Searching for the Sun

On my fear of death

In 2011, a senior at Yale University warned her passionate peers about the investment banking and consulting lucre. Marina Keegan’s DealBook column piece, among her other work, showcased that she was a writer with a lot of promise. She had a job lined up with The New Yorker magazine.

She died in a car crash five days after graduating. She was 22.

I read Keegan’s story right before I started my undergraduate degree in finance. I embodied the essay as a siren, one that blared every time I passed recruitment booths at school career fairs. Her untimely death was a reminder that life makes no promises on longevity.

My Catholic school teachers told me that after death, we’ll be sorted into heaven or hell. I’m not sure where I stand on the afterlife. I don’t think it matters much. What actually scares me about death is that it takes me before I become who I’m supposed to become.

I noticed my fear’s looming shadow when I found myself negotiating with a hypothetical higher being. If I promise to live harder, can I be spared an early death? I even superstitiously try not to think about death too much lest I manifest it into existence.

I don’t want to be the catalyst to another protagonist’s “wow life is too short” epiphany. The force that pushes them to take the plunge, go after that dream, chase the sun. I want to be that person that chases the sun.

There’s people like Keegan, who passed while on her path to the sun. She left having a body of work to show. A musical she wrote was performed at the New York International Fringe Festival four months after her death. A collection of her essays was published posthumously.

Then there’s people like me, who are still searching for their path. This year, I’ve been haunted by one big question: what is my purpose?

There are many untimely death stories that linger in my subconscious. I think of Jonathan Larson and Alexander Hamilton, so plagued by a premonition of an early death that they wrote like they’re running out of time. Larson penned the musicals Supurbia, tick, tick … BOOM!, and Rent. He died the night before Rent’s off-Broadway premiere. In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda poeticized the protagonist’s thoughts: “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory”. Hamilton dreamed of dying as a martyr on the battlefield. Though he lived to see America’s independence and wrote financial systems and laws into existence, he died at 47 in a duel in New Jersey.

I see the same sense of urgency in a media personality I look up to, Kara Swisher. Her father’s death when she was five propelled her to work like there is no time to spare. She built media companies, combining business acumen with an editorial flair. She also quitted projects easily, jumping ships once they stopped becoming exciting. There is no time to dilly dally. “Just imagine right now if half of your friends died. Your parents, when you’re five, are really pretty much your entire world… It would be shocking and devastating, and so I think it also gives you a sense of the capriciousness of life,” Swisher wrote in her memoir.

Larson, Hamilton, and Swisher figured out their superpowers and poured that into their writing, an ever-evolving body of work they can be proud of. They each found their purpose and toiled tirelessly at it.

Five years after graduating, I now work in a bank - Keegan’s nightmare. Surely I don’t exist to do emails 40 hours a week.

My gnawing fear reflects back at me. It posits me to think if I’m living enough, learning enough, clawing enough at my true potential. I also think about my relationships. Am I flying out enough to spend quality time with my closest friends? Can I host more dinners for my chosen family? Am I healing fast enough to repair my relationship with my parents? Am I fighting enough, crying enough, loving ferociously enough?

The panic from those questions nudged me to read

Paul Millerd

’s book of how he left consulting to pursue a path only he could create. Before he took the plunge, he spent years in exploration, testing ideas and forms of creative expression in his search for the sun.

I felt a lot calmer after finishing the book. Turns out I am already in exploration, experimenting with creative projects like this Substack and putting together an art book. But it still scares me that there is a possibility I may die before I find my purpose.

In recounting my conundrum,

Michael Dean

asked if these characters that inspire me even know what their purpose is when they started out their journeys. Perhaps nobody - not Swisher, not Hamilton, not Larson - had compasses pointing at their suns. But they persistently created blocks of bricks and laid them down one at a time towards a direction that excited them.

Just as important in my urgency for the search is the unlikeable trait of patience. I know I’m not guaranteed time. But I am creating bricks. While my urgency will push me to create more bricks, I will place each down gently and with faith that I will eventually reach my own sun.

Thank you to friends who are also chasing the sun:

Linart Seprioto

,

Harrison Moore

, and

Michael Dean

.

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Looking back: The more I learn about the world, the more I realize that my major shortcoming is my shortsightedness. Not literally, I had that corrected last year with a wonderful scientific procedure. But because I have only been around for 27 years, I am unable to comprehend the history that has made current circumstances possible. I take everything status quo for granted. Plus, with tech advancement and the seemingly exponential speed of innovation, I believe that what I see is all there is. So I'm now committing myself to take a longer horizon view. I'll be reading and thinking of longer-term trends, and I’ll post a snippet of my learning each week:

Cardiovascular diseases have shifted from being an end-stage disease around fifty years ago to an early intervention disease thanks to good diagnostics. Before, people would go to the hospital for a stroke or a heart attack - the final stages of the disease manifestation. Now, monitoring genetic risk factors, cholesterol, calcium score, blood tests could help detect heart failure. The treatment has shifted to eliminating the amount of time people have at risk. Mortality rates from heart disease drops. Source: On with Kara Swisher - Why Reed Jobs is Betting on Cancer Innovations via Snipd.

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Update log:

• 📖 Started reading Babel by R. F. Kuang (4% completed) and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (9% completed). I try to always read 1 fiction and 1 non-fiction concurrently.

• 🔧 One of the most promising careers, consulting, is slowly showing people the exit, via Wall Street Journal. This just proves again and again that companies don’t repay loyalty anymore.

• 🎙️ Sam Altman is a good interviewer. I enjoyed listening to Kara Swisher being interviewed by Altman. An insight for her interviewing philosophy: Young reporters ask, “What are they lying to me about?”. Sophisticated reporters ask, “What are they lying to themselves about? What do they need to believe to be true to get through their day?”

• 🥗 I asked my national athlete friend many questions about nutrition. I’ve always had a hunch that I’m not eating well enough to support the exercise I’m doing. I asked questions like: do I need to cut out rice (no, but swap some out for more complex carbs), am I exercising enough (yes), is running for 30mins enough (no). He also recommended intermittent fasting, which I am slightly apprehensive about.

• 😂 Saw Atsuko Okatsuka’s standup in Hong Kong. She’s as funny as you’d think she’d be. If you haven’t watched her HBO special yet, I highly recommend it.

• 🎨 I finished my digital art class. It was intense and I learned a lot but I am definitely slightly over it by the end. I know, though, when I start painting again after a short break, I’ll notice just how much I leveled up in 8 weeks.

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