The Filter I Didn't Know I Dropped

Three weeks in San Francisco, around founders who'd raised billions of dollars. It was everything I'd wanted, and it slowly turned me into a person I didn't choose.

I was standing in a room in San Francisco, surrounded by people who had raised billions of dollars, and I was more anxious than I had the sense to notice at the time.

This was supposed to be the best thing that had ever happened to me. I'd gotten into a startup program, the first year they ran it, and it dropped me into the city I'd been dreaming about since I was a kid. San Francisco. I wanted to be there because everything there is big. Big companies, big ideas, big money, people who had actually done the thing I kept telling myself I wanted to do. For three weeks I was in rooms with founders and CEOs whose names you would know, at companies I'd grown up hearing about. On paper it was a dream I'd actually caught.

And I was slowly losing my mind.

The setup

Every day, the message was some version of the same thing. You are the next generation. You are going to be the next founders. The next people who raise the money and build the companies that turn into the names on the buildings. That's a hell of a thing to hear when you're young, hungry, and already want it. So I did exactly what they were pointing me toward. I started scrambling to build a company right there in the middle of it. Meeting everyone I could get in front of. Pitching a version of myself that was going to raise a round, drop out of school, and go all in this second.

Somewhere in there I stopped being a person and started being a project I was behind on. Emotions were coming in faster than I could do anything with them. Excitement, pressure, comparison, this low background hum of am I behind, am I enough, is my idea big enough, is that guy already further along than me. And here's the part I want to be honest about. I didn't notice it happening. It didn't feel like something going wrong. It just felt like being there.

What was actually happening

I figured out what was going on later, and it took getting on a plane to see it.

Normally I have a way of sorting the stuff that comes at me. Something lands, and without thinking hard about it I can ask, is this mine to deal with or not. Can I actually affect this, or am I just harping on it. In regular life, with regular small problems, that sorting happens almost on its own. It keeps me focused on what matters and it quietly throws out the noise.

Out there, that sorting was just gone. And when your own filter isn't running, the input doesn't stop. You start processing all of it with whatever filter the room hands you. The room in San Francisco had a loud one. Raise the money. Get the status. Become the name. Measure yourself against the person next to you who's a step further along. I hadn't chosen that filter. I'd just soaked it up, because it was everywhere and I didn't have my own running to push back with.

I think this is true far outside of San Francisco. Everybody is running some filter on what deserves their attention and their worry. Almost nobody picked theirs on purpose. You get it from where you are, who you're around, and what's on your feed. And it's invisible while it's happening. You don't feel yourself getting more anxious or more materialistic or more obsessed with what people think of you. You can just slowly become it, and it feels like you.

The plane

The thing that snapped me out of it was leaving.

On the flight back to Maryland, out of that room for the first time in weeks, I could finally think. And what I landed on was uncomfortable. A lot of what I'd been frantically chasing out there wasn't even mine. I'd been pushed into wanting a very specific, generic version of the whole thing. Raise now. Drop out now. Go this second. Sitting on that plane, I was pretty sure that wasn't me. I still wanted to build something, I've wanted that for a long time and I still do, but there's a more realistic version of it, later, when I actually know more and have a plan that makes sense. The panic to do it all right now was the room talking, not me.

I just remember thinking, wow, that was a lot.

The framework I'd dropped

I realized that I used to be better at this. There was a stretch of my life, going through something just as intense, where I had a way of handling exactly this kind of flood, and it made all of it easier to carry.

It was the Stoics. I'd read Seneca and Marcus Aurelius my freshman year of college, and I remembered it helping a lot, but at some point I just stopped. That's probably why the framework wasn't there when I suddenly needed it. It isn't something you learn once and keep forever. It fades if you stop using it, like anything else.

So I picked the book back up.

What it actually is

And I want to actually say what Stoicism is, because I think most people carry around the wrong picture of it, including the half version I'd absorbed myself.

When people hear the word stoic, they picture the guy who feels nothing. Stone face, no reaction, grits his teeth and takes whatever comes. The internet has run with that and turned it into a whole personality, the unbothered alpha who's above having emotions in the first place. In that version, being stoic basically means shutting your feelings off and toughing it out.

That's not it. It's almost the reverse.

The actual Stoics, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, weren't trying to feel nothing. They were obsessed with a single question. What is actually worth spending yourself on. And their whole starting move is a split that sounds simple and is brutal to live. A small number of things are genuinely up to you. What you choose, what you do, where you point your attention, how you read a situation. Almost everything else is not up to you. What already happened, what other people think of you, how things turn out, the future you keep rehearsing in your head. They noticed that most human misery comes from dumping your energy into that second pile. Fighting what you can't change. Suffering things in advance that haven't happened and mostly never will.

Which is the line of Seneca's I keep coming back to. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. Sit on that one for a second, because it's almost rude how true it is. Most of what wrecks you on an average day isn't actually happening to you. It's a trailer your mind is running for a movie that never comes out. The interview that ends up going fine. The text that meant nothing. The worst case you can already feel in your chest that never shows up. You pay for it anyway, in advance, at full price.

So the practice was never about feeling less. It's about sorting. When something hits you, you run it through the split. Is this real and mine to deal with, or is it a story about something I can't control. If it's real and actually yours, like the deadline you're behind on or the conversation you keep dodging, you deal with it. If it's imaginary, you name it as imaginary and you stop feeding it. That's the filter I'd walked into San Francisco with switched off. Not a way to kill the feeling. A way to aim it at the things that are actually in the room.

The practice

And the part that makes me actually trust it is that the great Stoics never fully got there either. Marcus Aurelius ran the entire Roman empire, and his Meditations, the book people quote like scripture, is really just his private notebook. Page after page of him telling himself the same handful of things. People will be difficult, so what. You are going to die, so don't waste today. Stop caring so much what they think. Over and over, for years. You don't write the same reminder to yourself for a decade if it stuck the first time. He kept losing it and dragging himself back. That was the practice. The losing and the coming back was the whole thing.

I'm reading Seneca again now, running my own filter instead of the one San Francisco handed me. I feel more like myself than I did out there.

But I don't think this is something you read once and keep. That was my mistake the first time, treating it like a book I finished instead of something I have to maintain. The Stoics couldn't leave it alone either. Marcus wrote the same reminders to himself for years because the drift never stops coming for you. There's always going to be another room, another feed, another city ready to hand you its filter, and if you aren't watching for it you'll put it on without noticing. San Francisco was just what it looks like when I stop watching.

So the real work was never the one read. It's staying awake to the drift, and catching it sooner than I did this time. I'm not going to pretend I've got it figured out either. I caught it this time, later than I'd have liked, and I'll be continue to work on it. But I'll take that over the alternative. Another San Francisco. Wearing a life I didn't choose, and not noticing until I'm already on the plane home.