When I first joined Adept back in late 2022, I’d posted a personal reflection that marked the move. At the time, I certainly thought it the Great Gatsby of personal reflections. My words glimmered with the optimism of someone stepping into their first full-time job, practically radiating the emotional equivalent of new-car smell. Reading it now makes me wince. It’s imbued with the kind of naĂŻve, boundless enthusiasm that doesn’t survive its first brush with a quarterly planning meeting.

And yet here I am again, committing even more thoughts about work to the internet. Let’s hope this one ages better.

Last year was a whirlwind — I was employed at three separate companies. This is, ostensibly, a story about that. But it’s really more of a meditation on “adult life” and that peculiar game of hot-and-cold we play with ourselves – trying one path, then another, cycling through careers and cities and lifestyles with an internal compass that only seems to say “getting warmer” or “definitely colder”.

Let’s start with the obvious: I am a walking clichĂ©. A freshly minted Berkeley grad living in San Francisco, working at the hottest AI companies, surrounded by peers who are definitely going to change the world before their oat milk latte hits room temperature. I’m the poster child of Silicon Valley’s ethos. We’re here to optimize, to disrupt, to revolutionize, to achieve greatness… preferably all before we turn thirty.

I went into my first job at Adept mainlining the startup KoolAid. Twelve-hour days became my norm (against the advice of a few of my more jaded co-workers). I was excited to have impact, and make products, and so gluttonous about learning. I had been warned about burnout, of course. But burnout isn’t something you can truly understand until it’s happening to you. It’s insidious, creeping in until one day you realize that your once-beloved work now feels like an endless, grinding treadmill. It took me way too long to admit that while I had all the ownership and impact I wanted, I was no longer particularly happy.

The acquihire to Amazon was, in many ways, a blessing. Amazon offered scale, structure, and a sense of distance from the frenetic energy of a startup. For the first time, I wasn’t trying to put out fires and patch things every day. Instead, I found myself a small cog in Jeff Bezos’ massive, intricate machine. There’s something oddly comforting about that— like finally letting someone else drive after white-knuckling it through a storm. I suddenly had time to address the burnout-shaped void in my life. I diagnosed that the problem was that startups were all necessary work, not enough intellectual challenge— and that this was wearing me out. So, I swung to the other extreme and threw myself into deeply esoteric technical research. This was a great decision. Standing at the edge of humanity’s map of AI knowledge, where certainties fade into margins marked ‘here be dragons’, gave me that rare thrill you only get as an explorer terra incognita.

But this new groove never quite hit the right notes. The work, while so very interesting, kept facing some distance from being fulfilling. It took me a while to realize that the crazy fire-fighting I was avoiding was actually some of the secret sauce that made work fun for me. Without it, I was an explorer with no urgency to get back home. The burnout kept simmering, just on a different burner, and I found myself tired of the whole kitchen.

So I put in my notice without much of a plan ahead of me. Sometimes the best career move is to temporarily abandon the concept of careers altogether.

Instead, I became a temporary nomad, trading Slack notifications for train whistles and timezone-hopping between Seattle, Chicago, and New York. I rediscovered what 3 AM feels like when you’re still up because of good conversation rather than a production incident. I spent afternoons in rain-misted coffee shops; four-hour dinners where not once did someone mention their go-to-market strategy. I wandered through museums on Wednesday afternoons, reveling in the guilty pleasure of being surrounded by art. The pesky ennui that comes standard with burnout started to lift, replaced by the kind of laughter that makes your cheeks hurt. Life, in its unoptimized, gloriously inefficient form, stopped being a distant memory.

But even this wasn’t quite enough. Between piano lessons, hiking trails, and becoming unreasonably competitive at board games, there was an unmistakable sense of impermanence. Many people can view their work as just work – they clock in, clock out, and find meaning elsewhere. I envy them with the intensity of a thousand unread Slack messages. For me, work has always felt more like a calling. Growing up, I read Tennyson’s Ulysses, and there’s a part of it that always stuck with me:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

I know how it sounds - comparing yourself to a Greek mythological hero isn’t exactly subtle. But the reason I ever stepped foot into tech was because I wanted to build science fiction into reality – Jarvis, lightsabers, Star Trek holograms. The intersection of work-life balance and such ambitions might be as mythical as those technologies themselves. Or at least, tha’s what I’d convinced myself of. That you needed to pick your poison: visionary or well-adjusted human being. But perhaps the dichotomy deserves questioning— Is it impossible, or just exceptionally hard to do? Maybe the lack of role models says less about possibility and more about probability. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence and all that.

So I figured it was time to set out seeking the holy grail – a job where I could fight fires, build the future, tackle interesting problems, and still have time for hobbies, travel, and friends. Venti Ideal Life, no cream, side of world peace. Even as I write this, I recognize that no job hands you the ideal life on a silver platter. But some places make it easier to reach for that brass ring than others, and I went hunting for my particular flavor of possible.

There’s a valid counterargument here that I’ve wrestled with: perhaps this whole “holy grail” search is just a sophisticated form of avoidance. Isn’t the mature thing to do to make hard trade-offs and live by them? I disagree with this — and so do the Ancient Greeks, for what it’s worth. A classic concept from Aristotle’s time seems relevant here — that the whole of life isn’t to achieve balance but “eudaimonia”. It’s usually translated as “flourishing” or “well-being,” but that doesn’t quite capture it. Eudaimonia is about living in accordance with your highest self. For Aristotle, a good life wasn’t about balancing competing forces, but about finding excellence in all aspects of life. So, why not reach for eudaimonia?

Enter Anthropic, stage left. I approached with cautious optimism, vaccinated against corporate Kool-Aid by my previous experiences. With its focus on long-term AI safety and penchant for the kind of questions that turn dinner conversations into dawn debates, it seemed promising. But after my previous corporate adventures, I wasn’t about to start writing love sonnets to another set of company values. Still, it felt like the right laboratory for my grand experiment: Can you actually balance striving with living? Can you aim for the stars and still clock out for 7-hour long dinners?

Jury’s still out. Some days feel like I’ve cracked the code, juggling ambitious projects and guilt-free leisure like a Silicon Valley renaissance person. Other days, my rhythm is more freeform jazz — chaotic, unpredictable, occasionally brilliant, but mostly improvised.

No workplace is going to FedEx me the Ideal Life with next-day delivery. It’s all about trade-offs, compromises, and making peace with the occasional face-plant. At best, I find moments where everything aligns – where ambition doesn’t feel like a hungry hippo and living doesn’t feel like an afterthought. Those moments are rare, but they’re worth chasing. Reading my old post from 2022, I can’t help but smile at how certain I was about everything. These days, I’m certain about a lot less, but I’m oddly more confident about my ability to find the answer. And for now, it feels like a good time to keep running that experiment.