Hello friends! I’m trying something new this week by forcefully timeboxing my writing to the ~1 hour it takes for my Caltrain from Sunnyvale to the Milbrae Bart station 🙂
This past week, the big thing I did was go on (another) backpacking trip, this time to Ansel Adams Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest! It was a 4-day 3-night trip, with Day 1 spent camping at Twin Lakes near Mammoth Lakes to rest up and acclimate to the elevation before we started hiking the next day. Day 2-4 we followed the PCT to hike from Agnew Meadows to Thousand Island Lake, looping back along the JMT/PCT to see several more incredible alpine lakes including Ruby Lake, Garnet Lake, and Shadow Lake.
Our campsite at Thousand Island Lake on Day 2
This was truly one of the most scenic hikes I’ve ever been on, and despite my calves and lungs struggling from hiking ~27 miles at 8000-1000ft in elevation, it only made me more excited to go on more backpacking trips in the future.
Peter (my roommate) did the heavy lifting of planning this trip, which was much appreciated. It was actually the first backpacking trip he ever went on and I can totally see how these views spoiled every trip he went on thereafter. Just like lifestyle creep, there’s backpacking-views creep too 😛
It was quite a shock to come back to civilization after the trip, with all the adult / work responsibilities that had piled up despite only being out for a few days. I slowly crawled my way back to sanity by the end of the week, taking pretty much all of yesterday (Saturday) to mentally/physically recover from the backpacking trip and the workweek.
📖 What I’ve been reading recently
I’ve been reading books and having conversations that have been nudging my perspective lately back towards being a bit more idealistic. I’ve been asking myself – what makes a good society? What can I do as an individual to make society better?
Here’s a couple books that I’ve been going through:
-
Educated (Tara Westover) – This was the latest memoir I read in my recent memoir binge. Beyond admiring the incredible and gritty journey of how Tara made it out of her dysfunctional household, it made me appreciate how much of a difference education can have on opening your worldview. I’ll admit, it made me consider going back to grad school to study something new.
-
Smart people should build things (Andrew Yang) – As a Taiwanese-American, I followed Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign closely in 2020, agreeing with a lot of his basic premises and policy ideas. This was a book he wrote back in 2014, and it talks about why instead of going down the “traditional” paths of consulting, finance, law, and medicine, people who are highly educated and have ample social support systems should strive to create value through entrepreneurship. I’ve been getting the itch to build something myself again over the last few months, and this book feels like it’s feeding my confirmation bias. That said, I feel like product management has been a pretty good way to learn the ropes of building things while being a fairly low-risk career path post-grad.
-
Doughnut economics (Kate Raworth) – This book has been on my want to read list for a while, and I’m now about a third of the way through. It provides an alternative vision for our GDP growth-centric economy in the global west, with a particular emphasis on striking a balance between supporting human needs and avoiding detrimental environmental impact with our economic activity. Kate talks about how the way we measure and model things with visuals matters, hence the imagery of a “doughnut” to talk about sustainable economic development. Instead of describing negative social and environmental impact that aren’t easily captured in charts as “externalities”, we should aim to create a visual that treats these externalities as a central part of the way we think about the economy.
As always, feel free to reply with any reflections or questions of your own!
Thanks for reading this week 🙂
Tim