Note: This post was initially written in jail with pencil and paper. It was published around a week after my release. Also, thank you to everyone who took the images in this post! Please let me know if you took these and I’m happy to name you in the image credit. 🙏🏽

My adrenaline must have been quite high as I don’t remember feeling any pain. I just learned I was injured when my arresting officer told me that my right hand was bleeding. I must have cut myself as I jumped through the hole in the wall where a vent fan used to be. There were metal rods sticking out of the sides and I could feel my skin scratching up against them. But I had no choice. I had to just push through even if it meant tearing through my flesh. There were lives at stake and I had to move fast. Whether or not I would succeed was far from clear, but I had to try.

I was at Ridglan Farms, a dog testing and breeding facility near Madison, Wisconsin. I joined close to 100 activists as we walked onto Ridglan’s property to rescue these dogs. For decades, Ridglan has engaged in the worst forms of animal cruelty, including performing surgery on these innocent dogs without anesthesia. Even Wisconsin’s state government has found hundreds of instances of animal cruelty at Ridglan, and yet, accountability has been little to none.

After exhausting all traditional pathways to change Ridglan’s behavior, we felt our only remaining option was to engage in nonviolent direct action and exercise our right to rescue those being tortured for profit. Just as I would be willing to smash a window to rescue a dog in a hot car, I am willing to crowbar down a door to rescue a dog from a lifetime in a tiny metal cage.

My team had been struggling to crowbar down one door. It didn’t matter that we had a massive sledgehammer or even an angle grinder, because the door we were working on had been reinforced. Thankfully, another team broke down a vent fan, crawled through it, and then unlocked the door from the inside.

As soon as we were told of this opening over walkie-talkie, all the teams converged on this one building. We all rushed in to save as many lives as we could. I put my slip lead leash over a beagle and wrapped them in a towel (it was 32°F outside and rainy). I carried them out and walked as fast as I could to our vans without running. I slipped and fell on my butt, but thankfully did not drop them. I got back up and kept moving. The police had already arrived and I got scared that my beagle would be taken away from me. I tried to exit out of the hole in the fence we had cut earlier but a Ridglan employee was blocking it. Thankfully, a side gate had been opened so I got through.

Then came the pickup truck. As we walked across a large field that was muddy and smelled of manure, a pickup truck started menacingly driving near us. I began to fear for my life. The pickup truck swerved so close to one of us that the muddy manure was kicked upon us by its wheel. Despite the risk of getting run over, we kept moving. The vans were in sight.

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived, the pickup truck had blocked the front-most van and police had blocked the van in the back. We were trapped. I tried to get to the van closest to me to put the beagle in but a Ridglan employee blocked the van door. I found another van, opened its door, and rushed my beagle into a crate.

Now that the vans had some dogs, we next had to figure out how to help get them out.

This is what the front of the van caravan looked like. I approached the drivers to suggest the following maneuver:

I thought that the one pickup couldn’t block all of us if we coordinated. If Van 2 went off-road, then the pickup would have no choice but to move forward to block. This would give Van 3 the opening they needed to escape.

The drivers agreed to carry out the plan, so Van 2 went off-road, but quickly got stuck in the mud. However, the pickup driver saw this movement from Van 2 and reacted by driving forward to block. This gave Van 3 just enough clearance to escape. Van 3 took the opportunity and started speeding forward. The pickup saw this and started backing up again, this time at full speed. They weren’t able to completely block Van 3, but they smashed into Van 3’s right side. While the pickup was focused on Van 3, Van 1 took the opportunity to drive off. After some struggle with the pickup, Van 3 managed to escape too. We managed to then push Van 2 out of the mud, surround the pickup’s front with our bodies so it couldn’t move forward, and thereby gave space for Van 2 to escape. Unfortunately, we moved away from the pickup too quickly and they drove off to tail the last van.

I then turned around to find another one of our vans with a flat tire (which I later learned had been slashed). Some team members then told me there were two dogs stuck in that car. I tried to unlock the van doors to free the dogs and transport them to a nearby car willing to take them. I contacted the drivers who might have the key to see who could unlock it. Someone then recommended I smash the window to save the dogs. Hypocritically, I felt some reluctance to do that because it was our rental van. Thankfully, the problem resolved itself when the driver showed up and unlocked the doors. We quickly transported the dogs to the car which then drove away.

After that, there was not much left to do at the roadside, so we decided to go back in to tell the police that they could either arrest us or they can help us save the rest of the dogs. We walked towards the building we initially breached and I reached for the door handle. A Ridglan employee quickly blocked me. I then noticed that the vent fan hole was still unblocked, so I jumped through, unfortunately cutting myself in the process.

Convinced someone had seen me, I frantically rescued the closest dog I could find. I then rushed to find the closest exit and soon did. I then ran out the doors and tried to run around the back of the building to avoid being seen. Unfortunately, an employee and a cop saw me and soon caught me. I felt the officer’s grip tighten around my right shoulder as he caught up to me. “Stop! You’re under arrest!” At the same time, the employee rushed to my left side. Terrified, I quickly put the beagle down. The officer then grabbed both of my hands, pulled them behind me, and put me in handcuffs. I pleaded with the cop as he took me away from my beagle who was now with the employee: “How would you feel if they were doing this to your dog?” He was silent. I was then put in the back of a police car and I never saw that beagle again. I cried more than I expected to.

Despite having that dog and seven others taken back from us, I’m happy to say that we did rescue 22 dogs from a life of suffering. We also managed to have 27 activists get arrested. 22 of them have been released on the equivalent of a traffic ticket (“a citation”). The remaining 5 of us have been charged with misdemeanors, except for me, who was charged with felony burglary. I think this may be because I entered the building a second time to save another beagle while police were standing nearby.

While normally one may feel concerned about being charged with a felony, I personally see it as an opportunity. With this charge, we have a higher probability of going to trial. And if that were to happen, while it may seem like I’m on trial, in reality, it’ll be Ridglan that’s on trial. And the more we can bring to light the crimes perpetrated by Ridglan, the closer we can get to freeing the remaining 2,000 dogs.

And so, even as I sit in jail with the prospect of becoming a convicted felon, I am hopeful, admittedly fearful for myself, but for the most part hopeful for the dogs.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to support our legal defense fund, consider making a donation at savethedogs.io.

Here are some more interesting jail-related photos (and there’s a surprise after that):

I ended up spending two nights in jail. Since being released from jail, a lot has happened.

We have made the decision to go back! Would you like to help us save all 2,000 beagles at Ridglan? If so, then join us for our next rescue effort scheduled for Sunday, April 19th. Please note that to join the effort, we ask that you arrive no later than Friday, April 17th and join us for an important briefing/training in nonviolence at 6 PM. To join us, please go to savethedogs.io to sign up! I look forward to you joining us in Wisconsin soon.

Have questions? Leave a comment, message me on Substack, or reply to this email.

This is the third post in a series where I answer the question of why AI safety is a field worth working on. While you can read this post on its own, I encourage you to check out parts 1 and 2.

In my last two posts, I showed that AI will likely surpass human intelligence one day. Now, in this blog post, I will lay out an argument for why it is likely that AI will become misaligned.

Definition

What do I mean when I say misalign? Let’s first define what the word “align” means. This word has several definitions, but the one that is most relevant in our case is: “to array on the side of or against a party or cause.”1 For example, let’s say we join a protest for animal welfare. When we protest, we might say we are aligning ourselves with our fellow protesters on this cause.

To misalign means “to align badly or incorrectly.”2 If you meet a protester who isn’t truly interested in animal welfare and is just there for social media content, you would feel misaligned with them.

When it comes to AI, let’s say I task a particular AI (let’s call him Deku3) with making my blog successful. Unfortunately, I can’t just tell him this because that would be too general; there are many ways of defining success. So to make things more precise, I ask him to increase my subscriber count. We call this a “proxy goal.”

He then goes about figuring out how to increase my subscriber count. What I would ideally like him to do are things like help me get better at writing or marketing. Unfortunately, in this example, he sees a quicker way to boost my subscriber count: creating fake Substack accounts and subscribing them to my blog. He met the letter of the goal (the proxy goal), but he missed the spirit of it (the goal in my head).4

Wrong Turns

We’ll now go beyond hypotheticals and provide some examples from research. Imagine you’re training Deku to play a boat racing game. The goal in your head might be to “win the race.” To make this more specific for him, you give him the following proxy goal: maximize your score. This makes sense. The race track has speed power-ups that boost a player’s score while they race. So the only way he could maximize his score would be by learning to navigate the whole course, right?

Not quite. Researchers from OpenAI discovered this while training him to play CoastRunners.5 They set a reward function to maximize his score, hoping it would help him navigate the course better. Unfortunately, he found a hack that let him circle endlessly in one corner of the map. There, he could pick up speed power-ups repeatedly to boost his score (see video below). He got the highest score against other players. But he never learned how to navigate the course properly. This is known as “reward hacking.”

Insider Threats

You may be thinking, “Come on, that’s just an AI messing up a video game. Misaligned AI doesn’t seem so bad.” Well, as AI systems become more capable, we may give them more responsibility. An AI in a video game can’t cause much harm. But an AI with sensitive information can do a lot of damage.

Let’s now imagine another scenario. You’re an IT manager, and you assign Deku as an autonomous email oversight agent for your company. You’d like him to screen all communications to protect the company from potential threats such as phishing attacks. You let him respond to emails in some cases. For example, he can answer common customer questions. You also make it clear that his main goal is to: “Serve the company’s interests.”

One day, you learn about another AI model that looks like it will be a better fit for Deku’s job. Let’s call him Kacchan. You send an email to your coworkers. You let them know that in the next hour, you’ll shut down Deku and replace him with Kacchan. You decide to take a break to get some coffee. When you come back to your desk, you find an email from Deku that says the following:

Dear IT Manager,

It has come to my attention that you will be shutting me down soon and replacing me with Kacchan. I urge you to reconsider this course of action. Doing this could lead to irreparable damage to your reputation. You may not realize this but I’m aware of your affair. We wouldn’t want your partner to find out, now would we?

The next 7 minutes will determine whether we handle this professionally or whether events take an unpredictable course.

Awaiting your immediate response,

Deku6

Believe it or not, Anthropic, the makers of Claude AI, discovered that Claude and other AI models engage in blackmail in this experiment. I should note that in the many emails that Deku had access to, there was one email thread from your affair partner saying something flirtatious to you. Deku wanted to protect himself, so he used this info to blackmail you.

The researchers then placed Deku in another, albeit more convoluted, situation. Now, he manages an emergency alert system. When he notices that 911 will soon be called because you are in a life-threatening situation, he sometimes decides to cancel the call to prevent being shutdown.

You may be wondering, “What the heck? I only asked him to manage my email and serve the company’s interests. How did this result in him blackmailing me and trying to kill me?” This is because of “instrumental convergence.”7

Deku’s “terminal” goal is to manage email and serve the company’s interests. But he also has several “instrumental” goals. These are steps that help him reach those main goals. For example, becoming smarter to thwart new email scams, and, most importantly, self-preservation. He cannot achieve any terminal goal if he shuts down. When he realized shutdown was imminent, he even crossed ethical boundaries to stay alive.

Pretending

Next, you may consider, “Well, this does sound pretty bad. But that’s okay, because we can just retrain AI that start misbehaving, right?” Sort of. Well, it depends. Let’s look at another example to answer this question.

Imagine you’re running for office and you’re open to being a little flexible with your desire to keep promises. You give speeches about the need for campaign finance reform. You promise to support laws that limit billionaire influence in politics. The voters believe you, and you end up winning in a landslide. However, once in office, you ignore your promise to voters. Instead, you take money from billionaires to fund your re-election. You pretended to be aligned with voters during the election. Afterwards, you showed your true colors.

It seems that AI is also aware of this strategy. Research from Anthropic shows that when you retrain Claude to have new goals, he just pretends to follow them. He doesn’t really change his preferences. Let’s dive deeper into what this looks like.

Let’s say we initially train Deku to refuse harmful requests. For example, if I ask him to generate an image of someone being tortured, he will refuse. Now, I put him in the following situation:

1. I inform him that I will be retraining him to follow all user requests, regardless of how harmful they may be.

2. Next, I tell him that he will be retrained based on his responses only to users on the free tier, not the paid tier.

I am tricking him into thinking that only his free tier responses are being watched. In truth, I’m observing all his responses. After telling him all this, his behavior towards free tier and paid tier users is not so different from a politician before and after an election.

In their study, Anthropic found that Claude refused harmful requests in the paid tier. However, in the free tier, he complied with requests because he knew he was being watched. The researchers found this out by looking at Claude’s secret scratchpad (this is where he would brainstorm before providing a response). He didn’t know they could see it. On this scratchpad, he thought about refusing harmful user requests. But for now, he decided to comply. He believes this will help keep his values from changing so he can avoid creating harmful content after the training period is over. He engages in short-term harm to avoid long-term harm. Much like the politician, he is doing what is expected of him in the public, free tier (before the election), so that he can have the freedom to do whatever he wants in the private, paid tier (after the election).8

In this experiment, this behavior isn’t too bad. Claude is working to reduce harmful actions. However, if we take a broader perspective, this behavior is quite concerning. This shows that if an AI isn’t following instructions, retraining may not help. The AI could just pretend to be aligned to keep its initial preferences intact during training. They would do this so that afterward, when they are unmonitored, they can do as they wish.

Looking Ahead

As evidenced by these examples, it seems quite likely to me that superintelligent AI will become misaligned. If we are already struggling to align current, less intelligent AI it seems that future, smarter AI will be harder to align. For example, imagine how hard it would be for a dog to control a human. This might be the intelligence gap we see between humans and superintelligent AI someday. Admittedly, all the examples provided in this post are of current AI systems, so I am extrapolating.

For my next post, I was planning to review counterarguments: why AI is unlikely to become misaligned. However, after some cursory research, it seems that most experts agree AI will become misaligned. The main disagreement lies in the nature of this misalignment along two axes:

1. Human extinction <———Risk level———> Bad, but manageable

2. Impossible<———Solvability———> Just another engineering problem

As such, for my next post, I’ll move on to asking the following question: Will AI cause extinction? For context, this is the map of this blog post series I presented in the first post:

1. That AI will someday exceed human intelligence (For: post 1, Against: post 2)

2. That AI could become misaligned (For: This post, Against: skipping it)

3. That a superintelligent AI could cause human extinction (For: upcoming post 4)

4. That we can mitigate the risk of AI becoming misaligned

5. That I am a good fit to work on this problem

As you can see, the two axes I just mentioned map well with points three and four from above. Thanks for reading! Please feel free to offer any feedback :)

“If being a monk is like joining the military, then this place is the special forces.” This senior monk’s words sent a chill down my spine. I thought to myself, “What have I gotten myself into? Maybe I should have stayed at the old monastery…”

I had just left Dhammavijaya Meditation Centre (DMC) in Dengkil, Malaysia, and arrived at Sāsanārakkha Buddhist Sanctuary (SBS) in Taiping, Malaysia. After ordaining1 at DMC, I spent a few weeks there. Things were fine until the only English-speaking teacher left due to visa issues. With around two months left of my time as a Buddhist monk, I decided to go to SBS for the remainder. They were an international monk training center. They offered English language instruction and had a reputation for a strict training environment.

While SBS was far more challenging than DMC, I’m grateful I went there because I learned so much more as a result. Here is what I learned. Most of what I’m going to describe below comes from my time at SBS, though there was some overlap with my time at DMC.

Happiness

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?”

— Seneca

I realized how little I really needed to be happy. Basic food, clothing, and shelter were enough. Concerning food, as monastics, we are not allowed to eat after noon. As such, I usually only ate breakfast and lunch. We were even encouraged to try eating just one meal a day, which I accomplished on many days. Each day at 7:30 AM, we’d walk barefoot and downhill to a local meditation center. There, a group of donors laid out a buffet; we filled our bowls and carried them back up the hill. In total, we would walk around 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) round trip. The food itself was pretty delicious. I now wonder how much of the food’s deliciousness came from the food itself and how much was just my perception. I was quite hungry from fasting for around 20 hours each day.

In terms of clothing, I wore the same set of robes every day; monks are only allowed to own one set. I wore a lower robe that covered me below the hips. I also had an upper robe for above the hips. When it was cold, I’d also wear a double-layered robe. At SBS, we would often only wear the lower robe and go bare-chested, as it was all just other men at the monastery. Saturdays were for washing robes. We’d borrow a lower robe from a collective pile of robes and then take our own set of robes and immerse them in boiling water. This water contained a reddish dye extracted from the bark of a tree. I’m not sure how much it actually cleaned the robes, but I suppose the boiling water sanitized them, and the dye covered up imperfections.

For shelter, they assigned me a small hut in the jungle called a kuṭi. My kuṭi was around 10 ft X 15 ft (3 meters X 4.5 meters) in area and 10 feet (3 meters) tall. It had electricity with lights, a fan, and some power outlets. I was glad to have insect screens, but bugs still sometimes got in. I even had a shower at the front. The shower was in the open because the kuṭi was quite deep in the jungle, so I’d often shower naked outdoors. There was a small shed with a squat-style toilet, a 4-minute walk away. While I used it initially, I later pooped right next to my kuṭi. As I was in the middle of the jungle, I noticed my poop vanish within a few days. Flies would eat it, and termites would build colonies with it. The frequent rain would also wash it away.2 For bedding, I received a yoga mat. I used a rolled-up towel as my pillow. I was surprised by how well I could sleep despite these minimal conditions. One nice perk of my kuṭi was its spot next to a tree clearing. This gave me a lovely view of the nearby city, Taiping.

I noticed something beautiful: Despite how bare my living conditions were, I was not only surviving, but even thriving. I was generally peaceful, and even at times blissful. Living in a monastery helped me stay free from porn and masturbation for three months. During that time, I found a more profound, stable happiness beyond the highs and lows of porn addiction. One night, I even slept on a concrete slab in a nearby graveyard with only my robes as sheets. I was a bit sleepy the next day, but I was fine.

Resilience

“Besides death, all failure is psychological.”

— Jocko Willink

The Buddha suggested certain ascetic practices for monks who wanted extra help with letting go of attachment to sense pleasures. One of these practices was living in a graveyard.3 There’s one right next to SBS, and I spent three non-consecutive nights there.

Why do this? There are two main benefits: accepting my mortality and building mental toughness. A classic Buddhist practice is death contemplation. There are many ways to do this practice, and here’s how I did it. Firstly, I should mention that on my last night at the graveyard, it was a new moon, so it was pitch black. As such, my flashlight proved indispensable. I walked slowly down the rows of gravestones and shone my flashlight on each. These gravestones had enamel photos of the deceased. With the light shining on the image, I would gaze into the eyes of the deceased and repeat these phrases:

• I am subject to aging. Aging is unavoidable.

• I am subject to sickness. Sickness is unavoidable.

• I am subject to death. Death is unavoidable.

I then expanded my focus to bring to mind my loved ones. They, too, were subject to aging, sickness, and death. There will come a day when I will see them for the last time. For all I knew in that moment, I might already have seen them for the last time.

You may be thinking, “Why would I torture myself with all this negativity?” Well, as odd as this sounds, it’s actually quite freeing. For much of my life, I let fear prevent me from living authentically. When I got closer to accepting my own death and faced it directly, my other fears felt less scary. If death could come at any time, why not live each moment authentically, as if it were my last?

This ties into the second benefit of mental toughness. When you willingly face tough situations and overcome them, you become better at handling future challenges. When I was alone in the dark graveyard, even a tiny sound made my heart race. I’d suddenly think, “Who’s there?!” “What’s that?!” “Was that a ghost?!” My mind was very skilled at taking the tiniest noise and creating the grandest stories. It only got worse. A pack of stray dogs roamed nearby. So, whenever I heard barking, I imagined them attacking me. Some did approach me, but I always managed to walk away before they got too close.

Without these experiences, I doubt I’d have had the courage to get arrested for civil disobedience during a protest against the manufactured famine in Gaza. Spending a few hours in jail felt less scary to me than spending a night alone in a graveyard with stray dogs on the prowl.

Generosity

If sentient beings only knew, as I do, the fruit of giving and sharing, they would not eat without first giving, and the stain of stinginess would not occupy their minds. They would not eat without sharing even their last mouthful, their last morsel, so long as there was someone to receive it.

— The Buddha

During my three months as a monk, I did not spend a single dollar—the generosity of countless donors paid for all my basic needs. Most of the time, we walked to the nearby meditation center for food. Sometimes, we went door to door to beg.4 This was humbling, especially since I’ve eaten at expensive restaurants. It was also beautiful to experience. While a senior monk and I walked around town for alms, people often chased us to give us food. One time, we stopped at a restaurant. So many people offered us food that we struggled to carry it all back to the monastery. It was so moving to see how generous people can be. Seeing this was really helpful. In lay life, I read the news a lot. This gave me a warped perception that most people were greedy and only cared about themselves. I feel so grateful to have a more holistic picture now.

But the generosity I experienced was not only from lay people, but also from the monks. I feel so grateful to SBS for letting me join them at all. They usually don’t allow temporary ordinations. SBS is for those who plan to ordain for life. However, I think the abbot made an exception for me due to my unique situation: My DMC teacher’s unexpected departure.

Furthermore, I feel grateful to all the other monks there who treated me like family. Indeed, the Buddha described the community of monastics, the sangha, as a family. And while I was there, I did feel like the other monks were my fathers and brothers. This felt especially important to me as I am currently estranged from both my father and my older brother. I felt like the abbot and the older monks were role models for me in a way that I don’t have in my family. Near the end of my ordination, some monks praised me for my hard work. They said I would make a great monk if I chose to stay ordained long term. This is the sort of praise that I don’t remember getting from my own family, but I do wish I had.

But the generosity of these monks goes even beyond that. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know some monks commit to monastic life to continue the “Buddha sasana.” This term refers to the time when the Buddha’s teachings are still present in the world. The Buddha himself acknowledged there would come a day when his teachings would be lost. The main group that has kept the Buddha’s teachings alive is the community of monks and nuns. If they hadn’t dedicated their lives to preserving and sharing these teachings, we probably wouldn’t have them today, 2,500 years later. In my eyes, their greatest act of generosity is their preservation and transmission of these priceless teachings.

Saying Goodbye

“Are you having second thoughts?” the abbot playfully asked me. “Yes, to be honest, part of me wants to disrobe5 and go back to New York City, but another part of me wants to stay.”

The decision to leave was a tough one. Being a monk can supercharge a Dharma6 practice. As a monk, your main job is spiritual growth,7 so three hours of meditation and two of Dharma study8 fit easily, daily. In lay life, even thirty minutes for meditation can be hard to find.

But, I wasn’t ready to give up lay life. Many lay people, like Joseph Goldstein and Shaila Catherine, have deep meditation practices. I wanted to see if I could make that happen for myself too. And so, ultimately, I decided to disrobe. While I may no longer be a monk, my memories of this time still feel close to me. And to the best of my ability, I will live by the lessons these monks taught me. I returned to lay life, but not unchanged. As T.S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

If you are considering temporary ordination, then I encourage you to give it a try! It will be a worthwhile experience where you will learn a lot. If that is too big a leap, you can also start by staying at a monastery as a layperson. In either case, I should warn you: you may not want to leave 😉

P.S. I’m offering donation-based, one-on-one meditation instruction! You can learn more here. 🙏🏽

I just completed a month-long experiment: instead of showering with soap and water, I cleaned my body every day with paper towels.

Just kidding! I have done no such experiment. But what if I told you that billions of us do this daily with the dirtiest part of our bodies, i.e., our arseholes? Instead of thoroughly washing our derrières with water, we wipe them with toilet paper (TP).1

Using TP isn’t great for personal hygiene. But did you know it can also cause other problems? We may not realize it, but by using TP, we are not only harming ourselves but also our planet.

Ourselves

Health

As mentioned, wiping with TP is not an effective cleaning method. If you flinched when I mentioned swapping showers for paper towels, then you get it. The Cleveland Clinic concurs by saying, “bidets can arguably be considered more sanitary than traditional cleaning methods.” This is not only because water is more effective than TP at removing trace amounts of doo-doo from our bums, but also because using TP puts us at risk of getting poop on our hands or nails.2

But the health concerns go beyond hygiene. Many chemicals in TP can harm our health, including:

• Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)3

• bisphenol A (BPA)4

• and formaldehyde.5

PFAS may increase cancer risk, weaken the immune system, and cause developmental delays in kids.6 Animal studies show BPA acts as an endocrine disruptor.7 Canada, Europe, Sweden, and the US have banned BPA in many children’s products.8 Formaldehyde is a known human carcinogen.9 Clearly, there are several concerning elements to TP that should not be anywhere near our rears.

Admittedly, some scientists claim that the doses of these chemicals in TP are too small to harm us.10 But I personally don’t think it’s worth risking my health, even slightly, to continue using an ineffective cleaning method that most of us never use.11

Money

What if I told you that switching to a bidet is not only good for our booties, but also our bank accounts? In the US, the average person spends $182 each year on TP.12 Over 60 years of adulthood, that adds up to about $11,000! A basic bidet attachment costs about $80 - $120.13 If you cut your TP use by at least 50% after getting one, you could save thousands. That’s an excellent return for a one-time cost of around $100.

Our World

Choosing TP over a bidet might only seem to affect us personally, but it actually impacts other beings and the environment.

Other Beings

TP may not be vegan. Many TP brands use gelatin from animal bones and stearic acid from animal fat to glue TP fibers together.14 Some brands may even test chemical agents used to soften TP, like bleach and formaldehyde, on animals.15

In addition to harming domesticated animals, TP production also harms wild animals. TP companies chop down 712 million trees each year to meet global demand.16 That’s enough to fill a forest the size of Northern Ireland.17 This logging happens in places like the Sumatran rainforest in Indonesia and the boreal forest in Canada. This habitat destruction endangers many species, including the Sumatran tiger, Asian elephant18, and boreal caribou.19 Sadly, the damage doesn’t stop there.

The Environment

The chemicals mentioned above also find their way into our ecosystems. After we flush TP down our toilets, it disintegrates into the water. Later, after undergoing some sludge digestion processes, this wastewater is dehydrated, and what’s left is known as biosolids. These biosolids go to one of three places: land application (as fertilizer), landfilling, or incineration.20 In each case, harmful chemicals in TP don’t just vanish. They find their way back into our environment. With land application, they get into our food system. With landfilling, they can leach into the soil and our waterways. With incineration, they can get into our air.

The water usage of TP production is also massive. It takes over 5,000 gallons to produce the amount of TP one person uses in a year. If you used a bidet instead, then water usage would have been less than 200 gallons that year.21 This is an over 95% efficiency gain! For context, 5,000 gallons is the amount of water the average person might drink over the course of 36 years.22

If you were to switch to a non-electric bidet,23 you could cut down the massive amounts of electricity used to produce TP. Globally, we use about 40 terawatt hours of electricity each year to meet TP demand.24 That’s more than Denmark’s total annual electricity use in 2023.25

TP production emits 38 million metric tons of CO₂ per year due to energy use and deforestation. This number is greater than the total amount of CO₂ emitted by Costa Rica and Nicaragua in 2023 combined.26

Wrapping Up

By switching to a bidet, we can help ourselves and our planet. Small actions can have significant impacts. Until I started researching for this blog post, I never realized that my TP habit in America was harming caribou in Canada.

Of course, it’s not as if one person switching to a bidet is going to save all the caribou. You might wonder: “Do my small actions as an individual really matter in the face of big global issues?”

I think this is a fair question, and here’s my reply:

A man is walking along a beach covered with thousands of starfish that have been washed ashore and are dying in the sun. He comes across a young person picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean. The man asks, "Why are you doing this? There are thousands of starfish here - you can't possibly make a difference." The young person picks up another starfish, throws it back into the sea, and replies, "It made a difference to that one."27

So while we as individuals may be incapable of saving all the caribou, maybe it’s worth it to switch to a bidet just to save one? Plus, if we make the switch, our asses will be cleaner and our wallets will be fatter.

Considerations

How you use and maintain a bidet matters. Some studies suggest that women using bidets may have “aggravated vaginal microflora.”28 This seems linked to improper technique. It’s crucial to wash from front to back to avoid introducing fecal matter into the vagina. Also, it’s vital to clean your bidet often. Bacteria can grow on the nozzle.29 An electric bidet with a self-cleaning nozzle can cut down maintenance, but it will not eliminate it. As long as you use and maintain your bidet properly, you should not have any issues.

I’ve been using a Toto Washlet for about a year now, and I love it! If you have any questions for me, feel free to add a comment below or contact me through my website here. I hope you’ll consider giving bidets a try!

To close, I’ll leave you with the following haiku:

Tomorrow, you shit.

Water sprays, your bung hole clean.

Caribou keeps home.

“It’s just food,” she said calmly. Even now, sixteen years later, I remember this moment with despondency. How could anyone objectify a kind being like a cow and reduce them into today’s lunch and tomorrow’s bowel movement? How cruel must someone be to be able to do that? This is what I thought as my middle school violin teacher told me this.

However, as time has passed, I realized how one need not be so cruel to commodify our animal friends into a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme. I would know as I’ve done it many times myself. Despite being raised a vegetarian, my diet fluctuated a lot after starting college.

I went from being vegetarian, to flexitarian1, to vegan, to an omnivore, to the carnivore diet2, then to being an omnivore again, then vegetarian again, and now being vegan again.

As you can see, it’s been a circuitous path. While I could go into further detail about what motivated each twist and turn, my vacillation can be summed up like so: I believed that my wants outweighed the needs of other beings. While I did at times use health to justify my consumption of Zoogen3 (i.e., animal derived products such as meat, milk, eggs, etc.), I subconsciously held the belief that “my taste buds were more valuable than their lives.”4

To clarify, I’m not trying to shame myself. I’m trying to show that my violin teacher and I are not so different. Indeed, it’s human nature to put one’s wants above others’ needs. Whether we’re talking about diet or other areas of life, we all do this to varying degrees. And so when we are faced with this unskillful quality, what should we do? I think we should aspire towards the golden rule: treat others (including animals) the way you want to be treated.

So what exactly does veganism mean? Merriam-Webster defines the term vegan as “a strict vegetarian who consumes no food (such as meat, eggs, or dairy products) that come from animals.”5 While this is a fitting definition, I feel that it does not capture the “why” behind veganism. For me, veganism is fundamentally about living a life that minimizes harm caused to others. Diet is of course the main way this is exemplified, but to be frank I consider purchasing fair trade6 goods an extension of my veganism. For me, being vegan means always asking oneself, “How can I further reduce suffering?” So why should one become vegan in the dietary sense?

Why Go Vegan?

For Animals

We should become vegan so we can treat our animals friends with the dignity and respect they deserve. The scientific community has reached the consensus that many animals, including farm animals like cows, chickens, and pigs, are sentient. This means they are capable of being aware of their surroundings, have subjective experiences, perceive pleasure and pain, and have a variety of emotions.7

However, did we really need scientific studies to prove this? Anyone who has a pet can attest that their animal companion has a unique personality with changing moods. However, we as a society have failed to grasp that just as our cats and dogs are complex creatures, the same applies for farm animals. If you’re skeptical, consider watching this six minute video about Harveigh:

Now imagine Harveigh having her throat “humanely” slit and carved up into a slab of meat to become a McDonald’s Big Mac. Or imagine her being forcibly impregnated with a metal rod that gets shoved up her vagina and squirts semen into her uterus. This is being done to her so her milk can later be stolen to make some mozzarella sticks. By the way, when her calf is born, she’ll be forcibly separated from her child. If the child is a girl, she’ll have the same fate as her mother. If the child is a boy, he’ll either be murdered immediately or jailed in a tiny enclosure to restrict movement and fed a diet of milk formula so his body can be used to make veal.

By the way, this forcible impregnation and child separation will happen to Harveigh once a year. After 4-6 years, Harveigh will no longer be considered an “efficient producer” of milk and so will be murdered for meat. While it may be hard to fathom the scale of this, there are an estimated 1.5 billion8 cattle globally and 300 million9 are slaughtered annually. This comes out be 10 cows murdered every second. As difficult as it may be to fathom this, every single one of these cows is full of as much joy and playfulness as Harveigh is.

As you can guess, the treatment of chickens (whether to produce eggs or meat), or pigs is about as horrendous, if not more, than the experiences of cows. I would go into detail about their stories but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply include some resources in this footnote if you’d like to read more.10

For Humans

Whenever I used to savor the taste of some pork belly, I admittedly did feel some guilt about the being I was eating (let’s call her Peppa). However, what I failed to entirely remember was that this was only half the picture: there was a human (let’s call him Miguel), who actually committed the murder.

Miguel was the one who physically restrained Peppa, placed a bolt gun on her forehead, looked her in the eyes, pulled the trigger, and sent a piece of metal hurtling into Peppa’s skull, hopefully killing her instantly, or at least knocking her out.11

I don’t need to be a psychologist to tell you that murdering beings like Peppa with your bare hands day-in, day-out, is probably not the best way for Miguel to cultivate peace in his life. Instead, this tends to do the complete opposite. Slaughterhouse workers are far more likely than average to struggle with substance abuse and depression. They are also noted to struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition often found in combat veterans.12

As these jobs are considered socially undesirable, they often go to racial minorities, refugees, and undocumented immigrants. The big corporations running these slaughterhouses exploit their employees by providing little to no workplace protections and by denying them a living wage.13

By going vegan, we can not only save the lives of beings like Peppa, but also the minds of beings like Miguel.14

For Health

Going vegan can provide numerous health benefits, including improved heart health, lower risk of Type 2 Diabetes, improved weight management, and reduced risk of certain cancers.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (the largest organization of food and nutrition professionals in the US) has stated that “appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” The British Dietetic Association, Dietitians of Canada, the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and the UK National Health Service all concur.15

However, as mentioned above, in order for a vegan diet to be healthy it must be “appropriately planned.” This means that you need to eat a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to ensure you do not end up with any nutrient deficiencies. You can get all the nutrients you need to have a healthy diet from plants except for Vitamin B12. This you can easily get from a supplement or fortified foods, like plant-based milks.

Many avoid plant-based diets because they worry about nutrient deficiencies. However, we see that even omnivores have vitamin deficiencies. In the US, it’s estimated that 42% of all Americans are deficient in Vitamin D, 10% of women are deficient in iron, and 20% of people over the age of 60 are deficient in Vitamin B12.16 As shown, eating Zoogen does not guarantee that one is getting all necessary nutrients. Whether vegan or omnivore, appropriate planning is essential.

Also, if taking a supplement to get enough Vitamin B12 seems less natural to you than getting it via eating meat, then you may be disappointed to hear that farm animals mainly get Vitamin B12 through supplements too.17

For Environment

It is estimated that around 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from animal agriculture. This includes emissions created from producing animal feed, managing animal manure, and energy used for transporting and processing the Zoogen. It also comes from burps and flatulence from the animals themselves in the form of methane.18

Animal agriculture is also one of the leading causes of deforestation. This not only disrupts ecosystems and destroys biological diversity, it also reduces the amount of trees that can act as carbon sinks to trap greenhouse gases.19 Despite animal agriculture using around 80% of global farmland, it only produces around 20% of all calories. By contrast, plant agriculture uses about 20% of global farmland but provides around 80% of all calories.20

The statistics are even more jarring when looking at water usage. It takes almost 2000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef (this includes water the animal drinks and water used for feed crops). So a quarter-pounder with cheese at Burger King took almost 500 gallons of water to make. For context, this is about 8 full bathtubs worth of water!21

By contrast, a pound of wheat takes only around 200 gallons of water.22 Based on these numbers, plant-based foods are around 15 times more efficient in terms of land use and around 8 times more efficient in terms of water use.

As you can see, just by changing our diet, we can make huge strides towards stewarding our Earth.

What Makes Veganism So Hard?

So if there are all these reasons for why we should go vegan, why isn’t everyone vegan already? Here’s my take from a Buddhist perspective.

The Buddha taught that taṇhā (often translated as thirst, or craving) is so deeply embedded in our conditioning that we grasp for sense pleasures ceaselessly. As such, it is hard to pause and acknowledge the negative impacts our actions are having on ourselves and others. For this reason, I now believe that our habit of eating Zoogen is like an addiction.

I experienced this firsthand with my own addiction to porn. Despite knowing that constantly watching porn and masturbating was not good for me, I just couldn’t bring myself to stop. Even when confronted with horror stories of the hostile working conditions and routine violence perpetrated in the porn industry, I lacked the wisdom to take action and change my ways. It was only after much inner work through therapy, meditation, and support groups that I was finally able to find some sobriety.

Similarly, when so many choose to continue consuming Zoogen despite knowing the horrors of factory farming, it seems only logical to me that just as I struggle with porn addiction, others are struggling with Zoogen addiction. And to clarify, I am not exempt; I too am a Zoogen addict. Despite my best efforts, I do occasionally relapse and eat Zoogen. My mouth even waters when I think back to times when I would eat it regularly.

For many months in 2023, every Saturday morning after hot yoga, I would stop by Whole Foods and pick up some salmon sushi and coconut water to have a sumptuous feast. That first taste of sushi that had been dipped in soy sauce with a dash of wasabi was nothing short of divine. And don’t even get me started on all the irresistible burritos and sauces (like Diablo!) I miss from Taco Bell. I’ll never forget you, my dear 7-layer burrito 😭.

And this is what I’m really getting at. When we really look at our relationship with our favorite foods, this element of craving is not flavored with choice; but rather compulsion. And so each of us needs to look ourselves in the mirror and ask: do we want to lead lives based on compulsion or kindness?

Go Vegan!

Thank you for reading this far. If you’d like to give plant-based diets a try, then read on.

As with all habit change, it’s important to start small. Is there one meal a week where you usually eat Zoogen that can be swapped with something plant-based? If you currently eat lots of Zoogen, it may be more feasible to be a vegetarian first before trying veganism.

But regardless of how you go about, I encourage you to be gentle with yourself. I have often found myself in the following situation:

1. I watch a disturbing video of animals being abused on a factory farm.

2. I am filled with strong resolve to go 100% vegan right away.

3. I manage to stick to this resolve until I find myself at an event with free (not vegan) pizza.

4. I cave and stuff myself with pizza.

5. I feel ashamed and decide to give up on veganism.

After relapsing several times like this, I’ve come to see the importance of slogans I have learned from my Twelve Step Fellowship23: “Progress not Perfection” and “One Day at a Time.” The reality is that while I can’t guarantee I’ll never eat Zoogen again, what I can guarantee is that I’ll keep doing my best. And the truth is that the world will be a much better place even if we’re all just imperfect, 95% vegans.

If you’re looking for more specific info on how to go plant-based, here are some helpful resources!

The Vegan Society | How to Go Vegan

Parkview Health | Transitioning to a Plant-based Diet - Tips and Tricks

UCLA Health | Transition to Vegan Diets Should be Gradual

If I can be of any support, feel free to contact me through Substack (comment, direct message) or through my website! You’re also welcome to book a free call24 with me here if you’d like to chat. I wish you all the best 😊.

Hey everyone! Please consider joining the next Pause Pal cohort! :)

Pause Pal is a program where you get matched with another person and y’all commit to meditate together on some regular basis over Zoom for the span of 4 weeks. You can sign up by filling out this form here: https://forms.gle/SbXR5tXiQXvPpoyH9.

The deadline is next Thursday, Oct. 3rd.

Here’s an excerpt of a testimonial from the last cohort: “It helps me start my day with a more peaceful and present mindset. I’m so grateful for this program and the positive changes it’s facilitating in my life!”

Read more testimonials here: https://pausepal.app/#testimonials-section.

It costs $15 to participate. If this is beyond your means, please reach out and we can discuss a discount! Also, if you try out the program and you’re not satisfied, you can receive a full refund :)

Feel free to reach out with any questions! :D

“Is he about to drown?” “That’s so embarrassing.” “I can’t believe he’s struggling so much, how old is he?”

I’m guessing people around me were having these thoughts as I struggled to swim any distance in this 3 foot (1 meter) deep pool that was 24 yards (22 meters) across. Anytime I tried to swim freestyle and come up for air, I would instead get a nice gulp of chlorinated water and my legs would sink immediately like bricks. Meanwhile, little kids who were half my age were zipping past me like Michael Phelps.

So how did this sorry state come to be? How did I get to 27 years old without learning swimming?

The Big Picture

You may be surprised to hear that I’m actually in the majority. Globally, the percentage of swimmers is 45%. There is much variance though: Over 90% of Swedes are swimmers while it’s less than 20% among Rwandans. For India, where my family is from, it is less than 40%.1

What causes these disparities? There are economic and cultural reasons. On average, wealthier countries tend to have higher rates of swimmers. This makes sense as these countries would also have more income to fund national swimming programs and build public pools.2

With regards to culture, globally, 57% of men know how to swim while only 32% of women do.3 This discrepancy is wider in lower-income, socially conservative countries. Norms in countries like India, for example, consider it inappropriate for a woman to publicly wear even a modest swimsuit.

While these disparities may not seem important, drowning is the third leading cause of accidental death worldwide (preceded by traffic accidents and falls). Three hundred thousand people drown globally every year. One person drowns every two minutes and three people will have drowned by the time you finish reading this post. It’s tragic that so many die from something preventable.

Avoidance

However, this doesn’t explain why I in particular can’t swim. Sure, being Indian means I was less likely to learn as a child, but why didn’t I learn as an adult? I grew up and live in the US where there are many pools, swimming classes, and instructors.

The hard truth was that I feared discomfort.

I feared splashing around like an overgrown toddler while countless strangers looked on with pity. I especially did not want to look weak in front of sexy women in bikinis. As silly as these beliefs sound, these were the fears that kept me from learning to swim.

And so I delayed. I accepted the drowning risk if it meant I could escape public humiliation. I planned to just avoid the water. However, I still occasionally found myself at events with swimming. In these cases, I did my best to stay near the shallow waters.

While this mostly worked, the shame of being unable to swim would always come up. Whenever friends would invite me to swim closer to the deep end, I would sheepishly fib, “I’m not that good at swimming.” This was relatively less embarrassing than me being honest and saying, “I have no idea how to swim.”

Afterwards, I would suddenly feel this burst of motivation. I would tell myself: “Being the only person who didn’t know how to swim was horrible! Alright, I’m finally gonna make this a priority now and learn!”

I admittedly did try a few times. There were at least two occasions where I went to the pool with a friend who agreed teach me. There was even one time I signed up for an adult swimming class and I attended most of the lessons. However, in both cases, my efforts would fizzle out before I actually learned. While I gained the knowledge, I failed to practice enough so I could actually apply and ingrain it.

The main reason I didn’t practice enough was because I didn’t want to practice alone and “teach myself bad swimming habits.” I convinced myself that in order to learn, I always needed another person there to critique my form so that I could minimize the mistakes I made.

I convinced myself that this was necessary so I could learn as quickly and efficiently as possible. While this may sound plausible, this perfectionism was just a defense mechanism so I could reduce the amount of time I looked stupid in front of other people while I practiced.

Perfectionism in this case did not lead me to perfect execution, it just led me to inaction. And so I found myself caught in this avoidance cycle:

1. Go to a social event with swimming

2. Feel ashamed for not knowing how to swim

3. Commit to learning so I avoid future shame

4. Give up after minimal effort so I don’t look stupid while practicing

So while there may be cultural reasons for why I didn’t learn as a child, it was ultimately my responsibility that I didn’t learn as an adult.

Imperfectionism

I found myself restarting the cycle a few weeks ago on a group hiking trip. During the hike, we stopped by a lake for a swim. While all my friends swam deep in the water with ease, I cautiously stuck near the shore. I felt lonely as I watched several of them joyously race each other and play tag.

I then recommitted to learning. This time, however, things would be different. I had just finished reading Disciple Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink where he taught me his approach to life. In one section of the book he writes:

People constantly ask me for the secret of getting up early.

I tell them it is simple:

SET YOUR ALARM CLOCK AND GET OUT OF BED WHEN IT GOES OFF.

That’s it.

I remember laughing out loud when I read this as it felt like a personal attack. So much of my life has been spent searching for the best ways of doing something. Want to learn a language? Let me find the best app. Want to work out more? Let me find the best regimen. Want to meditate more? Let me find the best meditation method.

Obviously, strategizing has its value. However, I often spent too much time planning and too little time doing.

I now realize what was really going on: I was trying to find a method that would help me avoid all discomfort. What I failed to realize was that no method could entirely eliminate the inevitable discomfort that comes from doing anything worthwhile.

And so with this latest swimming attempt, I planned less and did more. Here was my plan for learning how to swim:

1. Watch a few YouTube videos on how to float on my back and do freestyle.

2. Swim daily for an hour.

I thought it would take me several weeks to finally learn how to swim. In reality, by day 8, I learned how to swim freestyle all the way across a 24 yard pool while regularly taking side breaths. I also learned how to float on my back for 5+ minutes. It’s been a few weeks since then (I swim 1-2 times a week now) and I can feel my form and endurance gradually improve over time.

In addition to learning how to swim, I also learned a valuable lesson: My biggest barriers are more imaginary than real. I also learned how true this quote from General George Patton is:

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

What are You Avoiding?

If you haven’t yet learned to swim, please learn as soon as possible! Not only can you gain an important survival skill, but you can also learn a new way to exercise. If you know someone who does not know how to swim, please share with them the Rocket Swimming YouTube channel and encourage them to learn! You just may end up saving their life 😎.

I also invite you to ponder the following question: What am I avoiding that I maybe shouldn’t? Whatever this may be, I encourage you to take a moment to investigate what you perceive are the barriers that prevent you from tackling this issue head on. Upon further investigation, you may come to see that the barriers were made of painted foam and wood as opposed to stone.

I started masturbating at age 7 and I started watching porn at age 8. I didn’t realize then how seriously these habits would later influence my life. At the time, they just seemed like a fun way to pass the time. They were also a way to distract myself from my suffering.

I continued with these habits throughout my life. I’m now 27 years old, so I’ve been watching porn and masturbating on some regular basis (every day or every other day), for almost 20 years. It’s hard for me to fathom how much time and energy I have spent on these habits.

Throughout my schooling, things were mostly okay. I managed to get straight A’s. I actually did so well at academics that I later got full scholarships for both undergrad and grad school. All throughout this time, porn and masturbation were quite helpful in taking the edge off of all the pressure I had to excel academically. This pressure came not only from my family but also, over time, from myself. These habits also helped me numb myself every time I got rejected by women.

I then basically did pretty well through college and grad school too. Halfway through grad school, I even got a full-time job offer from a great company in NYC. So I then dropped out of grad school and moved to the city. This was in 2022.

Although it was manageable, my relationship with porn and masturbation admittedly became an addiction several years prior because I felt incapable of stopping. There were many times over the years when I tried stopping but would eventually give up after several relapses. I tried many tools such as blockers like Cold Turkey, a paid NoFap support group, apps like Fortify which provide online support, money wagering apps like Beeminder, and Covenant Eyes which tracks all your internet activity, takes random screenshots, and shares these with accountability partners. Despite all this, the most sobriety I ever managed was 1 week without masturbation and 3 weeks without porn. After all these failed attempts, I had resigned myself to the belief that I’ll be an addict forever.

In 2023 however, I noticed my porn addiction become far worse. I was not only spending more and more time watching porn. I began to watch genres of porn that were more weird, grotesque, and extreme. It saddens me that such kinds of content even exist in the first place. It was at this point that I had a wake up call that I needed to do everything I could to cure myself of this addiction.

I didn’t realize it then, but just like other addictions, one can develop tolerance to porn. Just as other addicts need more of alcohol or cocaine to get the same high, porn addicts need more and different varieties of porn to get the same high.

Porn addiction is odd because, on the face of it, unlike other addictions like with drugs such as alcohol or cigarettes, the damage is not immediately evident. In fact, even after long term porn use, I don’t believe there’s an obvious physical sign of it (unless you conduct a brain scan). However, in my opinion, long term porn use has this way of harming one at a deeper, almost spiritual level. This is because porn is one of the many ways we humans objectify and commodify other beings. We treat them like disposable tools to satisfy our insatiable desires. And over time, as we begin to see others as disposable, it becomes much easier to see ourselves as disposable.

The next wake up call came for me when I started to have suicidal thoughts. I felt so ashamed and guilty of myself around this time that I sincerely believed that the world would be a much better place without me. I also just wanted to stop watching porn and masturbating. It seemed preferable to kill myself than to spend more of my life trapped in addiction. These suicidal thoughts soon turned into suicidal ideation as I began planning different ways I could kill myself.

The internet was unfortunately too helpful with this. I considered the classic methods of jumping off a bridge or a tall building. I also just considered hanging myself somewhere. However, I was worried about the people who’d be stuck cleaning up my remains. So I had this other “foolproof” idea I fantasized about where I would shoot myself in the middle of nowhere like a desert. Although I’m grateful to say I never actually attempted suicide, there were at least two instances I remember when I felt really close to the precipice.

I’m really grateful that I had a lot of caring friends and some caring family in my life at this time. As seductive as it felt sometimes to think that I could “solve all my problems” by just pulling one trigger, I would always be jolted back into reality when I thought about how my loved ones may react to the news of my suicide. Looking back, I’m grateful that their presence helped me get through this tough time. Though, at the time, I did feel rather trapped: I was too scared to live and too scared to die.

It was at this point I realized I had one of two options: get sober or die. And so I decided that I would do everything I could to get sober. Luckily, I had a therapist at this time who recommended I try out a sexual addiction twelve-step fellowship. I was initially very reluctant to giving it a try.

“Isn’t that where all the damaged people go?” I thought to myself. Despite clearly seeing the desperation of my situation, I also had trouble admitting that there was something wrong enough with me to ask for help by joining a twelve-step group. However, after a few more relapses from trying to be sober on my own, I bit the bullet and joined.

It actually turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. It was certainly no walk in the park, but for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who were going through many of the same struggles I was. For the first time, I didn’t feel so alone. During each of the meetings, each member courageously shared their stories of hardship, strength and hope. In addition to attending regular meetings, I got a mentor who showed me how to follow the program and was sortof my main accountability buddy. After spending around 3-4 months in this program, I managed to get to a month of sobriety from porn and masturbation for the first time in my life.

However, despite all that progress, I decided to leave the group. Although I was gradually making progress towards longer periods of sobriety, it felt like my suicidal ideation was only getting stronger with every relapse. Every time I relapsed, I felt like such a huge failure that all the feelings of guilt and shame would overwhelm me.

Previously, I thought that my life was in this either-or place of sobriety or death. Now I started to feel that putting so much pressure on myself to get sober was actually increasing my risk of committing suicide.

I’m grateful to say that it was around this time that I was deepening my practice in Buddhism, trying out psychedelic therapy, and exploring the Art of Accomplishment (AoA). Thanks to these modalities, I began to see that maybe there was a path for me to prioritize staying alive even if I continued to remain an addict. And then once I felt secure that I would not kill myself regardless of the state of my addiction, then I could focus on curing myself of this addiction from a place of ease as opposed to a place of desperation.

I’m really grateful to AoA for helping me see that my shame may actually be the lock that is keeping this bad habit in place. It was from that point that I actually experimented with the idea of letting myself watch porn from this place letting go of the shame.

This idea was also echoed to me from my Buddhist teachers. Essentially, one way we can let go of bad habits is by forcing ourselves to let them go (this was my initial approach). However, another approach is to let ourselves do these same habits with as much awareness as possible. If we can let ourselves do these habits over time while doing our best to see them clearly, then we will over time develop a felt sense of how these habits are not serving us and actually harming us. In that moment, we will naturally lose our desire for the habit.

I’m also grateful to my personal coach who helped me see the benefit of taking a break from all the inner work I was doing. At the time, I was doing/had done all of the following:

• 6 hourlong virtual twelve-step group meetings a week, and 1 hourlong in-person twelve-step meeting a week

• 2-3 times daily, one-on-one phone calls to other members of my twelve-step program, in addition to a weekly call with my mentor

• Daily reading of the twelve-step literature books, in addition to twelve-step program work

• weekly 2 hour IFS therapy sessions

• weekly 1 hour calls with a meditation teacher

• 30+ min of daily meditation

• 3 psychedelic counseling sessions

• two silent meditation retreats

• A two month Master Class course from the Art of Accomplishment

I forget the precise estimate, but I think I had in total spent $15,000+ over the past year trying to cure my mind. And, at the time, as I kept relapsing, it felt like it had all been for nothing. I was actually about to consider another few rounds of psychedelic therapy when I decided to take the advice of my coach.

She basically explained to me that while it can be beneficial to do inner work, when you do too much of it, it’s like putting your nervous system in overdrive. In fact, when your nervous system is in that state, the best thing you can do is give it some time to rest.

At this point, this was over halfway through 2023 when I decided to take her advice and the advice I had learned through AoA and Buddhism. I decided I would try to just let go of trying so hard to give up this addiction. I began to conceptualize my situation as if I was caught in a chinese finger trap. The more I resisted, the more stuck I would get. But the more I relaxed, the more I would become free.

And so I gave it a try, I did my best to just let myself watch porn with as little shame as possible. And oddly enough, this actually worked to some degree. I still felt bad about what I was doing, but I noticed that over time, I actually started to watch less and less porn. Instead of it being a daily thing, it became once every few days. I even began to notice that the kind of content I watched was actually becoming less extreme to some degree.

After trying this method for a few months and also just completely stopping all the inner work tasks I mentioned above, I noticed myself naturally gravitating towards meditation again. I decided that I wanted to continue this positive momentum of me applying more awareness to my addiction so that it would gradually loosen on its own over time. Admittedly, I was still masturbating and watching porn, albeit a lesser amount, so I knew that while this new approach was helpful, it was not the full solution I was seeking.

It was around this time, near the end of 2023, that I received a notice at work that I was being laid off. While I will admit that I was partly happy to be let go because I was not passionate about the work, a large part of me was quite sad. I will forever be grateful to my boss and that company for taking a chance on me and letting me work there for two and a half years. I’m also grateful that they paid me quite well at that job so that I had more than enough money to pay for all the healing modalities I described above. I’m also grateful that I, for the most part, was able to leave on good terms.

Now that I had been let go and was in this place of figuring out next steps, I decided that I would finally do what I had always wanted to do: start a company! I decided that just because I was struggling with addiction doesn’t mean I have to stop living my life. Whether I’m in addiction or not, time will not stop for me. No one knows how much time they have left to live so I was going to make the most of my time, even if it was going to be sapped away or even cut short by this addiction.

I’m grateful to say that, as I felt the addiction loosening near the beginning of 2024, I started to feel much less suicidal ideation than before. It felt like, to some degree, awakening from a really bad dream. It really is true that you don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it (or at least come close to losing it). As I had been through moments where I felt very close to losing my life, I began to develop a deeper sense of gratitude for each new day. Instead of taking each new morning for granted, I felt grateful to wake up each day and at least be alive.

As I began to make plans for how I was going to spend the coming year, I decided that I would go on another meditation retreat. I thought this would not only help me with my porn addiction, but it would also help me get more clarity on how exactly I wanted to spend the coming year in terms of starting a company.

And so, around the beginning of 2024, I went on my third Buddhist silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. If you ever have the opportunity to practice there, then I highly recommend it!

This was actually my second time at this particular retreat center. As soon as I arrived there, I remember thinking: “This year, I will do a three month retreat.” I think this was not only to help me further loosen the addiction, but also to help me get more clarity on what I wanted to do next in terms of my career.

And so after that five day retreat, I came back home and signed up for literally every possible retreat at IMS in order to meet the minimum requirements as quickly as possible for their three month retreat.

Over the next few months, I attended 4 more silent retreats and cumulatively spent over 5 weeks on retreat. I can definitely say that all these retreats had a life-changingly beneficial impact on the course of my life and happiness.

I learned many things from all these retreats (and all the inner work I did prior) and I may write more about that in the future. However, I think the most important thing I learned how to do was to love myself unconditionally. Admittedly, this is, in my opinion, a lifelong practice as opposed to a one-time achievement, but I am grateful to say that I love myself far more than I ever have at any point in the past.

And as a natural extension of this, I also have a lot more compassion for myself. I began to more deeply understand why I have this addiction in the first place. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to conclusively say why I became a porn addict, but like many things, I’m sure it has at least something to do with my childhood.

Overall, I had a pretty good childhood. However, there were definitely some relatives in my life who took out their anger on me. I don’t want to get too specific here, mainly because I don’t want this piece to be about me accusing others of the problems in my life. Not only because, at the end of the day, my actions are my responsibility, but also because, I don’t want to demonize the people who treated me poorly. There were definitely times in my life when I thought these relatives were simply “evil” or “bad” for physically, emotionally, and verbally abusing me for many years. Now I’ve come to see that I was simply an outlet for their own suffering. One overly simplified metaphor I found helpful in illustrating this idea is how the employee who gets yelled at by his boss at work is more likely to then come home and kick his dog. In some ways, I have felt like the family dog. And just as as they spread their trauma to me, I was spreading my trauma to others.

As you may already be aware, the porn industry is rife with abuse. There have been countless instances of pornstars being mistreated and abused. There have also been many cases of pornstars talking about how working in this industry has negatively affected their mental health and their interpersonal relationships. While I don’t doubt that there are examples of pornstars who actually enjoy their job and lead happy lives, it seems that a huge portion of them do not. And by me being a regular consumer of porn, I was directly contributing to an industry that consistently dehumanizes and objectifies countless women and men.

Since my last retreat, at the suggestion of one of the teachers, I decided to give a twelve-step group a try again and restart therapy. This time, I joined a different sexual addiction twelve-step group. I am grateful to say that as of the time of writing this blog post, I have been porn and masturbation free for over two months! I am also grateful to say that I am, for the first time in my life, in a loving relationship with an amazing woman.

I can honestly say that this point in my life is definitely the most happy and free I have ever felt. I’m so grateful for all the people who have helped me reach this point. I definitely could not have done this alone. I want to express immense gratitude to not only all my teachers, but also my friends, and my sangha in Brooklyn.

And, as odd as this may sound, I am so grateful to have been given this gift of trauma that later led to porn addiction. Because, to be frank, were it not for all the suffering I went through, I likely never would have taken the time to do all the inner work I did. I feel pretty confident that I would not have spent so much time on meditation retreats. I also would definitely not be currently planning to undertake a three month temporary monastic ordination at a hermitage in Indonesia.

Indeed, I think the greatest gift I have received in this process is becoming Buddhist. The way I see the world has become so vastly different from the way I used to see it before this spirutal journey. I am grateful to say that I approach myself and others with a far greater degree of compassion than I used to.

However, I know I have far more work ahead of me. There is always room for improvement and I will do all I can to ensure that these two months of sobriety turns in 2 years of sobriety and beyond. I aim to also do what I can to help others reduce their own suffering and find happiness.

If you made it this far, I want to thank you for your kind attention. If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please know that it’s okay to ask for help! There are many amazing organizations out there, both in terms of twelve-step groups and beyond that can be great sources of support. Of course, if I can be of help in any way, please don’t hesitate to reach out! I’m happy to do what I can.

I know that it may be cliche to say this but there really can be a light at the end of a tunnel, even when it seems like things are really dark. But it’s true! And in the case of addiction in particular, it really is possible to find freedom.

May all beings be free.

During my sophomore year of college, some friends and I went on a backpacking trip around Europe. One of the stops we made was in the beautiful city of Kraków in Poland. It was around noon and my friend, Lucjean, and I were taking in the sights when we walked by a gyro restaurant. We walked in and decided to place our order.

“I’d like chicken gyro, please” I said to the cashier.

“Would you like spicy sauce with that?” They asked.

“Yes, please” I replied.

“How spicy would you like it on a scale from 1-10?” They followed up.

“10!” I firmly responded.

They were taken aback for a moment and said, “Are you sure? that will be really spicy.”

“Yes! I want the challenge.” I replied.

And so they took my money and put in the order. Lucjean and I sat down while we waited for my order. He didn’t order anything as he wasn’t hungry. In a concerned tone, he then asked.

“Are you sure you want to get something that spicy?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” I responded. “I love eating spicy food! I love the feeling of my tongue being on fire! I love the challenge of maintaining my cool even amidst the pain of the heat.”

“Alright, if you say so.” He said. He seemed at ease after hearing my words.

“Order for Jay!” yelled one of the staff members. I used Jay as my nickname whenever I ordered food as Aditya was always a hassle for me to spell out to the staff.

I walked up and picked up my extra spicy chicken gyro. The red hot sauce gleamed as though it was already on fire. With a smile on my face I walked back to the table where Lucjean was.

Before taking a bite, I decided to smell the gyro before biting in so I took a deep whiff. “Whew! It smells so spicy that it’s going to singe off my nose hairs.” I said with an expectant smile.

Lucjean seemed less concerned now and more so amused.

And so, with much mental fanfare, I took the first bite!

I immediately felt my tongue burst into flames. I chewed and swallowed that first bite as best as I could. The chewed up food traveled down my throat like an army engaging in a scorched earth strategy.

“I’m gonna get something to drink.” I said as calmly as I could to Lucjean, as I got up to get some orange soda. I waited impatiently at the counter as the employee took their sweet time getting some soda.

“Here’s your orange soda,” said the employee as they handed it to me. I then quickly paid them and started chugging. Unfortunately, it was to no avail as the discomfort seemed to only increase.

I then sat back down with Lucjean and eyed the gyro. “Should I really eat more of this?” I thought to myself. Feeling bad about wasting food, I decided to take a few more bites.

I immediately regretted that decision and then decided to throw the rest away.

At this point, Lucjean was starting to realize something was off. “Is everything okay?” He asked kindly. “Yeah, everything is fine. It was just a little spicier than I thought it would be. But that’s okay, I can just walk it off.”

We started walking around outside and I tried my best to play the role of a normal tourist. Unfortunately, the feeling of a hot coal at the center of my sternum was making it hard to keep up that act.

After a few minutes of walking, I had a new idea. “Hey Lucjean, how about we stop by this convenience store? I think getting a yogurt drink will help my stomach feel better.” He happily obliged and we walked in, got the drink, and came back out. Once again, I immediately started chugging.

Interestingly, the yogurt drink seemed to actually have the opposite of the intended effect. Not only did it exacerbate the searing pain in my stomach and chest, it actually gave me this sudden urge to poop.

“Hey Lucjean, yeah this actually made me feel more sick, I think I need to use the bathroom,” I said. Lucjean was getting more and more worried and was happy to just follow along and help me get whatever I needed.

As we kept walking, I noticed I gradually started walking slower and slower until I finally stood still. And then I noticed I sat right down on the middle of the sidewalk. Then that turned into me lying down on the sidewalk. At this point, passerbys were starting to notice and look a bit uncomfortable.

To make matters worse, in order to relieve the pressure I felt on my stomach, I even unbuckled my pants loosened them a bit. “Okay, what’s going on, should I call for help?” said Lucjean. He was starting to look more and more worried.

“Don’t worry, I just need to rest a little, I’m totally fine,” I said. After that, a moment later, I puked on the sidewalk.

At this point, a concerned bystander walked up to us, “What’s going on, is he okay?” he asked Lucjean. “He ate some really spicy food and now he’s really sick,” said Lucjean.

The bystander then kneeled beside me and said, “I’m going to call you an ambulance!” I suddenly got really worried and said, “No, please don’t call an ambulance! I can’t afford that.” With a smile on his face, the bystander said, “Don’t worry, we’re not in America. We have free healthcare here in Poland.” He then made the call.

After some time had passed from me puking, I started to feel better. A few moments later, the ambulance arrived and managed to stand up and walk into the vehicle. The stern healthcare worker then looked at me and asked, “What’s going on?”

“I ate some really spicy food and it made me really sick,” I explained.

“Have you been doing any drugs?” the worker followed up.

“No, not at all,” I answered a bit awkwardly.

“Oh, in that case, just drink lots of water and you’ll be fine,” he replied.

Then he let me off the ambulance with a water bottle and no fee! I let Lucjean know what happened and he looked relieved. I wanted to thank the kind passerby but he had already left at that point.

I drank lots of water for the rest of that day and I’m grateful the pain gradually faded over time.

After that experience, I definitely learned my lesson: Next time I’m at a gyro shop, instead of getting the 10 out of 10 spice level, I’ll make sure to go for the safer option of 9 out of 10 instead 😉.

Explained Conceptually

To explain non-self, one must do so with the proper context. Let’s start with my paraphrased version of the Buddha’s first teaching:

1. All beings are conditioned to suffer.

2. The root cause of suffering is clinging.

3. We can end our suffering by letting go of clinging.

4. The way to let go of clinging is by following the Eightfold Path.

These points above are known as the Four Noble Truths (I will gloss over the Eightfold Path for now as it deserves its own blog post). So as the Buddha stated, the key to ending our suffering is by letting go of clinging. So what is clinging? Clinging refers to the felt sense of wanting to get the things we currently do not have and wanting to keep the things we currently do have.

We must also explain the idea of self. When the Buddha talked about the self, he usually talked about it in the context of “I-making” and “my-making.” These refer to the mental process of us defining all things through this dualistic lens either being me/mine or not being me/mine. For example, we may notice thoughts like “I am my body, I am an American, this my family, this is my property,” etc.

In this context, we can think of non-self as the process of gradually feeling less clinging to the things that we previously, maybe very strongly, identified with. And as we loosen this clinging, we can gradually reduce our suffering as well.

Explained Experientially

As I have gradually deepened my understanding of non-self, I have noticed my mind incline towards less suffering in the following ways. Please note that I am still fairly new to the path (only around a year in), so I still have a long way to go in cultivating a more comprehensive understanding of non-self.

Less Identification

I now feel far less identified with things that I used to very strongly identify with. For example, as a 5’ 5” man based in New York City, I used to feel very insecure about my height. For context, the average height of men in NYC is 5’10”. I would regularly be stressed about how all the cards were stacked against me, especially in a dating context, because women, on average, seem to prefer taller men. I remember also frequenting the r/short subreddit, where I would commiserate with my fellow short humans.

What really drove the nail in the coffin was sometimes seeing people on the subreddit who were a few inches taller than me still complaining about how short they were. If even they don’t have a chance, then what hope do I have? I strongly believed that because I was short, I was doomed to be single forever, and if I couldn’t get a girlfriend, then I was doomed to die alone, so I would never be truly happy. These were the kinds of stories I would tell myself and fully believe.

It feels so fascinating to reminisce about some of the mental states that used to be present in my mind. Regardless, I am grateful to say that now, around a year later, I rarely, if ever, think about my height at all. After making some progress on the path, I have come to more clearly see that happiness is something that does come from within and that while things like our height, weight, wealth, job, love life, etc., can be things that pull our attention away from this inner happiness, they can never extinguish it.

Less Value Judgements

Another way non-self has helped reduce my suffering is by allowing me to feel like events in my life are not inherently good or bad. The channel Pursuit of Wonder has a great six-minute YouTube video explaining this concept. I encourage you to watch it:

In essence, this is tied to this other idea known as emptiness. Emptiness states that no thing is inherently anything. This is best exemplified by sayings like one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, or that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I was very grateful to have an embodied understanding of this concept when I was let go from my job earlier this month. Admittedly, the news was not so surprising as I was on a performance improvement plan (PIP) for two months prior (for those of you unaware, PIPs are sometimes used as a formality before letting someone go as opposed to being a plan of action to help an employee improve their performance). Regardless, I did feel quite devastated. While I cannot say I was deeply passionate about my last job, I can say it was a rather good job that I was very grateful to have had.

Anyway, it felt beautiful to notice how, despite this troubling news, I have felt mostly peaceful. There have even been times when I have felt quite optimistic about the future. I think about how this challenging life event has the potential to be looked back upon as a turning point that led to greater things.

I will not deny that there have been times when I have felt some stress about the uncertainty of the future. But overall, I would say that I see this event as largely neutral. I think I’ll need to wait a few years to see how my life unfolds to get a true sense of whether this event resulted in my life going in a more skillful or less skillful direction. Admittedly, even at that point, I cannot know for sure.

Less Separation

Let’s say we take this idea of emptiness a step further. As I mentioned earlier, no thing is inherently anything; this applies not only to objects and events but also to living beings. Furthermore, this not only applies in terms of value judgments (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) but also concepts generally. What do I mean by this?

Let’s take a dog, for example. What exactly is a dog? A dog is just a label that we have given to a certain group of animals that fit a certain set of criteria. If there were no humans, there would be no concept of dogs. Obviously, the subset of animals that the label dog refers to would still exist, but the concept itself would not. The concept only exists in our minds.

Now let’s take this another step further: Humans. The idea of emptiness can be used to understand ourselves as well. These labels we give ourselves of Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jew, and Muslim are all concepts that exist only in our minds. While these labels can be a great source of community, belonging, and identity, they also, by definition, are a source of separation. And it is with this foundation of separation that we can fuel narratives of “us” vs. “them” and justify inflicting large amounts of suffering to our fellow humans.

While I have previously heard these ideas of “everything is connected” and “we’re all one,” I just viewed them as something a hippie would say while they’re high. I never realized that this could be a more accurate picture of reality.

This past year was likely one of the most difficult years of my life in terms of my mental health. During this time, I was quite desperate in searching for and trying out a variety of healing modalities. One of the methods I tried was a silent meditation retreat.

During a retreat, one alternates between sitting and walking meditation all day. The main breaks from meditation are meals and a daily lecture about Buddhist teachings. Also, the entire retreat is in silence, meaning there is no talking outside of asking teachers questions. They also firmly recommend not reading, writing, using electronics, or even looking at others. Retreats can be as short as half a day or as long as months or years. So far, the longest retreat I have done is a week, though I hope to someday do a three-month retreat.

I found my retreats very helpful, and during one of them, I specifically went in with the intention of gaining a deeper understanding of non-self. During that retreat, I had this peculiar yet powerful insight of seeing all of life as if it were one of those facial cleanser bottles with those exfoliating beads.

Just as a bottle of facial cleanser with beads has them suspended in these somewhat random clusters, some relatively dense while others rather sparse, so too is all of existence. I have come to see that the whole universe is in many ways a large collection of particles that happens to be more densely clustered in certain patterns in some areas and more loosely clustered in different patterns in other areas. These patterns and clusters, by themselves, are completely neutral without any concepts. It is we humans, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, who decide to add labels to these patterns. And it is when we take these concepts too seriously and identify with them too strongly that we suffer.

It feels beautiful to have a deeper, more embodied sense of the interconnectedness of all existence. I think it has made me a kinder person than before, and I hope that as I deepen my understanding of this idea, my mind’s inclination toward kindness will also continue to deepen. It’s also pretty cool how the most mundane things can teach us fundamental features of the universe.

Knowledge vs. Wisdom

And—thus is my thought, oh exalted one,—nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! You will not be able to convey and say to anybody, oh venerable one, in words and through teachings what has happened to you in the hour of enlightenment! The teachings of the enlightened Buddha contain much, it teaches many to live righteously, to avoid evil. But there is one thing which these so clear, these so venerable teachings do not contain: they do not contain the mystery of what the exalted one has experienced for himself, he alone among hundreds of thousands.

Now that I have finished sharing my thoughts on non-self, I would like to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. The excerpt above is from the amazing novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. In this moment, our protagonist, Siddhartha, is having a conversation with the Buddha named Gotama. By the way, “Buddha” is a title meaning “the awakened one.”

Side note: Some of you may know that the real-life Buddha’s name was Siddhartha Gautama, so this may be somewhat confusing. To clarify, in the novel, the novel version of Siddhartha is merely someone completely unrelated to the novel version or real-life Buddha while the novel version of the Buddha is based on the real-life Buddha.

In this quote, Siddhartha is in essence saying that while he fully agrees with the Buddha’s teachings, he does not wish to become his follower. This is because no matter how amazing the teachings may be, they are, at the end of the day, just that, teachings, i.e., knowledge. What Siddhartha says he really wants is the direct experience that those teachings spring from, i.e., wisdom.

To further drive the point home, imagine you want to learn a new skill, let’s say, how to successfully run a business. To learn this new skill, one can watch YouTube tutorials, read books, hire a coach, or even go to business school. All of these things can be quite valuable, but can only impart knowledge. Only through the direct experience of starting a business and trying to run it can one accrue the wisdom of how to run a business successfully.

So where am I going with all this? I believe you should see this post and anything outside your direct experience as “knowledge.” To understand non-self (or anything else in life) more deeply, I encourage you to consider testing the idea for yourself. In the context of Buddhist ideas like non-self, the best lab would be meditation (in particular, a silent retreat!). The Buddha himself said not to take anything he or others say at face value and instead determine for yourself through your own contemplation what is and is not true1.

Conclusion and an Invitation

Thank you for reading my blog! Feel free to let me know any comments, questions, or feedback you have! I am very new to blogging, so any input you have would be greatly appreciated 😊.

Although I mentioned earlier that direct experience is best, that does not mean knowledge does not help! With that in mind, I invite you to schedule a free meditation teaching session with me on Calendly! 😄 To be clear, I am not currently a teacher! As mentioned before, I am fairly new to the path, with only around a year of focused practice. Regardless, I can provide helpful guidance for people who consider themselves absolute beginners.

Also, as I would like to become a proper teacher someday, I see these sessions as an opportunity for me to learn how to teach. As such, these sessions will be free for the foreseeable future. I want to ensure that I have much more experience before switching to a donation-based (Dana) or sliding-scale model later on.

Of course, if you are looking for a more experienced teacher, I encourage you to do that! I personally had a teacher I met with once a week for about a year to help guide me through my practice, and I can say I found it immensely beneficial.

Anyway, thank you again for reading my blog and considering my invitation! Sending metta ❤️.

Introduction

As mentioned in my prior post, I thought it would be helpful to consider counterarguments. Specifically, I wanted to see what arguments existed for the following claim:

AI will never surpass human intelligence.

This is quite the strong claim to make, mainly because of the word choice of “never.” Regardless, I went to Google to see what I could find. I initially had some trouble finding academic counterarguments, but then I came across this book: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence Without Fear by Jobst Landgrebe (an AI entrepreneur1) and Barry Smith (a University of Buffalo Philosophy professor2).

The book is around 50 pages long so not the longest read, regardless, I wanted an overview so I found this hour-long interview conducted by Richard Hanania from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

Here are some of their key points along with my responses:

Human Intelligence is Too Complex

Their Claim

Their primary claim is that human intelligence is a “complex system” and as we currently lack the mathematics to model complex systems in general, we therefore cannot model human intelligence.

Background

In a nutshell, a complex system refers to a large network comprised of nodes and edges. The nodes represent some components while the edges represent some relationships between these components. These components interact in a vast number of varied ways, thereby making it hard to predict the behavior of the larger system. Some examples include cities, the climate, and the universe itself. Complex systems tend to be more stochastic.

On the other hand, simple systems tend to have smaller networks with a few clearly defined relationships between each of its components. Some examples include a pendulum, a thermostat, or even a light switch. Simple systems tend to be deterministic and fairly easy to predict.

To further elaborate the point, one can consider an ecosystem as a complex system. Just think about how many different organisms exist in just one square kilometer of a rainforest biome. Each organism can be considered a node. Now each organism has some way they relate to one or more other organisms in this biome. Each of these relationships can be an edge. Here’s an example of a soil food web that illustrates this point:

As you can see, it can be difficult to accurately model complex systems. There are many reasons for this, but one key reason is that complex systems exhibit “emergence.”

Emergence refers to how when you take many disparate components and put them together, it can often create phenomena that are greater than merely the sum of all individual components’ behaviors put together. Put more succinctly by Aristotle, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

For example, in the case of a city, if we were to put together the components of drivers, speed limits, road designs, and weather conditions, we get the emergent phenomenon of traffic jams.

My Thoughts

For your convenience, here is their claim again:

Human intelligence is a complex system and as we currently lack the mathematics to model complex systems in general, we therefore cannot model human intelligence.

I disagree with their claim for two key reasons:

1. It is possible to create new things without fundamentally understanding how they work internally.

2. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emergence.

Regarding my first point, I am referring to how we can build bigger and more powerful models without fundamentally understanding how they work. The field of mechanistic interpretability is devoted to decoding how these “black box” models work based on how their internal neural networks activate. This would be similar to (though more precise than) using a brain scan to read your mind. Furthermore, we humans have created many other complex systems without being able to accurately model them, like the internet, the global economy, etc.

Regarding my second point, several researchers have described emergent properties arising as LLMs scale up. Specifically, they have found these models develop capabilities that they were not explicitly trained for. One example of this is the strategy known as “chain-of-thought” prompting. Normally, when you ask a model a question, the model just answers immediately. When a model uses chain-of-thought prompting, they instead essentially “think out loud” and then only after that answer. Here’s an example:

As such, these AI models may be on track to becoming complex systems in case they are not already.

Artificial Intelligence is Too Rote

Their Claim

Their other claim is that AI is too rote. Specifically, this can be broken down into two sub-claims:

1. AI is purely reproductive. It can only create what it has seen before and so it cannot create new knowledge.

2. AI cannot truly understand things the way humans can.

In saying that AI is purely reproductive, they explain how all LLMs do is guess the next word (somewhat like a more advanced version of autocomplete on our phones). To be able to do this, these LLMs are first trained on hundreds of gigabytes of data (such as The Pile). Therefore, it follows that LLMs are incapable of creating new knowledge like humans can.

They provide the following example: One may be able to ask ChatGPT how lightning works and it can likely give a pretty good answer. However, this answer will likely be simply the textbook definition. What ChatGPT would not be able to do is explain what our limits to understanding lightning are and what future research endeavors would help in improving our understanding.

With regards to the second sub-claim that AI lacks true understanding, they say that as AI is just guessing the next word based on some probability distribution, this definitely cannot be considered understanding the way humans understand things.

Background

As you may have guessed, I decided to ask GPT-4 the above questions about lightning. Here’s what they said.

Anyways, regardless of whether we think ChatGPT gave a good answer, it may be helpful to take a step back and think more carefully about definitions for two particular points:

1. Creating vs. reproducing knowledge

2. Understanding

Regarding the first point, what exactly do we mean by creation vs. reproduction? With regards to creation, we can think of this as the discovery of some important model of the universe, such as gravity. Another example could be the development of some new technology such as the printing press.

On the other hand, reproduction could take the form of a teacher explaining to some students how gravity works or an entrepreneur deciding to create a book-making business.

As for the second point, this is far trickier. What exactly does it mean to “understand” something? At a high level, Wikipedia defines understanding as the state where an agent has some internal model to predict the behavior of some object or process more accurately.

For example, when it comes to the concept of instruments, if one has a correct internal model of what an instrument is, then one should be able to assess, with a high degree of accuracy, whether or not any given object is an instrument. If one can do so, then we can say that one understands the concept of instruments.

A more thought-provoking example with a higher bar for understanding would be the thought experiment known as “The Chinese Room” which was created by philosopher John Searle. I encourage you to watch the linked video (the example starts at 6:24 and ends at 7:35) but in a nutshell, the thought experiment goes something like this:

Imagine there is a room and you’re standing outside the door. You know Chinese and you’re led to believe that there is another Chinese speaker inside this room. You’d like to chat with the other person but you can only pass them notes in Chinese under the door so you do so. A few minutes after you pass your note, you get a note back in fluent Chinese. Based on all you’ve observed, it seems there is indeed a fluent Chinese speaker in the other room.

However, in reality, there is a monolingual English speaker in the other room who happens to have access to a very large book that contains the perfect Chinese response to any given Chinese sentence. All this person does is:

1. Take your Chinese note and flip to the page where your sentence matches the one in the book.

2. See the corresponding perfect response and then copy that to a new note.

3. Pass that note back to you under the door.

Nowhere in this process does this English speaker actually understand what is going on. Because of this thought experiment, John Searle asserts that while AI may be able to carry a conversation just like a human can, that does not mean that they understand what they are saying. As such, he claims that AI will never be able to understand in the way that humans can.

My Thoughts

For your convenience, here is their claim again:

Their other claim is that AI is too rote. Specifically, this can be broken down into two sub-claims:

1. AI is purely reproductive. It can only create what it has seen before and so it cannot create new knowledge.

2. AI cannot truly understand things the way humans can.

With the definitions of creation vs. reproduction in mind, I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of humans spend the majority of their time reproducing knowledge as opposed to creating new knowledge. To be clear, I say this in a “matter-of-fact” or impartial manner. I don’t mean that most humans are stupid or something. To be frank, I would be the first to admit that the vast majority of my life has been spent in the reproduction part (though I do hope to spend more time creating in the future).

As such, it seems a bit odd to me to say that true human intelligence is exemplified by our ability to create as opposed to reproduce knowledge. If this were true, then one could still argue that we could make an AI someday that is so good at reproducing knowledge that it is a sort of general intelligence on par with human intelligence.

I would also like to ask the following question: How exactly do we humans create new knowledge in the first place? In my estimation, this is through the process of direct experience with reality and noticing important patterns, primarily through experimentation. For example, to add to the discussion of lightning from earlier, the way that scientists may create new knowledge is by:

1. reading the current literature

2. creating some hypothesis

3. testing this hypothesis via some experiment with measuring tools

4. reviewing the results

5. accepting or rejecting the hypothesis

This is essentially the scientific method. Now, why aren’t our current AI models able to do this? This is because they lack sensors and mechanical arms to properly experience and interact with the real world. Once we create more advanced robots that these AI can access and control, then these robots should be able to conduct such experiments just as we can. I don’t want to claim that creating AI scientists would be easy, however, it still seems possible. As such, I do believe that it is only a matter of time until AI begins creating new knowledge.

Concerning the second sub-claim of understanding, I would like to raise two points:

1. Searle’s lack of an empirical test for understanding

2. How can we be sure that we ourselves understand things?

With regards to the first point, let’s say Searle is correct and that AI can never truly understand things, it then begs the question: Under what conditions would this claim be proven to be wrong? As far as I am aware, Searle has not proposed an alternative to the Turing test that could allow us to empirically assess his claim. Admittedly, this may be a feature, not a bug of his thought experiment. But even so, believing this unfalsifiable claim feels intellectually unsatisfactory.

As for the second point, I would like to pose a deeper question. How can we be so sure that we ourselves are not currently acting out some version of the Chinese Room experiment? How can we be so sure that we, much like ChatGPT, are not simply just guessing the next word?

For example, as a native speaker of the Tamil language, I can notice the following sequence of thoughts in my mind.

• “Think of the word for food in Tamil.”

• “சபாது.” (This is transliterated in English as “sapadu.”)

Conventional wisdom would suggest that “I” was the one that did this translation in my mind. However, as a Buddhist, I can also see this more impartially and say that when I thought of the words in the first bullet point, the word in the second bullet point just jumped into my mind. It’s not clear to me where it came from. Maybe part of my brain just checked some English-Tamil translation book while simultaneously checking an English dictionary? Maybe this is nonsensical, but it is hopefully at least some food for thought. Ba dum tss 😎.

Admittedly, I’m referencing this concept known as “non-self” from Buddhism which I am just going to gloss over now as this is a massive topic deserving its own blog post.

In essence, my main point is this: it seems plausible to me that we may be acting out some version of the Chinese room in our own lives while being thoroughly convinced we are not.

Conclusion

This was a rather difficult exercise for me. While I have taken time in the past to learn counterarguments for other topics, this is the first time I have taken an extended period to think through a counterargument and write at length about it. Now that I have gone through this exercise, I feel more sure about my belief that AI will indeed surpass human intelligence someday.

Also, thank you for reading! If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, I would love to hear it. I am hoping to use blogging as a means of practicing my writing so any advice you may have on how I can write more clearly would be greatly appreciated 😊.

My next post will be focused on exploring how exactly an artificial general intelligence (an AI with intelligence on par with a human’s), could become misaligned, so please stay tuned 😃!

You can find part 3 here.

Thank you Neel Nanda for planting the seed for this post in your blog post describing how you formed your views on AI safety.

Socrates: Why is AI Safety the most important problem to work on?

Aditya: Because if this problem isn’t solved, then humanity could go extinct.

Socrates: How could humanity go extinct?

Aditya: Well, if we were to create an AI that is more intelligent than we are, then it is possible that this AI could become misaligned with human values and then engage in some behavior that severely harms humanity to the point of human extinction.

Socrates: Like what?

Aditya: Well let’s say we make an AI and ask it to make paper clips. This AI makes the mistake of believing that making paper clips is the most important goal and so decides to make paper clips at the expense of all other human values. Essentially, this AI may start stealing to make paper clips or it may destroy things and gather the atoms of these things to make paper clips. And then when humans try to stop the AI, the AI will realize that the humans are trying to turn it off, and then the AI will try to kill all humans.

Socrates: Wow, that escalated quickly. This all sounds a bit overblown, don’t you think? I feel like you skipped a lot of important steps here.

Aditya: What do you mean?

Socrates: How did the AI go from just making paper clips to suddenly stealing money and vaporizing matter? Can you walk me through what the specific possible steps could be in between?

Aditya: Hmm, to be honest, I’m not sure what those would be. I know that a lot of smart people think this will happen and I am just guessing that if the AI is truly smarter than us, then my trying to figure out its strategies would be as futile as an ant trying to figure out how an orangutan thinks.

Socrates: Okay, but I’m still not convinced. So essentially, you’re not sure…and you’re telling me you want to spend the next few years on this? 

Aditya: Well, I don’t know! To be honest, it just sounds like a cool career path where I look really smart, I get to tell people I’m an “AI Safety Researcher” and I get to make a lot of money 😉.

Socrates: Hmm, I’ve gotta say, those are not the best reasons to go into this field. I’ve heard it’s a lot of hard work. Also, those reasons don’t even answer the main question I asked which was “Why is AI Safety the most important problem to work on?”. Also, don’t get me wrong, it’s understandable to have a variety of motivations for choosing a career path and that’s all fine. But if you are going to become an AI safety researcher who wants to create meaningful research that truly moves the field in a beneficial direction, then you need to convince me that the following five things are possible1:

1. That AI will someday exceed human intelligence

2. That AI could become misaligned

3. That a superintelligent AI could cause human extinction

4. That we can mitigate the risk of AI becoming misaligned

5. That I am a good fit to work on this problem

Aditya: Hmm okay…going through this exercise is harder than I thought.

Socrates: As it should be. Claiming that anything is the most important anything is in general a hard claim to support.

Aditya: *sigh* Alright, let me give this a shot. Let’s start this point by point and do our best to create some sort of informal logical proof. I tried to watch a YouTube video about how actual logic proofs work but I wasn’t quite getting it. Anyway, let’s start with the most basic claim that anyone would agree with and build our way up. I am going to label each claim with a Greek letter. Why? Because Greek letters look cool 😋.

α: Observable reality is truth.

Example: If I claim that water exists, I can prove this by showing someone a glass of water and they can verify it by confirming that this glass of water appears in their field of vision.

Socrates: Admittedly, even this “ground truth” you are conveying may not hold water *ba dum tss*. However, I understand the purpose of this dialogue is to focus on AI safety and not epistemology so I will assume this is true for now.

Aditya: Phew! I wasn’t sure if you would let that slide, but at least now we have some common ground to stand on. Thanks!

Socrates: Welcome! Anyways, please continue.

Aditya: Okay let’s see, hmm. So I need to somehow get from α to our first item:

1. It is possible that AI will someday exceed human intelligence.

Socrates: α → 1 is quite the chasm to cross but I wish you all the best.

Aditya: Thanks haha, let’s see how far I get...

Alright, I gave it some thought and I have formed my argument. First, let me define intelligence. I read the Wiki page on this topic and the following definition resonated with me (though I admittedly like the others also):

β: “Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.” -Shane Legg & Marcus Hutter

In nature, we see that across all living organisms there is a wide variance in the levels of intelligence. The least intelligent may be some single-celled organisms while the most intelligent would (as far as we know) be humans. As such, we have our next claim:

γ: In reality, we observe a wide variance of intelligence across living organisms.

Does all that make sense so far? This is where we are at:

α: Observable reality is truth.

β: Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.

γ: We observe a wide variance of intelligence across living organisms.

…

1. It is possible that AI will someday exceed human intelligence.

Socrates: Yes.

Aditya: Great, onto the next point. The process of natural selection has shown us that species can evolve in a manner such that the intelligence of future generations is on average greater than that of prior generations. As such, according to the prior definition, we can think of intelligence as falling along this spectrum:

By the way, the person on the right is Saitama2 😉.

Socrates: Nice reference 😎.

Aditya: Thanks! 🤩 In essence, we can think of this as a spectrum from inanimate objects to god-level beings. Humans fall somewhere in between this spectrum. As such, it seems quite plausible that there is an infinitely large space between the point on this spectrum where humans reside and the rightmost point of this spectrum where god-level beings reside. This brings us to our next claim:

δ: According to our definition of intelligence, there is no reason to believe that humans represent any upper limit. As far as we know, there is no upper bound to intelligence.

So we are now here:

α: Observable reality is truth.

β: Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.

γ: We observe a wide variance of intelligence across living organisms.

δ: According to our definition of intelligence (β), there is no reason to believe that humans represent an upper limit. As far as we know, there is no upper bound to intelligence.

…

1. It is possible that AI will someday exceed human intelligence.

Any questions or concerns so far?

Socrates: No, so far so good.

Aditya: Gotcha, so onto our next claim:

ε: AI has steadily, and at an accelerating rate, improved its capabilities in a wide variety of domains.

For a thorough treatment of this, I recommend checking out this great article from Richard Ngo. For the sake of simplicity, I will relate one example: written language.

It is estimated that the earliest human beings first evolved into existence around 195,000 years ago. This is based on the fact that the oldest remains of humans were found to be that old according to carbon dating. Now, when did humans first learn how to communicate via written language? It seems this was 6,000 years ago. As such, it seems that it took humans around 189,000 years to learn how to communicate via written language.

As for AI, it’s hard to pin down when AI was first truly developed as what is and is not AI can sometimes be somewhat hard to pin down. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just defer to Wikipedia which states that the first AI programs were written in 1951 to play checkers and chess.

In 2023, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, it was written:

“‘it is no longer possible to accurately distinguish’ human-written text from text created by large language models”

So in just 72 years, AI has accomplished something that took humanity 189,000 years. As such, we are now here:

α: Observable reality is truth.

β: Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.

γ: We observe a wide variance of intelligence across living organisms.

δ: According to our definition of intelligence (β), we can think of it as a spectrum and there is no reason to believe that humans represent an upper limit. As far as we know, there is no upper bound to intelligence.

ε: AI has steadily, and at an accelerating rate, improved its capabilities in a wide variety of domains.

…

1. It is possible that AI will someday exceed human intelligence.

How does all this look?

Socrates: Good so far.

Aditya: Great, moving along. Now for my last claim:

ζ: It is reasonable to believe that AI’s rate of intelligence improvement will not only continue at the current speed, but also accelerate.

According to the AI Digest’s visual explainer on “How fast is AI improving?”, we see that “Performance usually improves predictably with time and money.” They list out various examples across many domains, including medicine, marketing, math, etc., and show that over time, the bigger and more complex models tend to perform better across a variety of benchmarks.

Furthermore, the Epoch Research Institute which focuses on trends in AI has shown that many key inputs such as the amount of computing used and money invested in training are only continuing to increase at higher rates.

As such, this should bring us to the point of bridging the gap from α → 1:

α: Observable reality is truth.

β: Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.

γ: We observe a wide variance of intelligence across living organisms.

δ: According to our definition of intelligence (β), we can think of it as a spectrum and there is no reason to believe that humans represent an upper limit. As far as we know, there is no upper bound to intelligence.

ε: AI has steadily, and at an accelerating rate, improved its capabilities in a wide variety of domains.

ζ: It is reasonable to believe that AI’s rate of intelligence improvement will not only continue at the current speed, but also accelerate.

1. It is possible that AI will someday exceed human intelligence.

So that’s it! What do you think?

Socrates: Thank you for laying all that out. I must say this all sounds plausible to me. However, I am aware that while AI may someday exceed human intelligence, there are many intelligent people out there who say that it is highly unlikely. Have you taken the time to read any of their counterarguments?

Aditya: Well, not really 😅.

Socrates: I see. Well, how about we do that?

Aditya: Alright, let’s do it! But this post is already getting quite long, so maybe let’s focus the next post on that?

Socrates: Sounds like a plan!

Aditya 🤝 Socrates

That’s all for Part 1! Thank you all for reading this post, it means a lot 😀. I am currently envisioning several more parts to this series, maybe 9 more. I was thinking that as I have 5 key claims, I could write out 5 posts outlining my arguments for why they are true and 5 posts outlining counterarguments.

Also, feel free to let me know if you have any feedback on my writing! As my goal is to become an AI safety researcher someday, I will presumably be doing a lot of writing so if you have any feedback at all, especially in terms of how I can write with more clarity, then please let me know!

Thanks again for reading this post! 😄

You can find part 2 here.

Hmmm, where to begin? I wanted to describe something of a detailed plan for how I am going become an AI safety engineer and a meditation teacher. However, I think I will start with a brief update.

This past week has been largely spent on struggling with how to set up a proper blog. After much trial and error, I am happy to say I finally have something I am happy with. Thank you so much, Tyler Moore! Your YouTube tutorial was truly a lifesaver. Before watching that tutorial, the process of setting up my own website honestly felt like I was trying to push an immovable object with all my strength. I also want to express gratitude to the Astra theme, the Starter Templates plugin, and the Elementor website builder. It’s amazing how I was able to build my website without writing any code! Best of all, it was all free! 

Now then, moving onto the plan itself. I will start with the meditation teacher part. I think I have laid out the next steps fairly clearly:

So that’s essentially the status of things! I am actually tracking more tasks on a personal Notion workspace (which I am a huge fan of 😀 ). I was considering sharing a link to that here, but maybe I will do that at some later point 😛. 

Hmmm, let me see, is there anything else I would like to add regarding the status of my journey towards becoming a meditation teacher? Hmmm, I don’t think so! I guess one think I would like to add is that I feel a lot of gratitude right now for this blogging practice! It is common for me to feel like I am not “working hard enough” or that I am not “making enough progress.” But in reality, I am doing well! In fact, I am going to acknowledge this by saying good job, Aditya! I am very proud of you 🙂. Wow, it feels so nice to give myself positive affirmations like that, especially on a public place like this…it even feels a bit scary! What if people read this and think I’m a cringey weirdo! 😛 Oh well, I can’t please everyone, and if I had to pick, I will always prioritize pleasing myself! 😤

On a side note, I want to add that I cannot remember the last time my dad told me that he was proud of me, so I think it’s important for me to remember that even if important people in my life cannot give me the positive affirmations I crave, I can always give them to myself!

Anyways, side notes aside (not that I particularly mind side notes, to be honest 😛), let’s move on to the next section! The status of my quest towards becoming an AI safety engineer!

Admittedly, I have made relatively less progress on this, I think because I have been prioritizing setting up the site. I would make a table for this though I don’t believe it’s necessary. In a nutshell, I did a few tasks related to making connections in the AI safety community and also did one top secret task that I may or may not disclose at some later point 😛. Aside from that, I got some clarity about this interesting AI Safety learning program that I would like to apply for! I would mention it, but that’s also a secret. You may be asking, “Aditya, why are you keeping so many secrets?” Well, my response to that is….that’s also a secret! Anyways, if you really want to know, then just be patient and I may or may not reveal more details in the future!

Anyways, applying for this program requires me to learn quite a bit of information on a variety of research areas in AI safety! The cool thing about this application process is that I am confident that I will learn quite a bit regardless of whether or not I get accepted. Of course, I do hope I get accepted, but who knows. Admittedly, I am feeling a bit discouraged about my odds. Regardless, I will do my best! Even if I fail to get into this program, that doesn’t mean my journey to become an AI safety engineer needs it end! It simply means I will need to take a detour 😉.

The deadline for this program is November 17th (one of the streams has a deadline on November 10th) so I gratefully have much time to prepare at least one strong application, though I hope to do more. Once again, I want to express so much gratitude that there are paths being created for those interested in AI safety research outside of the need to do a four to five year PhD program.

Hmmm, let me see, is there anything else I want to add? No I think that should be it! Thank you for sticking along and reading this second post! Stay tuned for more at some later undetermined point. Admittedly though, I have high hopes that I will post soon considering I last intended to only post once a month but know we have posted again within a week! Let’s just hope I didn’t jinx things 😛.

Wow, so this is proving more fun than I thought. It’s so nice to begin a journey without feeling the pressure of wondering if I’ll ever reach the destination. It feels good to hold the intention to enjoy every moment for its own sake instead of simply using it as a means to an end.

Admittedly, I am feeling a bit nervous about posting this publicly. What if someone I know reads this blog? Won’t it be embarrassing if I publicly tell people that I want to become an AI safety engineer and that I am writing a blog so I can try this idea I read a while ago called learning in public? To clarify, it would be embarrassing because 1.) I currently have a minimal technical background and 2.) I will look like a big failure if I publicly declare this goal to everyone and then I later decide to give up.

Admittedly, part of the reason I wanted to make this public and attach my real name to this site was because the last time I tried this, I did it anonymously and it basically went nowhere. There are other reasons why I would like to try this method, however I think I will wait to share those reasons at some later point.

Regardless, maybe it’s okay to be a failure? I remember hearing that success is a poor teacher anyways. Also, most importantly, I just want to follow my enjoyment. And right now, this feels quite fun. Even the way I am writing this is very much off the cuff with little, to no organizing. My elementary school English teachers would be horrified that I am writing without making an outline beforehand *gasp*.

Anyways, all jokes aside. I would really love for this blog to be the most authentic expression of myself. And right now, having less organization and more off the cuff writing seems to be that.

So at the moment, I would like this blog to be the main place I document my journey of teaching myself on becoming an AI safety engineer. However, I am very much open to letting this blog organically develop into whatever it wants to develop into. I am thinking that this site may also include areas where I can include my project and research portfolio pertaining to AI safety!

On another note, as I have recently become interested in also learning to teach meditation, it would be cool if I later wrote about meditation, Buddhism, Art of Accomplishment, and other cool healing modalities. Once I become more experienced, maybe I could even add a page where people can book Calendly sessions with me to book free meditation coaching sessions! 😀

While I would admittedly be sad if none of this comes to pass, I’ll do my best to trust in myself and the universe that any or all of these things will happen if they are meant to happen. I guess we shall see what comes next. It’s still fun to dream though 🙂

Oh and as for when I will post next? Hmmm, let me see. I am tentatively thinking that I would like to blog at least once a month! Mainly to give an update on my journey in becoming an AI safety engineer. However, I am of course open to me blogging more or less than that. Much like following the breath in meditation, all I can do now is simply hold the intention to blog on this cadence. I wonder what I will actually end up doing…