The E31 BMW 850CSi had a lot going for it: V12, pop-up headlights, comfortable seats. But in a short time, it became the tragic last chapter of an unfinished masterpiece. Heading into the 1990s, the prospect of its successor—an unleashed M8 variant of the E31—must have been tantalizing. Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Porsche had been taking tremendous swings with the Diablo, F40, and 959, respectively, but even so, the since-revealed prototype of the M8 was something else, a rising legend “pointed at a very high orbit.”

Whatnowness is the feeling that creeps in at a new phase of life immediately when the festivities have ended, and a new kind of ordinary existence is expected to resume. It is that moment when you realize said existence is about to unfold, and you’re the one holding the pen to write your story. It is the characteristic of this summer, in which I exist at the juncture between college graduation and the first day of my full-time job.

In many ways the world runs on JavaScript—for better or worse. How long can this paradigm last? Sure, one may write the source code for websites in other programming languages, but at some point, the interactive aspects of the website must be boiled down to JavaScript, as web browsers do not come with an interpreter or compiler for other languages.

If you’re anything like me, ordinary life can start to feel like a game of catch-up pretty fast when left unchecked. The physical environments we inhabit are subject to clutter, misplaced items, unsorted papers, and a litany of other foes. Digital life, quite plainly, can be affronted by entropic agents of dread as well. The other day, I started to draw a diagram to describe a fraction of this sense of digital chaos. Each node in the diagram represented one persistent digital space where I’ve offloaded some of my thoughts in the last year. Then I cleaned up the diagram and digitized it for easy reading. But it occurred to me soon enough that an elaborate diagram is not necessary:

Nearly two years ago, a professor of mine assigned our class to read Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article “The Problem with Silicon Valley,” which is how I originally came across the writer’s work. I’ve closely followed him since then and more recently started listening to his podcast Plain English in my spare time. So when Thompson’s then-latest piece “We’re Missing a Key Driver of Teen Anxiety” came out a few weeks ago, it might not surprise you that I dropped what I was doing to read it. In the piece, he starts by recapping the ongoing debate over the economic and psychological implications of Columbia University’s decision to remove standardized testing requirements from its college applications. By the end of the piece, though, he highlights “the paradox of wealthy nations,” in which countries appear to have happier adults with societal advancement while yielding increasingly unhappy youth. The culprit? A culture of obsession over high student achievement that’s seeming to cross into unhealthy territory today. “Adolescents go through a kind of happiness slingshot, in which stress early on springs them toward greater wealth and well-being later in life,” Thompson said. I found his take to be particularly refreshing for a number of reasons, especially as social media’s negative impact is becoming a tired trope with hardly any useful insights as far as I can tell. Maybe it also resonated with some deep-seated resentment stemming from my own experiences and how I’ve come to believe that one’s life can be infected by such cultures and obsessions. If I had the inclination, I could list right here several personal qualms that are either brought on directly from school, exacerbated by school, or rendered insurmountable due to competing interests of so-called “student achievement” that demand the time and energy I would need to deal with the issues. But I digress. What initially arrested my attention was that the article appeared to be about adolescents, judging from the title, yet the featured image at the top included young individuals sitting in cubicles.

The first few weeks of the school year are a fever dream every time. You’ve got thousands of young adults coming in from all over the world, filtering into their respective dorms. These students frantically attempt to restore some sense of home by unpacking cardboard boxes with their personal possessions and decorating the walls with posters or stocking the bookshelf with an alphabetized selection of novels that they’ve “been meaning to read.” Then, precisely 72 hours later, students find themselves sitting in a lecture hall or classroom as they embark on the first lesson of one of several courses in which they have enrolled. All the while, friends want to find a time to catch up, student organizations are ramping up their activities, and in Stanford’s case, Silicon Valley’s greatest stars are graciously showering our inboxes with invitations to on-campus recruiting events.

Inconvenient is the word of this summer. That’s not to imply negativity, however. The past three months have been remarkable, and I’d be quite disingenuous not to recount the many ways in which the summer has been positive and enriching. Despite the first week of June—in which I remember hauling cardboard boxes, boarding the red-eye flight out of town, and losing hair over finding somewhere to reside in Washington, D.C.—I quickly developed a fondness of the area, first in Woodley Park, and then elsewhere. Transit is convenient, and there are many places to walk. As I explored various neighborhoods, I was reminded of the times I’ve been to the nation’s capital before: once in first grade during the Easter Egg Roll, another time in eighth grade, then again later that year, then again in 2019, and then again briefly in 2020 when helping my sister move into her apartment. The city has quite a personality. There are so many different kinds of people from different backgrounds. The number of languages I could hear people speaking on any given day rivaled my hometown of Chicago.

Sophomore year of college has come and gone; it is now time to stumble into summer plans, despite having taken my last exam of the quarter six days ago. That Monday’s final was for Human Behavioral Biology, and looking back, it would have been like any other exam if not for a surreal element I noticed. See, it’s been nearly four years since I first stumbled upon a Reddit post about Robert Sapolsky’s YouTube playlist, and I’m proud to say that since then, I’ve matriculated to Stanford University, where I just completed his course as his student. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. My one regret about it is that I never spoke with Professor Sapolsky informally to thank him for how much he’s influenced me. Due to family matters, he had to be conservative with his exposure to students, and thus lectures had to be remote.