a monastery and a nightclub in Kathmandu

I checked my watch.

3:47 a.m.

I stumbled out of the bathroom into an avalanche of cigarette smoke and flashing lights. The music was deafening, but I could still feel my heart thumping in my chest.

That may have been the three vodka Red Bulls I'd smashed an hour earlier, or maybe it was the girl I was dancing with. I think her name was Sofia. Or maybe Lucia. 

It doesn't matter.

For a second, I forgot where I was. Then I remembered—Lord of the Drinks. Yep, you read that right. The "44th best club in the world," apparently, smack in the middle of Kathmandu.

A lot more happened that night. Some I remember, most I don't. What I do remember, I won't share here, because it's 7am, you're scrolling LinkedIn, and you haven't even finished your coffee.

You might be surprised to hear that a day earlier, five kilometers away, I was somewhere where drinking wasn't even allowed. Neither were music, phones, electronics, drugs—no stimulation of any kind.

Not prison, don't worry.

A beautiful Tibetan monastery in the foothills of Kathmandu. And that day—the tenth day of my meditation retreat—was just as intense as the night out, in its own weird way. Seven to eight hours of sitting meditation. Complete silence. Zero eye contact. 6 a.m. wake-up time, not bedtime.

These two experiences may sound contradictory. No—they definitely sound contradictory. 

Degeneracy versus equanimity. Fun versus boredom. Stimulation versus abstinence.

But I don't think they're contradictory at all. They're not opposites—they're just different parts of being alive.

And somehow, both felt completely right.

For those who know me well, this won't come as a surprise.

I've never been good at being just one type of person.

I love having a deeply serious, philosophical conversation, then joking about the same topic a minute later. I love that some days I want to take over the world and other days I want to fuck off to the woods and read all day. I love being viciously competitive in games and then soft and tender when they're over (only if I've won, of course). I love being super healthy for two weeks—my usual mode—then spending a night absolutely bodyslamming an entire bakery.

And I love growing my hair out for six months, then getting a buzz cut on a whim.

I love feeling the different parts of myself, no matter how extreme. 

Apparently, I like doing it with my career, too.

In January, I sold my company, The Neuron—a media company that taught people about AI. I spent a little over two years grinding every day, consistent and disciplined to a boring degree. I wrote hundreds of articles for millions of people, helped launch a top podcast and courses, and spent way too much time in Northwestern's most boring libraries. Every free second went to The Neuron.

It was intense, and I loved it.

After we got acquired, I flipped the switch from 100 to 0 almost overnight.

A lot of people expected me to jump into the next thing right away. Because I'm stubborn, I put my computer away and did the exact opposite. So lately it's been travel, not knowing what I'm doing next week, sometimes not even an hour from now. Reading. Traveling. Meditating. Trying comedy, calligraphy, ancient breathwork techniques, and sketchy internet-sleuthed health supplements I found on Reddit.

I love this, too.

Which brings me here: what is it about me that enjoys living in extremes? Am I just an adrenaline junkie who gets bored easily? Non-committal? Just curious about dipping my toes into the full range of human experience?

Three green smoothies, two garlic naans, and one good night’s sleep later, I landed on this: I don't want to be just one thing. I want to embrace each part of myself and each part of life as fully as possible. 

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing a hangover with Buddhist philosophy. 

Who knows.

Most of us hold onto our identities like they're the only truth.

And I get why—it's easier. Cleaner. You're either healthy or unhealthy. Disciplined or lazy. Thin crust or deep dish (IYKYK). 

Pick a side, defend it, reject the other.

I think it starts with how we see ourselves. We put ourselves in a box first—"I'm the type of person who wakes up early"—then we look at everyone else through that lens: "anyone who doesn't wake up early is lazy."

Once we've locked into these identities, we cling to them.

Why? 

Three reasons, I think.

First, evolution. Our ancestors who had a clear sense of self—"I'm the hunter," "I'm the protector"—survived better than those who stood around having identity crises while the tiger charged.

Second, a strong sense of self helps us move through the world. It's like an operating system—tells us what to do, what to care about, who we are. Without it, we'd be paralyzed by choice at every turn.

Third, we need to look consistent. Humans hate saying one thing and doing another, especially publicly. If you tell everyone "I don't drink," you're way more likely to actually not drink. You've put it out there, and your ego won't let you break it.

We all cling to identities.

At Kopan Monastery, our lead monk—a genuinely kind, funny, wise dude—took a swing at the modern world one afternoon and said, "You won't ever find happiness in a night club."

Okay.

Maybe usually true.

But the broad stroke misses why the night out matters for some people: friends, music, release, belonging. On the flip side, I've got "friends" back home—the go-out kind you only ever see on Friday nights—who laughed when I said I was studying Buddhist meditation in Nepal.

Eye roll, sip of vodka soda.

Same move, different costume. Both locked into their identity so tight they can't see past it.

For most of my life, I've held onto my identities like they were the only truth. Which meant I judged everyone who didn't fit how I thought the world should work.

The tighter I held my identity, the more everyone else was wrong. And the more everyone else was wrong, the less I actually got them.

The problem with holding onto identity so tightly isn't just that it's judgmental.

That's obvious.

It's that anything outside your box becomes suspicious, so you never test the edges that might actually teach you something. You lock into "my kind of person," and life gets smaller than certain anatomical features in a cold plunge.

About eight months ago, I was talking with my therapist about identity. 

My therapy sessions usually went like this: I'd come in with some random minor issue in my life, like a girl I kinda sorta liked, and by minute 20, we'd be deep in philosophical territory.

I told my therapist I felt stuck in a little identity crisis—this sense that I'm "this kind of person," so doing that thing would be off-brand.

What he told me next really changed how I see things.

He said: identity is transient.

It's a tool, not a truth. Identity is just a label we slap on a stream of thoughts. "I hate seat-recliners on planes" becomes "I'm the kind of person who never reclines unless the person in front of me is reclined." And now your lower back hurts for three hours because your label said so!

When you actually look for this identity, where is it?

In Buddhism, they call this anatta—non-self. The idea isn't that you don't exist. It's that the "self", the little “you” that you think is so solid and permanent is more like a river than a rock. 

It’s constantly moving, constantly changing, even if it looks the same from the outside.

Think about it. 

The person you were at 15—the music you liked, the things you cared about, the opinions you'd die defending—how much of that is still "you"? That person felt just as real and solid as you do right now. And in ten years, you'll probably cringe at some of the stuff you're doing today.

So where's the fixed self in all that?

There isn't one. Identity is just a story we keep telling ourselves, updated constantly but narrated like it's always been the same book.

So my therapist said: your identity isn't real in the way you think it is. You can just let it drop. You can be anyone you want, at any time, without holding onto some idea of who you think you are.

Alan Watts put it like this: "You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago."

And here's another wise philosopher: "Every moment we're changing. Every moment we're a new person."

JK. I said that.

But it's true, right?!

This isn't some abstract philosophy thing. It's actually pretty practical.

Because if your identity isn't as fixed as you think it is, you don't have to defend it so hard. You don't have to reject experiences that don't fit the story. You can be the person who meditates AND the person who stays out until 4 a.m. You can be intensely ambitious and completely directionless. You can contain contradictions without exploding.

It's like watching a movie of your own life. You see yourself at 15, obsessed with whatever you were obsessed with, totally convinced that was the real you. Then 18, different obsessions, different personality, equally convinced. Then 22. Then now. Each version felt permanent at the time. None of them were.

When you watch it like that—from a little distance—you start to notice: oh, I'm not any of those versions. I'm the one watching them change.

You still feel each scene fully. You still experience being disciplined or lazy, serious or silly, monk or party-goer. But there's a part of you that knows you're not permanently any of those things. They're roles you're playing, scenes you're in. And when the scene changes, you don't freak out about being inconsistent—you just recognize it's a different scene.

And you might be thinking, wait, Noah, isn't this just confusion posing as philosophy? The risk of dissociation, of not knowing who you are at all, of using impermanence as an excuse to run away from yourself. Maybe you're not becoming who you are. Perhaps you're just scattered.

Fair. 

But here’s why I think there’s a difference.  

Ken Wilber, a great American theorist, has this idea he calls "transcend and include." It's about how we grow as people. Each new stage of growth doesn't erase what came before—it builds on the previous stage while keeping the good parts.

You can't skip stages, and the later stages actually need the earlier ones to be there.

Think of it like learning a new language. 

You don't forget your first language when you learn a second one. You transcend the limitation of only speaking one language, but you include what you already knew. You're not less fluent in English because you "learned" Spanish (i.e., you got a 2 on AP Español).

You're just... more.

That's what I'm trying to do with different parts of myself. I'm not rejecting the disciplined, grinding version when I take months off. I'm not rejecting the free-flowing version when I buckle down to work. 

I'm trying to include both.

They're both part of the larger whole.

There's this moment in Everything Everywhere All at Once (overrated movie, btw) where Evelyn sees all her possible lives at once—the movie star, the chef, the laundromat owner, the kung fu master. The point isn't that one of those is the "real" Evelyn.

They all are. 

She's not rejecting one life for another. She's holding ALL of them.

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm not rejecting one life for another and then switching back. I'm including both. It's not either/or. It's both/and. 

It's about maintaining balance and evenness of mind regardless of what you're experiencing. There’s this phrase I like in Buddhism called Upekkhā. It means equanimity. You can be out at a bar or at the monastery, working intensely or doing nothing, and the equanimity is what stays steady underneath. Not the experiences themselves, but how you relate to them.

The swing of life is fine. 

It's the clinging that messes with you.

I keep coming back to this idea that embracing different parts of ourselves can help us understand other people better. Not because you have to do the night out → retreat whiplash thing, but because being open to different ways of living gives you a wider map of how people actually move through the world.

As great as the retreat in Nepal was, there was something off about monks who meditate all day and then teach classes to 50 Westerners who live much more conventional lives.

At times, it felt like they didn't fully get the life we were coming from.

We had this teacher at the monastery. A super kind, funny guy from India. One afternoon, he was talking about the modern world and how it's creating suffering in our minds. His English wasn't great; it wasn't his native tongue. He said, "You know, uh, I think the internet is maybe not so good."

Like, okay, monk, no TikTok for you today. Only Dharma. Go study!

Sure, there are problems with being online all the time. But just having the broad thought of "the internet is bad" felt incomplete. He'd never felt what it's like to have the whole world in your pocket from the time you were twelve and actually try to resist looking at it.

So his advice—"internet = bad"—was partly true but completely useless.

To be clear, Buddhism is great at building empathy. That's one of the things I learned most at the retreat. When we meditated on compassion, death, and suffering, visualizing other people's pain—that was really helpful.

But I also think what helps with empathizing is letting yourself experience the full range of being human—not just the parts that fit your identity.

Actually feeling what it's like to be offline for a day and then to scroll TikTok deep into the night. Sitting in silent meditation and going to all-night ragers. Eating $75 omakase dinners in Japan and staying at $5 hostels with questionable hygiene standards in Nepal.

I think we need to "embrace the different parts of life" more than ever. Because our culture feels weirdly close-minded about people who live different realities from us—and the internet, which was supposed to connect us, mostly just shows us more people to judge.

Look at our generational divides.

Boomers look at GenZ spending six hours a day on TikTok and talking to AI chatbots and see entitled kids who can't touch grass. My generation looks at Boomers and can't understand why they stayed at the same company for 30 years waiting for a gold watch.

It's not just generational.

Tech people judge humanities majors. Humanities majors judge tech people. Sober people judge partiers. Partiers judge sober people. The monk judges the internet. The guy refreshing X judges the monk for not understanding "the intellectual town square."

I think if we can actually experience different parts of being human—even for a week—we can meet people where they are instead of where we think they should be. You know what the phone addiction feels like, so you can offer something better than "just stop." You know what the silence does, so you can explain it to someone who thinks meditation is boring hippie shit.

Maybe there's nothing here. But maybe there's something.

And you might be reading this like: "Okay, Noah, we get it, enough with the philosophical preaching. How practical is any of this for someone who didn't just sell a company and can't do whatever the fuck they want?"

Fair.

In a way, I'm the monk on the hill yelling about city life. I'm not living your Tuesday with daycare, a boss, and a 6 a.m. commute. This mindset can be unstable and out of reach for some people. Some people thrive with strong identities. I'm working out what works for me, not telling you what should work for you.

But I do think there's something here that applies to any life.

Noticing the different parts of yourself—how they come and go, how they show up—and holding that instead of rejecting it. Not just rejecting the way other people live. Sometimes trying it to see what you learn.

You don't need to quit your job and backpack through Asia like a middle-aged tech bro who found “God” during an ayahuasca retreat. Maybe it's just trying the meditation app even though you're "not a meditation person." Or going to the event even though you're "too serious for that." Or letting yourself sleep in on Saturday without the guilt trip.

The point isn't to live in chaos. The point is to hold your identity lightly enough that you can move when life asks you to move.

I'm working on this now in my own life.

Saying yes to things that don't fit my usual identity. Catching myself mid-judgment and asking: okay, but why does this person actually do that? What does their world look like?

I'm not the Buddha on the hilltop. I don't think the Buddha binge-played Catan for three hours last night before binge-watching The Sopranos.

But we all have to start somewhere.

One afternoon at the monastery, I was sitting in the cafe when a nun came up to me. We started talking about her life in the nunnery. She told me she was about to go into a two-month retreat where she'd have to stay inside the whole time—no going outside, total seclusion. A serious, intense retreat.

When she was leaving, I joked, "Hey, no going outside!" and waved my finger at her.

She laughed.

It was a great moment.

Here was someone about to enter one of the most disciplined, serious practices you can imagine, and she could still laugh about it. She wasn't holding her identity as a nun so close that she couldn't joke around. It wasn't that serious. Or maybe it was that serious, and that's exactly why she could be light about it.

This stayed with me.

I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Chicago now. A few months removed from the monastery, a few months into whatever comes next. I'm still figuring this out. I still don't know what the heck I'm doing next hour, much less next week.

Maybe I'll buckle down and start building something new. Maybe I'll keep wandering. Maybe both. I don't know if I'm choosing different parts of myself or if they're choosing me. But I'd rather keep exploring than spend my life defending one costume.

The point isn't that everyone should quit their jobs and ping-pong between extremes. The point is that we're allowed to change. We're allowed to be different tomorrow than we are today. We're allowed to be serious and silly, disciplined and spontaneous, spiritual and worldly.

You don't owe anyone a consistent character. You just owe yourself an honest life.

And maybe that's all this is—permission to stop being so rigid about who you are.

Permission to use your identity as a tool, not a truth.

*A QUICK NOTE FROM NOAH*

Hey, thanks for reading. I'm probably wrong about at least half of this. One thing I've learned over the past year is that most of my strong opinions have a shelf life of about six months before I cringe at them.

But I love writing this stuff, and I want to do more of it.

So hit reply and tell me what you thought. Where I'm right, where I'm full of shit, what the monkey illustrations did for you (or didn't). All of it's fair game.

Thanks.