Afresh Start
Two and a half years ago my life changed when I was hit by a car. I was riding home when it ran a stop sign at just the right speed for me to smash its windshield and land on its roof. The driver didn’t stop; they just went faster and I slid off the back of the car, hitting the pavement at about 30 mph.
I spent the day after the crash lying in bed watching La La Land. It’s a film about two people in Los Angeles, each with their own dreams, who are struggling to make them come true.
It reminded me of my own time in LA when my future was uncertain and I was trying to figure out who I was. After leaving art school I spent a winter backpacking in New Zealand followed by another skiing in the Sierras, and then I didn’t know what to do. I took a technical job and did graphic design, photography, and filmmaking on the side. I wondered how I should spend my life and whether I would be happy.
Eleven years later I’m living the life that the younger me always wanted: I’m married with three kids, a house, and a good job. Why, then, did I envy the characters in La La Land? I think it’s because they have aspirations; they see clearly the gap between who they are and who they want to be.
Somewhere along the way I stopped wanting and became satisfied with what I had. I traded the risk and excitement of an unknown future for safety and predictability. I knew what my life would look like in ten years and I realized that I’d rather be surprised.
Here’s how it happened:
My first two years at Nextdoor were very difficult. I was missing a lot of skills that I needed to be successful there. We were living in a cramped and uncomfortable apartment, we had our second child, and we were trying to build a house and not making a good job of it.
On a typical day I’d wake up tired, take care of one of the kids in the morning, attend an architect or contractor meeting, go to the office, come home, have dinner, put the kids to bed, and stay up late working on plans for the house. Then I’d sit on the couch for a few minutes and feel like a piece of shit for getting us into the situation before getting a few hours of sleep and repeating the routine the next day.¹
The quality of my work was sometimes good but often inconsistent and unreliable. I thought I deserved to be fired. I had trouble concentrating because I was worried about running out of money before we finished the house. I started stress eating. After one construction mishap I kicked a door so hard that I thought I broke my toes. I walked with a limp for days.
We did eventually finish the house and life got easier after we moved in. And, over time, my work improved as well. After two years of just trying to make it from day to day, I was relieved that I wasn’t struggling anymore. For a while I was happy with that. And then I got hit by a car.
According to Elizabeth Gilbert, a hobby is something that you do purely for pleasure. A job pays the bills. A career is a job that you’re passionate about, one that’s worthy of sacrifice because you believe in it. And a vocation is a calling, the thing you were meant to do.
What La La Land made me realize is that Nextdoor felt like a job. It was a good job, a safe one where I could stay for a long time while I worked with nice people, developed new skills, and made meaningful contributions. But I was not daring greatly.
Much later I would discover, through Cassandra Xia, a sentiment from Richard Hamming that describes what I was feeling: “What’s the most important thing you could be doing? And why aren’t you doing it?”
Why not indeed?²
There are a great many important problems that deserve our attention. The one that speaks most clearly to me is climate change.
In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, climate change is not a binary problem that happens or not, or that is solved or not. Rather, it’s a matter of the degree of loss: of forests, of glaciers, of species, of farmland, of cities, and, ultimately, of life. Some of this loss is unavoidable because it’s already happened or because there’s too much inertia in our geologic, biologic, and chemical systems to stop it. As for what remains, its fate will depend upon the decisions that we make and the work that we do in the coming decades.
How much loss are we willing to bear? The burden of climate change is not shared equally. The global rich may regret the shortened ski season while the global poor suffer and die. Some number of our human family are already lost, and more join them with each passing day.³
Climate change compels me and I plan to spend the rest of my life doing my best to reverse it. In this work, I believe I’ve found my vocation.
After deciding to focus on climate I started learning how my skills can be used to contribute to solutions. My main resources were the Climatebase job board, the Reversing Climate Change podcast, and the Work on Climate community.
Climate change is largely a problem of values, policies, and physical processes. Climate-related software jobs tend to fall into three categories: carbon reduction (preventing CO₂ from entering the atmosphere), carbon removal (removing CO₂ from the atmosphere), and adaptation and resilience (getting used to it). My interests lie more in the first two than the third.
I had conversations with nineteen companies, did full interviews with five of them, advanced to offer at four, and ultimately accepted a position at Afresh Technologies.⁴
Afresh uses machine learning to help grocery stores make better decisions about how much fresh food to stock. About a third of the food that we produce doesn’t get eaten and reducing food waste is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing carbon emissions.
The scale of the climate problem is daunting. Globally, we emit about 40 gigatons of CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per year. We need to reduce this to zero and start removing over 10 gigatons a year from the atmosphere. This will take the effort of millions of people. I believe it’s possible if we find the will. Let’s make sure that history doesn’t look back upon us and say “They thought about saving themselves but decided it was too expensive.”
During my last two years in LA I worked for an engineering think tank that was co-founded by Danny Hillis. Danny had a side project that he called the 10,000-Year Clock. I think of it as an art project that hopes to change how we relate to the world by helping us consider our place in time. Not everyone gets it but it’s always meant a lot to me.
There’s a story that Danny tells about the dining hall at New College in Oxford, which was constructed in the 14th century and featured enormous oak beams in the ceiling. In the 1800’s it was discovered that these beams were infested with beetles and needed to be replaced. This was a problem because timber that big had become hard to find. They called the college forester and discovered that the builders of the hall had anticipated that the beams would eventually need replacement so, for this purpose, they planted oak trees, and generations of foresters had been tending them ever since.
The story turns out to be apocryphal but I think it serves as a useful model of what could be. Wouldn’t it be better if we were thoughtful about the future? If we love the future generations as much as we love ourselves?⁵
I’ll end with some words from others. Once again:
What’s the most important thing you could be doing?
And:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
[1] These are, admittedly, very first-world problems. There are too many people whose daily lives involve struggles way more severe than ours were, not because they’re building a house, but because they’re trying to meet basic needs like food, shelter, and safety.
[2] Most people don’t get to choose what they do so the ability to pursue a fulfilling career must be considered an enormous privilege.
[3] Peter Brannan, discussing the “anthropocene”, observes that the 10,000-year history of human civilization is such a thin layer of the geologic record that it will be nearly undetectable tens of millions of years from now. A future archaeologist will surely know that the Earth experienced a mass extinction event coinciding with a dramatic increase in CO2 concentration, but it will not be clear that one of the species caused it.
As a thought exercise, he suggests that if the dinosaurs had become space-faring in their last few millennia and extinguished themselves by crashing a giant rock into the Yucatán Peninsula in a tragic asteroid mining accident, we’d never know it. Hilarious!
[4] I also completely bombed a phone screen. I knew it was going badly but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, and the more I talked the worse it got. They passed on me and I don’t blame them.
[5] Some Native Americans share a similar sentiment called the “seventh generation principle”. This is the idea that a decision should be evaluated based on its impact on the next seven generations.
