stories by Vincent H. '23

a few weeks ago someone wanted to shoot a music video and needed a few dozen extras in the background, so they made a big group chat and added me to it. i wasn’t friends with any of the other extras, but there were a lot of people whom i recognized from classes or activities a few years ago and hadn’t seen recently, and we had some pleasant conversations while filming. afterwards i realized i enjoyed talking to them and wanted to learn more about them, and then i also realized i simply did not have enough time to get to know everyone i wanted to

even though i’m graduating in a few weeks, i haven’t stopped meeting new students here and trying to understand them as well as possible, and i plan to continue doing so up until the very end. i know this is a foolish endeavor from a friend-making perspective, but i really enjoy hearing new kinds of stories even if i don’t end up becoming friends with the person telling the stories. i think maybe that’s one of the reasons i’ve been getting more interested in film and theater

lately i’ve been coming to terms with the fact that there’s nothing special about stem. this semester i’ve enjoyed learning about distributed systems and statistics and cell biology and statistical physics, but i’ve also enjoyed talking to a wide variety of people and absorbing their perspectives. those two kinds of information are very different from each other, but i don’t think one is more interesting or more valuable than the other; they’re just different, and empirically speaking it seems like i’m equally good at picking up both kinds of information

and if there’s nothing special about stem, then as a corollary there really isn’t any reason i need to be working in stem. for instance, ever since i committed to doing ai research after school, my friends have been bugging me with questions about ai policy (specifically, how to deal with the socioeconomic effects of widespread automation) and these questions actually feel around as interesting to me as actual ai research does. this is a disorienting realization to have because i’ve spent my whole life doing stem, but it’s not so different from the realization i had a few years ago that i didn’t have to limit myself to math and that the rest of stem was interesting too

anyway, all this is to say that lately i’ve been obsessed with seeking out as many stories as i can, and the awareness that i have more stories left to hear than hours left at mit has made me sad. at the same time, i know this is a futile quest anyway; even if i did understand everything there was to understand about my friends, i would simply move onto my friends of friends, and so on. there is no end to this task, and perhaps the goal shouldn’t be to finish it

recently i encountered my first true instance of decision paralysis, when i was trying to figure out who to hang out with in my remaining time here, and i found myself utterly unable to prioritize or decide between people. i hate group hangouts, so choosing to see one person necessarily meant choosing not to see someone else, and ultimately i decided that i didn’t want to optimize my social life so i would just not actively choose anything; instead i just go about my days and the people i happen to run into end up being the people i hang out with

sometimes i feel like a sitting duck, refusing to make decisions of my own and simply waiting around for the end of the world. but i’ve been happy with the results so far, and i’m not sure i’d be able to accurately optimize my schedule even if i did try to. i’ve never been great at predicting how much i’ll enjoy a conversation or a hangout before these things actually happen