Ten Years Later, Somehow

Ten years ago, someone at college orientation asked me what I wanted to study.

I smiled and told them I had no idea.

And this is probably the most honest answer I could’ve given for the next decade.

At 18, I didn’t arrive at the University of Arizona (what I call the Harvard of the Southwest) with a grand vision for my life. I didn’t have a five-year plan. I didn’t have a ten-year plan. I probably didn’t even have a convincing plan for the rest of that week.

Just a backpack, a scholarship, some vague interest in international relations, and the confidence of a person who hadn’t yet learned what all-nighters do to the human brain.

I wish I could say I was some hidden genius waiting for the right moment to activate.

I wasn’t.

I was a deeply unserious person with occasional flashes of effort.

This was the same Ryan who got a D in Calculus I. The same Ryan who would skip gym class by taking yoga mats into the hallway, pretending to do abs workouts before getting in the car with his friend and somehow ending up at Circle K drinking soda and eating Slim Jims.

The same Ryan who almost failed chemistry because playing Super Smash Brothers Melee and getting Diamond in League of Legends Season 4 meant more to him than trying to get into a good college and secure his future.

… to be fair, the Summoner’s Rift had a lot going for it at the time, so I respected his decision.

There was one moment from high school, though.

I had just absolutely bombed a chemistry test. Not the “oh no, I got a B” bombed. I mean the kind of score where the paper feels heavier when it gets handed back to you. C’s may get degrees, but F’s don’t.

But my teacher gave me a chance to replace the grade with the final. So for one week, I studied. Dawn to dusk. Pure panic. The kind of studying where you’re not learning because you love knowledge. You’re learning because the walls are closing in fast.

And somehow, I nearly aced the final.

I remember getting the score back and mostly feeling relieved that it was over. My teacher looked at me and said:

“You have so much potential. I never want to see you waste it like this again.”

That is the annoying thing about certain sentences. You do not even have to believe them at first.

They just sit somewhere in the back of your head and wait for you to become old or more mature enough to be bothered by them.

And at the time, I didn’t take this as some beautiful movie moment. No swelling orchestra behind me. No sudden transformation. No montage where I wake up at 5 a.m. and start chugging green juice and egg whites.

I mostly just thought, “Please do not make me do that again.”

But the moment stayed with me anyway.

So when I got to college, even though I had no idea what I wanted to do, some part of me knew I didn’t want to keep wasting my life away.

That sounds dramatic.

It was probably less dramatic than that. It was more like, “Okay, maybe I should actually try this time.”

That was the whole revolution. Pure cinema.

At freshman orientation they asked me what language I wanted to study. I immediately said, “Anything but Spanish.”

This is not how serious people make life decisions. In fact, it was driven entirely by high-school Ryan’s poor performance in his high-school Spanish class.

But somehow that turned into Japanese. And somehow Japanese became one of the most meaningful parts of my life.

I don’t know what the lesson is there. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe sometimes your life changes because you made a random life choice and then stubbornly kept showing up.

Which is stupid, but apparently allowed. Because that’s what happened to me.

Japanese class was intimidating at first. I walked in and saw someone in the back wearing cat ear headphones and blasting Hatsune Miku. My immediate thought was, “Aw shit. I … I don’t belong here man.”

It’s funny thinking back on how I reacted. But honestly? Respect to that guy. He was out there fully himself, cat ears and all, while I sat there judging.

But anyways, the class was hard. It wasn’t an anime appreciation seminar. It was grammar, vocabulary, particles, and the slow realization that learning a language is mostly being humbled in public, over and over.

I liked it anyway.

Not because it was easy. It wasn’t. But because I kept wanting to come back to it. Japanese made the world feel bigger. It made me feel like there were doors I hadn’t noticed before.

I also studied abroad at Waseda University after my sophomore year. That summer deserves its own blog post, so I won’t try to cram it in here. But it mattered. Getting lost and driven home by police, running out of money, meeting actual yakuza, somewhere in all of that, I for sure came back a different person.

Studying abroad in Japan gave me friendships, a lot of public embarrassment, and the very special experience of learning that “I studied Japanese for two years” and “I can function in Japan” are not the same sentence.

What actually shocks people when I tell them now: I started as a Political Science major. I liked my history teachers in high school, was president of the Model UN club, and had some vague concept of an idea that maybe I could go out into the world and do something important.

Peace treaties. Diplomacy. Cultural exchange. Global cooperation.

Sitting at a big table saying things like “the international community condemns these obvious crimes against humanity” before doing nothing and patting myself on the back.

You know. Modern useless diplomat activities.

I still love modern history. I still care about figuring out how other cultures and how people interact with each other across borders and try to come to an understanding. But after a while I started looking more honestly at the future attached to that path.

I liked learning about it and experiencing it.

I became less convinced I wanted to make a career out of it.

This is where college starts doing that annoying thing where every interest suddenly has to justify itself economically.

Do you chase what you love, or take the safe path?

This is one of those questions young, particularly college-aged people, ask because at that age, every decision feels like it is about to permanently lock down your path in life. And now that I am older, which is a disgusting sentence to write, I guess I can answer from experience.

It is a terrible question.

Not because it is dumb. It is probably one of the most real questions you ask in college. But it tricks you into thinking there are two separate roads. I figured Japanese and International Relations was the thing I loved and Computer Science was the thing that would keep me employed and not eating Ketchup Sandwiches for the rest of my life.

I was completely wrong. I just didn’t know it yet.

Because I also needed a future where I could support myself. I couldn’t just sit there going, “Ah yes, my passion is cross-cultural understanding,” and then starve artistically in a studio apartment with no furniture.

So Computer Science entered the picture. Not through any grand plan, obviously.

It started one day at a Chipotle, with a friend complaining about his Computer Science courses. I knew absolutely nothing about programming. So naturally, being young and competitive for no reason, I told him it couldn’t possibly be that hard and that I could do it.

The next thing I knew I was sitting in an intro programming course with zero experience, staring at Python, wondering why pasting Windows Command Prompt commands into my MacBook’s Unix terminal wasn’t working.

Little 18-year-old Ryan really did have the pride of a thousand lions for absolutely no reason.

And the funny thing is, I thought this meant I’d chosen the practical road over the passionate one. Two clean lanes.

It was not obvious at the time, but later in my life, I realized they are just the same thing.

And the annoying part was that Computer Science actually became fun.

Not immediately. Let’s call a spade a spade. There was a period where I was just getting emotionally stretched to my limits. But after a while, I started to like it. I liked learning how the web worked. I liked seeing the design decisions behind things I had used my whole life without thinking about them. In a weird way, it scratched the same part of my brain that history did. Computer Science had its own history, its own arguments, its own people making decisions that shaped how everyone else lived later. It was not like international relations and history, obviously. But it had that same feeling of, “Oh, this world was built by people, and if I study it long enough, I can start to understand why it looks the way it does.”

Japanese became useful too. It gave me a different kind of challenge. I like it because you could actually feel your efforts compounding. A little vocabulary every day. A little grammar. A little listening. Then suddenly, years later, you can read something you had no chance of understanding before. That was addictive in its own way. And when Japanese started mixing with Computer Science, I started using them together in ways that felt very natural to me. Translation tools. Natural language processing. Random things I wanted to read, understand, or make easier for myself because I had just enough background in both worlds to be dangerous.

Hell, I even built a website for an English-Japanese language exchange group because apparently the correct response to liking languages and coding is to create more work for yourself. Go check it out on my website by the way. I paid for that domain.

Math was different. It was less of a fun side quest and more of this thing I slowly realized I could not avoid if I wanted to keep going deeper into technical fields.

I did not always love it. Sometimes I still do not know if I love it. But I respect it a lot more now than I did when I started. Math gave me a way to look under the hood. If Computer Science showed me how systems were built, math helped me understand the machinery underneath them. It also opened doors into engineering, optics, machine learning, and other fields that I probably would not have had access to otherwise.

That does not mean math suddenly became beautiful to me all the time. Math is fun when you understand what is happening. When you do not, it is honestly just miserable. But I think that was part of why it mattered. It forced me to sit with confusion longer than I wanted to, and that ended up being useful in ways I did not really appreciate at the time.

And International Relations never really disappeared either. It just stopped being the job. I still cared about history, culture, countries, and how people interact across borders. It stayed with me, just in a different form.

So none of it really stayed where I originally put it. Japanese was not just this random passion thing. Computer Science was not just the safe option. Math was not just suffering, although there is strong evidence for that case. And International Relations was not wasted just because I did not turn it into a career.

It all kept bleeding into each other while I was trying to move forward. I do not think I understood that at the time. I was still trying to sort everything into clean boxes: useful, useless, passion, practical, career, hobby. But life did not really care about my boxes. It just kept taking pieces from each one and mixing them together anyway.

And I guess that brings me back to the original question.

Do you chase what you love, or do you take the safe path?

After ten years, the answer I feel confident in giving is that either way, there is going to be work.

Take the secure path, and you still have to work. You still have to get good at something. You still have to deal with being tired, confused, and occasionally wondering if you chose wrong.

And if there are things you love outside of work — friends, family, hobbies, and so on — you still have to make time for them. Otherwise your career can slowly take over, and suddenly the stuff you cared about is just something you “used to do.”

Chase the passion, and you still have to work. You still have to pay rent. You still have to become useful. You still have to figure out how to make the thing you love survive contact with real life. And the tradeoff becomes very personal. How broke are you willing to be? How unstable? How many opportunities are you okay with giving up? How much uncertainty can you actually tolerate before things hopefully work out?

I used to think I was choosing between completely different lives. International Relations was meaning. Japanese was passion. Computer Science was safety. Math was, I don’t know, punishment with career benefits.

But ten years later, I do not think they were as separate as I thought. They all kept pointing at the same thing in different ways: understanding how the world works, how people connect, and how to build something meaningful inside of it.

So when people ask whether they should chase what they love or choose the safe path, I get why it feels huge. But I think the answer is less clean than that. Either way, there is work. Choose safety, and you still have to keep the things you love alive. Choose passion, and you still have to make it to survive living with everyone else.

There is no path where you get to skip the work. So try your best either way. Chase the dream, choose the money, do some weird combination of both. If you keep going long enough, I’m confident you’ll come to realize that the pieces all start converging into something that works.

By junior and senior year, life had started to feel a bit more settled.

I had made good friends. I became a TA for Computer Science. I was still taking Japanese, still working through CS and math, and for the first time, all the random choices I had made were starting to feel like they had some kind of direction. That’s because I was beginning to understand something about myself that would end up mattering much more than any of the degrees.

I actually liked learning.

I do not mean that I suddenly became one of those people who enjoys every class, reads textbooks for fun, and wakes up excited to show the entire class how quirky and smart they are.

I still hated exams. I hated forced group projects. And I still hated assignments that felt pointless. I still had classes where I would sit there wondering how somebody had managed to take an interesting subject and present it in the least interesting way possible. Powerpoint slide readers have done more damage to society than any natural disaster could in my humble opinion.

I still feel that way now, actually. Five years of higher education have not cured me of having preferences.

What I loved was the process of becoming able to understand something that had previously been closed off to me.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who spent high school avoiding work whenever possible. But somewhere along the way, learning stopped feeling like something I did only because a teacher told me to. I started enjoying the moment when something that had made absolutely no sense finally clicked. I liked being able to look back at something I could not understand a year earlier and realize that, without really noticing it day to day, I had become capable of doing it.

Japanese showed me that most clearly. The progress was slow enough that I rarely noticed it while it was happening. You study vocabulary, grammar, and listening every day, and for a long time you mostly feel like you are still bad at Japanese. Then one day, you read something you could not have read before, or you understand a conversation without translating every sentence in your head, and you realize the work had been adding up the entire time.

Computer Science was similar, although with more error messages and stack overflow. I spent a lot of time feeling confused, but over time and repetition the confusion itself became less threatening. College slowly taught me that confusion usually means exactly what it says: you are confused. It is not a diagnosis. It does not mean you are incapable of understanding. Sometimes it’s really as simple as you just have not spent enough time with the problem yet.

Math tested that belief more than anything else.

There were subjects I enjoyed once I understood them, and subjects I tolerated because they gave me access to something else I wanted to learn. There were also subjects where I spent months waiting for the beauty everyone kept promising me, and I am still waiting.

And that is the difficult part about talking about a love of learning. It makes it sound like you walk into every classroom filled with wonder and immediately become fascinated by whatever appears on the board.

That was not my experience.

It is easy to say that you love learning when curiosity comes first. You find something interesting, you want to know more about it, and the work has an obvious reason behind it.

The harder version is when the work comes first.

Sometimes you are required to learn something you do not care about. Sometimes it is a prerequisite. Sometimes it is part of a degree, a job, or a research project. Sometimes somebody hands you a task, and your honest first reaction is that you would rather be doing almost anything else.

I still struggle with that now.

But it was during those years of my life that I started learning how to make the most of those situations. Not by pretending that everything was secretly fascinating. I do not think you need to lie to yourself like that. But I learned to look for the question inside the subject that I could care about. I learned to ask what understanding it might allow me to do later. I learned to stay with the confusion long enough to give interest a chance to appear.

Sometimes it did.

Sometimes I never loved the subject, but I became grateful for what it taught me. And sometimes I gave something a fair chance and still did not care very much. That happens too. At the very least, I can make some dumb smart person joke to someone who is much more intelligent to me later in life.

Becoming a TA made me think about this differently as well. Trying to explain something to another person reveals very quickly whether you actually understand it. It also teaches you how often people mistake confusion for inability.

A student would get stuck on one idea, fall behind on the next one, and eventually decide they were simply bad at Computer Science. Usually, they were not. They were missing one connection. But after being confused for long enough, that confusion had become part of how they saw themselves.

I recognized that because I had done the same thing. Even now many years later.

Then Covid happened.

For everyone, it was disruptive. For me, it arrived right when I was supposed to be deciding what came after college. I was close to graduating, but I did not have internship experience like many of my software friends. The world was shutting down, hiring felt uncertain, and the future suddenly felt much more immediate.

So I decided to stay another year for the fabled super senior year.

Part of that decision was practical. I was already close to a math minor, and because my Japanese degree was a Bachelor of Arts, I needed one anyway. From there, it slowly became, “If I am already this close, why not finish the math major?”

That is usually how these things happen with me. I begin with a reasonable decision and then gradually make it much less reasonable.

But there was something else underneath it too.

I think another part of me simply was not ready to stop learning yet.

I did not know exactly what I wanted to do next, but I liked the idea that Computer Science, Japanese, and math might meet somewhere. I had become interested in artificial intelligence and language technology. For the first time, the subjects I had wandered into separately seemed like they might actually belong in the same conversation.

So staying one more year became finishing the math major, completing my Computer Science and Japanese degrees, taking remote and graduate-level courses to meet the Honors College requirements, writing my thesis, applying to graduate school, and applying to jobs as a backup. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there were also a few serious health scares in my family.

It was a lot.

I was pulling multiple all-nighters some weeks during that year-long period, which is what I choose to credit for my seemingly inhuman resilience nowadays. I am sure it had no other lasting consequences.

By the end, I had three undergraduate degrees and 208 credits when the university required 120. This was the physical evidence that all of my effort had accumulated into something: a bigger number. And bigger number means better person. For sure I believe that is how life works.

And I know what the story is supposed to look like from the outside.

Unserious kid → starts trying → discovers a love of learning → puts in the work → finishes something difficult → feels proud.

I understand why someone reading this might expect that ending. I had gone from barely caring about school to finishing three degrees, writing a thesis, and getting ready for graduate school. This is normally where I am supposed to stop, look back at everything I accomplished, and say that it was all worth it.

But when I finally graduated, I mostly thought, “Thank God, it is over.”

I did not feel especially proud. Honestly, I still do not feel especially proud of the triple major or honors now. So there goes the idea that maybe I just needed another five years for the feeling to arrive.

What I remember much more vividly is the exhaustion. I remember the all-nighters. I remember the constant feeling that something was due. I remember knowing that I was burning out but also knowing that the work was not finished, so recognizing the problem did not seem particularly useful.

And even when the work was finally done, I did not immediately know how to stop. I would finally have nothing urgent in front of me and somehow feel more restless. I think a lot of people know that feeling. You spend so long bracing for the next problem that, when nothing comes, your body keeps bracing anyway. You sit down to relax and immediately feel guilty, like you have forgotten an appointment with some responsibility that has not revealed itself yet.

It is a very strange reward for finishing something difficult, but apparently a fairly common one.

However, everything had been my decision.

No one forced me to take on three majors. No one forced me to do honors or write the thesis. No one forced me to stay another year and make my life more complicated than it technically needed to be.

I ordered the food, so I had to finish the plate.

That was how I understood responsibility. Complaining felt illegitimate because I had chosen the workload myself. Stopping felt less like changing my mind and more like disappointing myself. Other people can judge you, obviously, but yourself tends to be the judge you have the most difficulty escaping.

And to be fair, that way of thinking worked for me. It got me through the year. But once there was nothing left to finish, I realized I had gotten very good at pushing forward and had no idea how to stop.

Once I graduated, it did not feel like I had arrived anywhere. It felt like I had checked off a box and earned the right to start worrying about the next one. My brain had spent so long in finish-the-job mode that when the job ended, it did not know how to celebrate. It just looked around for another job.

I finished it. I survived it. I guess we keep going.

I think this period taught me that loving learning and loving school are not the same thing.

Learning has been one of the most rewarding things in my life. It gave me access to languages, people, careers, and entire fields I could not have imagined when I was 18. It changed what I believed I was capable of. It taught me that confusion can become understanding and that progress is often happening long before you are able to recognize it.

But learning can also become tangled up with performance. With grades, deadlines, applications, and the need to prove that you can finish whatever you started. At some point, it becomes difficult to tell whether you are still learning because you care about the subject or because stopping would feel like a failure of character.

I am still trying to separate those things.

I am still trying to hold onto the part of learning that makes the world feel larger without turning every difficult task into another test of my worth. I am still learning how to make the most of work that does not naturally interest me, without pretending that every obligation is secretly my passion. I am still trying to recognize the difference between giving something enough time to become meaningful and punishing myself because I believe quitting is never allowed.

I do not think I have figured it out.

But I think I learned that interest is not always something you begin with. Sometimes it grows after you understand enough to see what is there. Sometimes you find value in a subject without ever loving the subject itself. Sometimes all you can do is find one piece of the work that matters to you and use it to get through the rest.

That process is difficult to explain because it is not consistent. My relationship with learning has always been a back-and-forth one. Sometimes curiosity pulled me forward. Sometimes discipline had to carry me until curiosity caught up. Sometimes curiosity never arrived, and discipline carried the whole thing by itself.

Discipline is good at getting you through things. I am grateful for that part of myself. It can make you finish the class, write the thesis, and keep going when you are tired.

But it does not automatically teach you how to feel fulfilled after.

It can make you finish the plate. It does not automatically make you feel full.

I think learning that distinction has been one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of my life. Not learning how to love everything, because I do not. But learning how to remain open long enough for something unfamiliar to surprise me, and how to take something valuable from the experience even when it does not.

After undergrad, I went to USC for a master’s program in Artificial Intelligence. At the time, I wanted to study Natural Language Processing. It felt like the perfect intersection of everything I had spent college wandering through: Computer Science, Japanese, and Mathematics.

I wanted to work on language, translation, idioms, and the strange gap between what a person means and what a machine is capable of understanding. It felt like all these separate interests had finally converged into something that made sense.

Then, while I was studying it, the field began changing faster than my classes could keep up with it. The material I was learning was becoming outdated in real time as it was being taught to me. The lectures were not wrong. OpenAI had just released ChatGPT, and the field had suddenly moved several miles down the road while we were still discussing the map.

One of my professors told us that he believed we were witnessing the beginning of the next Industrial Revolution.

And I am inclined to believe it as well.

I went to school to study AI, and somewhere along the way AI became something the entire world had an opinion about. It stopped being a field that mostly belonged to researchers, engineers, and people willing to explain what a neural network was at nerd parties. Suddenly everyone was being asked to think about it. Teachers, artists, programmers, students, writers, doctors, parents, and unfortunately governments. People who had never cared how a machine learned were now being forced to consider how they were supposed to live with one.

And that has been strange to watch.

Because I believed in AI as a tool for making people’s lives better. Deep down, I still do.

That was the version of it I came up learning about. A tool that could help people understand difficult information, communicate across languages, recognize patterns we could not see ourselves, and solve problems that were too large or complicated for one person to handle alone.

The point, at least as I understood it, was not to make people less necessary. It was to give them greater reach.

That was the future I wanted to contribute my very small piece toward.

And in some ways, that future is happening. AI has made knowledge easier to access than at any other point in my life. You can ask a question about a subject you know nothing about and receive enough context to begin. You can translate, summarize, code, model, analyze, and learn at a speed that would have felt ridiculous when I started college.

The research has also advanced far beyond what I imagined when I entered graduate school. Problems that sounded distant or theoretical are becoming practical. The systems improve every year, sometimes at a pace that makes anything I say about them feel temporary before I finish the sentence.

It is genuinely fascinating.

It also scares me.

Not because I think the machines are secretly planning something. Honestly, human beings remain more than capable of causing problems without requiring help.

What scares me is how quickly a tool meant to expand human ability can be redirected toward reducing people. Reducing someone’s work to something that can be generated more cheaply. Reducing art to content. Reducing judgment to a score, a prediction, or an automated decision that no one wants to take responsibility for. Reducing a person to the amount of labor a company believes it can replace.

I worry about jobs disappearing before anyone has decided what people are supposed to do afterward. I worry about artists watching their work become training material for systems designed to compete with them. I worry about people having their faces, voices, and identities reproduced in ways they never agreed to. I worry about the enormous amount of global money pouring into the field and the incentives that come with it.

A technology can be extraordinary and still be used in ways that are greedy, dishonest, or cruel. Those things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, historically, they seem to enjoy traveling together.

There is also the simpler problem that producing more is not the same as producing something worthwhile.

In the hands of someone thoughtful, AI can be an incredible tool. In the hands of someone careless, it mostly allows them to be careless much faster and with much nicer formatting.

What frustrates me even more is when using it stops being a choice.

I believe AI can help people learn. I do not believe it should become another institution forcing people to learn in one approved way. Once schools, companies, and managers decide everyone must use AI, the tool stops feeling liberating. It becomes another requirement. Another platform you are expected to adopt. Another measure of productivity.

The same system that made learning feel like an obligation now hands you a tool that could have made learning more personal and says, “Use this, or fall behind.”

That is not the future I found exciting.

To me, AI is most valuable when it gives someone more freedom to pursue their own curiosity. It can lower the barrier to entering a new field. It can explain the part you are stuck on. It can help you get started when the blank page or unfamiliar problem feels impossible.

But it should not decide what is worth learning for you. It should not remove the need to think. And it should not become a substitute for the judgment required to know whether what it gave you is useful, true, or even yours.

That question matters to me because so much of my own life came from struggling through things I did not understand yet. Japanese, Computer Science, Mathematics, and now Optical Sciences all required me to spend a lot of time being confused.

AI can shorten that period. Often, that is incredibly helpful. But sometimes the process of working through the confusion is also where the learning happens.

In that sense, AI has made learning both easier and harder to define.

Knowledge is easier to access. The friction between having a question and receiving an answer has become incredibly small. But an answer appearing in front of you is not the same as understanding it. Being able to generate something is not the same as knowing why it works. And having a machine speak confidently does not relieve you of the responsibility to decide whether it is saying anything worthwhile.

AI made knowledge easier to access.

It made it harder to define what learning means.

And it made judgment more important, not less.

So what did it feel like to spend years learning how machines work, only to enter a world where everyone was suddenly being asked how they should live with them?

Mostly, it felt like watching something I cared about become much larger than my own reasons for caring about it.

There was excitement in that. There still is. But there was also a kind of grief. The technology I saw as a way to help people learn and solve problems had become tied to job loss, corporate power, surveillance, disposable art, and an economic race that seems to be moving much faster than our ability to decide where it should go.

I do not think that means the original hope was naïve.

At least, I hope it was not.

Tools do not arrive with one fixed moral purpose. People decide what they are for, and then money, power, incentives, and ordinary human laziness all join the discussion. That does not make the tool inherently evil. It just means building it was never going to be the end of the responsibility.

For me, studying AI also turned out not to mean that I would spend the rest of my life working only on language models or translation.

I thought choosing a field meant deciding what kinds of problems I would solve forever. What I had actually chosen was a way of approaching problems I had not met yet.

AI taught me to look for patterns, build models, question assumptions, work with incomplete information, and turn messy problems into something I could at least begin testing. Those habits followed me somewhere I never expected.

Now, at 28, I am in a PhD program in Optical Sciences.

The subject changed. The way I learned to approach it did not.

So I did not exactly leave AI behind. I carried it into another field, where it became one tool among many rather than the entirety of the work.

I think I prefer it that way.

And I suppose that brings me back to the question I started with.

When I was younger, I always wanted some way to fast-forward my life. I wanted to know where all of this was going. I wanted to see whether future me had figured things out, whether he was successful, whether he was happy, and whether all the uncertainty eventually became a story that made sense.

Ten years later, I can report that the answer is somewhat inconvenient.

Some of it makes sense now. A lot of it still does not.

Japanese led me toward language. Computer Science taught me how to build things and how to remain confused without immediately assuming I was incapable. Mathematics taught me that something can be useful, difficult, and occasionally enjoyable without becoming the love of your life. AI gave me a way to approach problems I had not encountered yet. Somehow, all of that eventually followed me into optics.

I could arrange those events into a clean progression and pretend I understood where they were leading the entire time.

I did not.

Most of the important choices felt ordinary while I was making them. Some were practical. Some came from curiosity. Some came from pride. A surprising number began because I said yes before I had enough information to know whether saying yes was a good idea.

Only later did they begin to look connected.

I think that is one of the reasons I have come to value learning so much. It gives a choice somewhere to go, even when the destination is not obvious yet. You spend enough time with a language, a problem, or a field, and it begins changing what you are capable of noticing. Sometimes it becomes a career. Sometimes it becomes a tool you carry into something else. Sometimes it simply becomes part of how you understand the world.

That process has been one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

It has also been difficult. I am still learning the difference between staying with something long enough to understand it and continuing only because stopping would disappoint me. I am still trying to separate curiosity from performance, responsibility from self-punishment, and genuine ambition from the internal judge who believes every completed task is merely evidence that I should now be capable of doing more.

I thought accomplishment might eventually silence that judge.

This has not occurred.

But I do understand myself better than I did ten years ago. I know that I can work hard. I know that confusion is not a verdict. I know that interest can grow after understanding, but that I do not have to pretend everything is meaningful simply because it is difficult. And I know that finishing something is not the same as feeling fulfilled by it.

That last one took a while.

So what would I tell 18-year-old me?

Probably that he is not as far behind as he thinks he is.

He never needed a perfect plan. He does have to start caring eventually, which may be difficult news for him. But he should try things, give them enough time to surprise him, and pay attention to the ones that keep pulling him back. He should work hard, but he should not make his whole life a test of how much discomfort he can endure.

He should also try to sleep more probably (coach gives advice, but he don’t play).

And mostly, I would tell him that his life is not going to arrive all at once. It will look like random classes, embarrassing failures, conversations he forgets until years later, interests that disappear and return, and decisions that do not feel important until long after he has made them.

He will spend a lot of time wondering whether he chose correctly.

I still do.

But eventually, the choices began to feel like mine.

Japanese became mine. Computer Science became mine. Mathematics, somehow, became mine. AI became mine despite it being a complicated relationship right now. Even the failures became mine once I stopped treating them as evidence against me and started asking what they had taught me.

I do not think I found the correct road.

Most of the time, I do not think there was a road.

I think I kept walking into things, getting confused, learning something, and adjusting from there. Then enough time passed that I could look backward and mistake the footprints for a plan.

Ten years later, somehow, that has been enough.