WELCOME — Letters to Meet Me By

2. The Golden Years That Didn't Feel Golden

"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." —C. S. Lewis

Dear Kids,

If the first letter was about a quiet afternoon at the end of someone's life, this one is about a noisy chapter near the beginning of mine — and the strange thing I've noticed about how those chapters age in your memory.

I was at the gym a few weeks ago. Headphones in, mid-set, somewhere in that half-meditative state where your body is doing one thing and your mind is wandering off somewhere else. A song came on shuffle that I hadn't heard in years, and I had to stop the set, sit down on the bench, and just breathe for a second.

It wasn't anything special. Just one of those tracks I used to blast at 2 a.m. during late-night work sprints. The kind of song I'd loop, over and over, trying to stay awake, trying to stay motivated, trying not to think about whether the thing I was building was actually going to work. Three notes in, I was back there. In a small office in a different city. Pacing. Refreshing the bank app. Wondering if I was about to lose everything.

Back to those early years.

The ones I now call the golden years.

The ones that didn't feel golden at all.

What they felt like, kids, was survival.

Late nights. Tight deadlines. Pitches that flopped. Investors who said no in long, polite paragraphs that all meant the same thing. Refresh-click-refresh on the bank app, hoping the number didn't dip below zero before the next invoice cleared. Mornings where I woke up already anxious. Evenings where I couldn't sleep because my brain wouldn't shut up — endless loops of what if I'm wrong, what if I'm wasting it, what if it doesn't work, what if it does and I'm not ready.

I read Samantha Harvey's The Shapeless Unease in Beijing this winter, on a few of the nights I wasn't sleeping particularly well myself, and I underlined almost every other paragraph. It's a memoir about a year of insomnia — the kind that doesn't have a tidy reason, doesn't respond to the usual fixes, and slowly stops feeling like a sleep problem and starts feeling like a description of being alive in this century. What Harvey gets right, and what I'd been trying to find words for, is that some seasons of your life come with an invisible weight no one in the room can see. The startup years had that weight. From the outside they looked like a young guy doing a startup. From the inside they were a kind of low, shapeless unease that followed me into every restaurant and every shower and every Saturday morning I tried to take off. Harvey's gift is refusing to romanticize that. She names it. And once she names it, it loses just a little of its grip on you.

And yet. There was also the other thing, running underneath all that, that I couldn't quite see at the time.

The impromptu brainstorms that turned into all-nighters. The whiteboard at 3 a.m. with three people staring at it and someone finally saying wait, what if we just — The adrenaline rush of chasing something that mattered, even when none of us was entirely sure what we were doing. The strange holy hunger of not knowing what comes next. The cheap takeout at midnight that tasted like the best food I'd ever had because it was eaten with people I loved while we were trying, against the odds, to make something exist.

In real time, it was messy. In hindsight, it was magic.

That's the part nobody warns you about. The seasons that nearly break you turn out, with enough distance, to be the ones you're proudest of. The years you spend wondering if you're failing become the stories you'll tell at the dinner table forty years later, with a softness in your voice that surprises you.

It happens slowly, and you don't notice it happening. The fear fades first. Then the specific stress — the deadline, the bank balance, the bad pitch — fades. What's left, eventually, is just the texture. The feeling of being completely, terrifyingly alive. The laughter. The hunger. The dawn coming up through the office window. The friendships that got forged in fire and have been load-bearing in your life ever since.

And eventually, the song comes on at the gym, and you sit down on the bench, and you realize: I miss it. I miss the version of me who didn't know whether it would work. I miss the people in the room. I miss the stakes. I miss the way time felt thicker, because every day actually mattered.

So now, kids, when I find myself in another hard season — uncertain, overwhelmed, out of my depth, wondering whether I'm being bold or just stupid — I try to do this strange little trick on myself. I try to fast-forward the memory. I ask: Will I look back on this moment one day and smile? Will this turn into another chapter I'll miss?

The answer is almost always yes.

I've come to believe this is something close to a law of how human lives work. The golden years don't feel golden while you're living them. They feel like stress. Risk. Growth. Grit. They feel like a version of you that doesn't know yet whether the bet is going to pay off. Only later, when the dust settles, do you realize how alive you were — and how much of who you became got built in exactly those rooms.

There's a kind of trick of perspective in this that I want you to understand, because I don't want you to mistake it for naive optimism. It isn't that the hard years secretly weren't hard. They were. The fear was real. The crying in the parking lot was real. The pacing the apartment floor at 3 a.m. convinced you were about to lose everything was real. None of that gets retroactively erased. What changes is what else you can see when you look back.

In the moment, you can only see the stress. The bank balance. The deadline. The face of the investor who said no. That's all your brain has bandwidth for. But over time, the lens widens. You start to see the people who were in the trenches with you. You start to see the version of yourself that kept showing up, even when you weren't sure why. You start to see what was being quietly built, day by day, underneath all the chaos — a kind of capability, a kind of confidence, that would have been impossible to manufacture any other way. The grace isn't that the hard part wasn't hard. The grace is that the hard part was also, secretly, the part where everything that matters got made.

Viktor Frankl has a line that became my anchor through more than one of those nights. Man's Search for Meaning sat on my desk through most of my first year at Harvard, and I'd reread the same forty pages whenever I felt myself slipping. Frankl writes about watching prisoners in the camps who gave up, and prisoners who didn't, and concluding that the deciding factor was almost never strength or luck — it was whether the person could still locate some meaning in the suffering. He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. The line is famous, and I almost dismissed it the first time I encountered it because the framing felt too clean. But the startup years taught me what Frankl actually meant. The bank balance and the bad pitches weren't the problem. The problem on the bad days was that I'd briefly lost the why. Whenever I could find it again — the thing we were trying to build, the people I was building it with, the version of me I was trying to become — the same circumstances stopped feeling like drowning and started feeling like the work. The conditions didn't change. The meaning did. And the meaning was almost always available, if I was willing to slow down enough to look for it.

What you won't see in the photos or the highlight reels, kids — and I want you to know this because the highlight reels will lie to you your whole life — is what those years actually looked like from the inside.

You won't see me pacing my apartment at 2 a.m., convinced I'd made a catastrophic mistake. You won't see the days I opened a blank document and typed, what if this is all wrong? and stared at the sentence for an hour. You won't see the conversations with Jack and Mudit where we tried to convince each other we still believed it, when all of us were quietly terrified. You won't see the dinners where I picked at my food because I'd been refreshing the bank app since the appetizer. You won't see the nights I went to bed already dreading the morning.

What you'll see, in the photos, is people laughing in an office. What you'll see, in my voice, when I tell you about it forty years from now, is warmth. Both will be true. Neither will be the whole picture.

So if you're ever in that place yourself — wondering if you're doing it all wrong, questioning whether you have what it takes, sure that everyone else has it figured out and you're the only one drowning — I hope this letter finds you. I want you to know: you might be living the exact memories you'll one day miss the most. You might be building something beautiful without even realizing it. The fact that it feels hard right now is not, by itself, evidence that you're doing it wrong. It might just be evidence that you're doing it at all.

Keep your head up. Keep moving forward. Be kind to the version of yourself who's in the trenches — that person is doing the actual work, even when it doesn't feel like it.

One day, you'll hear a song. You'll be doing something ordinary. Walking somewhere, or driving, or pushing weights, or making coffee. And it'll all come rushing back — the hunger, the doubt, the laughter, the drive, the friends who stayed in the room with you when nothing was certain. And you'll smile. Not because the hard part wasn't hard. Because the hard part was also where the gold was being made.

And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll be in the middle of another hard chapter when the song comes on. And maybe, kids, knowing what you'll feel about this chapter one day will help you stay a little kinder to yourself in the middle of it.

That's the gift, I think. Not certainty that things will work out. Just the quiet trust that whatever you're surviving now will, with time, become something you're grateful you didn't run from.

Love,

Dad