issue 001 — may 28, 2026
fulfilment
one L or two — and everything in between
twin peaks, san francisco
About once a month during my freshman year at Berkeley, I'd venture out to Twin Peaks. Bart to Civic Center, Muni to Haight Street, then a hike past some of the most insane houses I've ever seen. One magical sunset per month — usually after a midterm, a weekend I needed to get away from everyone, or just because the journey itself was the point.
When I look at San Francisco from up there — this city of opportunity, frontier, and dreams — I see a bubble. People only obsessed with the next move. UGC kids angling for CMO. A member of technical staff at a research lab thinking about jumping to Anthropic. Medical students wanting to become doctors. High schoolers trying to get into college. And in my eyes, the whole ecosystem: the sales hustlers, the Luma event organizers, the hackathon vibecoders.
Sitting down and looking at over a million people around me, I kept asking myself: what exactly am I fulfilling?
i — the american spelling
fulfilment
The dictionary definition is clean. Fulfilment: the achievement of something desired, promised, or predicted. One L. Notice what's missing — any mention of feeling good about it.
I'm a rising sophomore at Berkeley, which means I got thrown into an ecosystem that gives this word a completely different shape. You're 19, surrounded by people who treat every action as an instrument. Everything becomes a calculated move. This gets to you. You start doing the same thing. And then one day you look up and realize you filter everything — every single thing — through one question.
the only question that remains
will this matter 6 minutes, 6 hours, 6 days, 6 months, or 6 years from now?
If the answer is no, you don't do it. Learning the drums? No. Reading for pleasure? Debatable. Gardening just because you want to? Absolutely not.
That's the one-L version. You're achieving. You're moving. You have an internship for summer and you're already thinking about fall. You have goals for fall and you're already thinking about a year from now. The goal line keeps moving. You're never filled.
Never ful-filled. One L because something is always missing.
ii — the british spelling
fulfillment
I played carnatic violin for ten years. I did quizbowl. I was learning French for no reason. I sketched characters. I collected geography maps because the world genuinely fascinated me. None of it was for anything. It was just mine. It was who I am.
I don't do any of that anymore.
Not because I stopped liking those things. Because at some point I started asking what they were for. And that question is poison. The moment you apply ROI logic to the things that make you a person, they stop working. The violin could literally be in my hands right now and my brain would file it under "useless." The thing I would spend countless hours on — perfecting ragas, krithis, playing one song hundreds of times. Useless.
Each trade seems fine. Then one day the person who did those things for no reason just isn't there anymore.
disillusionment
That's not ambition. That's not being the top 1%. That's what happens when you've been in a high-pressure environment long enough that your baseline — the version of you with actual preferences — gets quietly dismantled, one reasonable trade at a time.
The uncomfortable truth is that I'm now numb to enjoying those things. I can't spend an hour absorbed in a 1940s map of India the way I would have five years ago without my mind pulling somewhere else. You make a resolution — not even an unrealistic one. Just: do something every day for one hour that genuinely satisfies you. A lot of people never tap into that again. Those hobbies just go. Forever.
iii — what it actually means
alignment
Here's what I think fulfillment actually is. Not achievement. Not constant joy. Something quieter.
It's the person doing the thing and the person you actually are occupying the same body at the same time. Not performing ambition. Not running a version of yourself optimized for external legibility. Just being the same person inside and outside the room.
I've been split for a while. The split is what emptiness actually feels like. You can hit every goal on the list and still feel hollow — because the person hitting those goals isn't really you. It's a mask you built to survive a particular environment, and somewhere along the way you forgot the mask isn't the face.
From Twin Peaks, San Francisco looks like everything. But I stopped seeing the city. I stopped noticing the pizzerias open since the 1906 earthquake, the houses older than the startup ecosystem by a century. I just saw the bubble.
That's the cost of optimizing everything and feeling nothing. You lose the view.
Pick up the drums. Cook something new. Record a dance video. Shoot some photos. Your definition of fulfillment isn't what you think it is — and that's exactly where you start.
— vaibhav hariram