Finding Myself

About twelve weeks ago, I was faced with the simple truth that I did not know who I was.

Sure, I was an aggregation of my parts, a summary of memories. But if you were to take “Sahiti” and separate the labels from Sahiti: “Sahiti” goes to UPenn, “Sahiti” is from Georgia, Sahiti is a Libra, “Sahiti” is 19. Well, then who is Sahiti?

Thus, I started my descent into exploration.

Perspective matters; I learned soon

I think I originally stumbled upon this question out of pure insecurity. A good mentor of mine, Christina, once advised me not to claim to be more than I am, and I appreciate that reminder. Unfortunately, it left me vulnerable as I sat unemployed and unemployable¹ for the first time in my life.

“What are you doing in SF?” strangers would ask.

“Why are you working on what you are working on?”

Or even my (least) favorite, “What drives you?”

I can’t remember the last time I had to answer this question in a non-evaluative setting. And in the past, during evaluative settings, I often catered my answer to my needs (later I realized this is futile; see section titled “States of Being”).²

You can only use sarcasm (joining the traveling circus, rating all the snowy plover spots, etc) so many times before you become inauthentic.

It was when I finally settled into the discomfort of my choice’s uncertainty that I felt comfortable accepting that I simply did not know why I was in this city³, and that to understand why I must first understand myself.

Initially, I try to answer the question with more questions. Here are some lines of reasoning:

• If we are not a summation of our labels, perhaps we are an aggregation of our creative output into the world
  • What do I want my creative output to look like?
  • Obviously, if something drives my creative output, then there must be something else that is the root of all this
• Maybe we are direct reflections of our actions
• Maybe we are the pillars and values we stand on
• Maybe we are everything, everywhere, all at once
• Maybe we are nothing

I tried to search deep inside of myself to find my values, but couldn’t articulate them.

So I resorted to defining myself through actions in this flexible time of life. I had no expectations for myself except the simplest one: to grow. And thus I did things on my bucket list.

This is what my bucket list looked like at some point in the summer.

I’m proud that I actually checked off a good portion of this list.

• I acquired a ukulele and started practicing for 5-15 minutes per day. Even jammed a bit on the electric guitar with Ali :)
• Chopsticks! Not a pro yet, but can pick up dumplings occasionally. Thank you, Ishan, for taking me to Dumpling Home
• I started going to the golf driving range with Miki, and she is a good teacher. My favorite club is the 8-iron
• Learned how to use a cobbler shaker & make a mocktail cosmopolitan. Thank you, Yuyi!
• Created some glorious gifts this year: from surprise karaoke kidnapping to a custom T-shirt for my roommate
• Started researching more into the basics of blockchain and crypto. Simmi even took me to the Stanford Blockchain Conference, where I got a banana in a box

Through the process, I began to realize things about myself: I like randomness, I love a patterned lack of pattern, I love freedom and choice of responsibility, I like control of the responsibility. “If I could do anything in the world, would it be doing nothing?” I asked myself. Short answer: no, I would get bored quickly.

Longer answer: I feel unfulfilled if I don’t see my productive output in the world. I ache to create interactions via story. Yes, we must live and create such stories, but I think it is important to slow down to record them as well.

I love photos. I am not a photographer; I am simply collecting visual stories. The same way I love books and hate movies⁴.

I also think it’s fun to romanticize.

For example, I romanticize retiring in my late 30s and becoming a real estate agent. Real estate agents, in my head, are just socialites who sell houses on the side and enjoy design & persuasion⁵. That seemed like a good balance for me.

Everything is a problem until I become a real estate tycoon

It was also sometime along these explorations that I realized money is trivial.

My friend Linda believes that money is a universal token for energy and expertise. And once AGI hits, energy exchange will become more granular and thus money will go away. That being said, she doesn’t quite know what “AGI” means yet.

I also gained a “deceptive nonsense” detection meter and lost the ability to trust people blindly. I used to be quite trusting; I have come to realize that.

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

John Green, Paper Towns

Blind trust is not healthy. The only people I can blindly trust to be aligned with me are myself and, probably, my parents (again, only after nearly two decades of proof). Naive was the Sahiti before; now I saw deceit in many forms: in the form of a doe and in the form of a bear, and that spun my head a bit. Why do people work against others? And why do even innocent people lie? I answered these questions for myself later (see section titled “Alignment”).

My Understanding

This is the best articulation of my current understanding of the world, my relationship with the world, and my relationship with myself.

The Dimensions

There are other dimensions. This is a fact. Dimensions of the universe all work differently.

Sure, there is length, width, and height, but there is also time, an axis we index on. There are also a fifth & further dimensions, where time plays no role and isn’t the axis we index on. It is similar to a parallel world, with multiple alternate possibilities for histories and outcomes of reality.

It is hard to explain this if it isn't experienced, but it is true.

Neel explained this pretty well in his analogy and point that abstractions of reality are important: AI learns abstractions on top of the real world; his version of simulation is that there could be a hyperprior reality that everyone kind of approximates with their own senses, and it might not be the same.

What does this mean at the larger level? Well, nothing. But I know that if I am living in a reality where there is another equally weighted hyperprior reality, then I might as well be happy and have fun with it. I might as well enjoy it, and the least I can do is explore and see the world. I might as well let things happen and take it all in, failures and joy. I might as well take charge of change and achieve moving mountains.

The world feels so small when we are on top of large truths.

“we’re so small,” I name a playlist on the top of this large rock of land overlooking the ocean. I add a single song to the playlist, and it represents Linda’s shower song.

Perspective

I also realized no one sees the same world I see.

And this is true of you: no one sees the same world you see. In fact, we all see quite different worlds.

Sure, when you walk to the Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll see a large bridge. But that image is computed alongside your emotion of the bridge, memory of the bridge, connotation you relate to the bridge - all before it is registered as a “bridge” in your mind. And that’s why you can look at the bridge and see a symbol of the golden West Coast, and I can look at the bridge and think of my Common App college essay.

We can both look at the same world and perceive it very differently, and most likely do.

I used to spend so much time trying to get close friends to understand my perspective on the world, but never understanding that they might not. And it’s ok. Maybe they will never see through the yellow-tinted glasses that I see through because theirs are blue. It is all okay & that is just how life is.

Comic about different lenses: I dropped my iPad Apple Pencil under my bed, so I used Claude Design to draw this instead.

Now, I find myself thinking more during conversations. I find myself putting myself in other people's shoes more often, and becoming a better, more articulate explainer when sharing a story.

“Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”

John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

I think it’s helpful to think of people as each having only a certain vector basis. I might have <A, B, C> while someone else has only <B, C, D>. Language is the medium between us, but it also functions: when I express something, my meaning passes through language and gets projected onto the other person’s basis. If you don’t have A, then whatever I say that depends on A has nowhere to land. Translation is structurally lossy, so someone might receive my meaning projected into a space that can’t represent part of it. So we can hold a conversation about the same topic while never actually processing it through the same definitions.

Sahiti Space x Linda Space diagram making in progress

Energy

We are also all just energy. Imagine every living organism as a large ball of energy.

And I also believe we all have auras. I have a yellow aura, which I discovered.

When we interact with each other, we transfer energy.

Energy isn’t one single substance. Some people give attention, some give logistics, some give presence, some give challenge, and as mentioned previously, it could also be money. If your basis is <words of affirmation, time> and theirs is <acts of service, loyalty>, someone might be pouring energy into you along an axis you can’t perceive.

It is vital to understand and be able to measure the energy others put into you, and the energy you put into them. I believe in reciprocating energy, and if you are ever upset with anyone or any energy interaction, you can solve it by just not putting energy back. Before you exit a “drain,” the honest question is whether the flow is actually negative or just denominated in a currency you don’t hold. Sometimes the fix isn’t leaving; it’s learning to read a new axis.

Comic about energy transfer, generated by Claude Design due to dropping my Apple Pencil under my bed.

More importantly, be proud of the energy that you can provide/give to others. I enjoy this phrase, stolen from Agniv’s website.

I will not live forever. But to increase the fruit for which others get to eat is a worthwhile goal in and of itself.

In a sense, fruit is just energy. Where do you want your energy to go? And in what form? Understanding the energy interactions in the world is important to me, because something I hold dear is the impact (or energy) others have had on me.

Love: a word I actually throw around quite loosely (because the world needs more love!), but I realized there were actually very few people I truly love deeply, souls entwined.

Later, I Google “what does a yellow aura mean?” and smile because the AI Overview represents it well.

So much joy, so much whimsy

Time

There’s physical time, and then there’s psychological time.

Physical time is what you see on the digital clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365.25 days in a year.

Psychological time works differently. It’s how you can go hours working on something interesting and forget the sun is about to set and you missed two meals. It’s the way you can have a perfect summer, and it feels like a year of growth.

I once read a study that when your life is repetitive, the moments your brain tracks create monotony that makes the present moment agonizingly slow, even as weeks blur together. That’s why your years between elementary school and adulthood might have felt like a long time, but later, as an adult, they might’ve gone by quicker. It’s because you were processing fewer new things.

To live a long, fulfilling life, I remind myself to keep conquering new circumstances and never say no to new experiences.

I do not fear death right now, but I’ve historically never feared change until I saw it on the same week of my Google calendar. Until time runs out on a biological standpoint, I think I should take advantage of my anti-fear and conquer everything.⁶

Alignment

This all leads to my understanding of alignment.

As humans, we are all little compasses with a needle pointing in different ways. The position of this needle depends on our inner motives & goals, but it will always point toward what is best for who we are.

You may meet people who you find are tangential to your alignment, or even parallel. These are awesome people that you will know you are immediately aligned with.

You can be aligned with certain people on some axis but not on others, and I think that’s also worth noting. Understanding where you align with people can save you a lot of time in the future when choosing teams, partners, etc.

On the other hand, you may also meet people who are oppositely aligned with you.

Comic about alignment, generated by Claude Design due to dropping my Apple Pencil under my bed.

It is easy to meet these people and wonder, “Wow, I have never met someone this evil”. But I think it makes more sense to just realize that they are simply not aligned. And that is also okay.

I don’t think evil people exist. I know evil things happen, but I think we all have energy output guided by our alignment, and some people are aligned in less-than-ideal ways (whatever you want to define that as).

States of Being

Previously, when speaking about “catering to needs” in terms of forming opinions, I used to confuse the pillars of who I am with my state of being. In a conversation with Daniel, I recall explaining that I felt like I was shifting my read on what was true to fit whatever I wanted out of the interaction⁷. Now, I realize that was an inaccurate understanding of myself on my own part.

A state of being is grounded in the question “what is my role in this situation?” or, more precisely: who do I serve, and for what purpose?

For example, if I am with a friend who is upset (situation) and I want to be a good friend (goal), my state of being will suddenly be a “Caretaker,” making sure my friend is okay.

The beauty of states of being is that they are temporary and fluid. I will not forever be a Caretaker, and so it is not a definition of who I am. We are pillars that stand for far longer than a simple state.

As soon as you can separate a state of being from who you are, you can measure how authentic you are with every interaction, as well as what you truly value, or in other words, what pillars you carry through every state of being.

To live the most joyous, fulfilling life, finding the people who align with you best on each dimension, depending on your state of being, can be the most fruitful. If you are anything complex, you will most likely find that different people align with different axes of yourself.

5 Senses

“The 5 sense guys, wow they were really onto something.”

Growing up, you learn about the 5 senses and are like “yeah, obviously, duh,” but take a moment and sit. And breathe. And stare. And listen. And taste. And feel. And it’s only when you’ve done that that you realize how magical it is that these are the labeled inputs of a human.

As soon as you understand that there are truly only 5 inputs of the body, you can generalize the rest of your thinking to how your mind digests these.

And if these are the inputs, what are the outputs? It’s how you take those senses, digest them, and then put something out into the world for someone else to sense.

How do our inputs affect us? How do I want my outputs to affect the world? Answering this can provide a better direction to a north star.

Frameworks/Philosophies

With this better understanding of the world around me, I tried to relate it to my relationship with the world through certain frameworks.

Stoicism

Somewhere along this journey, I finally internalized a very simple but harder-in-practice truth: you control your happiness.

By this I mean, you control what upsets you. You control what frustrates you.

And you can choose not to be frustrated, and, at the very least, you can choose to be happy. It takes as much energy to be happy as to be angry.

And if that’s a conscious choice that I can make, why suffer⁸? If life is an ocean that I can float around through, why would I create additional friction? And if there is friction in the form of wind and waves, why don’t I let it steer my sails and travel with the current?

And either way, what is happiness?

You'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows - whatever you choose, you'll regret it, because the problem isn't in your choices,

— 𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 (@sunnkssdseraph), August 10, 2026

Universalism vs. Absurdism

The world is growing and learning at an exponential pace. If you cut through all the slop and noise, the progress made in the past year is insane compared to the equivalent progress over the cumulative 3-4 years prior. Progress ranges from technological progress to advances in health, the environment, and energy, etc.

If we continue on this trajectory, we will probably reach greater discoveries, but I think it’s important to understand that this trajectory is sourced by knowledge accumulation.

Our centralized library of knowledge is becoming “smarter” and more accessible with the creation of the internet, agents, and beyond. But it’s worth thinking about how we are building this body of knowledge. The ultimate agent should be all-knowing, and all-knowing shouldn’t mean just the thoughts and ideas of technical SF men. It should also hold the perspectives of those who have never learned to read or write, because their perspectives have just as much value.

But then what? Once we create that all-knowing, “hive-mind” resource, what question are we asking it? I hypothesize that it will be, “What is the meaning of life?”

We are never going to read about a ubiquitous world without war, a virus, or something tremendously bad happening that turns us into a dystopia. Even if you created a BCI to find every person on every corner of the world to utilize this and transcribe an image into a single form factor - to lose nothing in translation seems far-fetched.

Humans can’t help but climb towards it, but I’m unsure if life has a single inherent meaning. Maybe the meaning is the process behind the meanings we derive. Maybe the true meaning is the friends we made along the way. Maybe it’s the lack thereof.

I am at peace knowing I can make my own meaning out of the mess in front of me⁹.

Storytelling Matters

If we accept that everyone sees the world differently, that there are multiple dimensions, and that energy transfer is important, I realize the importance of storytelling.

What a gift storytelling is, to capture a moment, an experience, and transfer it through another form, whether that be language or art.

The most driven moment I will ever feel is after I understand a revolutionary idea and before I communicate it to an audience. That process is storytelling, and I think it can make or break a person and their dreams.

To work towards something bigger, we have to work with others. And to work with others, we need to communicate our missions and progress. To inspire change, we have to move crowds. And to move crowds, we need to articulate our leadership and impact. To become immortal, we have to pass wisdom on. And to pass wisdom, we need to teach through lessons of failure and success. All of this is storytelling in different fonts.

There are moments when I wish I recorded an exceptionally brilliant conversation (please sponsor me a Pocket¹⁰) to look back on again. When I mentioned this after speaking to Max on the floor of Chase Center for 6 hours, he mentioned that “some things are meant to be forgotten.”¹¹ There’s beauty in choosing the details we want to depict.

Choice is an important part of storytelling.

The medium of a story depends on the audience and the type of message: a movie, an oral, a book, a narrative, a project, a photograph, a song, a painting, a reel, a poem. But one can argue that people are naturally attuned to being good at producing different types of media and understanding which one you should reach for first and more naturally is also a skill.

I am good at oral storytelling and will only get better. And that is because I enjoy it dearly.

Conclusion

This summer was ultimately a summer of firsts for me. First concert, first oysters, first stitches (after being hit by a car while biking). A record number of conversations and stranger-turned-friends.

Delicious Cajun oysters at 1803 NYC. Highly recommend.

Later, while speaking with Rishi, he brought up the Ship of Theseus philosophical thought experiment.

The Athenians kept Theseus's ship in the harbor as a memorial, and because wood rots in saltwater, they kept replacing bad planks with new ones. This went on for centuries. But if you replaced every plank of wood on the ship with another plank of wood, at what point does it stop being the original ship?

Does an object remain the same after all of its parts have been replaced over time? How many parts must be replaced until it is no longer the Ship of Theseus? And how many parts must be replaced until it is no longer Theseus’s Ship? Is it more than half? Or does it take only one? What is a single part of something: an atom or a unit of wood? How modular is it?

What is the ship really? A bunch of wood that floats, or a label on a structure? Is the ship its utility or its possession?

Who are we if we aren’t our beliefs?

My first use of OpenAI’s DALL-E in 2022 was this representation of a girl with her head in the planets, among the stars.

The most impactful moment of my life was leaving the neighborhood playground at age 4 and experiencing sonder for the first time. I have always believed the meaning of life to be to experience, understand, and love.

Perhaps that’s all it was truly about.

I am still understanding the world around me, but I feel as though I know myself a bit better.

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