What's next

What’s up my less-than-ten subscribers. I’ve been encouraging a friend to start writing on substack and almost forgot that I made a few posts quite some time ago. A lot has happened since then. So I’ve decided to make another post. Don’t want to go into details about EVERYTHING that’s happened over the last eight months, but to summarize:

• lived in SF for a month working on Surfer and then realized midway that I didn’t care about personal data

• lived in New York for four months and worked for a startup

• took a break from building side projects and spent a lot of time walking around Central Park, writing, and hanging out with friends

• solo traveled to Spain and Dubai (running with the bulls and hitting the beach were definitely the highlights)

I’ve been back now for almost two weeks and have started building again. But more importantly, I now have a direction that I want to build towards and a better sense of why I want to build. For that, I need to take you guys back to March 13th, 2020 when COVID hit.

I honestly don’t remember the first few weeks. What I do remember was that I found immense peace and clarity within myself. I had deleted all social media and was spending every single day reading, going on long bike rides, and reflecting. COVID gave us all a space to be alone with ourselves. In a world where distractions are everywhere and seem to get crazier and crazier every single day (GPT-5 was just released, for instance), finding space to be alone with ourselves is missing.

Someone once said that “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” In other words, we as humans are not built for the modern world in some ways. And over time, the people building these godlike technologies have figured this out. How is it that the internet and personal computers, which are arguably the greatest enablers to individual agency in history, are used to just distract ourselves with shit we genuinely don’t care about? Incentives, incentives, incentives. The great machine known as the attention economy. Attention is all you need, after all.

Now I don’t have a plan to fix the attention economy. After all, I’m just a jackass with wifi. But what I do fundamentally believe is that people are tired of living in a world that wants to hijack their focus 24/7. For those of you that disagree with me, let me point you to the countless screen time apps on the app store, digital therapy, and r/digitalminimalism.

The issue is it’s way more convenient to scroll TikTok or reels than do something about it. Building for convenience will get you very far and it’s a much bigger market than the countermarket. For instance, McDonalds is WAY bigger than Sweetgreen. But what’s the point of that. What’s the point of building if all you’re doing is exploiting human emotions to sell someone shit they don’t need (Note: I’ve definitely done this lol). Some people find that interesting. I don’t.

I want to rehumanize technology. Why is it that we have such a strange relationship with our phones? Why is it that these technologies that are supposed to save us time end up becoming such large time sinks? I could keep going.

The point is, this is what I care about. So I’m building a new idea in this space that I’ll launch in the next few days and iterate upon. If any of you have counterarguments to the points I’ve said above, I would love to discuss. Call me out on it.

That’s all for now.

- Sahil