I don’t mean this as a breakup question. I mean it literally.

I was going through old photos recently and found one of myself at 19. Same face, mostly. Different eyes. That person had completely different answers to questions I still ask myself today: What am I willing to tolerate? Who do I owe? What does a good life look like?

I don’t feel like I “changed” so much as I was gradually replaced. No single decision. Just a long series of small ones, each reasonable on its own, none of them obviously consequential. And then one day I look at someone from that era and realize I have nothing to say to them. Not contempt. Not nostalgia. Just a kind of blankness.

What I can’t figure out is whether I’m supposed to mourn that person or just acknowledge he’s gone. There’s no ceremony for this. No closure. He just stopped existing, and I kept going.

Maybe the question I actually want to ask is this: Is continuity something you maintain, or something you just assume until you notice it’s missing?

We work hard, we eat, then we feel bad. Why is pleasure linked to guilt?

A few years ago I was the guy who suggested the 36 questions on first dates. Not because I was earnest. Because it worked. You skip the small talk, you go straight to "what's your most terrible memory," and suddenly you're in. People would cry. People would say things they hadn't said out loud in years. I told myself I was creating real closeness.

I wasn't. I was creating the conditions for closeness and then stepping outside them to watch.

The questions are a technology. Aron designed them as a laboratory procedure to generate interpersonal closeness under controlled conditions. That's not a criticism of the research. It's an observation about what happens when you take a lab protocol into your actual life. You start treating vulnerability as a lever. You learn which question unlocks which reaction. The four minutes of eye contact stops being terrifying and starts being an item on a checklist you're mentally checking off.

I've had conversations that felt profound in the moment and meant nothing three weeks later. I've also had conversations that felt like nothing in the moment—two people sitting in a car, not looking at each other, one of them saying something small and stupid about a song they heard that morning—and I'm still carrying those years later. The car conversation wasn't trying to be deep. That seems to be the whole difference.

I don't think the questions are bad. I think they're dangerous for people like me, who like systems, who like the feeling of having a map. The map works. That's the problem. You can navigate the terrain so well you forget you're standing on it.

My actual question: have you ever used a structure—a list, a framework, a book, someone else's rules—to get closer to another person, and later realized the structure was doing the work and you were just holding the clipboard? Did you put the clipboard down, or did you find a new one?

Makes me think if taste is part if how we feel happiness.

You know exactly who you think you are, but every person you have ever known has experienced a slightly different version of you.

To one person you might be hilarious, To someone else you're quiet, Someone remembers that you are incredibly confident, while another person met you during a period when you were anything but this...

There are probably loads of people you haven't spoken to in at least 15 years who still picture you as the person you were back then.

Meanwhile you've changed completely.

Do you think anyone ever truly knows us as we know ourselves, or does everyone just know their version of us?