It’s 2004 and I’m a junior in High School. The night before the SATs, I’m in a car with Mrs. Robinson driving two hours to watch Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals in concert.
I’d just arrived in Tampa from Costa Rica about 6 months before then. Bright eyed and with disheveled hair, I landed in what my parents thought was the best High School for me (it wasn’t). If you closed your eyes and imagined a mix between the worlds of The Fast And The Furious and 8 Mile, I bet you could visualize something pretty close to the High School.
On my first day, they asked me to take an “e-sole” test. Or that’s what I thought they said. I later learned they actually said “ESL” which logically stands for “English as a Second Language.” I wasn’t fluent in English but had played enough Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy video games to read and write it fairly well (with some exceptions: later that year I took a chemistry test and I remember staring at it for about 30 minutes trying to make sense of the word “sandpaper”. How could paper be possibly made out of sand?!) The test results came in and, thanks to Hideo Kojima, they placed me in AP English. I felt accomplished until I stepped into class and the teacher (presumably) asked me to introduce myself. I couldn’t understand her so I did what I thought was a bullet proof response in every social situation: I smiled and nodded.
My junior year was filled with moments like that. Just, super fun kinda stuff like that. Naturally, I took refuge in reading. I spent every lunch hour eating cold pizza slices from the cafeteria and reading books to learn English. I thought that would help me understand the language and stop nodding and smiling so much.
My social life outside of school wasn’t much better. Did I mention I lived in Tampa? If you happen to have spent time there in 2004, you might’ve noticed that 80% of the city was reserved for highways and car dealerships. The other 20% was occupied by strip clubs and “accident lawyer” billboards that promised you a fortune after crashing your car. Our family had one car, which was usually being driven somewhere without me. Determined to leave my house, I discovered a public library that was only 4 bus transfers away (I won’t even mention the 45 minute walk to the bus stop under a hundred degree weather.) As expected, the library had tons of books and, to my surprise, tons of CDs that you could check out for free. I spent every weekend traveling to the library to stock up on new books and music for the week.
Back in school, my English teacher must’ve noticed me: a foreign kid reading books like Lolita and Kafka’s Metamorphosis in class. Her name was Mrs Robinson and we developed a sort of kinship. She loved jazz music and jam bands, just like me. She’d recommend me books, and I’d recommend her music I’d find in the library. She introduced me to The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Of Mice and Men. I introduced her to Soulive, Ben Harper, and Jamie Cullum.
She explained what the SAT was. I found a big book at the library with sample SAT questions and she coached me on how to study for it. A few days before the test, she surprised me with a gift for all my hard work: two tickets to see Ben Harper. The catch: it was in Gainesville, a town 2 hours away, the night before the long awaited SAT.
A couple days ago, Leah and I were driving through upstate New York’s windy roads and the car shuffled its way to Ben Harper, a band I hadn’t heard in decades. To my surprise, Leah also loved him! That great feeling where you’ve known someone for a long time and you discover a new corner of their tastes is even better when it happens to overlap with yours.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place. You see, Ben Harper wasn’t just a phase. I grew up listening to people like Ben, who dared to believe in a better world. They could draw a straight line from what they did to the better world they imagined. To me, that was meaningful and they armed me with purpose to attempt to do something meaningful as well.
Meaning has been simultaneously the light and shadow looming over my actions. Believing in meaningful actions brought order to an otherwise chaotic environment. I thought: if there are infinite things we could do, we should do the meaningful ones.
And so, much of what I’ve done professionally, I’ve deemed as “meaningful“ for my old pal Ben. I’ve “drank the kool-aid” because that’s what I grew up believing. (That term, “drinking the kool-aid,” is pretty problematic isn’t it? It’s weaponized by cynics to put down those who dare to believe in something bigger than themselves.)
Strangely, I was lured to corporate culture by their beliefs. I didn’t look up to salesmen or entrepreneurs. I saw rich men and never thought “that’s what I want.” Yet I jumped in the pool of the tech industry because I believed in what they represented: a new set of institutions, powered by the Internet, that connected people and destroyed taboos. Naive, maybe, but purposeful. And then, one by one, they let me down. Past the veneer of mission statements I found money-hungry piranhas who fed from the status quo. So then I jumped to a different pool and, over time, the piranhas showed their teeth again.
The bigger tragedy is not that the industry didn’t believe in anything at all, it was that it made me stop believing. Viktor Frankl said “those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” Conversely, I found myself bearing with almost any ‘why’ to justify the ‘how.’
I got back from the concert at 2am and got up to take the SAT at 6am. I did fine in it and, to this day, remember the concert fondly. Mrs Robinson gifted me another pair of tickets a year later, this time to see Santana after I graduated from High School. We are still Facebook friends.
I’m too old now (surely “a baby” to older eyes but ”a dinosaur” to younger ones) and can justify too many things. Pluralism has consumed me and paralyzed my judgement. Believing in one thing gets drowned by countless other things that can be believed. Maybe that’s okay, if anything is “okay,” but I’d like to get back to doing something meaningful. Or rather, believing I’m doing something meaningful. If nothing else, because that’s the way I grew up.
Piranhas abound.
Checking out Ben Harper now.
Beautiful piece 👏