What's wrong with doing what others do?
on looking for better games
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” —Carl Jung
René Girard posits that humans are mimetic creatures, that “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”
To want something because others want it—sounds tribal, but think of the Ivy Leagues, and think of the offer from McKinsey, Harvard Business School, dropping out at 19 to found a startup, becoming a lawyer, a doctor, a software engineer, an AI researcher. Think of your mom, who had heard from Jimmy’s mom, that Jimmy will be spending his summer at an advanced Pre-SAT prep agency, and now she’s anxiously checking if the registration deadline has passed. We were baptized in these waters, you see.
What’s so bad about this? I’ll first borrow two reasons from Sam Altman: “First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing. This will probably prevent you from doing truly interesting work, and even if you do, someone else would have done it anyway. Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term.”
But there's a deeper problem than either of these. The consensus track is a bullshitocracy, riddled with performativism. In this kind of environment, the endogenous incentives reward optimizing for legible signals of competence rather than competence itself.
The hallmark of the consensus track is the systematic reliance on bad tests that compress variance in personality and ability to mechanically scale the filtering and selection of people. That these tests tend to reduce you to much less than the sum of your parts is especially costly for people whose strengths—such as originality, the courage to be wrong, intrinsic love of learning—align more along axes that are illegible to standardized filters. Worse, these filters aren’t just missing information about you, they’re actively reshaping what you optimize for. The variance compression happens twice: first in what gets measured, then in what you become as you adapt to the system on top of the measurement. Because primary school is the original consensus track, bad tests prematurely narrow your personal development. Because you inherit the choices of your past self, bad tests compress not just your variance, but your potential futures, your destiny.
This is the real tragedy of the consensus track. The system is broken in an asymmetric way, and you’re the collateral.
You, with your unfashionable strengths. Maybe you grew up with an insatiable love of learning. You were a precocious child, you read a lot and spread yourself between all your idle curiosities. You didn’t go deep, not yet, you’re still only 14! But already, coming around the corner is your first big standardized filter—college applications. Did you hear that Jimmy is headed to national math camp? In which essay box do you write about love of learning? You learn to translate yourself.
Now freshman year, with club admissions and internship recruitment looming already—you thought you’d have time to wander intellectually but Jimmy already has a 4 year plan to triple major in computer science, business, and economics. Better stay focused. Senior year, and the real world is before you. You’re home for the holidays, mom shares that Jimmy has a full time offer to join Amazon as a software engineer. You work hard at interview prep and join Big Tech too.
Now it’s just you, this 9 to 5, and the rest of your life. You’re surrounded by people who chose this for the paycheck, same as you. You got good at not asking what you actually wanted; better start saving so you can retire early. And then what? After the social game, the status game, the money game—what game is left? Is this all there is? When was the last time you impressed yourself?
Because most people are doing what others do, the consensus track suffers from intense competition. This is not the kind of competition that leads to healthy growth, this is junk competition where there is little signal in rejection because evaluation functions are brutish and myopic, and collective Molochian race to the bottom is the default.
Status games plague the consensus track, because when you neutralize idiosyncrasy with bad tests people instinctually return to high-school power dynamics, virtue signaling, and clique-think. In the absence of an internal sense of value or identity, people will borrow it from the hierarchy.
The winning strategy in the consensus track is not to do good work, it’s to hack the test, where the test is Goodharted value proxies: school exams, college applications and standardized tests, Leetcode interviews, Amazonian performance reviews, investment banking and consulting recruitment, academic publishing, VC pitch culture. Hacking it means performing value: pattern matching answers, extracurricular padding and test prep agencies, politicking and alliance building, leadership principle STAR story banks, coffee chat networking theater, citation rings, obsessively optimizing pitch decks and narrative.
Altogether this is not some secret forbidden knowledge; most people in the consensus track either explicitly know the structural flaws or sense it indirectly, that the roots are rotten and the honey fruit is laced. In both cases, they feel the opportunity cost of not doing more meaningful work as a low-grade chronic discontentment and cope through irony, numbing out, or escapism.
If everyone there knows or feels it, why are they there? From Paul Graham: “The difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you’ll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside.” Golden handcuffs, low-agency, fear of failure, or just inertia, will keep you in the room even when the door is open.
Then there are those who make it a soul-level quest to retire as young as possible—see r/FIRE, an entire subreddit with 700K+ users dedicated to the pursuit of this. But let’s differentiate needs from the strategies to meet them. FIRE is one strategy, another is to choose work that you are internally driven to do. The real underlying need is to stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. If you stick around in that sub you will see successful members come back to express regrets over not developing their real interests; they have all the time and nothing to spend it on. Freedom from is a different game than Freedom to.
The opposite of hacking the test is doing good work for its own sake. Better games are out there, where it feels like play because it aligns with your edges and where either the market or another tight feedback loop arbitrates and evaluates outcomes rather than metrics. This often looks like starting your own business. If that sounds daunting and unreachable, look around you—that hotel, that park, that restaurant. The world is a museum of passion projects. Startups are one version, so are certain kinds of writing, teaching, art, community building.
This is, as of the end of 2025, my perspective on work and life paths. I hope it takes you out of your fishbowl so you can see the water you’ve been swimming in. I hope it gives you permission to leave and go search for better games, if that is what you choose.
It is what I chose. The imaginary kid I described above is me. I grew up loving to read and learn about the world. When I was 8, I asked for How Things Work encyclopedias for my birthday, and wanted to be an inventor when I grew up. Over the next decade and a half, I encountered, muddled through, and bounced off of institutions, games, standardized filters and bad tests which didn’t fit me. I lacked conviction so I played along every time. Eventually I stopped seeing my ambitious curiosity as a strength; I just cursed myself for being a generalist with no legible spike. What I didn’t know is that I was relying on other people to recognize my value for me. In truth, this essay, at its core, is a letter to my younger self.
Eventually I did find my way to these ideas. In junior year of college, I realized that wanting good grades and a job at a big tech company, these were not games I had chosen, instead they were just the consensus track river I had been floating in since the beginning of primary school. Starting then, I decided to stop prioritizing academics for the first time and instead worked on projects and art—piano, singing, drawing.
That winter, one of the projects, talk2arxiv, reached the top of HackerNews and the GitHub repo exploded to 500 stars. I still strongly remember how deeply it affected me, it was like a revelation I had trouble believing—that I could build something, put it out in the world, and others would find it valuable. It was incredibly empowering; I began to dream bigger.
In senior year, I decided to start my own student organization—something that I dreamed of doing since freshman year when I felt alienated from the one I had joined, but never had the agency to think I really could do it. I announced what I was doing in class forums, put together a founding team, wrote up my vision, designed the structure, recruited members, created a semester-long AI curriculum and personally taught it every week to the first member cohort. I reached out to companies to pitch contract work, planned parties, and tried to bootstrap a community, culture, and network all at the same time. I named it Generative AI at Berkeley and it also exceeded my wildest expectations. By the end of the year, we grew to over 40 members and had signed project contracts with YC startups, Google, Netflix, and other companies.
After I graduated, instead of joining Amazon, I joined a YC startup as a co-founder, and focused on living more authentically, being intentional about what I do, and applying that across my entire life. I started journaling and meditating to know myself more deeply having always lived from the neck up. I built confidence by doing things that scared me: starting this blog, doing improv for 6 weeks, solo traveling in London, singing in public, hosting a book club. I trained for 3 months and ran a half-marathon in 1:47. I let go of old friendships that weren’t good for me, and built new ones. I left my startup to build an even more fulfilling project.
One of my favorite quotes ever, by Steve Jobs, goes like this: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Now I can see them behind me, the dots, and the line they trace: slowly, by achieving progressively larger intrinsically motivated goals, I built up the confidence and conviction to follow my own path.
The journey has been one mostly of unlearning and simplifying. It takes a lot of work, courage, and time to shed all of the desires and games of other people that you’ve absorbed throughout your life.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” So it is now for me, I strive simply to live an authentic life, for there’s no value in winning a game that doesn’t matter to you.