I reread something I wrote 13 years ago

I recently reread a psychology paper I wrote in college more than a decade ago. I expected to cringe. Instead, I had a completely different reaction.

Holy shit... I'm still asking the same questions.

The assignment was for an Environmental Psychology class. A couple classmates and I spent several hours observing a courtyard at Cal Poly to understand how people interacted with the space.

My job was to map where people walked. I drew the different routes people took through the courtyard, counted how many people used each one, and started looking for patterns.

Most people followed the obvious paths. Sidewalks. Stairs. The routes the environment had essentially designed for them to take.

But a small number cut through the middle, off the designated path and closer to the grass and trees.

And apparently, twenty-something-year-old me couldn't just record that and move on. I started wondering why. Were people choosing the easiest route? Was the environment quietly directing their behavior? Why did some people choose a different path?

I even noticed that the people taking one of the less conventional routes seemed happier and wondered whether being closer to nature had something to do with it.

At the end of the paper, I basically argued that our man-made environments should be redesigned to feel a little less man-made.

Reading it again more than a decade later was weird. Because that's basically what I'm still doing.

Our.os didn't exist then. I wasn't thinking about intrinsic states. I didn't know how important autonomy would eventually become to me. I definitely wasn't thinking about building a human-first operating system.

But the questions were already there. Environment. Human behavior. Nature. Technology. Patterns. Why people do what they do. How the world around us quietly shapes the way we experience it.

So I started looking further back. And that's when things got even stranger.

When I was a kid, we lived on five acres. I'd disappear outside for what felt like hours. Walk around with my dog. Climb trees. Stare at clouds. Look for Bigfoot. Try to catch leprechauns with my friends. Basically just wander around and see what I could find.

When I wasn't outside, I was usually watching The Crocodile Hunter, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, or National Geographic.

I wanted to understand everything. Nature. Animals. Technology. Physics. Space. Reality.

I remember looking at the stars and realizing I was literally looking into the past. That kind of thing would send my brain down a rabbit hole for hours.

As I got older, technology became another version of the same curiosity. Photography. Video editing. Burning CDs and designing the album art and labels so they looked like the real thing. Building playlists around a particular vibe. Exploring random corners of the internet on StumbleUpon. Imagining technologies that didn't exist yet.

I loved the school projects where the instructions were basically: Here's the question. Now go figure out what you think and make something.

Looking back... Curiosity, observation, technology, nature, and creation were everywhere. I just didn't know they were clues.

A good friend once told me:

"You've always been the same person."

At the time, I don't think I gave it much thought. Now I think he might be right.

Obviously I've changed. I've learned. Matured. Gotten married. Had kids. Built a career. Left that career. Started a company. My beliefs are more informed and probably a little less naive.

But underneath all of that... I'm not sure the foundation has changed very much. I think I've mostly gotten better at understanding it.

Autonomy might be the clearest example.

If you'd asked me ten years ago how important autonomy was to me, I'm not sure I would have known what you meant. Today, I'd tell you it's probably one of the most important things in my life.

But autonomy didn't suddenly become important three years ago. The evidence was everywhere. Disappearing outside alone as a kid. Loving open-ended projects. Wanting to build things from scratch. Trying entrepreneurship through an incubator program before taking a job. Choosing a startup instead of a traditional company. Constantly wanting more control over what I worked on and how I worked. Eventually leaving that stable career to build Our.os.

The signal was there. I just didn't have a name for it.

Which made me wonder... What would have happened if I could have seen that pattern earlier?

Maybe I would have continued pursuing entrepreneurship instead of joining the company I was at for 8+ years. Maybe I would have structured my career differently. Maybe I would have left sooner. Maybe I'd have built and sold a company by now. Who knows.

But here's the problem.

I don't actually want to change any of it.

A different career path might have changed my relationship with my wife. My kids might not exist. The life I'm sitting inside right now could be completely different. And I wouldn't trade that life for some hypothetical version where I figured myself out faster.

Maybe the wandering mattered too.

So I don't think the goal is to know exactly who you are when you're 20. And I definitely don't think an app should tell you. Maybe the goal is simply to make the clues a little easier to see while you're figuring it out.

Imagine if something had quietly been observing alongside me for the last 18 years. Not telling me what to do. Just remembering.

The environments where I felt most alive. The work that energized me. The projects I couldn't stop thinking about. The moments I felt most fulfilled. The things I kept returning to. The things that consistently drained me.

Then one day it could zoom all the way out and say:

Hey... I don't know what you should do with this, but you might want to look at something.

Across school, work, relationships, and different stages of your life... these things keep showing up.

Not because an AI decided that's who I am. Because my own life produced the evidence.

That's becoming one of the things I find most interesting about what Our.os could eventually become. Not something that tells you who you are. Not something that tells you what to do. But something that helps you see the evidence of who you've been all along.

Maybe self-understanding isn't always about discovering something new. Maybe sometimes it's finally seeing a pattern that's been there for years.

I'm still thinking about this one. But rereading that old paper made one thing pretty clear:

The clues were there long before I knew what they meant.

And now I'm curious about yours. Have you ever looked back at something you did, wrote, loved, or obsessed over years ago and realized:

"Damn... that's still me."

I'd genuinely love to hear about it.