Hi there!
I’m Mark, and welcome to The Middle Path. This post is the beginning of what I hope to be a long journey of “writing in public”. But first, I want to take a moment to explain the motivation for this newsletter, describe the topics it will cover, and introduce myself.
What is the Middle Path?
I was first introduced to the idea of the Middle Path, also known as the Middle Way, during a twelve-week Buddhism course at a meditation center in NYC. The popular Buddhist magazine Tricycle explains the concept by recounting the life of the Buddha:
Before he was known as the Buddha, or Awakened One, he was Siddhartha Gautama, a wealthy nobleman living in luxury. But later he left his home, renounced that lifestyle, and embraced the other extreme, becoming an ascetic practicing mortifying austerities . . . Close to death, the Buddha abandoned his austere practices and the ascetics he had been practicing with, and shortly after that he encountered a young woman named Sujata, who offered him a meal of rice and milk, restoring his energy. Having found fault with both extremes, the Buddha embraced a path in between, the Middle Way.
Though this may seem like straightforward advice for moderation, the underlying lesson is more profound. The Middle Path is a call to reject any sort of dualism, or diametrically opposed pair, entirely.
In the past few years, I’ve started to rely on this concept more and more for navigating my life’s most pressing questions. It has guided my answers to questions like: how can I be highly effective in a demanding job without feeling constant stress and anxiety? How can I live with both self-discipline and self-compassion? How can I form independent opinions on complex political and ethical issues, especially in a highly pressurized cultural environment?
Over the next few months, I’ll dig into these questions. In the domain of happiness and well-being, I’ll explore ideas around compassion, gratitude and meaning. In the domain of meditation and mindfulness, I’ll explore concepts within consciousness, neuroscience, and mental training. In the domain of work and art, I’ll explore the role of technology, ambition, creativity, and cultural values in our professional lives. In the domain of politics and morality, I’ll explore themes around right action, meaningful discourse, and reasonable policy. Occasionally, I may also veer totally outside of these domains.
Though the scope of these topics is broad, every post will be in service of answering the fundamental question: “What does it mean to live a good life?”
I hope you’ll join me on this journey, as I try to better understand how we can make the most of this brief, miraculous life.
My Path So Far
In my final years of high school, I started to feel the fundamental tension of my young adulthood: deciding between a life of ambition and a life of contemplation.
This tension only grew stronger in college. The tech ecosystem was booming, and it seemed to provide the clearest path towards satisfying my ambition and becoming wildly successful. Working backwards from my imagined future as the next Mark Zuckerberg, I chose to major in Computer Science.
However, when it came to the actual CS curriculum, I quickly found my heart wasn’t in it. I managed the assignments and exams well enough, but I rarely felt genuinely excited learning the material. Some people are born to build computers and write software; I am not one of them (sorry Woz!).
I found my real passion in liberal arts seminar courses where we discussed and debated questions about how to improve ourselves and our society. I felt simultaneously energized and at ease in these environments, like I was swimming downstream. In my free time between classes, I started practicing meditation and reading about Buddhism.
When I first graduated from college, my goal was to become a product manager at a high-growth education startup. After five years working as a software engineer, I moved into a product management role at Lambda School. This felt like the job of my dreams - the perfect way to marry my CS degree with my passion for learning and education. Now I would find the lasting happiness, meaning, and contentment that had eluded me since college.
Nope.
Unfortunately, my identity and sense of self-worth were wrapped up inextricably with the success and failure of the company. I continued to work long hours, and the anxiety that had manifested over the previous years remained a constant companion. Though I worked with incredible people and believed whole-heartedly in the company mission, I realized this job was a local maximum instead of a global maximum in terms of my satisfaction with my work. I realized it was time to start climbing a new hill.
Then, I got laid off. A few weeks ago, Lambda School laid off about one-third of the company’s staff. Just like that, I was plucked from the top of the mountain I had worked so hard to ascend, and placed back at the bottom.
My initial instinct was to race back to the top of that mountain by applying to every PM job I could find. However, I soon realized the motivation behind this instinct was simply to reclaim lost territory and restore my professional identity as a PM in tech.
Once I had acknowledged this, it felt like a magnet that had suddenly lost its charge. The impulse was still there, but I no longer felt compelled by it. Instead, I started to think of my present situation as an opportunity to change course and explore a different mountain.
This newsletter is my first step toward that second mountain. It is my attempt to forge a middle path of my own, one of both ambition and contemplation, and to refocus on the questions that make me feel truly alive.
Thanks for joining me,
Read of the week: Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings newsletter is the best thing to arrive in my inbox each week. (And yes, I still think that is true even though I subscribe to my own newsletter.) In her midweek edition last week, she covered Kierkegaard’s philosophy on unhappiness.
The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.
Listen of the week: In this episode of Dan Harris’s 10 Percent Happier podcast, he talks to author George Saunders. (Saunders’ book Lincoln in the Bardo is among my all-time favorites. But reader beware: it will bring a torrent of emotions.) Given my interest in both writing and Buddhism, this duo was a perfect match. During their conversation, they cover a broad range of topics, including: how writing resembles meditation, how to integrate our vocation with our spiritual path, the definition of kindness, and inquiries into what may await us after death.
Watch of the week: The Youtube channel Kurzgesagt produces some of the best educational (and mind-bending) videos on the internet. Last week, they released a video about how more and more of the universe is becoming unobservable to us (to the tune of about 60,000 stars per second!).
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Yessss!!! Can’t wait to follow your journey!!
Congrats on starting this journey, Mark! Excited for you and love the writing already.
"Working backwards from my imagined future as the next Mark Zuckerberg, I chose to major in Computer Science." 🤣 I felt that.