I’m not where I want to be. I am much better. I can make myself much better.

It is wrong to think that these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better future is possible.1

The quote above only makes sense to me as a scene: I’ve suddenly been placed into a room. Within it, I spot another version of myself, but he looks a bit odd. He looks notably chubbier; not at all reminiscent of the person I’m used to looking at in the mirror. His hair is long, flowing through the sides of his head, messy yet detangled — it seems, as I suspected, to be an attempt to hide his side profile. Another, second, version of myself is also in view. This time, I can tell he’s definitely far younger than me. It’s not like I can differentiate much of his facial features — he’s wearing a mask — but I can infer that he, in a similar vein to the first version of me I spotted (whose face has now contorted in shock looking at me), had a special interest in hiding the bottom half of his face.

Like any normal subset of the human population, we immediately break into deep conversation about the state of our daily lives. It dawns on me: the first I saw is, well, me — one year younger; the other, four years further down. I tell them about what I’ve done in the past year. The work I’d done, the losses I’d suffered, the progress I’d made, my worries, my hopes and dreams, every slight and salient emotion I feel, every goal I’ve had, failed, and achieved.

While I do this, I note that their words, formerly ridden with emotion, paralysing uncertainty, and paranoia, start to sound more enthusiastic. Though I’m bad at reading emotions, I suspect I’ve painted their faces with courage, contentment, and ease — borrowed from my own. They are unfathomably proud of me, and explicitly say so. To them, I had broken so many boundaries they had struggled with for their entire life, things that had made both of them miserable throughout their lives up to that point. In retrospect, that knowledge — that a version of me would emerge with the gall to do whatever it took to shatter the life-held belief that I’d forever struggle — would have been far and away the greatest comfort to them.

In my head, I go back to when I was twelve, and I recall just how much I would have wanted to know that everything would pan out. That wanting must have been ineffable.

A sobering admission I’ve made to myself is that a lot of my achievements have been driven by the feeling that I am not good enough. I’ve observed that this stems from some vague feeling that I’m trying to overcompensate for something that I lack, that I worry is inherent — something that makes people dislike me before they’ve even met me properly. Maybe, as I’ve thought to myself, if I do more; if I make myself appear relentlessly formidable, my accomplishments impossible to dismiss; I’d be safer from judgement, I’d become more secure, and I’d be harder to reject.

This is a pretty bad theory of how relationships work, and it’s not very rational. I’d wager that a large number of people would agree with that, but also that a considerable portion of those people also nevertheless behave and feel as though that is true. The disconnect between what we know to be true and how we feel about it runs so much of our lives, and ultimately, our emotions are only crude approximations that allow us to react to things without having to reason it through — which is why my brain can know this story is wrong, and still run it anyway.

This is just one way in which we are really bad at threat-modelling. I don’t think people, when introspecting on their social dilemmas, would say: “God, nobody likes me. This must be because I haven’t benched two plates yet!” At the same time, however, things in this exact vein are exactly what people prescribe themselves when they face these struggles. As problem-solving creatures, we face an difficulty in our lives and, in order to gain some semblance of control, quickly attach a solution to this issue: a solution that, in many cases, doesn’t directly solve that problem. When the thing you want depends on other people — something you can’t control — you reach for the thing you can control; something you can do alone.

I also suspect that there are many people who chase excellence because they want to feel seen, or for a relationship-facing reason — trying to pay for human connection with the proof that you’re worth it. If you are perceived as more impressive, as better and more accomplished, more people will give you a chance, reply to you, and take you seriously, increasing your surface area for connection. It also builds a feedback loop where your competence reinforces your own confidence, and gives you an out from your rumination with structure and routine. However, status-building doesn’t guarantee you’ll reach what you actually want — it doesn’t directly get you warmth, compatibility, or connection, and it might not fix the root of your loneliness.

I don’t deny that great achievements make things better. Having great feats to talk about, being physically fit, enduring arduous journeys in life, and constantly having cool things you’re up to will make your life more exciting, more interesting to you and to other people, and most importantly, prevents you from ruminating about the perennial struggles you’ve never quite been able to fix. I would go as far as to extend this by saying that a lot of us wouldn’t have done as much as we have if it weren’t for the fact that there were external, “unsolvable” problems present in our lives.

At the same time, however, it’s well-established that you can do novel and creative things without needing to feel so terrible about yourself. It is very possible to simultaneously be completely happy, connected with and confident in the person you are now while also wanting yourself to grow and do great, exciting, and incredible things — they just aren’t mutually exclusive. One view of achievement I’ve found interesting is that of an anxiolytic — a drug that temporarily sedates the fear of inadequacy. While it’s an extremely effective substance that alleviates and distracts from your troubles, it is also incredibly addictive, and rarely tackles the root cause. Indeed, you begin to build a tolerance to it; the excellence you’d attained last year you barely perceive this year, and you push yourself to heights far greater to get the same hit.

Indeed, in mid-2024, I deeply wanted to change myself. I underwent a fitness journey that would see me losing more than 25% of my body weight. I began going to the gym, where I gained strength in almost every respect, doubling my squat and massively increasing many of my other key lifts despite losing weight. In February 2025, my school encouraged people to sign up for a half-marathon event a month away. I signed up because I had that inexpressible urge to prove that I could do whatever I set out to do, and within a month of hard training I went from barely breaking 37 minutes on the 5K to running the half in under 2 hours. In August, I finished my weight loss journey, dropping from 102kg to 72kg.

I still, now, don’t feel satisfied. I’m currently training for a sub-20-minute 5K, a sub-1:40 half-marathon, and my first full marathon two days after I turn 18, and goal creep has taken its toll on me. The goals I have empower me, but also weigh me down — they are great, and I enjoy pursuing them, but they are ultimately proxy goals for the things I value the most: meaningful human connection, transformative positive experiences, and the knowledge that I can do great things. In the end, no matter how much I achieve, I am evermore uncertain on my ability to secure those things, and it’s something I constantly think about.

This comes in complete contrast to the views of myself that my former selves would adopt of my present self, in the hypothetical I raised at the beginning. My twelve-year-old self is euphoric at the idea that I have close friends I can relate to, that my mental health is in a decent place, that I’ve had significant and life-changing positive experiences, and that I’ve been able to connect to and relate to so many people. My sixteen-year-old self is incredibly proud of me for breaking the prison I thought I was in for so long — that I would be physically unfit for my whole life. He’s amazed at how much I’ve learned how to be okay with myself, and is just as excited as I am for what I’m preparing for. Most importantly, both versions of myself feel immensely reassured that things will have gone well for me, and they’ll carry that as they continue their normal lives.

Unfortunately, I lack an older self to reassure my ruminations about the future with. It could very well have been that in the past year I’d have failed to do anything meaningful, and that therefore the worries my past selves had would’ve been justified. This is what returns me back to the proxy goals I’ve set for myself. While the numbers I chase don’t reassure me that I belong, that my future will be amazing and better than things are now, they at least tell me that I’m moving forwards, that I’m improving in some way, and that I’m not wasting my life. It’s a substitute form of certainty, and it’s not like I have a better choice.

This leaves me with a strange truth: achievement has changed my life, and it still hasn’t solved the central fear that drove it. It has made me better, and it hasn’t made me certain. It has made me impressive, and it hasn’t made me safe.

The quote at the beginning is certainly true for me. I always want more. I’m better than I was. I can always get even better. I’m still not certain about my future; I may never will be.

But in that room, the older version of me exists at all — and that is its own answer.

Special thanks to Youssef, Mario, Aurelio, and Joshua for helping me write this and giving me feedback!

Most of those I get to know at a non-superficial level have likely heard about my music tastes, usually to their peril. It’s such a massive way I’ve come to experience the world, mainly by my own admission — I use a pair of high-end noise cancelling headphones pretty much constantly! However, something I’d never anticipated is that for many people (I’d wager the majority of people across the world), the types of music they listen to don’t determine the feeling they get in their chest when thinking about certain times in their life, ebbing away with some relentless, difficult-to-describe, insurmountable sensation; nostalgic or not.

For a far larger subset of people, these feelings also aren’t determined by the exact Liquicity Yearmix they happened to listen to during some two-month time period. I’ve become very accustomed to the fact that most people just don’t operate in thinking about their past like that, and it’s not like those periods of time in my past are solely tied to them, but the concept of not remembering a period of time and immediately attaching that to the one-and-a-half hour mix of songs nearly nobody else you know of can relate to having listened to before is extremely foreign to me.

For longer than a year, I’ve predominantly listened to liquid, atmospheric, and dancefloor drum-and-bass — I can best describe this amalgamation of my preferences as highly melodic and somewhat melancholy, yet (depending on the song) extremely energised and fast-paced — I’d reckon the average BPM of the songs I listen to exceeds 170. If a song manages to be what I’ve described above,1 chances are I’d really like it.2 It also just so happens that a lot of this music lies within an innocuous record label called Liquicity, which has led to people probably thinking I’m a bit weird for talking about as much as I do; they’re not even a band.

The problem is, the mean reaction I receive when I show these types of music to my friends is — “Oh my god, is this 2016 Roblox tycoon music?”3 — usually followed by some vaguely judgmental looks. To be completely honest, they’re not wrong! The music I listened to most in mid-2024 was Liquicity Yearmix 2012, an hour-long mix of liquid drum and bass from that year, which you genuinely only need to listen to the first ten seconds of to understand their perspective. This unfortunate characterisation of the music I listen to, however, prevents anyone from perceiving the songs I like to the depth that I perceive them with.

Take the first ninety seconds of that yearmix. Even though I couldn’t really rid myself of the impression most others would have either, it turns out to also be the exact music I’d simultaneously imagine myself writing my first GCSE paper to, nerve-wracked, fighting a battle all on my own. It turns out the element of nostalgia the mix has, being so old, kind of made me reminisce about all the definitely-happy moments I had throughout secondary school, all culminating into the most important one-to-two hour bursts of my life (at the time).

Other examples that stick out to me quite a bit include 2020, which brings me right to the end of secondary school, where I’d just left the period of time I call the worst five years of my life — yet, the future I imagined for myself after it all ended never came to fruition, and I was dealing with the melancholy that followed. The last half-hour, in particular, I ended up looping as it resonated particularly with the feelings of loss, and the sentiment of “What Happens Now?” that I felt throughout much of that summer, even following on later.

2024 represents the first few months of 2025 — where I’d felt the most lost, trying to rebuild myself after a barrage of inconveniently timed, bad events. I was at the beginning of a weight loss journey that ended in me losing >25% of my former body weight. I hadn’t even found running yet, which would turn out to be one of my favourite things, and something I actively keep myself going with long-term goals. The last half-hour in particular evokes a lot of energised despondence, as it personally seemed to sum up that period of time as, “I’m really depressed, but I’m trying to work really hard to change that”.

In contrast, 2021 represents me reaping the rewards of the hard work I did earlier that year. I’d managed to see the light at the end of the tunnel after a lot of personal growth — I’d ran two half-marathons, hit an all-time personal best on the 5K, finished that weight loss journey and lost 30kg, made amazing friends, and had the best summer camp of my entire life. I now associate any form of extremely meaningful enjoyment with that period of time; it is truly memorable, and I hope to create many more summers like that.

An observation I’ve just made while writing is that, throughout, I seem to particularly like pieces of music if I can fit them into the narrative of some really important, meaningful struggle I’m trying to overcome. This essentially applies to every Liquicity Yearmix I’ve listened to, which, as of writing, is much easier to describe by mentioning the ones I haven’t played (on loop, for many hours). People have often expressed surprise at the fact that I don’t have any peaceful, non-energised music to listen to; I think the most valid explanation of this is that I’ve observed that I’m nearly constantly hyperactive — even if I’m exhausted or drained, I still feel internally active. I extremely frequently, even in periods of rest or inactivity, daydream about doing great things, or doing hard things, and I’ve internally established a link between that and really meaningful, intense, melodic music.

As these mixes of songs are usually an hour and a half long, it takes me about two months before I get tired of looping the same one on repeat constantly before I move on to the next. Unfortunately, when I’m asked about my music tastes, I’m essentially forced to distil everything I’ve detailed above into a few words to avoid speaking a mouthful about artists and collections of songs the other hasn’t heard of at all, despite how massive a topic this is and how significant it’s been for me. Worse yet is saying, “you wouldn’t’ve heard of it”, which feels criminal to tell someone clearly getting to know you, even though you’re forever burdened with the curse of being a part of a niche that such a small proportion of the population relates with.4 You’re telling me I have to somehow tread the line between overexplaining exactly why my music tastes are the way they are and saying, “umm… I listen to drum-and-bass”?

Why drum-and-bass? Before I found Liquicity, a lot of the music I listened to was electronic or dance (note that this somehow differs from EDM;5 don’t ask me how).6 But in 2021, something interesting happened — I got really into osu!, a rhythm game where you click circles to the beat of music playing in the background.

This, long story short, is pretty much what got me into drum-and-bass in the first place, not only by virtue of enabling me to discover Liquicity itself, but also establishing some brain-pleasing neural connection that lies within hearing the actual beats of music as “clicks” or “taps”, or something else. While I don’t play the game much nowadays, I often chatter my teeth to the beat of the songs I’m listening to (usually involuntarily at this point), and I now scarcely enjoy songs that aren’t energetic or at a high BPM, with exceptions usually only for particularly incredible, or sad, pieces of music.

What keeps it going now the most is certainly the fact that I’m into long-distance running. These mixes are suitably long, range from 160-180BPM, and extremely energetic, and as a result are almost perfectly conducive to running. Listening to them during high-intensity, hard sessions is an experience I’d seriously recommend, and borders being memorable at times in its vividness. I’ve sometimes done ungoaled 10Ks where I push my pace solely to the intensity of the music I listen to, which I’ve found amazing if the purpose for a run on a given day is to prevent me from going insane.

I find it so interesting how the things I’ve been exposed to have had a seemingly causative influence on my musical preferences, especially to this extent. I wouldn’t argue against you if you told me I’d been conditioned to like drum-and-bass to this extent — it’s kind of true! I also find it curious that I link pieces of music extremely strongly to my feelings; not only in the moment, but to the general feelings I’ve had across weeks and months, and to entire periods of time (which I’ve learned not everyone does).

I’m currently listening to Liquicity Yearmix 2025, which I’ve come to love extremely quickly, and will likely be the subject of my overplaying for the next few months. If you’ve taken interest enough to read down this far, you should play it!

Imagine that you’re one of the many key decision-makers in Parliament, but that for some reason you hold an unusual amount of power. Superseding the entirety of the Transport Ministry and the Iron Lady, you solely hold the ability to approve the construction of the M25. Let’s also assume that you have perfect hindsight, and access to the exact information that we have now.

In 2018, the M25 saw a total of 637 casualty-causing collisions, of which 5 were fatal. If we extrapolate this death rate to every year since the motorway was opened, this suggests that a reasonable estimate2 for the M25’s death toll is between 100-200 people, with 10,000-25,000 total accidents (constituting a broad spectrum of trauma, both physical and emotional) across its lifetime.

I want to phrase your decision under perhaps the worst lens that I can come up with. Picture the families of those involved in such accidents — the average household size has been roughly 2.5 people, leaving 250-500 close family members, relatives, flatmates, and more to face the guttering experience that is losing someone they are close to. Consider also the financial burden of such a road — in 1986, it cost £1 billion (~$1.35 billion), the increases in global emissions, and to finalise my spiel, this quote from the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Appraisal:

We conclude that the M25 experience most probably does, as is popularly thought, serve as an example of a case where roads generate traffic […]

This decision is not at all easy to make; please do not let me convince you that this motorway is a net negative for the UK! I don’t even have fully formed opinions myself on how much the existence of the motorway does for us compared to the counterfactual. But, having all of this information, it’s kind of hard to look at this choice and feel completely good about one of them over the other.

On one hand, we need massive projects like this because we consistently need our critical infrastructure (which is perpetually inadequate) improved in the UK. It may be prohibitively expensive, or difficult, to prevent the inevitable deaths that come along with it, and if we were to paralyse ourselves with this notion and value these lives so highly, we may reach the conclusion that massive projects should never be approved if they have a solid chance of causing this many deaths, which also seems plainly wrong.

Then again, many other viable, safer alternatives come to mind: we could probably transport the same (if not a higher) number of people by heavily investing in British railways, or some other such method of transport. In typical effective altruist fashion, the money spent on this project could have been used to save millions of people, for example with the installation of malaria nets.

Whether this choice is actually good or not, the question of, “how can I make high-stakes decisions where I know people might die?” comes up for me.

I will come back to this later on, because for the time being, I’d like to talk about, as author and professor of neuroscience Matt Walker put it, a global experiment that over 1.6 billion people take part in, twice a year, across 70 different countries, also known as daylight savings.

All it takes for measurable impairments in your cardiovascular health is the deprivation of 1 hour of sleep. In the spring, when the clocks go forwards and we lose that hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a 21% reduction in heart attacks. Further to that, we can make similar observations about car crashes, strokes, workplace injuries, and even suicide rates. For a lot of these patterns, however, it is unfortunate and surprising that the gaining of an hour of sleep in the autumn does not cause a decrease of the same magnitude in these areas.

While we end up gaining an extra hour of daylight, as a consequence of our decision we lose an hour of sleep for a day, and on the scale of the Earth’s population, where minute differences in a population’s wellbeing caused by collective events causes all sorts of messy downstream consequences, it leads to deaths. This brings us to the conclusion I’ve thought most reasonable human beings have had: why do we even do this?

The idea I’m confronting here is that, as people living on Earth, some of us are placed into positions where we can highly influence things that go on to affect many people. In the few areas that uphold direct democracy, or if you are a politician, or otherwise, you very well may be a part of such decisions. It’s remarkably interesting, and also guttering, to consider that the outcome of those decisions could, particularly in cases where it is historically shown to happen (such as the construction of new roads), lead to people dying where they otherwise wouldn’t have.3 It seems quite easy to think about such a death toll and react by never supporting such a project again, and you may be justified. I claim that there’s probably many different lenses you could view this under:

• consequentialism (maximising expected social welfare — can we quantify some increase in some metric that benefits us as being worth a life?);

• deontology (is it not just worth it at all, no matter what, to permit a death except under extremely special justifications?);

• virtue ethics (what would a wise, just, and compassionate decision-maker do?)

You may, or may not, have a kneejerk, harm-avoidance intuition that judges such decisions prima facie wrong because they foreseeably raise the risk of death, but if we’d ever a chance at advancing and making new decisions that could very well be a net benefit, we will likely have to draw some line, one that dictates that the potential costs in lives taken are worth the numerous benefits, and particularly in the weeds of decision-making, most likely under a consequentialist framework.

It is immensely crude, and borderline offensive, to make judgements on the worth of a human life relative to how many hours of travel I save taking one road over the other. At the same time, however, if you came to the decision that you supported the M25 despite an expected 200 fatalities, it means you judge the aggregate reduction in travel time and other gains to outweigh the harm of increasing fatality risk to that extent; equivalently, the average benefit per expected fatality is at least as morally significant as the harm of one death. Likewise, endorsing daylight savings despite the indeterminable number of deaths it’s plausibly associated with means you judge the extra hour of daylight you get to outweigh the harm of the same increase in fatality risk — a less defensible trade-off to many.

None of this licenses trading a named life for a sliver4 of convenience. Yet when pursuing high-stakes, important decisions that genuinely advance humanity, we are forced to make ex ante choices under risk; forced to determine, somehow, somewhere, how much (as we’re forced to go beyond “if any at all”) we are willing to sacrifice. We can support making these decisions not as a celebration of death, not under the guilt-laden wrath of the inevitable consequences of our decisions, but as a resolve to keep the harms of what we must do to go on as low as reasonably achievable while continuing to do what humanity does — pursue genuine, widely shared benefits.