Change is inevitable

I often think about how much I’ve changed since college, since high school, since middle school and onwards. I would go as far as saying that current Vinay couldn’t have been fathomable to Vinay at the start of Oxford, who wouldn’t have been recognizable to Vinay at the start of UVA, who would have been a stranger to Vinay at the start of high school.

I feel like certain principles about me—how I view friendships, how I view work, how I enjoy myself—have changed so much. I guess the optimistic view is that I’m always evolving, which is pretty cool. But something about this makes me really sad; I’m not the person I used to be a few years ago, and the person I will be won’t be who I am now. It’s like there’s this temporal isolation in who I am that makes me feel a little bit more lonely. The memories and experiences I had with people in the past are simply fragments that remain with the current me.

In a past life, I was an incredible debater: making it deep into tournaments, leading my high school team, and teaching kids at my local middle school. In another past life, I was a force to be reckoned with in hackathons: I knew how to make cool projects, ones that would win awards and impress others.

If you look carefully, I still have remnants of these qualities: I know how to argue well and I have a love for hacking small projects together. But those parts of my identity feel like they’re less part of my core.

I’m always changing, and the things I value are too. It’s taught me that when I want something, when I’m really, really excited about something, I should do it now.

Your utility function is constantly evolving

Suppose $f$ is your utility function, and you use it for evaluating how happy certain actions/goals make you. You shouldn’t just assume that you can delay doing something and it’ll still make you just as happy.

For example, one goal I have is to run the NYC marathon. I think it’ll bring happiness and fulfillment, and so I told myself I’ll have to do it some day—maybe in a couple years when I’m more ready. The problem is that I’m projecting my current day utility function to the future. Maybe 5 years down the road, I’m no longer interested in running or maybe I’m injured and I can’t do it anymore. In this way, $f$ is time-indexed by $t$ (and is continuous in $t$). It could very well be that $f_{t+\text{5 years}}(\text{running NYC Marathon}) « f_t(\text{running NYC Marathon})$.

If you have some goal, you should think about its stability with respect to time. There are some things that you care a lot about now, but probably won’t care about as much in the future—don’t put those off. I would argue that after a few years, your utility function is incredibly different (at least in my experience, I feel like if you enjoy something it decays with a half life of ~2 years). Another way of putting it, $f_{t+\text{2 years}}(x)\not\approx f_{t}(x)$ for many $x$s. That’s why now, when I get excited about doing something, I don’t put it off.