Thirty Years of Becoming

When I look back at my life at thirty, I don’t see a straight line.

For a long time, I thought that was a problem.

Mechanical engineering. Software. Robotics. Space technology. Psychology. Artificial intelligence. Entrepreneurship. Neuroscience. Music. Ideas that felt intensely important for a while and then seemed to lead me somewhere else.

From the outside, it might look as though I kept changing directions.

But the subjects changed more often than the underlying curiosity did.

Again and again, I found myself returning to the same kinds of questions:

How do complex systems work?

What shapes the way they behave?

And what exists underneath what we can immediately see?

At first, the systems I wanted to understand were machines.

Then they became software.

Eventually, they became organizations and people.

Now I find myself increasingly fascinated by perhaps the strangest system of all: intelligence itself.

From machines to human systems

Engineering taught me to look at the world as a collection of interacting parts. Something happens because something else caused it. A system can be observed, understood, redesigned and improved.

I didn’t ultimately build my career around mechanical engineering, but I don’t think I ever left that way of thinking behind.

I carried it into software.

I spent much of my twenties becoming an engineer. Over the years, I worked on large-scale systems and experienced what it means to build technology inside complex organizations.

That taught me something textbooks couldn’t.

Software was never just software.

There were users, deadlines, teams, incentives, personalities, decisions, disagreements, communication problems and trade-offs.

The technical system was only one part of a much larger human system.

Eventually, I became experienced enough that software could easily have remained the rest of my professional life.

Become a better engineer.

Move upward.

Earn more.

Invest more.

Repeat.

There is nothing wrong with that life.

For many people, it is a meaningful and satisfying path.

But somewhere along the way, another kind of curiosity became stronger.

Curiosity beyond the job

Even while working as an engineer, I kept exploring subjects outside the boundaries of my job.

I studied robotics.

I explored space technology.

I became interested in psychology.

I spent time learning things that had no immediate relationship to what I was being paid to do.

For a long time, I wondered whether this meant I simply couldn’t stay with one thing.

Maybe sometimes it did.

Curiosity can become fragmentation when every new interest is treated as a new destination.

But from where I stand now, I can also see that these interests were not completely random. They were different doors leading toward similar questions.

Knowing how to build a system was no longer enough.

I wanted to understand why people behaved the way they did around those systems.

Why some things motivate us while others don’t.

Why we become attached to certain beliefs.

Why we sometimes act against our own understanding.

Why one experience changes someone deeply while another disappears almost immediately.

That curiosity eventually pulled me toward psychology.

Psychology probably changed me more deeply than any technical subject I studied.

Not because it gave me the authority to explain other people, and not because it offered simple answers.

It changed the questions I asked.

Before psychology, I could look at behaviour and mostly see behaviour.

After psychology, I started looking underneath it.

What belief might be beneath this reaction?

What is this person trying to protect?

What am I trying to protect?

Is this something I truly believe, or something I learned to accept?

How much of personality is adaptation?

How much of what we do is conscious choice, and how much happens beyond our immediate awareness?

Psychology did not make human beings easier to understand.

If anything, it made me more cautious about reducing people to simple explanations.

It made me think more about context, motivation, attachment, perception, emotion, identity and the assumptions that quietly influence our actions.

Eventually, I started turning the same lens toward myself.

That may have been the biggest change of all.

The questions beneath a life

I became interested not only in building a better career, but in understanding why I wanted the things I wanted in the first place.

Money?

Recognition?

Knowledge?

Security?

Freedom?

Meaning?

Was I consciously choosing my life, or had I simply become good at the life that was already in front of me?

Those questions slowly changed what success meant to me.

I still have moments when I look at everything I have studied and wonder:

What exactly am I?

An engineer?

A founder?

A student of psychology?

Someone studying artificial intelligence?

A future researcher?

Someone drawn toward neuroscience?

There is a temptation to choose one label and discard everything else.

A single label is easier to explain.

It makes a profile look cleaner.

It makes a life appear more deliberate than it often feels while being lived.

But increasingly, I think forcing myself into one label would misunderstand my own story.

Integrating the disciplines

Mechanical engineering taught me to think in systems.

Software taught me how to build.

Working inside large organizations taught me how complicated human systems can become.

Robotics made intelligence physical.

Psychology introduced me to behaviour and the mind.

Artificial intelligence made me question what intelligence means computationally.

Neuroscience is drawing me toward the biological processes underneath cognition.

Entrepreneurship is teaching me what happens when an idea has to survive outside my own head.

These are not identical subjects.

But they are no longer unrelated either.

They keep circling around the same deeper questions:

How do complex systems behave?

How does intelligence emerge?

Why do human beings think and act as they do?

And can technology help us understand ourselves without taking control away from us?

Building under uncertainty

Building something of my own introduced another kind of uncertainty.

When you work inside an established organization, many questions have already been answered for you.

There is already a product.

There are customers.

There is a structure.

There are problems waiting to be solved.

When you try to build something yourself, much of that certainty disappears.

Suddenly, the questions become uncomfortable.

Does anybody actually need this?

Am I solving a real problem, or simply building something I find interesting?

Can I explain why it matters?

Will anyone use it?

Would anybody pay for it?

What kind of organization would I want to create around it?

It made me understand that knowing how to build software and knowing how to build a company are two very different things.

I am still learning the second.

But creating something of my own matters to me beyond whether it eventually becomes commercially successful.

It gives me an opportunity to build according to principles I increasingly care about: understanding before optimization, respecting people’s agency, protecting privacy, and creating technology that helps people see their lives more clearly rather than turning everything into another score.

Somehow, psychology found its way into the technology I wanted to build too.

A defined period of exploration

Then I turned thirty.

And thirty arrived at an unusual point in my life.

Instead of becoming more settled, I stepped away from one of the most stable parts of my life.

I left the company where I had spent several important years of my career.

For a long time, employment had automatically answered several questions.

What do you do?

Where do you live?

What do you earn?

What are you working toward?

Suddenly, those answers became less obvious.

I could have made finding another role my immediate priority.

Instead, I decided to allocate a defined period of my life to education, research and building something of my own.

That choice was not a rejection of engineering or work.

It was not a declaration that earning no longer mattered.

It was a decision not to replace one demanding chapter automatically before understanding what I wanted the next chapter to become.

I wanted room to study seriously.

To research.

To build.

To understand artificial intelligence more deeply.

To explore whether my interest in neuroscience could become something more substantial.

And, perhaps for the first time, to experience a period of life in which maximizing income was not automatically the only measure of progress.

That choice comes with uncertainty.

A salary gives life a rhythm and a familiar measurement system.

When you step outside it, even temporarily, you have to decide for yourself whether you are progressing.

Nobody sends you a performance review for becoming wiser.

There is no promotion cycle for understanding yourself.

Research can take years.

Companies can fail.

Learning does not guarantee a financial return.

A period of exploration can become meaningful work, but it can also become avoidance if it has no structure, discipline or output.

That is something I need to remain honest about.

Freedom is valuable only when I use it.

So this phase cannot consist only of consuming more information.

It has to produce something.

Knowledge that becomes clearer.

Research questions that become more focused.

Ideas that become writing.

Technology that reaches real people.

Conversations that challenge what I currently believe.

A direction that becomes more grounded in experience and less dependent on imagination.

Perhaps one of the things thirty is teaching me is how to live without requiring every decision to justify itself immediately in money, while still remaining responsible for the life I am building.

Money still matters.

Stability still matters.

Work still matters.

But they do not have to be the only things that matter.

Integrating curiosity

So what kind of person did these thirty years create?

I am still figuring that out.

I know I have become intensely curious.

Sometimes too curious.

I can become interested in more things than one life could realistically pursue.

I have learned that curiosity without direction can become fragmentation.

Every interest cannot become a new project.

Every qualification cannot become a new identity.

Every question cannot be answered at the same time.

But I have also learned that suppressing curiosity simply to appear coherent would remove something fundamental from me.

So perhaps the challenge is not becoming less curious.

It is becoming better at integrating curiosity.

It is learning to distinguish between an interesting detour and a question worth spending years on.

It is allowing different interests to support one another instead of forcing them to compete for my entire attention.

It is turning breadth into perspective and then choosing where depth is required.

I have become someone who instinctively questions underlying assumptions.

When something does not make sense to me, I find it difficult to accept that “this is simply how things are done.”

Sometimes that creates friction.

Questioning can become stubbornness when it is not accompanied by humility.

Independence can become defensiveness when it is not accompanied by openness.

Being able to identify problems does not automatically mean I understand every perspective involved.

Those are things I still need to learn.

But questioning assumptions has also led me toward some of the most meaningful decisions of my life.

It has made me examine what I value instead of simply inheriting a definition of success.

I have become increasingly independent in how I think.

But I am beginning to understand that independence should not become isolation.

The next part of my life cannot exist entirely inside my own head.

Ideas need contact with reality.

Products need users.

Research needs evidence.

Beliefs need challenge.

And a meaningful life needs people, relationships, collaboration, community and experiences that cannot be replaced by reflection alone.

I have also become less convinced that conventional success automatically produces a good life.

I have experienced enough professional progress to understand that reaching the next level does not necessarily end the search.

There is always another title.

Another salary.

Another achievement.

Another comparison.

That does not make achievement meaningless.

It means achievement needs to be connected to a life that is actually worth living.

That realization may be one of the most valuable things my twenties gave me.

From accumulation to integration

When I think about that decade now, I think it was largely about accumulation.

I accumulated skills.

Experiences.

Qualifications.

Interests.

Questions.

Mistakes.

Perspectives.

I kept collecting pieces without always knowing what they were building toward.

Maybe my thirties do not need to be another decade of accumulation.

Maybe they can be about integration.

Turning engineering, psychology, artificial intelligence and research into something coherent.

Turning learning into contribution.

Turning ideas into products.

Turning curiosity into depth.

Turning what I have built so far into room to explore what matters next.

Turning reflection into a life I actually enjoy living.

I do not know whether the company I am building will become successful.

I do not know exactly where neuroscience will take me.

I do not know whether my future eventually becomes entrepreneurship, research, engineering, or some combination for which I do not yet have a neat title.

I may rediscover parts of engineering that I thought I was moving away from.

Some interests may deepen.

Others may quietly disappear.

The person writing this at thirty does not have to dictate the identity of the person I will be at thirty-five or forty.

This is not a final declaration of who I am.

It is simply the pattern I can see from where I stand today.

And strangely, I am becoming more comfortable with not knowing exactly how the story ends.

At thirty, I do not need to have every answer.

But I do need to act on the questions that have followed me long enough to deserve serious attention.

Looking back, I no longer think the story is that I kept changing paths.

I think I kept moving deeper.

From machines,

to software,

to people,

to minds,

to intelligence.

And perhaps the person those thirty years created is simply someone who cannot stop asking:

What’s underneath this?

For the first time, instead of seeing that question as something that keeps pulling me away from my path, I am beginning to wonder whether it has been the path all along.