The Unprofessional Boy #2

Libraries, Soylent, and Welcome Week

Hello,

Good to see you again, if it’s your second watch— I’m beginning to work out the format, the most obvious change being that I’m dispensing with the bold labels for sections that don’t need them. They’re a crutch: I don’t (or shouldn’t) need “Greeting” to say hello to my readers.

It’s also good to have you reading if it’s your first time, in which case please disregard the above paragraph, in the same way as you wouldn’t page through a cringeworthy album of teenage photos. It’s the first few issues. The TUB staff (and consequently the newsletter) is still going through growing pains.

That’s a lot of unnecessary explanatory text, but I’ve never edited what I write, and I’m not about to start self-censoring now. Let’s move on.

That’s better.

This is the atrium of my college’s main library. It’s absolutely beautiful. I texted my parents a picture; my mother said that it looked “of the church of books.” I agree, and I’m stealing the phrase as a library descriptor. It’s very “cathedral of football”-equivalent, if you’re familiar with soccer stadiums.

This newsletter goes out on the Tuesday following Labor Day here in the States, otherwise known as my first day of classes. This semester, I’m taking four, which are essentially Chemistry, Calculus, English, and an introductory engineering and design course. I’m excited to continue learning in this technical vein, but I expect it to be rather dry, so I’m going to include it only if it’s relevant or particularly interesting. Instead, we’ll stick mostly with the writing and learning I do outside structured classes.

For example, last week I wrote about Rob Rhinehart’s early blog posts, which continue to fascinate me, and the reasons why: they’re a clear, methodical take on food, an area which so often seems obscure by tradition.

I felt that I left that thought relatively incomplete; in other words, that it wouldn’t be fair of me to critique the thinking of others without addressing my (admittedly flawed) approach to diet and exercise. I also thought, given that I’m writing about Soylent, that it would make sense for me to try at least a little rather than just posting flavor concepts, so we’ll continue last week’s conversation in those two parts.

We’ll start with the more exciting: what do I think of Soylent? I went out and bought two of their ready-to-drink meals to experiment with, both cacao-flavored. I went with the bottles for two reasons. Firstly, even if the powder is their flagship product, it’s not their most famous. Case-in-point; the Walgreens I happened to walk past stocked them by the checkout counter. Secondly, the fact that I chanced upon them while shopping for other snacks; it seemed fortuitous. What’s my review?

Well, given the standard caveat (namely, the extremely small sample size,) I quite liked it. It did not give me any form of stomach discomfort or gas, and in terms of eating-experience, it was delightful. The texture and taste were both reminiscent (again, cacao flavor, but I mention/reiterate this because it’s particularly impressive to me) of a fairly thick chocolate milk. The only negative: it wasn’t particularly filling, which is obvious given the 400-calorie count. I mention only to say that it didn’t exceed expectations; it quelled hunger better than an ordinary drink, for certain, but I couldn’t call it a really satisfying full meal. Two, I think, would have been. I do say this, though, knowing that I’d probably have to drink six of these a day rather than the average five(=2000kcal) they cite, so I may be biased.

I’m probably fighting all sorts of biases, also, in the ways I exercise and eat, but I think it’s a reasonable prototype of a routine, so I’ll share what I’ve got at the moment. The main substantive exercise I do is running a few miles most nights (probably average 3-ish miles, 6 times a week; I’m not training for anything at the moment.) I also walk quite a bit, and I take the stairs when presented with the opportunity. I use light (10-20lb) free weights very sporadically, and if I’m being honest stretch and do my ab-exercises at roughly the same frequency. I’m not on a frisbee team at the moment (tryouts haven’t happened yet for my college team) but that constitutes a few additional workouts a week in-season. I generally eat whatever I want, and I intermittent-fast five days a week (started tracking a little while ago,) but I don’t really enjoy desserts or particularly greasy/oily foods to the necessary extent, and I try to consciously incorporate more fruits/vegetables.

I’m opening myself to criticism by posting this, I suppose, but it’s what works for me (at the moment; I’m always iterating.) I believe I’ve ended up sticking with this as a result of my philosophy towards diet and exercise: make it easy. I, like most people, have very little willpower. I find it easy to commit to things, and hard to follow through. That makes me demoralized, which in turn creates a ‘down’ cycle. To avoid this I focus on things that have the best health/effort ratio, and I make those actions the default. (I think this is a pretty good general approach to things; it’s informed by Ali Abdaal and Scott Adams, amongst others.)

Links

I’ve come up with a new concept, I feel, for what this section might constitute; rather than just posting interesting things, I think the bulk will be concerned with setting up what I might write about next week in the meat of the newsletter. That’ll allow readers to read and process what articles I’m thinking about ahead of time, so it’ll feel less disjointed when I discuss these ideas further. Without further ado, here are a few of the things I’ve (re-)read this week which I plan to elaborate on in the near future (and, in a sentence, why.)

This Thoughts from Inside the Box post: they’re all interesting, but this one explicitly compares the truck to a dorm room, which is a parallel I’ve been turning over.

The Island Test, Paul Graham: puzzling over what non-essentials I need in my dorm room, this is an interesting thought experiment.

Before the Startup, Paul Graham: I’m in college, I’ve half-jokingly Tweeted about my interest in startups; this seems like a natural thing to be thinking about.

Stanford CS major seeks sales/marketing monkey, Andrew Chen: it’s an interesting lens into what skills are actually helpful/useful to technical people, and what business stuff I might want to learn (or at minimum, get acquainted with.)

Linking Out Loud #3: Levels of Action, David Laing: as someone that’s always preoccupied with the best ways to make decisions, I really enjoyed this breakdown of an earlier essay on the topic; David’s comments really helped me understand its core. (Sidenote: you should subscribe to David’s Substack. It’s like this Links section, but more in-depth and better-written.)

Work

This week, I haven’t been doing too much that’s specifically mandated. I’ve had to go to a few Welcome Week events, familiarize myself with the resources here, and generally get my house in order, but no class. Instead, I’ve had a lot of free time to work on the side projects I find interesting (like this newsletter.)

The first of these is a much-too-long blog post (with an image header that took me longer than I’m proud of) summarizing my first few days at college; if you’re on the mailing list for the Personal News section, you’ll love it. If you’re more interested in other stuff, I’ll round it up for you: I’m a nerd who both spends a lot of time in and gets very excited by the library. (You already knew that, but it’s worth repeating.)

I’ve also written another fairly short book chapter; recently, I’ve found that length a little easier to stick with and produce consistently. (Case in point, this second one.)

A few collaborations and moonshots also keep ticking along in the background, but I’ve gotten into the habit of not posting things I work on with others until they really get off the ground. I love putting work into them —each now-pretty-much-defunct project yields some useful lessons, and they’re always interesting to revisit— but as a matter of general policy I’ll stick to ‘finished first drafts’ of things for the time being, just as a general section disclaimer. Don’t want to help hamstring myself or kneecap creative stuff that may be in development, apologies. (But you’ll be the first to know!)

Writing To (Music)

I’ve been writing all of this to, actually, fairly little music. The vast majority of what I’ve been listening to has been while running, walking, or taking the subway, and most of that has been podcasts. If this continues, I might expand or split the section to accommodate podcasts; for now, we’ll stick with the usual roundup.

It’s almost all rock and rap, very motivational: here’s the full summary.

No Top Ten this week, because I haven’t had very strong opinions lately, just thinking, and that’s not a great state for controversially whittling down lists. (Next week, though, I’m sure it’ll return as I’m crunched for time and need some filler material to round out the episode’s back end.)

As always, I welcome suggestions, praise, and criticism.

All the best,

Orion Lehoczky Escobar