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Vibe
Life and coding fragments.
Shorter notes that aren't formal posts, but are still part of the story.
The opposite of love isn't hate
I keep coming back to a small question: what is the actual opposite of love? The reflexive answer is hate, but I don’t think that’s right.
Love and hate seem to sit on the same axis — both require caring about someone enough that they can affect you. You can love and hate the same person, sometimes in the same hour, because both feelings depend on the other person mattering to you. The real opposite of that axis isn’t hate; it’s indifference — the flat, weightless state of a total stranger, someone whose actions can’t reach you at all.
Framed that way, hate stops looking like the low point of a relationship and starts looking like evidence that something is still alive in it. The actual danger sign isn’t conflict — it’s the quiet slide into not caring enough to be angry anymore. That’s the version of an ending that doesn’t announce itself.
A life too busy to need a meaning
The moments that end up defining a life mostly aren’t the ones you planned for. They arrive sideways, while you’re doing something else entirely, and you only recognize them as pivotal much later, in hindsight’s flattering light.
I think a good life runs on the same logic. It isn’t one where you’ve solved the question of what life is about — it’s one where you’re too busy enjoying it to need the answer. The people who seem happiest aren’t the ones with the tidiest philosophy; they’re the ones who found something they love doing and kept doing it, letting the bigger question take care of itself in the background.
So maybe the advice, if there is any, is this: if you catch yourself stuck circling what it’s all supposed to mean, that’s usually the signal to stop circling and go find something you actually enjoy. Get busy enough having fun that the question quietly stops mattering. That might be the closest thing to an answer that exists.
In praise of ordinary sensations
I once tried making a list of the things that reliably bring me joy, and the exercise itself turned out to be one of them. A few, in no particular order:
A bowl of ramen from an actual ramen shop. Komorebi — the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through leaves, which somehow makes the light itself feel considered. The specific smell of each season: snow in the woods in winter, spring rain, a summer afternoon, something good cooking. A quiet rain that clears into a rainbow. Coffee in the morning, and iced coffee on a hot one. The sound of wind moving through trees. A weekend morning with nowhere to be.
Some of the joys are more active: fixing something broken around the house. Losing an entire afternoon to a stubborn bug in the software you’re building, and the particular satisfaction when it finally gives way. Learning something new just because it’s interesting. Walking through a town you’ve never been to and finding the local places nobody would recommend to a tourist. Baking bread from scratch. Playing music, or just sharing it with someone who’ll actually listen.
None of these are rare or expensive. That might be the actual finding: the reliable joys are mostly ordinary, mostly free, and mostly available on any given Tuesday, if you remember to notice them.