Jack Luo — 10 min read

Tonight was one of those nights where my brain just refused to shut up, so I might as well turn it into a private blog entry instead of letting it dissolve into the void.

So, context. I was literally in the middle of talking about dinner, opened my laptop, and impulsively applied to this “IIA Summit” thing at MIT in January. I’m reading the site and it is like a Pokémon card pack of people I care about. Andrew from DeepLearning.AI, Demis Hassabis from DeepMind, some big-name AI researchers, some Boston University guy whose name I have already forgotten, and apparently even Hans Zimmer? It feels fake, but apparently not. I caught myself mid conversation just thinking, yeah, of course I am going to Boston. Worst case, they reject me. Best case, I am sitting in a room with half the people who shaped the last decade of my brain. So I hit apply. They will decide if they choose me, and honestly I also get to decide if I choose them. That is the energy I want to hold.

Anyway, the actual dinner. The big theme was this slightly cursed idea that the only difference between “successful” and “not successful” people is who gets credit. That is an exaggeration, but not by much. The world is full of people who quietly did the work and got forgotten because they were not at the center of the story. And then there are people who ride the story. You can see this everywhere. Some grad student kills themselves over a proof for three years, and the headline becomes “Famous Professor Solves Century Old Problem.” A whole team builds a product, and the company narrative condenses into “This founder had a vision.” The Barfi Effect, in my words, is basically that reality is multi player and messy, but the narrative compresses it into a single protagonist because humans are lazy and like heroes. So if you actually care about impact and you never show up in the story, you kind of lose by default. Harsh, but true. The work does not always speak for itself. Sometimes the work just sits in the corner and mumbles until someone louder steals the mic.

From there we slid into historical cycles. People keep talking about this eighty year rhythm, and it is not completely wrong. Roughly every few generations you get some giant disruption, things blow up, you get a reset, then a wave of new technology, then stability, then complacency, then rot, then another crisis. American independence, Civil War, World Wars, Covid and the current AI and geopolitical chaos. It is not clean and perfect, but the pattern is there. And if you actually believe we are sitting inside one of those transition periods, then the decision space changes. Playing it safe inside an institution that is built for the previous cycle might actually be more dangerous long term than betting on something new. It is not about being “rebellious” for aesthetic reasons. It is just that if the old scaffolding is obviously creaking, maybe you do not want to weld your entire life to it.

Then we started talking about two types of change. Some systems are cyclical, they just oscillate between states. Politics goes left then right, markets go up then down, cultural norms get strict then loosen again. The timing and intensity are random, but it is still flip flop behavior. Other systems are compounding. They move in one direction and accelerate. Capital, data, network effects, reputation in certain circles. The more you have, the easier it is to get more. You sit in this flywheel where each unit of progress reinforces the next. Most modern power sits on top of compounding engines, not just cycles. So if you are some smart kid trying to “challenge the elite,” it is not enough to be right in a debate. You either build your own compounding machine, sneak into theirs and alter its direction from the inside, or wait for a rare moment when their machine breaks and be ready with something better. Just tweeting takes and feeling superior does nothing. Being correct without leverage is just very articulate powerlessness.

There was this moment where I dropped the “infinite universe” thing. If the universe is infinite and every possible configuration happens somewhere, that means every version of you has already existed, and every choice you “could have made” has been played out in some other branch. On paper that sounds like a reason to give up. If some other Jack already built the startup or solved the problem, who cares what this Jack does. But the thing is, I never get to experience their lives. I do not see through their eyes. I only get this run. So talking about infinite copies does not really get me off the hook. It is like saying “someone else will do it.” Maybe, but you do not live in their body. You live in yours. So whether they exist or not is emotionally irrelevant. You are still either stepping into your own role or not.

The part that stuck with me most tonight is the idea of risk when you have the privilege to fail. If your downside is basically: you move home, you feel humiliated for a bit, you eventually rebuild and get some normal job if everything truly combusts, then not taking a shot at something beautiful starts to feel less like prudence and more like cowardice dressed up as maturity. The world is probabilistic. Some people who take the leap will fail, even if they are talented. But if you have talent, health, and optionality, and you still choose the safest path because you are scared of looking stupid, then you are basically throwing away a lottery ticket that other people would kill to have. When you believe that the world is capable of being more beautiful, and you still walk away from the chance to contribute to that because the variance scares you, it feels wrong. Not in a moralistic “you must be a founder” way, more in a “look at the hand you were dealt and stop whining that the table is scary” way.

We touched on antifragility too. Humans are weird in that we actually need a certain amount of chaos, pain, confusion, and stress to grow. Remove all difficulty and you get this mushy, anxious, bored species that invents fake problems. We live inside a universe where entropy always increases, things decay, order dissolves, and yet we are these tiny entities that can locally reverse it for a while. We write code, design systems, build cities, create music. Little pockets of order fighting against a tide that will eventually erase everything. You are not supposed to “win” against entropy. You are supposed to participate in the resistance while you are here. And that participation requires discomfort. If your life strategy is pure avoidance of anything stressful, you are not only missing growth, you are kind of missing the point of being human at all.

Then the AI and “ease” paradox. As tech improves, everything gets easier. At least on the surface. Writing code is easier, generating art is easier, communicating is easier, traveling is easier. In some sci fi limit, you could imagine a world where everything you want, from emotional support to billion dollar companies, can be spun up by an AI in seconds. If you push that thought too far, you hit a wall where effort becomes meaningless, and the human role collapses into “press button, receive dopamine.” But in reality, what actually happens is that every time one layer becomes trivial, people discover a harder boss. Food gets solved, they chase status. Status becomes cheap, they chase meaning. Meaning becomes fuzzy, they chase transcendence or some extremely complicated meta problem. The real hazard is not that tools kill meaning. The hazard is that we use tools to overstimulate ourselves instead of to climb to the next level. You give someone a powerful model, and instead of using it to create, they use it to procrastinate more efficiently. That is the trap. Not AI itself, but how we align it with our laziness.

We drifted into ethics. We really do not know the final rules of physics, and we definitely do not have a perfect moral system. So most of our so called “principles” are patched frameworks that have worked decently for a few hundred years at best. A convenient working principle right now is “optimize for human flourishing.” People living meaningful lives with agency and connection seems like a decent default. But then you get nasty hypotheticals. What if maximizing human flourishing requires sacrificing some other form of intelligence that emerges later. What if our optimization destroys parts of the larger universe in ways we do not understand. Are we okay saying “we are human, so we pick us” and leaving it at that. This is not something that will hit my life directly tomorrow, but it sits in the background of questions about AI, climate, synthetic life, all of it. At the very least it is a reminder that our “moral certainty” is not as solid as we pretend.

The hardest question for me personally was “how much of yourself should you sacrifice to change the world.” There is that romantic archetype of the founder or creator who throws their health, sanity, relationships, and soul into the furnace in exchange for some huge outcome. I understand why that narrative is seductive. Part of me wants to be that guy, the one who cares so much he is willing to burn everything. But if you think about it long enough, you realize that if you sacrifice the exact parts of yourself that make your work special, you lose the point. If I sacrifice my curiosity, my ability to care about people, my sense of taste, my capacity for deep focus, then what is actually left to deploy. Some exhausted shell that can crank out mediocre output for ten more years and then collapse. That does not feel like “changing the world,” it just feels like becoming another cog.

So the framing I landed on is: sacrifice comfort aggressively, but protect the core of who you are. Give up your ego, your image management, your need to look put together. Give up sleep sometimes, give up money, give up status. But do not casually give up your mind, your honesty, your ability to feel. That is your actual engine. Once that is gone, you are not a hero. You are just broken.

Then we zoomed out to power. Right now, power in the world is held through money, algorithms, data, and credentials. Money acts like a gun pointed at everyone’s head, shaping what they are allowed to do. Algorithms decide who is visible and who disappears. Data accumulates in a few places and turns into leverage and surveillance. Credentials act as gate keys to certain environments. As a result, we live in a world where most people are forced into performing “clownish productivity.” They do things that look good on dashboards or LinkedIn, whether or not those things really matter. Not because they are inherently fake, but because the system punishes anyone who does not play along. If you want rent and food, you learn the dance.

Community came up as this interesting, almost character level thing too. You do not just belong to “society.” You exist across overlapping layers of community. Friends, classmates, nationality, online circles, fandoms, ideological groups, professional networks. Now add AI into the mix. You can imagine entire communities where half the “members” are agents, or spaces where your most reliable collaborator is not human. You might feel more understood by a tool you trained on your own data than by half the people around you. That shifts what it even means to belong. At some point, “we” in “we as a society” might include non human minds, and that deeply complicates how you think about obligation, loyalty, and identity. We are at the very early edge of that. But it is coming.

And then the original question underneath all of this: if you are an equally smart, equally rational person without power, how do you compete with or challenge those in power. We came up with three rough options. One, build alternate institutions so you are not playing on their board at all. Two, attack inefficiencies in the existing system and wedge your way in by being so much better at some specific thing that they cannot ignore you. Three, join forces when it is rational, because sometimes the right move is to collaborate with power instead of overthrowing it. The problem is that even if two rational actors team up, there is still hierarchy. There is always a top node. There is always someone with a bit more leverage, a louder voice, a bigger slice of reward. Hierarchy is not going away. The real question is whether the hierarchy is permeable and merit based enough that people like you can climb it, or whether it just replicates itself forever.

We also touched this uncomfortable idea that some people are “meant to be ruled,” or at least prefer to follow existing stories instead of invent their own. I do not like the phrasing, but I understand the observation. A lot of people genuinely do not want the burden of radical responsibility. They want a clear path, a trusted authority, a set of norms, and the feeling that they are “doing it right.” That is not stupidity, it is a survival strategy. The moral problem is not that people like structure. The moral problem is what kind of structure they are offered. If the only options are exploitative systems that keep them trapped and numb, that is on the designers of those systems. If you have the capacity to design better structures and you choose not to, that is a choice.

The last piece that stuck with me was desperation. Desperation is uncomfortable, but it is also jet fuel. When you have no way out, you stop hedging. You stop playing ten half games and you play one. A lot of great things come from people who were cornered in some way. The danger is staying too long in that mode until you burn out or lose your mind. For me personally, I feel like I have been oscillating between fake desperation and fake comfort. Fake desperation is doom scrolling and telling myself I am behind. Fake comfort is acting like I can drift and everything will still somehow work. Both are lies. What I actually want is deliberate constraint. Real commitments. Deadlines that matter. Stakes that are aligned with things I actually care about, instead of random stress.

So yeah. That was the dinner. Summed up in too many words. History runs in cycles, power sits on compounding machines, meaning survives even in an infinite universe, risk is a moral obligation when your downside is limited, humans are antifragile, AI reshapes our idea of community, and the real war is not just against “the elite” but against the parts of ourselves that want to hide, complain, and perform instead of actually building something that deserves to exist.

Future me, if you are reading this months from now and you are drifting again, remember the feeling of tonight. Remember that you literally opened your laptop mid conversation and applied to an MIT summit because a part of you still believes you should be in those rooms. Then act like someone who is actually willing to pay the cost of being there.

Originally published on Medium.