I Want to Step Into the Fire and Burn to Death. I Think I’d Be Happy.

I want to step into the fire and burn to death.

And I think I’d be happy there.

I don’t really care what someone chooses to care about.

You could spend your life trying to become an incredible programmer. You could spend years trying to hit Radiant in Valorant.

I understand both of those people. I think having something you want that badly is amazing.

What I don’t understand is wanting nothing.

No dream. Nothing you want to become. Nothing that makes you wonder how far you could go if you really gave yourself to it.

To me, that is death.

I want the opposite. I want to do what I love, and I want to become terrifyingly good at it.

But that fire doesn’t burn the same everywhere.

I felt that at Amazon more than I expected to.

It was easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, and when I think about why, I keep coming back to the people I was surrounded by. There were people from Ivy League schools, people doing YC, people building their own things, people whose lives seemed to extend far beyond whatever happened to be written in their job description.

Of course that wasn’t everybody. Some people wanted a good career and a comfortable life. That’s fine.

But there were enough people who wanted more from themselves that it changed the atmosphere.

It changes what you think is normal.

You can be doing more than almost everyone around you and start to believe you must be somewhere near your limit. Then you enter a place where the people around you are doing just as much, sometimes much more, and the thing you were proud of suddenly stops looking extraordinary.

It becomes exciting!

Because now the limit you had in your head looks fake.

And once enough people are doing that to each other, it starts feeding itself. Someone around you does something you hadn’t considered possible, so you push further. Then maybe something you do has the same effect on someone else.

It also changed the way I think about places like Ivy League schools.

The credential obviously matters. So do the professors, money, connections, and everything else people normally point to.

But I think there is something powerful about simply concentrating a large number of people whose idea of a normal life is already a little distorted.

If you put enough people like that together, their sense of what is reasonable starts changing.

Starting a company stops being some mythical thing that people on the internet do because the person sitting next to you is doing it. Someone gets into YC. Someone spends a year obsessed with some strange problem. Someone decides to try something that would have sounded ridiculous back home.

Eventually the reference point moves.

Environment matters.

There are places where caring too much makes you strange, where every ambitious idea has to survive the friction of everyone around you asking why you would bother. You can still care in a place like that, but you spend more of yourself just keeping the thing alive.

I increasingly want to be deliberate about where I put myself because of that.

Programming has made me think about all of this even more because the amount of leverage available to a single person is becoming absurd.

AI can take something that used to require six hours and make it take two.

There is an obvious response to that. Take the four hours back.

I understand that completely.

But there is another response that I find much harder to stop thinking about.

Keep the six.

If I already loved building things when six hours bought me six hours of output, what happens when those same six hours suddenly buy me much more?

That possibility is intoxicating to me.

Not because I want to fill every second of my life with work. I just keep thinking about what happens when somebody who already cares deeply about a craft gets handed increasingly ridiculous amounts of leverage.

How much faster can you learn?

How many more times can you try and fail?

How far can you actually go?

I love building things. I love having some stupid idea and then realizing a day later that it exists now. I love finding software I care about enough that I want to contribute to it. I love discovering some new tool and immediately wondering what becomes possible because it exists.

When I’m doing that, I don’t feel like I’m giving my life away.

That is the part of my life I want more of.

Of course, there is an obvious problem with all of this.

Burnout.

I don’t know what happens if you live like this for ten years.

I don’t know when devotion turns into compulsion, or when something you love becomes something you resent. I don’t know whether there is some version of me ten years from now who looks back at all of this and thinks I was a fucking idiot.

I could pretend I have a clean answer to that, but I don’t.

I just keep imagining meeting that version of myself and asking whether he regrets the years spent doing things he genuinely loved.

And I have a hard time imagining him saying yes.

Maybe that’s naive.

But even if every fire eventually dies, I don’t think that means nothing happened while it was burning.

Things existed that didn’t exist before.

I became capable of things I wasn’t capable of before.

Some part of me changed because I cared enough about something to let it change me.

The fire gives something back.

That is probably why the metaphor still feels right to me despite everything wrong with it.

You burn, but it doesn’t hurt.

Or maybe it does sometimes. I don’t know.

It just doesn’t feel like being consumed for nothing.

I think one of my greatest fears is dying full of potential.

Not failure. Failure almost seems easier to accept. At least then I would know I tried something hard enough to fail at it.

What scares me is reaching the end with this enormous collection of things I could have done, could have learned, could have made, and having no idea which of them were actually possible because I spent my entire life preserving the possibility.

I don’t want to be potential man.

Potential seems valuable because it contains so many futures. But eventually you have to destroy most of them by actually becoming something.

I would rather do that.

Maybe I burn out someday.

Maybe I decide this entire way of thinking was wrong.

Maybe whatever I care about now stops mattering to me and I find something else.

I don’t know.

I still want to step into the fire.

And I still think I’d be happy there.