On the Threshold of Thirty
We are rapidly approaching the age of thirty. We have always felt as if our lives could end at any stage. This is not a morbid thought - it is a kind of alertness, a refusal to take tomorrow for granted. But as age increases, the weight of that alertness has shifted. Those around us are leading increasingly divergent paths of life, and we see brilliant people we can’t catch up to. Some are building families. Some are rising in careers that seem to have no ceiling. Some seem to have figured out something about how to live that we haven’t. We feel ever-increasing pressure, ever-increasing solitude, and ever-increasing uncertainty about our future.
It’s easy to spiral here. But spiraling doesn’t help. What helps is having strategies - not answers, but directions, ways to orient ourselves when the ground feels unsteady. Here are our strategies.
1. Stay Loyal to the Land and Learn to Communicate with It
We live in the Americas. This is the ground beneath our feet. This is where we eat and sleep and think and worry. And yet, most people have lived as if the land were just a backdrop-a neutral stage for human drama. We want to change that.
In terms of eating, eat what’s native to the land as our main foods: corn, potatoes, beans, avocados, cactus fruit, tomatoes, chili, peanuts, pepitas, sunflower seeds, and so on. These are not just ingredients. These are inheritances - foods that have been cultivated here for thousands of years. When we eat this way, we are not just nourishing our bodies. We are practicing a form of attention. We are asking: what does this place offer? What has it always offered?
In terms of music, focus on Native American music. Not as a curiosity, but as the sonic grammar of this continent. The melodies and rhythms that grew out of these landscapes. We want to let that music shape the atmosphere of our days the way it shaped the atmosphere of this land for millennia. And alongside the music, learn about Native American mythology - the stories and the ways of understanding the relationship between humans and the world embedded in this place. Learn to communicate with the spirits of the land.
We shouldn’t be ignorant as them, as those who came here and saw only resources to extract and territory to claim. We should let the land welcome us, guide us, and protect us. This is not about identity or politics. This is about belonging - or at least, about asking to belong. About apprenticing ourselves to a place and letting it teach us how to be here.
2. Look Inward, Into Our Rich Past for Sources of Inspiration and Strength
The present is noisy, and the future is foggy. But the past - our own past - is a reservoir we already own. We need to remember how to access it.
During our high school years and the first half of our college, we admired the noble spirit of Beethoven and thought of it as something that could accompany us in inclement weather all the way to our last breath. There is something in Beethoven that resists despair - not through cheerfulness or denial, but through a kind of ferocious dignity. The hammering fate motifs, the late quartets, the deaf man conjuring architectures of sound he would never hear. That spirit - the refusal to be diminished by circumstance - was something we once held close. We believed it could carry us through anything.
And we pursued an attitude of “splendid isolation.” Not loneliness as suffering, but solitude as a deliberate stance. A way of saying, “We are enough.” Our inner life is vast. We can stand alone and not be diminished by it. We can find clarity in the quiet that others flee from. This was not about retreating from the world - it was about building a foundation strong enough to meet the world without being swallowed by it.
These are more relevant than ever, and while staying loyal to the land, these are things that we can rekindle.
3. Use Agentic AI - Use It More Than Ever
Our blog and quipu have proved to be invaluable to our daily life and work. They have become something like a cognitive exoskeleton - a way to think alongside something, to extend our reach beyond what our own minds can hold at once. We rely on them. We are grateful for them.
However, they do suffer from several problems - fragmentation, messiness, overcapacity. Conversations splinter across threads. Context gets lost. The things we built to help us organize our thoughts sometimes become another source of disorganization. The capacity fills up faster than we can prune it, and prudence takes time we don’t always have. These are not reasons to abandon the tools. They are reasons to improve them.
We need to think of ways to solve these problems, and to build more agentic systems or subsystems to meet our demands. Maybe that means smaller, more focused agents - each with a clear domain and maintaining its own context without bleeding into others’. Maybe that means better ways to archive, to summarize, to surface what matters and let go of what doesn’t. Maybe that means giving the system itself more agency to organize itself, rather than requiring us to be the bottleneck for every decision. This is not just an engineering challenge. It is a form of self-care. When the demands on our attention exceed what we can process alone, building external structures to share the load is not a luxury - it is survival.
4. Have Hobbies
We used to have many hobbies. Photography. Music. Coding. Things we did not do because they were productive or strategic but because they were interesting - because they pulled us in and made time disappear. Now we have almost none. That’s not an ideal situation.
Work has a way of colonizing everything. Not just the hours, but the imagination. It convinces us that anything that does not directly contribute to output is a distraction. And slowly, without noticing, we let the hobbies go. We let the afternoons of aimless exploration become afternoons of more work. We let the parts of ourselves that exist beyond our job descriptions go dormant. And dormancy, left unchecked, becomes atrophy.
We should find new hobbies, whether it’s building agentic systems, writing, or something else. Something we haven’t even thought of yet. The specific activity matters less than the posture it requires: the posture of doing something for no reason except that it pulls at us. We gotta do something that’s beyond our work. Not because work is bad, but because we are more than our work, and if we forget that, we lose something essential.
5. Schedule Communications with Friends New and Old
Not everyone is in the same situation as us. Some people have boyfriends or girlfriends, some may even be married, and some may naturally tolerate loneliness better than we do. Their internal weather is not ours. But if we don’t reach out, connections will gradually fade away. This is not a moral failure on anyone’s part - it is simply the physics of adult life. People get caught up in their own worlds. And if no one reaches out, the silence becomes self-perpetuating.
We should take the initiative to connect with the people we know - whether that’s during holidays, when we have something to ask, or just when we feel like it. A message. A call. A plan to meet. These gestures are small, but they are the stitches that hold a social fabric together. And given the fact that everyone tends to lead busy lives, this is something we should schedule in advance. Spontaneity is a gift, but it is not a strategy. Put it on the calendar. Treat connection not as something that happens when it happens, but as something worth protecting with intention.