A Stiff Dose of Awe

On curing cynicism, and recognising good fortune

I don’t have anything sophisticated to say today. There’s no elegant lesson or mental model to derive from this essay.

Today is not about being clever.

This will be an unedited tour de force. If you want to get straight to the point and walk away with the headline, here it is:

We are, everyone of us, God damned lucky.

Still here?

Good.

My regular readers know I run a company called Charter. Those of you who are more in the know may be aware that we recently got into the Techstars Space accelerator. With only the faintest intentions of flexing, it’s worth noting that Techstars Space happens to be the space industry’s best startup accelerator, and so my life for the past month or so has been an utter whirlwind of new opportunities, leads, and general progress.

Our recent pace of growth has made it painfully apparent to me why it’s called an ‘accelerator’.

I am, furthermore, living in Los Angeles for the duration of this program. So one of the things I did a couple of weekends ago was to go visit the Space Shuttle Endeavour at the California Science Center.

Now, the rest of the Science Center is laughably underfunded and in various states of disrepair, but the Space Shuttle hangar is in a league of its own. I have never been particularly religious, but to walk into that enormous, near-whisper-quiet space, and be confronted with that monument to humanity’s ambition - it calls to mind the image of a shining church on a hill. It is that reverential of an experience

It’s easy to forget about the capital-S ‘Space’ part of space when it’s only discussed in the abstract. I work in the industry and hell, I often forget it too. But to be there, to see it for yourself, to know that once upon a time the bravest people we as a species have ever had the good graces to produce rode this thing up time and time again, is something else.

It reminds you that this was real. We did that.

By God, we really did strap ourselves to pairs of missiles and, with great daring and fortitude, we went to space.

It occurs to me, as a chaser, that through sheer luck and circumstance I too now get to be a part of the next chapter of this great journey. I have wound up as one of the many inheritors of this grand civilisational effort, and with that, I have been charged with the mandate and privilege to use my head, my hands, and my heart to help put us back in space and keep us there.

Fuck me, how’d that happen?

Where am I and how did I get here?

I cannot tell you how I got here from being some smartass high school dropout.

It’s easy to form a narrative, as I have tried to do, about how my entire life has led to this point. About how my expensive government training as a logistics officer in the Army Engineers (and to think I was originally going to be the Quartermaster of an infantry battalion) and then my time in law school (and the bizarre, intractable decision to learn about space law) meant that it was inevitable that I would arrive here.

And sometimes, I do think everything was destined to lead here, not because it was preordained but because where else could I have gone? Defending more negligent surgeons? Arguing over semantics and dead languages with scholars of the utterly boring? Sweating my ass off in a jungle somewhere for a country that had no place for me, even as I gave up my health and youth in its service?

How lucky am I to fit in so poorly everywhere else such that I had to be driven here. How many ways, by how many degrees, could I have been led astray from this path? My dad’s lawyer friends still cluck their tongues at my choices and ask me when will I go back to finish sitting for the Bar.

But how much luckier still that I happen to be alive in a time that does have a place for me, and that place is right on the frontier of innovation.

Skating to where the (civilisational) puck will be

We live in a time I would describe as somewhere between ‘momentous’ and ‘miraculous’. My great-grandmother grew up seeing bullock carts lumbering along the dirt roads of Singapore. Thirty years later she watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, and thirty years after that she even lived to see Pathfinder land on Mars (although I suspect she didn’t actually pay attention to that when it happened).

And now here I am. We’re a long way away from bullock carts.

Isn’t that fucking incredible? In a world where nothing is guaranteed, not our liberty nor health nor safety, the one thing that can never be taken away save by death is the fact that we are alive to see these great strides being made right before us.

How can you not be excited about that? How can you not want to leap at the chance to be a part of creating this new world? How can you choose to sit on the sidelines even as the cutting edge of humanity’s technical prowess continues to hack away, ever faster, at the expanding boundaries of our collective knowledge?

The darkness retreats upon seeing our ferocity - we have taught it to fear our light.

Because we are charting our path through this universe. We, ordinary people, are doing it - not fictional characters in some young adult fiction novel, or stuffy old men cloistered away in ivory tower observatories. Do not tell me that this is the realm of just the billionaires. They are not building the rocket engines, the landers, the avionics modules and the hyperspectral sensors.

We are. People just like you and me are building this future. And I am constantly awestruck at the fact that I get to be alive at a time where this is all possible, real, and very within reach.

I, who would have been found wanting for a home in another era. I, who would otherwise have been consigned to fight and die in the mud of France, or fall asleep listening to wooden beams shift and creak on journeys across the high seas, or kneel to men born better than me as they passed on horseback.

And you too, for that matter. What ignominious existence would you have been forced to eke out in some other time, some other place? That we are here today, having this discussion across vast differences in time and distance, and that tomorrow we have the chance to go forth and build incredible things, is so infinitesimally unlikely that the only thing I think we can reasonably do is to laugh and be thankful for this stroke of utter serendipity.

It is fashionable to be bored, to be nonplussed, to pretend as if all this really is just ‘another day in the life’. We think this makes us cool, to be so accustomed to the incredible things around us that they no longer impress us. We divorce ourselves from our innate sense of wonder. The worst offenders amongst us go entirely too far, becoming jaded and cynical. They become too fond of rolling their eyes.

Resist this. Be amazed and awed. Drink in the wonder of the times we live in, of the technology we build, of the heights we reach.

I am telling you, it is fucking incredible.

Because it is easy to get distracted by life. By small, niggling doubts and great big pains-in-the-ass. I do too, too often, and let the marvelous beauty inherent to this time slip past me. It is a net loss, because there is no one else to appreciate what I fail to - the appreciation others have for their good fortune does not impact mine and vice versa. So these things - moments, lessons, and opportunities for gratitude - are lost forever, because I failed to grasp them.

I am learning to be better at this. It starts here, with being grateful that I get to live this life and be here for all of this.

One final word

In that vein, to end this essay, here are some brief thoughts I jotted down after seeing the Space Shuttle in person:

We are so God damned lucky.

That we are here, all of us, on the cusp of this terrific and momentous adventure, and that we have the great privilege of playing even a small part in all of this. Consider all the journeys that the work we do today will underwrite. We stand on the shoulders of giants, always, but how rare and precious of an opportunity it is that we too have been offered the chance to become the giants on whose shoulders our children and grandchildren will stand.

How many adventures will we inspire in those who come after us? How many more Endeavours will be built in our wake? Even after we ourselves have been forgotten, in how many ways will our life’s work be felt by those who surpass the footprints we leave behind?

We rose from scratching in the dirt to touch the stars. We are too foolish, to our credit, to know limits. The best of us have enough daring to outweigh all the cynics in the world. And we are so God damned lucky to be here, in this time and place, to be the right people to answer this call to adventure. To be the ones who hear the church bells ringing, the cries to leap to our feet and cast off our lines. This moment, this fleeting, urgent, wondrous thing, is special - even if we cannot name exactly why. We do not need to. We know nonetheless.

Because we are a people born to climb, leap, sprint, fly. We are restless creatures. We dreamt of lands beyond oceans, and now we dream of worlds beyond stars. We will never be satisfied. There will always be a horizon to chase.

And we are so God damned lucky that this is our turn to chase it.