27 April 2026
From Output to Connection
Day 27 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts
I feel it's worth reporting on a significant internal shift I've had recently. The shift is one of orienting more towards relationships with other people over having some kind of abstract "impact" or research output.
The feeling is something like everything that I care about is related to making things better for other people. That is the goal that I have set for myself, and the research that I do is aimed at making the world better and safer for other people.
But I realised that I have neglected my actual relationships with other people. Often this is because of acting too distant, or being unable to "lean in" and be fully vulnerable. This is largely a protection mechanism for my ego, a way to avoid looking foolish.
But this is far from the optimal method to actually have a good life and to have good relationships with other people. By constantly avoiding the worst outcomes, it becomes impossible to ever achieve the best outcomes, because the best outcomes always contain a risk of looking like an idiot.
I feel like a human poured into a robot's frame, unable to achieve the full range of motion and feeling a huge amount of stress.
I am truly tired of this vision of living though. I would never choose this for myself. I want to be the kind of person who radiates goodness to everyone around him with no fear at all. Just a raw bundle of nerves, heart and muscle, totally exposed to the world and able to feel and absorb everything.
Critically, truly committing to the relationship view provides more serious stakes to life. If I actually care deeply about doing well by others and positively impacting them, then the work that I do has to truly be good for them. It can't just be good in the abstract, it has to be useful to real people.
In my mind I have often treated research contributions as somewhat abstract, but this is really more harmful than helpful. Being able to name a specific person or group who would be significantly impacted by a result seems like a great heuristic for whether something is worth doing.
Actually decisively choosing goals somehow throws a new cast over all the decisions I have available to me. When I have a strong goal, or something that I want to do a lot, it makes the tradeoff I am making much clearer. When I have a deadline to submit something on a given evening, as well as a best friend's birthday that evening, I have a much stronger incentive to finish with that deadline so I don't have to miss the important thing. Everything takes on greater meaning. I am doing this work so that I can go and spend time with these people that I care about, instead of wasting time procrastinating.
The same failure mode exists in social situations. Optimising for the abstract relationship or impression I want to make, rather than thinking about the person in front of me.
What's more, it feels extremely liberating for social situations to actually go in with this framing. How can I improve my relationships with people here that I care about? How can I find new ways to connect with the people here in this room such that I want to invest even more? How can I make the people here feel safer and more connected with each other?
The times when I am awkward or thoughtless are when I am most concerned about myself. How to get someone to like me, how to make myself look good, how to get away from these bad feelings. When framed more as how do I make my relationships with other people here better, it becomes simpler. Just say hi to people. Feel warmth towards them. Be vulnerable about how I feel. Be honest, curious, and helpful. Figure out how we might connect more in future, think of plans for things we can do together. All of these are much more downstream of the goal of making our relationship better than other goals.
David Brooks's The Second Mountain talks about this concept. That once you have spent a bunch of time searching for individual success you realise that you have actually been climbing the wrong mountain all along, and the real one is over there, and is primarily composed of relationships and other people. This feels a bit like seeing that second mountain.