you can operate without some form of human connection, the most powerful being in person.
We are, after all, not machines.
4) The years of our lives are made up of the days of our lives.
Ever started your commute from work, and then pull up into your driveway and realized you cannot recall the past hour? You remember the rough details but it was all so mundane, so familiar your brain effectively autopiloted it.
Now think of a time when you were with friends and family, laughing over a well-told joke or catching an incredible vista while on vacation. It seems so lucid, so seared into our memories that even years later we can recall it like it was yesterday.
Why is that?
While that funny moment or wondrous view we experienced only lasted a few moments, it was engaging & engrossing. Our commutes are not and our brains are constantly optimizing to reduce the decision-making we need to undertake.
The result?
Without intentional effort, we can wake up on Thursday and ask ourselves, “Is it Tuesday?” Our sense of time warps and the days wizz by us.
This is why I enjoy writing. Each piece is a novel experience, something with which I can explore the ideas that are buzzing around in the distantness of my skull and that keeps me awake at the wheel of my life. I can delineate each week into a certain piece, a unique marker along a wider creative journey that is part of the infinite game of life.
5) Find places of serendipity and you’ll make the process of meeting people much easier.
After joining the workforce, I faced the reality that many young adults face: loneliness.
Unlike college, where there’s an abundance of people your age around you at all times sharing a common purpose (i.e. to graduate), the real world has a massive mix of people of all ages & life directions.
You won’t be meeting many people sitting in your studio, living like a monk, and can go years without doing so.
6) Do high-leverage activities intentionally.
For years, I struggled with losing weight. I was overweight however if you looked at me, you wouldn’t think I was. I’d run every so often, eat generally healthy, and then nothing would shift.
Then I would scratch my head, frustrated, and wonder, Why am I not losing any weight?
It was only when I began counting my calories, weighing my food, counting my macros, and building that internal sense of healthy eating that I significantly shifted my relationship with food. I learned about progressive overload, caloric deficits and to take the longer-term, sustainable view of weight loss. This led to losing > 25 lbs in about 6 months.
While I hypothetically could have lost weight earlier by simply running and eating generally healthy, being highly intentional with high-leverage actions provided significantly greater results. When I went deep into understanding the basics & then utilized the fundamentals day-to-day, my results didn’t occur 10% faster or 20% faster.
No, they occurred exponentially faster.
198 lbs in late September 2022.
173 lbs in early April 2023.
I’ve lost more weight in the past 4 months (120 days) than in the 4 years prior (1460 days).
When you do something high leverage, you are often not doing that one thing 2x better but 10× or 100x better.
Tip: I’ve found the advice from Jeff Nippard & his body recomposition guide to be very helpful.
7) Sleep is incredibly vital to living a fulfilling life.
Sleep is such an underrated hack that it gets its own lesson.
Having had sleep apnea for years and then finally getting it diagnosed & treated has been a game-changer for me.
Suddenly, I could think clearly; no more brain fog! I no longer felt like sleeping wherever I went and my stress & anxiety plummeted.
I felt an overwhelming surge of energy and concentration like someone had stuck an IV of caffeine into my veins, typing in some sort of reality cheat code to unlock vitality. Except this wasn’t a one-time thing; it was every morning after a full 8 hours of sleep.
Is this what life is like for everyone? All the time?!
My baseline experience of life had elevated.
Now I pay more attention to my body and its needs. When I don’t get 7-8 hours of sleep, something feels off. I don’t feel quite like myself and even when I supplement with caffeine (on the rare occasions that I do), while I can get thru the day, the same personality & creative juices are not there.
8) When your thoughts are racing or you are feeling unwell, eat healthy, exercise, sleep, spend time with your friends, or go for a walk in the sun.
It’s usually not another hack, strategy, or tip you need to learn to get yourself in a better headspace.
It’s the fundamentals of food, sleep, exercise, people, and nature.
9) Celebrate your wins when you get them since historically and presently, life doesn’t hand them out to everyone.
As recent as the 1800s, 1 out of every 2 children died before the age of 15. Today, it’s 5 out of 100.
We take for granted what we already have.
I usually don’t make a big fuss about celebrating my birthdays, sometimes avoiding celebrating them entirely. It’s just another birthday, no different than other days is what I tell myself.
This time? I’m throwing something together 🙂
10) Ask for what you want.
The world is not in the habit of simply providing you with exactly what you want and also has no way of reading your mind.
Want that promotion? Ask. See that attractive someone and think fire could catch? Walk up to them and ask. Don’t want to go along with your friends’ plans but instead have your own? Pipe up and suggest your plans.
If you want something, ask but ask with lowered expectations of things going your way.
With some luck and good timing, you’d be surprised how often things shift.
11) Understand that all people are flawed, including yourself, and are shaped by their life experiences & environment. Being considerate of that can make a world of difference.
It can be easy to hold people to some impossibly high standard, including ourselves, especially in an age of social media.
But if we give some room, some grace to be human, what you’ll find is that the unvarnished version of a person emerges, one that you find yourself relating to, laughing along with, and caring about.
I’ve especially noticed this with my parents.
My parents grew up in 1960s India, a time in which there existed a societal race to escape out of poverty via education to acquire a decent-paying job and elevate your family on the economic ladder.1
A woman’s purpose was to get married & become a housewife. Getting a college education enabled her to be more marketable for marriage, a sort of status update, and once married, if she was ambitious, her husband might allow her to run the family finances.
My parents not only attended university, and married outside of their economic & social classes but traveled thousands of miles to the United States where they both worked together. For them, job security and having a stable career is paramount to living a peaceful life in the States. As immigrants, without their jobs, they’d have no support system to lean on.
Compared to that, growing up in America and being told from a young age that you can become anything is truly incredible and privileged.
12) Progress needn’t be outwardly shown to be meaningful.
In a world where everything needs to be shown off, sometimes progress for progress’s sake is good enough. You needn’t flash your new gym muscles every week on social media or track the metrics of your posts & obsess over growth.
It can be the quiet fire that you alone cultivate and enjoy.
All Might from My Hero Academia. Cultivate your inner fire :)
13) Freedoms are relative and just like money, it’s important to appreciate & look for what you can do rather than what you would like to do.
To someone who has no money in their pocket for gas money, or someone with no car, the person with the car with a full tank of gas has the whole road opened up for them.
So rather than looking to a higher income to generate more options, ask yourself, “What can I do now that I’m not doing?”
14) All it takes is 5 minutes a day to keep the thread of connection alive with the ones you hold most dear.
Sometimes it’s not what's spoken that matters but the thought & action behind it all.
I make it a point I speak to my parents each day and now, when I visit home it’s as though I never left. The sense of continuity of connection means more to me than I ever could’ve conceptualized.
15) In areas of life where you have low confidence, build evidence.
Unsure of yourself as an engineer?
Start by building a small project and complete it. Then take the larger, more complex project. Complete that too.
Step by step, your confidence will grow and over time your identity will shift. Months later, you’ll look back and say, “That?! I was worried about that?”
16) Genius is a product of passion, consistent effort, and years of doing both.
When I see some incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable people around me, it can be easy to categorize such people as inherently talented. They must’ve been one of those childhood geniuses!
Upon further reflection, I’ve come to realize that this property of genius emerged due to years of being interested in a subject matter, combined with a daily effort to learn more in that subject matter (reading, testing ideas/concepts, teaching others, etc).
The end result? Being incredibly talented in that area (i.e. a genius).
17) Do things that increase your surface area and pull you into a future that makes you grow.
AKA this newsletter! Throwing my hat over the wall & publishing weekly, it’s a forcing function to meet new people, explore ideas, and push myself creatively.
18) Our realities are determined by the extent to which we can dream and our environment. The issue is that most of the time, our environment permits far more than we think it does.
Another version of this is “More often than not the bar exists where you set it.” or “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re probably right.”
Just as dreaming is vitally important, asking tough questions & taking action to crack and expand what you believe is possible in your environment is equally as important.
19) We add unnecessary meaning to things in life.
I used to believe that going to the gym must be hard. Now, it certainly takes effort; those weights aren’t going to move themselves.
But I used to associate every action in the gym to be inherently hard (gym=hard). And so surprise, surprise, when I showed up at the gym, everything felt incredibly hard.
Removing the bar of what you expect from an experience (i.e. from the going to gym) gives space for whatever is there to emerge forth such as fun, community, and a genuine appreciation for the progress you make.
20) Take agency into account when considering an opportunity.
When I meet some people (such as digital nomads, people working for themselves), they exude a certain aura that makes me gravitate toward them. I’ve come to recognize this as “agency” and if you look at the definition, it makes sense.
Agency: a) The capacity, condition or state of acting or of exerting power.
Since traditional 9-to-5 jobs are typically tied to a certain location, people who work remotely have high agency in terms of where they can be and often travel to various countries around the world.
In a time where many career paths are being considered solely for their compensations-sake, it’s worthwhile considering what level or type of agency works best for you.
21) Community is highly, highly underrated.
It’s awesome to see so many people flying across the world, traveling to far-flung destinations, and living as digital nomads that we can miss out on what they are giving up.
Investing in relationships and community.
When you’re switching countries every so often, it’s difficult to establish roots and really feel like a place is home.
Humans are social creatures and we like feeling like we’re part of a team. If you’ve ever experienced some sense of community, whether at the gym or at a cafe, where you are anything other than a customer, you’ll know what I mean. You feel welcome, invited, as though you have a stake in the place.
I can attribute some of my success at the gym to feeling a personal attachment to the place and people. Compared to the cold, standardized Fitness 19s I’ve been to, it feels welcoming, inviting even. You end up wanting to show up and put in the work.
22) Workability builds on workability.
I often think of this when doing chores such as cooking large amounts of food, doing laundry, and cleaning my kitchen & bathroom. It’s not that I am doing meaningless chores, rather I am preparing my environment to be workable for me to do the things I want.
It’s something I fall back on when I am not feeling like doing something creatively or logically intensive and do not want to default to watching Youtube or Netflix.
“Common sense is like money and health, once you have it, you have to work to keep it”
Greenlights - Matthew McConaughey
23) Success is relative and what each person wants out of life is different.
I used to strongly believe that success operated on a ladder. Those with wealth, status, and fame existed at the top and those without at the bottom. And since happiness clearly correlated with wealth, those at the top must be the happiest, right?
After wising up, I realized success is more so of a hidden marker, something that’s not quite so easily revealed.
And if you look at the definition of success, you’ll see that this makes sense.
Success: a) the attainment of wealth, favor or eminence. b) favorable or desired outcome.
We are all familiar with the first definition. Billionaire CEOs, dashing celebrities, and powerful politicians ascribe themselves to the first definition.
But what of the second? Favorable or desired outcome to whom?
Desirable to others? Desirable to you? If so, then what do you desire?
To me, these are the fundamental questions underpinning being successful. If I wish to live a successful life, then I want to live a life that I desire. And to do so, I’ve got to pay attention to my interests and slowly tug on different threads & see what sticks.
I’ve been tugging on the thread of writing for the past 6 months now and it’s been quite a journey.
Initially, I started with small creative posts I’d write with friends on weekends, then longer form short stories, a personal Substack, and finally to this newsletter. Each step was taken after thinking about, “What do I want to do?”.
Who knows how this newsletter will evolve in another 6 months?
The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.
Carl Jung
24) Have fun.
Life’s a little too short. So enjoy the silly things!
SF Bay Cold Plunge squad :)
-Kiran
If you liked this piece, make sure to subscribe by adding your email below!
For many today, it is still a major societal race to escape poverty and India has made significant progress.
Kiran’s Gems 💎
Looking for Alice Part 1 by Henrik Karlsson made me reconsider what love really is like. 🥹
Great piece on why writing online & being involved in the Internet is a great move: The Great Online Game by Not Boring’s Patty McCormick
Glad to know this Indian farmer is living out my mango dream 😋
Inspiration for this post was taken from Jack Raines’s 26% Loaded.
Where to Watch
Mashle
Stream: Crunchyroll (Season 1)
My Hero Academia
Stream: Crunchyroll (All 3 Seasons)