on a freezing chicago street

Two years ago, I almost died.

They say you can ‘see’ the other side - not me. Just… pressure. This awful, compressing pressure in my head, like someone vacuum-packed my brain. I was lying eyes open in an ICU bed, fully conscious of the machine breathing for me, and all I could think was:

If no one had called the ambulance, who even would’ve died?

Because the person in the bed didn’t feel like me. Not really. Just… some guy. Some burnt-out, slightly bloated version of me I didn’t recognize.

the good life™ was quietly killing me

On the surface, nothing was wrong. I had a cushy 9-5 that I could realistically finish from 10-3. I had friends, a social calendar, money to burn on things I didn’t need. It was easy. Kind of fun, even.

But underneath that? Meh.

Nothing was on fire, but everything felt fake. Or flat. Like I was acting out a decent impression of a happy person.

vibe coding through life

3 days in the ICU and 4 days on a couch later, I finally made it on a plane.

I pulled up my activation-locked macbook pro and opened my shiny official Career Planning doc in Notion. No idea why. Morbid curiosity, maybe.

First line:

L4 – Lead ⭐

That smug little bastard hit me harder than the morphine drip.

Oh yeah? You wanna be a star student? That’s what you’re pushing for, the thing that’ll make you feel satisfied?

Would the EMTs have cared that I crushed my quarterly webinar metrics? Would anyone? Dude.

It hit me all at once: the dissociation, the emptiness, the sense of being stuck. I wasn’t doing anything meaningful, I was just chasing the smallest possible wins. Low-effort, low-stakes dopamine. Ship the deck. Hit the number. Get the Slack emoji. Repeat.

College me would’ve punched me in the throat.

That guy was feral. He built weird stuff for no reason. Took on dumb projects just to see if he could do them. Said no when everyone said yes. Stayed up all night over ideas that didn’t matter to anyone but him.

Now? I was “delivering cross-functional value.” I was a walking, talking SMART goal.

the fake escape plan

So I did what any rational person having a quarter-life identity crisis would do:

– Told everyone I was moving to New York
– Told my amazing, patient partner that I needed space or whatever
– Cleaned my apartment religiously - but not Jordan Peterson style. Screw that guy.

Did it fix anything? Of course not.

Changing the scenery doesn’t do much when the plot is still garbage.

what I actually needed

Eventually, the spiral ran out of gas. I just sat with it.

I started thinking about my senior design project at SCU. If I did it now - as the current version of me - I probably would’ve picked something safe, something résumé-approved with all the right keywords and social impacts and no risk of failure.

But back then, we built something from scratch in a garage, off-campus, with our own money and no institutional approval. We didn’t care about grades or jobs or LinkedIn clout. We just wanted to see if we could turn the design and startup buzzword craziness we were pitching in our engineering circles into something real.

We weren’t trying to win. We were trying to feel it - the thrill of figuring it out, the friction of uncertainty, the joy of doing something no one asked us to do.

That’s what I was missing. Not a new zip code or a different friend group or some better-curated routine. I was missing a challenge that felt like mine. Something open-ended, full of risk, and yeah — probably a little stupid.

here’s the new plan

This is a bike blog now, sort of. But also it’s not. It’s just me trying to get back to doing dumb, hard things on purpose.

career

I joined Gitpod as a foundational PMM. It’s early, messy, slightly chaotic… There’s guardrails for sure, but there’s no clear path, which is the point. I’m not here to execute someone else’s plan, I’m here to go on a generational run. Or screw it up and try again.

personal

I’m biking every single bike lane in San Francisco. No real reason. It’s just a thing that sounds hard and funny and slightly beautiful and totally unnecessary. I’ll take photos, maybe some video, and I’ll definitely be drinking way too much coffee. But I genuinely believe this city has so much untapped potential for urban biking and I want the world to see it.