Hey, y’all! It’s been a while since I’ve popped anything in this newsletter. Every time August rolls around, I get random bursts of creativity and inspiration that stem from the anticipation of turning older. While birthdays continue to lose their luster, my fascination with the world consistently expands. Since 2021, a lot has transpired after I went fully nomadic and started wandering the Middle East. The unifying thread that I tell myself: A constant search: for culture, for conversation, for connection.
If solo backpacking has taught me any valuable lesson, it’s that constant change never goes away. Another year of earned wisdom tells me that the most important thing is to pay close attention to your levels of curiosity, comfort, and contentment so that you’re living the way you want to. If not, you can always reset and re-calibrate.
Last year I published a thorough “life-in-review” and conjured 10+ different custom frameworks to highlight the most formative experiences in my first quarter of life. Slightly self-aggrandizing, but playfully introspective. Today’s piece trades the typical technicality for more subtle sentiments about different approaches to live life fully.
I want to distill three major life elements to help illuminate the winding labyrinth called the “Late-20s”. In classic sam’s sandbox fashion, I’ve crafted a three-part model that serves as our guiding compass to navigate what it means to run life experiments, what it means to build taste, and what it means to enter scenes. We love feedback loops around here, so let me introduce you to the Fluxus Flywheel:
PS. Today I’m eschewing my love for spontaneity and taking myself on a planned date for my 26th. If you’re curious about how I structured my itinerary, take a peek here!
1) “Yes And, Sam”: On Experimentation 🔬
Shaping spontaneity: an experimental life is an exciting one!
Recently I’ve been obsessed with an avant-garde artistic movement in the early 1960s called Fluxus. Let’s just linger on this word for a moment — saying it out loud slowly produces a certain kind of strength in your speech, doesn’t it? The root definition of flux implies “continuous flow or change”, which really mirrors the emergence and evolution of events in our own lives.
Birthed by Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus was an artistic revolution where a fluid international group of artists, poets, and musicians came together with a shared impulse to integrate art and life. An illustrious bunch, notable contributors included Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and Alison Knowles. The nucleus of the movement thrived in New York, but cities like Berlin and Tokyo quickly adopted this quirky style. Fluxus resists categorization and embraces absurdist humour, involving spontaneous physical expression and democratizing creativity in a DIY fashion. This form is special precisely because it is atypical. Maciunas on flux:
“When asked to define Fluxus, Maciunas would often respond by playing recordings of barking dogs and honking geese, perhaps confounding his questioner but also demonstrating the experimentation and embrace of absurdity at its core.
Fluxus’s signature insight was that the best things in life are simple and often free. Fluxus was both a movement as well as a rebellion against the rigors of movements.”
I surface this fragment of art history because if you dissolve my current lifestyle into a boiling pot of water and extract the two most essential ingredients, the result is a strong affinity for experiences and experiments. This coincides with the core tenets of Fluxus and is why the movement resonates so strongly. The philosophy of “anti-art” is to collapse the boundaries between art and life by encouraging experimental thinking.
It’s no surprise that my favourite comedians of this generation — Nathan Fielder, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Bo Burnham — have developed the most profound art forms through intentional experimentation. They’ve directly tested bold big bets that range from unorthodox consulting services (Nathan For You, The Rehearsal) to fictional foreign journalism (Borat) to technology-induced existentialism (Bo Burnham: Inside).
To me, that’s best-in-class performance art: making people laugh, think, and feel deeply, while also shining a critical light on the most intriguing and insidious parts of human behaviour. Embodied parody, cringe comedy, method acting, mask work — you can brand the art form in dozens of different ways, but the takeaway is the same. Each of these comedians cracked the code on their own personal style and taste after thousands of thought experiments and field experiments.
“Okay, this is all great and nice and we can appreciate the idea of Fluxus, but how does this lead us to discover and develop taste?”
Let’s add shape to the spontaneity. It’s not too useful going through life just by trying random activities or hobbies once and calling it a day. This is generally okay, but we’ll have to be a bit more intentional if we want to develop taste. Of course, people try new things on a regular basis using the same language: I’m testing a new 5-step skincare routine OR I’m experimenting with hot saunas and ice baths. What usually tends to happen is that there’s a lack of accountability and integration with these tests — not only because of a lack of interest or momentum but a lack of guardrails and processes for learning.
As a Growth PM, I run product experiments for a living. I’m laser-focused on iterating and learning, when I tinker with the observed user experience or when I conduct large-scale statistical tests on our core features. We can adapt the same experimentation framework to expand our field of personal possibilities. The Yes, And principle comes back into play, where we superimpose our initial curiosity (“What do we want to try next?”) into actionable progress (“AND How does this help me develop my taste?”)
2) “Delicious, Nutritious”: On Taste 🍵
Cultivating identity: a taste-filled life is a richer one!
Taste is an interesting segue from experimentation because unlike the latter, it’s such a hard concept to pin down. Taste is usually tied to the philosophy branch of aesthetics. When someone has “good taste”, it means they appreciate the beauty and complexity of something “tasteful”. People typically conflate taste with any of its close cousins: interest, preference, and passion. These are related, but they’re passive: they don’t articulate the nuances in interpretation, expression, and action of tastefulness.
To me, taste is an important part of cultivating a multivariate identity detached from just work life or a basic set of interests. It takes a lot of consumption and curation to refine our tastes. Taste is also inherently mimetic at first: we sponge up the massive pools of likes and dislikes floating around in our immediate circles. Important life decisions are made with our inner taste programming that runs in the background — where we chose to live, what we keep in our homes, how we nourish our bodies, and what we choose in a life partner.
An important callout is that both appreciation and creation are forms of taste, but we don’t necessarily need both. I explored this idea last year in Appreciating Art for Non-Artists, where I argue that anyone has the capacity to engage meaningfully and introspectively with all kinds of art.
In Susan Sontag’s breakout essay Notes on Camp (1964), she details how taste typically comes in lanes, as a commitment to deep attention:
“There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people or in ideas.”
I suddenly found myself in a mini meltdown mode. Do I even have taste in anything? I decided to run a quick & nerdy thought experiment: what if I plot different dimensions of taste on a bubble chart to evaluate where I stack up? The visualization:
The x-axis represents how developed my taste is in each category, while the y-axis illustrates the extent to which the category impacts my everyday life and others. While we can dissect every single quadrant in this graph, I’ll pick out the biggest bubbles to discuss, where relative size = relative importance. As I dive into creative communities, you’ll see categories like Art, Music, Comedy, and Literature shift more to the right. Recreation is a bit of a weird bucket of things because it refers to having a keen eye for experiences and events, and I’d like to think my novelty radar steadily strengthens as I get exposed to more. I’ll accept my defeat in areas like sport and fashion though!
Technology is a funny-sounding category (how can you have good taste in tech?), but its pervasiveness in today’s society is exactly what separates a casual user from a plugged-in proponent who appreciates the software intricacies of something seemingly simple like a chat app. Dichotomies exist: someone might prefer Apple Notes over Notion or Telegram over Whatsapp. But as we’ve acknowledged, it’s not about comparing raw preferences but instead having empathy for the merits of everything in the genre.
This note about appreciation is also important when we zoom into a more notorious category: art. People have polarizing opinions, and the danger is falling into the trap of turning snobbish over taste. Take this abstract art piece I saw at Art Paris in April:
Many people might be immediately put off by such a non-sensical painting, dismissing it as a random hodgepodge of scribbles and shapes. But a subjective interpretation shouldn’t be mixed up with a value judgment. In other words, different individuals might tag a given piece as “good” and “bad” (like my writing), but those within a threshold of taste can both disagree and still respect the artist’s creative process.
The journey of cultivating taste draws further parallels to the writing and editing process, via George Saunders:
“The way I revise is: I read my own text and imagine a little meter in my head, with “P” on one side (“Positive”) and “N”on the other (“Negative”). This involves making thousands of what I’ve come to think of as “micro-decisions.” These are intuitive, instantaneous — I just prefer this to that — I just have a feeling and react to that feeling, in the form of a cut phrase, or an added word, or an urge to move this whole section, and so on. And then I do that over and over, for months, sometimes years, until that needle stays up in the “P” zone for the whole length of the text…”
To get to this level of mastery and intuition, it takes thousands of reps and iterations where the majority of output ends up as failures. It’s like we’re waging a relentless war with ourselves to keep testing, keep refining. There’s a cautionary tale here around the risk of passive consumption: all the time we spend reading Twitter and scrolling Instagram and browsing bookstores and watching Netflix modifies us in a thousand little ways. Only when we allocate enough attention and dedication to something specific that we can slowly coax taste out of its cocoon. It’s the same with people: spend enough time with someone and they’ll bleed into us. At the extreme, we can reframe taste as a quality: having well-formed and well-informed opinions held loosely (openness to experiment) and tightly (firmness of articulation). Delicious nutritious, indeed!
3) “Man’s Search for Belonging”: On Scenes 🎩
Creativity from unity: a scene-based life is a fulfilling one!
In improv, the atomic unit of creation is a scene. Within the span of minutes, characters enter and exit, environments are architected and annihilated, and premises contort and coalesce in a crescendo of creative choices. A scene is by definition, in flux, and cannot survive without the collective creativity of players who are in complete synchronization. There’s that famous Shakespeare quote of “All the world’s a stage”, but I actually suggest a slight remix: “All of life's a scene”. A scene is not a place, but a living shapeshifting organism that evokes movement and multiplication.
Our job in life is to create the best damn scene in the way we want to with the people who get us. This is a direct callback to our Fluxus Flywheel: start with an experiment, develop the unique taste, and aggregate other outliers into a coalition.
After our nth experiment and the struggle of refining taste, the question morphs into: Where do we play? We know there must be others like us out there; we seek scenius.
. . .
Scenius = Scene + Genius
The father of ambient music, Brian Eno, coined the term as a product of Fluxus-style thinking. The communal form of genius: when buoyed by scenius, we act like genius. Eno observed that:
“What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent.”
In last year’s birthday essay, I gushed about the huge value of the digital communities I joined over the pandemic. One year later, and I’m no longer active in any of them. This isn’t to say that I didn’t get immense value from being part of these amazing groups — aside from educational and professional opportunities, the number one benefit was the top-tier people I connected intimately with. My favourite type of personal network effect is when you see the cross-pollination of old friends into new spaces, providing a continuity to reinvest in established relationships.
As Joey DeBruin describes in the context of crypto communities, “humans are always balancing the need for inclusion and the need for differentiation”. The updated way to view communities isn’t as siloed buckets, but as a constellation of overlapping clouds:
Yet communities are porous — both barriers to entry and exit costs are minimal, and lack of participation doesn’t result in punishment or banishment. Despite efforts to onboard community evangelists and deploy engagement strategies, traditional community health is still tied to outcomes to achieve tangible goals rather than the process to express creativity (i.e. taste!)
Scenes are technically an extension of a full-fledged community, but a more precise definition would be: communities whose influence extends beyond the group itself and becomes foundational for a new way of thinking, doing, or creating.
Austin Kleon, the author of Steal Like An Artist (a very solid read!) on scenes:
“What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.”
So while we typically reference revolutionary movements like Fluxus, Silicon Valley, The Renaissance, and Les Années Folles as grade-A case studies, there’s something so empowering about the dreams of grassroots collectives that start from ground zero yet embody the DNA of scenius — mutual appreciation, rapid exchange, inspiring chaos.
In many ways, living in New York City is kind of like immersing in a microcosm of a 21st-century creative scene. Fluxus started in New York, and my modern rendition of the movement is also taking root in this monolithic metropolis. New York flows by default: city where you can both lose yourself and find yourself in the same blush. It's a type of immersion within a wildly diverse population, not unlike a forest canopy lined with critters, crawlers, and creatures that all contribute to the rich ecosystem. Swirling and swishing, that's what makes the New York energy so undeniably enticing.
We’ll see if my feelings last, but either way I’m going to be keeping a keen eye out for budding scenes on the horizon. I think one tangible way to explore this (outside from joining early-stage creative communities) is by harvesting the intrinsic power of physical places and gathering grounds. Well-designed third spaces can act as a core conduit for scene formation. Repeat players foster a deep loyalty and want to keep playing for the sake of play, rather than striving for a nebulous quantifiable objective.
One emerging scene that soft launched less than a week ago is The Commons, classified as a “space for inner-outer curiosity, co-created play & collective flourishing in SF”. I’m already emanoured by the range of experiences that members have shared: group meditations, music method classes, Bob Ross paint nights, French salons, and weekend hackathons. If this doesn’t scream scenius, then just listen to how they think about their concept:
“We may be a physical space yes, but what we really are is a container for humans w/ shared values of playful curiosity, kindness, and earnestness towards exploring their inner-outer worlds”
What tethers me to New York currently is not some fluffy optimism or some abstract desire for a fabricated American dream. It’s about mapping the truths, seeking the zeitgeists, searching for subcultures, and aiming for immersion; all these activities work in concert for discovery. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning often gets touted as a masterclass for its take on inner freedom and happiness, but I see this as a distant stepping stone in my personal pantheon of pursuits. This is my story and it’s called Sam’s Search for Belonging — not in the friendship sense, but in the hunt for scenius.
Star Gazing: A Telescopic Outlook of the Late 20s 🌌
Quoting from one of my favourite authors, Ruth Ozeki in The Book of Form and Emptiness:
“What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there a limit to the desire for more?”
I think this is such a powerful set of questions that I keep coming back to because it always seems like I’m on the neverending quest for more. Every time the fated birthday fades into the next ordinary day, there’s a leftover hunger to want and do more. It’s time to build! Let’s plunge face-first into a scene! I want to dig within myself, and then keep digging past the cliches, the bad first drafts, the failed ideas, the shelved projects. To keep myself constantly off-kilter, to expand the search space, to want to know. Life is a two-part excavation: of the undiscovered outer world, and the unexamined within.
It’s the experiments, tastes, and scenes that help bridge the gap and provide colour and depth to a neverending excavation. But it’s also soothing to realize we can just chill out from time to time — no rush, let’s pause & play!
To cap off the end of my 25th in a more whimsical manner, I asked DALL·E 2 to construct what its 12-billion parameter GPT-3 brain believes as “living a fun and fresh lifestyle in your late 20s”. This is what the AI spits out for me:
So I guess the real next step is that I’ll be adding in more moments of jumping into my days. Up and down, high and low, from toe to toe.
Still in flux,
Sam