issue 002 — june 10, 2026
environmental conditioning
how much of what you want was chosen vs handed to you by the loudest voice in the room you happened to be in at 18?
I'm sitting in Apex, North Carolina this week. Not Berkeley. Not SF. Same person. Different room. And for the first time in a while, the noise is gone.
Nobody around me is thinking about seed rounds. Nobody's posting about their summer at AWS. Nobody's asking what agent framework you're using or whether you've tried Claude Code. It's refreshing. It feels like I've traveled back in time, to around 9 months ago before I began college. But I'm noticing something uncomfortable. I'm not sure how much of me travels with me when the room changes.
The question that keeps surfacing is simple but hard to sit with: yes, I love startups, CS, tech, all of that. But would I love it the way I do if I'd never walked onto that campus? If I'd never walked underneath the faded turquoise of Sather Gate, looking up at the Campanile, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the SF skyline from Grizzly Peak?
i — osmosis
the room decides
My friends back home react differently to everything I say. Not dismissively, just differently. The things that feel urgent in SF don't carry the same weight here. And that gap started making me wonder.
If I'd ended up in Chicago, would I be deep into quant right now? NYC, would I be tracking bond spreads instead of worrying about what Claude Mythos is going to look like? Same person, different room, completely different ambitions.
That's not passion. That's osmosis.
Which means somewhere underneath all of it is a version of me that existed before any room got to him. Before Berkeley. Before SF. Before the startup ecosystem handed me a set of things to want.
I've been trying to figure out who that person is.
ii — elsewhere
any other room on earth
Food for thought. What would my life look like on the streets of Marseille, screaming wesh and olololo as a panna baller? Or growing up on Rishiri Island in Hokkaido, fishing town, 5,000 people, no startup ecosystem for thousands of miles. Or if I was really anywhere else on Earth?
whether I'm in
Mogadishu · Mumbai · Moscow · Melbourne
that answer changes
I think about these places more than I probably should. I've never been to Marseille. I've never been to Hokkaido. But I've been fixated on both, and so many other places, from simply watching YouTube videos about places that had nothing to offer me career-wise and everything to offer me as a person who just found the world genuinely interesting.
Back then, I didn't ask what a place could do for me. I just wanted to know it existed.
iii — before the noise
the pre-environment self
I've written about this before — the violin, the maps, the French nobody asked me to learn. But what I didn't say is that those things all share something. None of them came from a room. Nobody around me was doing quizbowl. Nobody handed me an obsession with Bohemian villages or told me to be fixated on a lake in South Africa I'd only seen in pictures. That stuff came from somewhere quieter. Somewhere before the noise.
The pre-environment me wasn't optimizing for anything. He was just paying attention to the world because the world was worth paying attention to.
Somewhere between that kid and Berkeley, the question changed. It stopped being what's out there and became what's useful. The curiosity didn't die, it got redirected. Pointed at things that compound. AI B2B SaaS instead of island geographies. Cold emails instead of geography bees. The same energy, completely different target.
And I'm not sure I chose that. I'm not sure anyone does.
iv — the honest answer
all of it is real
Here's what actually unsettles me about all of this.
I can't cleanly separate what I genuinely want from what I was handed. The startup obsession feels real. The drive to build feels real. The love for SF, complicated as it is, feels real. But so did the Marseille fixation. So did Rishiri Island. So did every version of myself I might have become in a different room at 18.
Maybe the honest answer is that all of it is real and none of it is entirely mine. You absorb the room you're in. You start wanting what the people around you want. You optimize for what gets rewarded in your specific ecosystem. That's not weakness, that's just how humans work.
The question is whether you ever stop and look at what you're carrying and ask where it actually came from.
I'm not saying Berkeley was wrong for me. I'm not saying SF is a mistake. I'm saying I walked into both of them at 18 without knowing they'd hand me an entire set of ambitions I'd spend years assuming were my own.
The pre-environment me is still in there. I can feel him when the noise goes quiet. When I'm in Apex and nobody's talking about seed rounds. When I'm watching a YouTube video about a fishing village in Minas Gerais at 2am for no reason I can justify.
He didn't go anywhere. He's just been waiting for me to turn the noise down long enough to hear him.
If you stripped away every room you've ever been in — every school, every city, every ecosystem that shaped what you think you want — what would actually remain?
I'm still figuring that out. But I think that's the most important work there is.
— vaibhav hariram