i went on a lovely hike with SK (lol) today. we went on the stonewall-panoramic trail, and we talked about our lives. we recited poems. then we talked about how we see the world, and how we choose our friends.

SK posited that he wants to choose his friends, and his partner, based on who will make him more impactful: as the old aristotle lines go, he thinks choosing friends of utility makes sense. particularly, this is because a lot of the virtues that SK cares about route through impact, or are strongly correlated with them: in some sense, SK’s view collapses virtue into impact.

there is some past version of me that might have agreed with this. even now, i directionally agree: i care about the teleology of friendship; i want friends who help me become the best version of myself that i can be.

but i think we disagree on the mechanism, or the most important traits to select for, to get there. perhaps more fundamentally, i think virtue is broader than just impact.

i care both about having a positive impact on the world through my work, and the content of my character.

it is good to surround yourself with people who care deeply. but if i could only choose one – ‘impactfulness’ vs. ‘kindness and generally being a good person’ – i would choose the latter, because i know, viscerally, what choosing the former in isolation does to you. it doesn’t make you a better person, nor does it make you more impactful. it just makes you miserable.

i do not constantly want to be judged on the axis of impact. especially for a partner: i want there to be some sense in which, if i screw up at work, i can still come home to you, and you’ll still feel like home. you’ll still, always, feel safe. and you’ll still be there for me, and have a lot of love for me, because you care about the person that i am, deep down, rather than the work that i do.

i want my partner to think, ‘i love her because of some fundamental way in which she sees the world, and tries her best to navigate through it. i love her because of the way in which she relates to other people, and tries to be kind to them, and tries her best to be the best person that she can be.’ and beyond that, i want there to be limits to legibility: i want there to be something irreducible, inexplicable, in the reasons why you love me, that just has to do with who i am.

perhaps i feel that some of why you love someone should resist being a criterion at all.

i have a lot of stupid credentials from my youth; today i learned i’m a presidential scholar, and when i read the email, i felt… nothing? i used to derive a lot of my self-worth from accomplishments, because i felt out of place growing up, and that was what i started clinging to early on. it was where i seemed to get the greatest validation from others, and i didn’t have a strong enough sense of self to be able to separate my self-worth from how others perceived me. in high school that shifted somewhat: i started caring about the causes themselves, the actual work, more than just the validation of winning some stupid award. but i still tied a lot of my identity to doing and achieving.

recently, i notice i’ve landed somewhere different again. as i was telling SK, i care most about the character of my friends: about them being kind, and good. reading that email earlier today made me realize just how much things have changed in terms of what i value – how i measure myself and other people.

i think, in my essay about leaving home, you can sort of tell that i used to find it incomprehensible that no one from my home town seemed to care. about the world, about all of its suffering, about the many things that need to be done. i don’t think i used to judge them in the same way that people like SV judge others, but i do think i was deeply confused.

but i look back, and i think about JLH, and AP, and KK, and i love them a lot. and they’re not working on ‘high impact things,’ but i love them anyway, and i don’t think it matters. and i would happily choose all of them to put in my top five, because i admire something fundamental about them. they are kind, and good people, and pure-hearted. i want to be all of those things.

what is most correlated with extremely high impact? perhaps it is ambition.

i think i have enough of that. i’d much rather absorb kindness and love than ambition.

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story —
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.

—mary oliver