I've lived in Minnesota, Madison, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, San Francisco, and New York. I'm 22. I don't know what that adds up to, but I've been trying to figure it out.

The thing I keep coming back to is that people are mostly products of the gravity they happen to fall into. The kid in SF chasing YC isn't choosing freely. He's being carried by a current. The izakaya bartender in Osaka isn't choosing freely either. Neither am I. We're all expressions of paths we got on without entirely meaning to.

In Korea I met someone who actually understood me. We ate melon soda ice cream and I remember thinking it was crazy. We sat in jazz bars and talked for hours. We stumbled home drunk postulating about what was true. The whole time I was with her, I knew it would end. You don't experience a thing the same way once you can see its expiration date. I do that with everything now.

In Paris I was nineteen and broke and somehow always drinking with someone at 3 a.m. We'd eat dinner at 9, leave the restaurant at midnight, find a bar, find another, end up at a kebab place at 4. One night two of us crammed onto a Lime scooter and almost crashed it into the Seine. I was meeting people for the first and last time, and knowing it. Paris taught me what transience feels like when it isn't lonely. You can be in something briefly and have it count.

In New York I learned to grind. Specifically: I learned to grind in a city that is honest about what it wants from you. Bonus checks. Dinners that cost more than my college rent. New York hands you the money and lets you decide what to do with it. SF doesn't do that. SF dresses up its grind in mission statements.

In the Bay Area I went on a hike with a girl. It was something like a date. She had gone to Berkeley, and the only thing she could talk about, the entire hike, was getting her little sister into Stanford. I think she was insecure about Berkeley in a way she couldn't admit, so she'd transferred the whole project onto her sister. What I remember most clearly is that she had no idea she was doing it. The Stanford fixation was, to her, just what a reasonable person talked about on a Saturday.

In Tokyo I met a fitness trainer who had won the Japanese version of American Ninja Warrior. I met models. I met bankers. I met a guy from Paris who had moved to Tokyo just for the fun of it. He lived in a communal house with eight other people. None of them were trying to be each other. None of them seemed to think their life was the obviously correct one. In SF every conversation ranks you. In Tokyo the rankings exist but they're plural, and people seem to have made peace with running on a different one than their neighbor.

There's one other person I want to mention. My next-door neighbor growing up was George. He went to MIT. He had a good career lined up. He moved to Japan instead. He didn't go for school or work or love. He just moved. He's in Japan now, making less than he'd make as a new MIT grad. He's the bravest person I know. He's the rarest thing in this essay: the person who saw and went. I don't know if I have it in me to do what he did. I think about it more than I'd like to admit.

Here is the part that took me a while to admit. I used to think the SF striver was missing something the izakaya bartender had figured out. I don't think that anymore. The Berkeley girl seemed happy. The izakaya bartender seemed free of the kind of ambition that follows me around. I can't tell whether that's wisdom, circumstance, or just a different idea of what a life is for. What I notice is that neither of them seemed to be thinking about the other lives. I am, all the time.

I broke that for myself. I've been to seven cities. I've watched the Berkeley girl and the izakaya bartender and the Paris kid at 4 a.m., and none of them, individually, would trade. But I've seen all of them, and I can no longer fully be any of them.

I've been trying to solve for the global maximum, the best hill to climb. The question isn't which hill. It's whether you can pick one and stay on it. Every time I start wanting one, another version of me interrupts. I'm standing at the fork, and I haven't picked.

It would be tempting to think of myself as outside this gravity. I'm not. My life is, in the scheme of things, pretty average. I'm an Asian guy who does computer science. The biggest risk I'll ever take is starting a company that fails, or becoming a content creator. The path I'm on ends with money. Some of it I'll make. Some of it I won't have to. I have a different gravity than the Berkeley girl or the izakaya bartender. I'm being carried by it just as steadily.

I should probably say I'd trade that for the bartender's life. I wouldn't. I like the money. I like the comfort. The gravity I keep complaining about is one I'm choosing, every day. Stepping off would feel like an insult to whatever momentum put me here. Sometimes I envy them. They get to want what they want. I do too. I just want mine to look nobler than it does.

But there are my parents. They left China for the United States. They came with a thousand dollars and couch-surfed. Almost no one does that. The few who do create the gravity their children get born into. They didn't hand me a script. They handed me a blank page. But a blank page bought with that much sacrifice is terrifying to write on. The luxury of being uncertain about what kind of life to live sits on top of the bravest thing anyone in my family has ever done. Total permission is its own kind of gravity.

The hardest question isn't whether I'll be happier or sadder for having seen so many lives. It's whether I'll ever have the nerve to be a statistical deviation on my own terms. If they bet everything they had on a thousand dollars and a stranger's couch, can I really bet what they earned me, just to be a disappointment? Or will my life just be the safe, predictable return on their investment?