The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.
[He] cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
There are two forces that have shaped me more than any others.
The first is a kind of existential unrest – an epistemic and ontological insecurity that first surfaced during that classic teenage existential crisis so common among inquisitive minds.
Like most, the pressing manifestations of this crisis took the form of questions too vast for me – those questions humanity has pursued for millennia, whose answers remain shrouded in inconclusivity:
- Why am I here?
- What is all this?
- Why does any of it matter?
I never quite moved on. That discomfort ossified into something enduring.
The second is a deep, almost spiritual reverence for the natural world – both its surface charm and its internal architecture. The elegance of physical law. The austerity of mathematics. The haunting precision with which the universe sustains itself.
My life has turned around the axis of these two forces: the wound and the beauty. I am trying, in essence, to understand enough of the universe to no longer feel at its mercy, to seek truth not as an abstract ideal, but as an act of self-defense.
Physics was the first tool I reached for. It remains, to me, the most principled, potent instrument for cutting through illusion.
My curiosity now radiates outward; to AI, cognitive science, neuroscience, economics, engineering, as converging paths to the same end: the transcendence of inherited constraint. The ability to gently bend the hardware of reality toward a more complete freedom. The power to co-author the laws of one’s own existence. To bask in the beauty and sublimity of such work is only a fortunate side effect.
I am not loyal to any one discipline or persona. I will be whatever the frontier demands: thinker, builder, theorist, poet. My compass is trajectory — whatever will most capably reveal structure beneath chaos and allow me to model the world better.