The Later 30s
Birthday reflections on body, quality time, and the robothole
A year ago, I wrote a birthday dispatch from my late 30s. A year later, my 30s are even later.
I’m fresh from a late daycare drop-off. Green infrastructure construction started on my Brooklyn block—dump trucks, jackhammers, backhoe loaders, and something I can only describe as a vacuum-big-rig.
The construction is likely good for my neighborhood, bad for noise, and GREAT for my toddler whose obsession with vehicles still burns strong.
I let him linger on my shoulders this morning. We watched a tow truck carefully back up the street, hence the tardy drop-off.
Time well spent.
Body
I’ve been thinking about my body. It’s a confluence of things.
Thing 1: I have more flexible time on my hands and want to be in great shape. My goal: run 20–25 miles per week, strength train three days, gain flexibility. I’m close. Some weeks on it, others almost.
Overall, I’m proud of the discipline. It helps that I genuinely enjoy physical activity. I am more me after each workout.
Thing 2: That said, I’ve been sick for a while. Before my son, I heard stories from parents about the endless kid-borne illnesses that rampage through your life.
“We are perpetually ill.”
“It’s a revolving door.”
But if you asked me a year ago how bad our baby-to-parent illness cycle was, I would have said, “Not as bad as I thought it would be!”
As we creep toward the end of winter (please?), I retract my previous statement. The coughs and congestion have lingered for… months? My skin is on the fritz. This man is sick of being sick.
Thing 3: I remember looking at my face in the mirror on New Year’s Day this year.
I saw the indentation on my nose from a close encounter with a surfboard seven years ago. I felt the thrum of my not-so-great left toe—likely a bad stub I never got properly looked at. An ache in my right calf—a muscle the PT says is smaller than my left calf, probably due to a long-term imbalance after fracturing my ankle on a pine cone in 2016.
These are my scars.
I’m not mad at them. I feel them. And they tell stories of adventure and missteps.
I’ve been able to pursue Thing 1 despite the setbacks of Thing 2 and the growing wear of Thing 3.
A friend and I recently decided that there’s honor in maintenance.
While I’m still drawn to big fitness goals, my deeper motivation is simpler: maintain a body that can take on everyday adventures for as long as possible.
You know the phrase—fit or falling apart by 50?
I’d love to avoid the latter.
Quality Time
You know the five love languages—acts of service, gifts, words of affirmation, physical touch, and quality time?
Yoko and I joke that my preferred love language is… all of them.
But if I had to choose, quality time would come out on top. It’s the one I optimize for most.
Travel has made that clearer as of late. Before our son, we planned trips around places. New cities, new sights, new attractions.
Lately we plan trips around people.
Earlier this year we spent extended time out west—the kiddo’s birthday with family in San Diego, Italian subs with college friends in LA, snowboarding with my dad in Colorado.
But of all the recent trips, our long weekend in Katy, TX truly filled me up.
I grew up visiting family in the Houston area every summer through middle school. Back then it just felt like summer vacation. Now I see it as a rhythm of formative experiences.
I remember trying boba for the first time—sipping a giant straw out of a diner glass. Eating new Vietnamese foods. Making mischief at family cookouts. Wrestling with my cousin Richard when we were supposed to be going to sleep. Listening to Southern hip hop and discovering online games.
But what used to be every summer turned into a twenty-year gap.
Our recent weekend in the burbs outside Houston felt both comfortably familiar and wonderfully new.
I wasn’t crashing on a cot next to my cousin anymore. Instead, I was bringing my lil family to homes where my cousins now raise families of their own.
My son climbed the carpeted stairs. We threw a football in the backyard. My cousin Sherrie introduced us to the wonders of Buc-ee’s and H-E-B supermarket. At a Super Bowl party, friends laid out Vietnamese foods—nem chua, pâté chaud, bánh chưng—in a cardboard football stadium alongside hot wings and cut fruit.
The magic of quality time with friends and family is the remix of new and old. Watching people you’ve known for decades hold onto the same values while shaping entirely new lives.
Seeing their lives unfold helps me see my own more clearly—where it started, where it might go.
The Robothole
I’m lost in the robothole. Hundreds of hours collaborating with AI. Fun, intoxicating, unsettling.
My workflow for making apps has evolved quickly. What started as asking an AI to code a webpage has turned into a sprawling setup—five to ten AI agents running in parallel, each with their own specialty.
I heard someone say that coding with AI feels like playing StarCraft.
I loved strategy and resource-management games growing up—nights constructing StarCraft bases, days building amusement parks in RollerCoaster Tycoon. You navigate rapidly, pushing things forward in pursuit of planetary or entrepreneurial domination. Go here to monitor ride construction. Go there to adjust ticket prices. Don’t forget to tune employee satisfaction from a dashboard of smiley faces...
The modern vibe-coder’s setup feels eerily similar. It’s multitasking to the max. Ten terminals open. Agents running in parallel. Workstreams humming along. My job? Tap in, check progress, and nudge things forward. Repeat.
And like many games, it’s easy to chase more for the sake of more.
In my media bubble, AI feels like hustle culture turned up to 11.
I feel simultaneously “ahead” and behind the times. Have I tried the latest model? Should I set up an OpenClaw assistant to plan our next family trip? Why don’t I already have an engineering bot fixing bugs while I sleep?
It’s embarrassing to document these thoughts! “More more more” can’t be the answer... right?
During my last month at Substack, I caught up with Chris Best about what I might build next and what AI makes possible. I’ve been thinking about something he said: The truly hard things will probably remain hard.
Not necessarily writing code. Not spinning up infrastructure. The hardest part is making something people actually want to use.
That reminds me of what Ira Glass once said about the “taste gap”:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good... And your taste is why your work disappoints you... It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Even with the powers bestowed upon me by the robots, the stuff I make often feels so-so. Cool! …but so-so. The output falls short of the vision in my head. And how clear is my vision, really? Is that vision something other people want?
Maybe technical barriers are lower now. But there’s still an iceberg of micro-decisions that make up the final output of any creative work.
Why does my game’s blob creature still look janky? Is it the lighting? The lack of ambient motion?
Millimeter by millimeter, I feel the taste gap closing with practice.
I enjoy the up-and-down journey of making things, and the robots offer new possibilities. But working with AI comes with this pressure to produce faster, and that expectation can hollow out the joy from a juicy creative experience if left unchecked.
So how do we stay grounded? Years ago, my book publisher asked me: What do you ultimately want to get out of all this? I keep returning to that question.
My answer today: Fun. I want to make tools that express something true about me. I want to have fun doing it. And I want to share with others to see what comes back.
AI can support that pursuit. But it’s not going to cook dinner for my son or run my miles. The robothole is tantalizing. And there’s a lot more to life outside of it.
On a recent long run, I started an audiobook about parenting. One phrase kept coming up: multiple things can be true.
We can chase ambitious fitness goals while being grateful simply to maintain a moving body.
We can witness the old and the new at the same time—watching families grow while remembering where we came from.
And we can feel both obsessed with new technology and cautious about what it might pull us away from.
Multiple things are true. Like an awestruck toddler on your shoulders, watching dump trucks shake the block. Wonder, chaos, and progress all at once.
That shopping cart had TWO steering wheels