Over the past six months, I’ve been going through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults program or RCIA. I’m an anomaly within my RCIA group: I have no religious background, zero complicated feelings about the church, and a crisis didn’t lead me here. I just never bought it that everything around me could be explained by science and happenstance. Believing in God simply meant putting a label on my longstanding belief that there has to be something bigger than me — a belief I found evidence for in the face of unexplainably intricate beauty: a newborn baby’s bare feet, misty redwood forest in the morning, breath curling out of pale, frigid lips. Being around beauty has long compelled me to spread its selfless essence, it just took me a long time to learn what that essence was made up of.
Which is probably why I felt so moved by the practices of Catholicism — the beauty of mass spoke a language I recognized but which had never been named for me. Gazing around at the sea of heads surrounding me while seated in the pews never fails to remind me that we humans were designed to believe in something greater. The orientation of our belief seems to be the operative factor — where I work in a small subset of Silicon Valley, it’s common for belief to be turned inward. Founders are taught to possess enough faith to will whatever they’re working on into existence but are rarely reminded to worship anything but themself. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the point that they often find it hard not to confuse themselves for God — and we all know how that ends.
My baptism is in two months. I’m scared, a little surprised, but mostly it just feels right. I don’t have all the answers, nor was I ever supposed to. I’ve been surprised by how quickly this faith has started to feel like my own and where it’s taught me to sit. No longer am I spending much of my time observing myself from a far-removed vantage point. Instead I am situated so close to the world outside of me that I often cease to be aware of myself at all. It’s cathartic, anti-insular, and a state of being all the people I most admire seemingly share. So far, my main learning is simple: the best belief system is probably the one that makes you more of the person you want to be.
Reads
The Lost Charisma of Capitalism (essay)
On the types of technologists and the commercial instincts that define entrepreneurs.Target Big Markets by Don Valentine (talk)
Excellent picture of Sequoia’s early strategy with lots of fun anecdotes.Michael Lewis on luck and what we owe to the people around us (speech)
An intellectual argument for humility as part of Lewis’s 2012 Princeton commencement speech.Big Tech at the End of History by Byrne Hobart (essay)
What happens after all the low-hanging technological fruit has been picked?Shipping Out by David Foster Wallace (essay)
DFW in peak form, examining wealth through his philosophically literary gaze.Questing for Transcendence by Tanner Greer (essay)
What does it mean to live for more than yourself?The Option by David Friedman (essay)
A fun bit of fiction on paths not taken.Art is for Seeing Evil by Agnes Callard (essay)
Art is for inspiring us to aspire to something greater!
Media
My love, mine all mine by Frank Watkinson (song)
Heart-wrenching Mitski cover, especially for those with older relatives.Fade Into You by Mazzy Star live (song)
Just as good 29 years later.
Say You Will by Kanye West ft. Caroline Shaw (song)
Re-recorded (and vastly improved) version of the original song from 2018.
Hania Rani live from Studio S2 (set)
Brian Eno-esque contemporary piano, excellent while working.
Tavi Gevinson on Longform (podcast)
Wonderful portrait of Tavi’s magnificent and wildly creative mind.
Parting thought
Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
The way you explain your path is so beautiful. I feel the same way. I really appreciate and love people who admire the beauty of creation, then contemplate about existence of a greater Artist, a Creator. I think this was something so intelligible by human nature, but hearts of majority is in delusion so most of us don't see the beauty of creation let it be the Creator. As a Muslim I may think myself nearer to devote and sincere Christians in front of a soulless Modernist world. I understand why you got closer with Christianity and I know this comment by random person may seem meaningless - and I'm not someone who write such comments all over the internet - but I think it would be awesome if you have an idea about Islam as a person who reached that point by solely listening pure sprit. At least the Christianity from Islamic perspective. Majority of people sees the religion only from its customs so I understand if it seems very Arabic even though there are cultures of many many different nations in our cultural heritage. Thanks for reading anyway. I'm very happy for you. May God guide us all to the right path, path of peace and beauty.
Why do you think beauty points to a creator? I've heard this argument from a few people who have thought deeply about life: Kant and Francis Collins. Could beauty not have arisen as simply a feature of the unfolding of the galaxy? Maybe the better question is: why a beautiful universe on the whole and not a repulsive one? Is it more this sense that the natural world *is* appealing to the eye, rather than not? I'm asking these questions because I'm trying to work out what I think makes sense about life, what is worth believing in, what is meaningful, what is right, what is true. Thank you for sharing your thoughts; it's nice to see others on the journey for meaning :)