The Book of Job

Rumors had been whispering for a month. The new financing round hadn’t gone well, the expected deals hadn’t materialized, and something had to give. Free lunches had been cancelled, the weekly company updates had changed to biweekly and the last one of these had been mysteriously cancelled. I started updating my resume.

One Tuesday I learned from backchannels that there would be “a layoff of not insignificant size” the next day. Despite some reassurances from a colleague that I should be safe, that night I tossed and turned until 3am, when I firmly concluded that I would be laid off. A mix of terror and exasperation hit me. I’d been laid off just a year previously, and I didn’t want to be unemployed again. When I awoke Wednesday morning, the commute to work felt like marching to the gallows. 

The process was efficient. They called half the company one-by-one into private offices, handed us exit papers and collected our badges and laptops. By 10am I was out, and by 11 had rendezvoused with other ex-employees at the Friendly Toast, where the bar was empty but open. The ensuing hours reached a level of day drinking rivaling my senior year St Patrick’s Day.

When I sobered up, I was sad, bitter, exhausted but excited. I was sad because CiBO had been my most enjoyable job. I had done interesting work with smart coworkers serving a great high level mission. It paid well, hadn’t been too stressful, and I could run to work on occasion. It had even taken me on a crazy 1 day trip to Malaysia. While the job didn’t trap me in the office long, I found myself home practicing Scala and studying the growth stages of corn. It bristles me now how fruitless this effort feels. Furthermore, the immediate termination was much rougher than the 1 month notice GE had given me. I had no time to mentally prepare to wake up the next day with absolutely nothing to do. I was bitter that after this long journey of changing careers, having spent so much time reflecting on what I wanted and then working so hard to actually get there, I had ended up with nothing. Twice. And during winter again. My browser cookies still remembered the Massachusetts unemployment website. I joked that I was now an expert in company collapses, of all different sizes. I got plenty of sympathy laughs, but when faced with the reality of yet another job hunt, I was exhausted before I even began.

Considering how much I care about my career, it’s a bit ironic that I’ve spent so much time funemployed that I'm able to name each period. Leaving Hong Kong, backpacking around Asia and returning to the US was my SabbatiCal. The period between GE and CiBO that included two international trips were my Callivanting days. This period? More like a Calamity. While I’m lucky to have had so many employment breaks - so many of my friends haven’t had any - this one was ill-timed and unwelcome.

However, I was excited because I had options for in 2019, data scientists are in short supply.  CiBO had been a fantastic tech environment where I’d worked closely with great software engineers. I had accrued enough confidence that I was a pretty badass data scientist and almost immediately began working with 20+ recruiters. I quickly realized though that I wanted, and had enough savings, to take my time. I wanted to explore transitioning out of a technical role, perhaps into strategy or product management. I wanted to return closer to the energy sustainability domain. And I wanted to move back to Asia. It was a tough multiple-criteria decision problem to optimize.

The best part of this Calamity was the many people who reached out to me and helped. It seems like I caught up with 100 friends that first week, juggling all time zones to the east and west. I chatted with friends about their professional lives and gained valuable insights into how other jobs worked. I had plenty of deep conversations that convinced me that my heart was still in Asia. I specifically targeted Beijing, Shenzhen, and Saigon, cities where I felt I could find cool jobs and cool people.

Saigon had vibed with me when I first visited during the SabbatiCal. I knew there was a decent tech scene, with a large concentration of foreign “digital nomads” utilizing a local ecosystem full of talented (and cheap) coders. I wasn’t sure what the options were for someone with no local country or language background, but my Saigon-dwelling friend Sam Axelrod connected me to someone who’d know. This guy gave me a rundown of the work international consultancies were doing, the locally-disconnected digital nomad scene, and the rapid government-backed digitization across the economy. He inadvertently went on a rant against those big name consultancies collaborating with government officials and multinational corporations to perpetuate modern colonialism. Having also lived in an Asian former colony, this rant won me over - he had expressed my views, albeit much more profoundly and eloquently. When he told me that in his previous role leading a UN bureau, he had made all his employees learn Vietnamese, I was sold. Then the conversation took a turn. “I lead a startup consultancy now. We have a Taiwanese manufacturing client and only one Chinese speaker on staff…and all of our work is really about using data to drive decisions….actually we could really use someone like you.” And so the informational chat turned into a job interview. A week later, I booked tickets to Ho Chi Minh City.

This is a fine ad for funemployment

In the meantime, I had already had a trip to New Orleans to visit my friend Jason Siu and partake in Mardi Gras. I took my employment frustrations out on hurricanes and Sazeracs, and somehow found myself walking down 10 blocks of Bourbon Street double fisting beers looking for Jason. The next morning, I awoke wearing a bushel of beads and needing to dry heave. I had scheduled a handful of recruiter calls before a late afternoon flight back to Boston. As I laid down on the couch in utter pain, I talked to Amazon on speaker phone and tried to go through my work history. I didn’t get a second interview. I barely made it to the airport, where I passed out on the dirty floor while JetBlue delayed us for 2 hours. When I took my middle seat, the old man sitting window asked me, in a volume indicating he was hard of hearing, “Did you enjoy the parades?” I did my best not to puke on him.

Back home, I planned an Asia trip to be part fact-finding mission and part friends catchup tour. I eschewed traveling to new places in favor of looking for jobs in familiar cities. I initially outlined a Saigon to Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Beijing to Paris to London trip, allotting myself 3 weeks. When my friend Doug Heimburger sold me hard on his 40th birthday celebration, I swapped out Shenzhen for Tokyo, then dropped Paris. I realized my dates in Hong Kong would coincide with Tosscars, the annual awards ceremony/party for the Hong Kong ultimate community. The ceremony’s hosts are secret until the event itself, and I had never been a host. I texted the organizers, and asked them if they wanted a super secret host. They replied that the theme was Carnival, and asked me to bring over Mardi Gras party supplies. Coincidentally I got that text while in a cafe in New Orleans, and walked outside to see a street vendor hawking party jackets. I got a sympathy $20 unemployment discount, and that jacket has proven to be one of my best investments.

I made a pun so bad, Vietnam decided to banh mi

Even since 2016, Saigon’s change was noticeable to me. There were more foreigners around District 1, Southeast Asia’s tallest skyscraper on the horizon and flat whites served in some coffeeshops in District 3. My first sight was a continuous stream of motorbikes street with no crosswalks and I had to relearn street crossing in Vietnam (with confidence and without eye contact). 

The startup consultancy was located above a clothing store and consisted of 6 employees. Though I’d be the only non-Vietnamese speaker, I knew I’d fit in well. My main worry with the role was whether I would stagnate technically. Though I was excited to learn about the Vietnamese economy and management consultancy in general, there was a good chance that the clients wouldn’t be ready for any interesting modeling, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to give that up. On my last day there, I was offered a role as an analyst, with the expectation that if I proved I could adapt to Vietnam, I would create and lead the company’s analytics division. There was a lot to consider. Between the motorbike traffic, lack of a subway (coming in 2020!) and inexorable heat, Saigon life is not without its challenges. But the food, coffee, nightlife and people I met in 3 days convinced me I could adapt to love the city.

Saturday morning I flew into Hong Kong. I had told myself that I shouldn’t move back to Hong Kong, that it wouldn’t be good for my career. But as my taxi zoomed down Gloucester Road past the pretty buildings, I thought to myself, I could carve a good life for myself here again. A few hours later I was in my party jacket hidden on the top floor of the Winery in Sai Ying Pun. It had been weird keeping my arrival a secret. As I heard the voices of my friends entering from below, I so desperately wanted to burst out and shout my presence. I managed to contain myself until Donna Doubet announced a surprise guest from America, and I flew down the stairs, threw some authentic New Orleans beads into the crowd, and awkwardly raised my arms, a little uncomfortable with the sudden attention. This was only my second time back in Hong Kong since I left, and I couldn’t imagine a better rewelcome party.

The next several days consisted of as many as 7 appointments a day, catching up with friends and family. I also got some intel on the work environment, and while the tech scene is growing rapidly, I confirmed my suspicions that interesting and high paying data science jobs don’t exist in Hong Kong yet. 

Doug popping his cherry blossoms

Doug’s party in Tokyo was a Hanami 見花, meaning cherry blossom viewing party, because of course Japanese has a word for that. We had rented out space at Yoyogi Park, roped off and carpeted to enforce a shoes-off policy. Organizer Niji had arranged for a small arsenal of whiskey, champagne and a buffet of sandwiches. To meet the formal dress code, I paired the New Orleans party jacket with grey suitpants. Even at this party, I met a programmer who tried to recruit me. I realized that having a skillset unbound by geographies or business domains could be a blessing and a curse - too many options means you have to restrict yourself to stay sane. I decided not to pursue working in Japan. 

Taking place a month past his 40th birthday, the Hanami was really a farewell party for Doug, as he had just accepted a promotion that would relocate him to Seattle. We spent the entire weekend bemoaning the challenges of managing an American career while smitten with Asia. Discussions with him and Austin taught me that for us, location can be more important than job, and wanting to learn a language is a legit factor in deciding location.

In Beijing I was fortunate to get connected with good tech people. My friend Joohee had moved from Hong Kong, and it was only face-to-face when I learned she now worked in Chinese tech venture capitalism. She connected me to the CEO of an AI startup trying to develop the flying car, and through another friend I met the former head of data science at Mobike. I learned about the speed of China’s 9/9/6 tech culture, the role of WeChat in everything, the way government-led directives influence entrepreneurs, and the sheer abundance of data available. Joohee evangelized her bullish views on China, and I was reminded how much I missed the uniqueness of Beijing life when I found myself telling my life story to an attractive group of film producers in Mandarin. I seriously wondered if I should focus on returning to China. However, barriers included the vast amount of competing Chinese programmers and the increasingly domestic nature of China’s tech scene that render multilingual people like me no longer highly valued. And this is before getting to all the moral and logistical complexities enforced by the Chinese government. 

By the time I got to London, I was exhausted. I met with friends there in interesting companies, and tried the city on for size. In my most productive conversation, I talked with a former coworker and ultimate teammate about how moving to Vietnam might mean missing weddings and/or an ultimate tournament in Amsterdam that I’d been invited to. “Oh, you have to go to Windmill.”  And so I did. I returned from my round the world trip with lots of renewed friendships, and lots of discussions comparing the social joys of living in Asia, the family warmth of staying in the east coast, and the asymmetric way America treats international experience. While Asia would always respect my US work experience, the converse was not necessarily true. I decided I needed to at least explore interesting jobs in the US to compare with the offer in Ho Chi Minh City.

-----

I was full of energy the first month back in Boston. I pursued all those things I never have the energy to do when working. I read voraciously, studied languages, attacked the gym, played ultimate and went through a TensorFlow tutorial.

The second month was harsh. The job interview process plodded along frustratingly slowly, and all my hard work towards self-improvement was largely irrelevant to the interviewers. It became difficult to sustain such intensity, and the uncertainty slowly ground me down. Not knowing where I’d live or what sort of income to expect made it difficult to plan things, date or try new activities. 

The Vietnam offer was still outstanding, while two local options were in play. One was a tech startup where I had wanted to work back in 2016 that was now recruiting me. They had given me a dataset assessment back then, and I laughed when they sent it again, virtually unchanged. With years of practice now under my belt, I did a way better job on the assignment. In the followup interview, a kid just out of college review the assignment with me. It was a little stunning to see 2018 as his graduation year, but he introduced to me a little trick transforming linear variables like date or time into cyclical variables, by taking the sine and cosine of them. The interview went well and they indicated they would bring me onsite. Then without explanation, they wished me luck and rescinded the onsite interview.

The second was a large tech firm where my friend had internally referred me as a product manager. I was excited to pivot away from straight technical work, which often strained my extroverted personality. That firm’s HR operated slowly, and weeks elapsed between followups. Finally in mid May, they brought me onsite for a marathon session of interviews. While the experience was largely positive, I reflected over the weekend and realized I needed to follow my heart to Vietnam. With that realization, I then booked my Europe trip for Windmill.

That following week my brother and sister-in-law visited, and I told my whole family that I was moving to Vietnam. They did not take the news well. They mainly believed that the low salary, distance from tech thought leadership and lack of any incredible valuation growth were wrong for me. Only my father, who had spent a decade working in Shanghai, considered the possible upside of being in a growing economy at the right time. The next day at breakfast, my brother asked me if I was happy at my last company. I had been, because we had been working towards real global impact, and that in the months since I hadn’t come close to any company that excited me like that. “Oh there was this company in New York that tried to recruit me last year. They’re using machine learning to solve city sustainability issues. Would that interest you?” “Uh, yeah, no shit that’d be cool.” “Damn, I should have remembered to bring this to you earlier.” “Yes, you should have."

I figured it was too late to apply as I had already interviewed onsite at the big firm. But my brother emailed the CEO, who responded extremely quickly, and the next day I spoke with the head of their urban analytics team. The conversation went shockingly well and I learned that this guy’s previous role was leading analytics for the city of New York. A Google search revealed him to be kind of a big deal, as well as a visible minority in the field. It’d be really cool to work for him. They sent along their dataset assessment and told me to take a week on it. I pulled an all-nighter and turned it back in a day and a half, producing some of the best modeling I had ever done including applying the cyclical transformation trick I’d learned just a couple weeks before.

Finally on Monday, a full two and a half weeks after I’d gone onsite, the big tech firm gave me an offer. It was at the level that I had wanted and legitimately thrilled me. It’s funny how much more interested I’d become in the role when the offer became tangible. Still, I made arrangements to speak with the Vietnam CEO and sent an email to the New York startup informing them of the offer. Again they got back to me right away, and I soon had a call scheduled with the CEO for Wednesday morning. The Vietnam CEO also asked to speak Wednesday morning, and I had a followup with the big tech firm for Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday evening I would fly out to Spain. It would be the most eventful Wednesday since the CiBO layoffs, and similarly, I couldn’t sleep at all the previous night. I had 3 separate timelines at my fingertips, with 3 very different cities and 3 very different roles.

The New York CEO informed me that they typically bring people onsite before offering roles, but he’d be willing to make an exception if I was committed. I replied that if they could meet my salary expectations, I’d also take an offer without coming onsite. He then said he’d have his people get back to me.

The Vietnam CEO and I had a good heart-to-heart chat, but he was not able to meet the salary expectation that I wanted. It was an enormous risk for both of us, and while I’m not exactly risk-averse, I realized that his startup probably wasn’t as ready as other places to get value of data science.

Finally, the Boston tech firm gave me their final offer and told me I had until Friday 5pm EST to accept it. After how long they took to get back to me, I was a bit resentful about the tight deadline they’d given me, but they had other candidates in queue.  I then proceeded to fly to Spain.

When I landed in Madrid on Thursday, I had emails from the New York startup. They wanted me to go on Google Hangouts with some more employees. Sigh. I wanted to vacation, but this was my future, so I said sure, how about 4pm EST/10pm Spanish time? Considering I’d done my final interview with CiBO in Tokyo, this wasn’t even unusual for me. I flew to Bilbao, met up with Antonio and his wife Raquel, grabbed a quick dinner and drink, then hustled back to get on Hangouts. The interview was full of challenging questions, but by now I’d done so many interviews I was almost on autopilot. In one of the last questions, they asked me how I approached a dataset. Tiredly, I asked back, did you see my assessment? Surprisingly, one of the interviewers excitedly responded, “yes, I thought it was awesome, it was so cool how you transformed those cyclical variables.” Fuck yeah, I thought. Finally I told them I had until 5pm tomorrow to respond to the tech firm.

¿Donde esta el email de Nueva York?

The next day we touristed around beautiful Bilbao. I tried to enjoy it as much as I could, but the whole day I was aware of the time in New York. 9am... they’re getting into work... lunchtime….no email yet. 11pm Spain was my deadline. By 9pm we posted at a bar with wifi. I tried to be a fun conversationalist but the anxiety was real. At 9:30, the New York startup sent me an email…all it said was “hang in there, we’ll get back to you within the hour.” By 10:30, they still hadn’t. 10:45, the inbox was still unchanged and I’d lost the ability to make conversation. At 10:50 Antonio lent me his phone and I called someone at the company. No response. Finally at 11:00, I sent an email to the big tech firm saying, “I accept!”

The burden was gone. I’d be a product manager in Boston. It’d be a good life. I approached the bartender and said, “Tres tragos de tequila por favor. Tengo un nuevo trabajo!”

I brought the three shots back to our table and prepared to do a toast to the new job. Glass in the air, I sneaked a peak at my phone and glimpsed one new email. “Wait hold on! We have an offer for you!” I put my glass down and sighed.

In the ensuing telephone call, I admonished the New York startup for being late. They quantified their offer, apologized for missing the deadline by 5 minutes, and asked me to consider rescinding the acceptance. That thought literally made my heart quiver - I hate going against my word. I sighed, told him I’d sleep on it, and to please send a formal offer via email. When I checked my email that night, there was a formal offer that was slightly larger than what he’d said on the phone - turns out accepting the other job was a good negotiating tactic - as well as a response from the big tech recruiter revealing her joy at my acceptance. 

I did sleep on it, sent the offer around to my family, and ended up choosing the New York startup - Urbint. The email to the big tech firm rescinding my acceptance was the hardest email I’ve ever had to write - I had to get my brother to draft it for me. I clicked send on the train to Paris, and now, two weddings and a painful move later, I’m in New York City.

The Calamity was longer than desired, but was an invaluable period reconnecting with friends. My lessons learned:

• It is so valuable having a strong, diverse peer network to inspire and raise you
• It's important to be patient
• It's important to be bold
• It's ok to prioritize location
• Jobs are like buses. You wait around for ages and then they show up all at once

I've chosen to be patient, to put off my return to Asia for an exciting job opportunity. Hopefully I'll be here in Urbint and New York for a long while. If I'm in this position again in a year, I'll know I'm truly cursed. But if that happens, I'll tell big companies to pay me to work at their competitors.

Twenty Five

5^2=25.

I like that equation, there's an odd symmetry about it. It's also my current age and a good one. I feel as if I'm still young, young enough to tell my age to both college students and mid professionals and not alienate either.

Recently is the first time I've felt old. Oddly it was the NBA draft that made me feel old. An ESPN Classic was run on the draft ten years ago, 2003.  As the special went over the Lebron Darko Carmelo Bosh Wade draft order, I remembered everything vividly. I remembered watching Lebron at St Vincent St Mary's in ESPN's first ever televised hs basketball game, then following the regular season with interest as the Cavaliers and Nuggets tanked it out. I remember watching Darko Milicic highlights, reading an ESPN the mag special about him on my flight to France, about how he did 100 push-ups and 200 sit-ups every night and I started doing more on that very trip. I remember watching Wade lead Marquette to the final 4, watching the confident quick point guard who could dunk in traffic pick up a rare tournament triple double. I remember knowing nothing about Bosh because his Georgia Tech team sucked. And of course I remember freshmen Carmelo, Hakim Warrick and Gerry McNamara winning the title.

That was all 10 years ago. The point is, it's a new experience for me, having this memory base that is both so detailed and from so long ago. It's the first time I feel like I could teach a history lesson based off I personal experience. And as a generation now enters high school without memories of 9/11, our experiences are only going to seem more historical from hereon out.

25 seems much different than 24. It seems an age relatable to both college kids and 30 year old professionals, neither too young to have adult conversations nor too old to discuss switching majors. It seems to hold more responsibility - it seems less an age where it is socially acceptable to go explore yourself and go backpacking. It's an age where many people graduate law school, or go to business school, or get their first promotion. Sure there are no set life paths and life is not a race, but life does have a progression, unpredictable though it may be. I have found that as I've aged, priorities, values and responsibilities have all evolved, and thus my whole decision making basis.

When I turned 25 the first thing my mom told me was that she got married at 25. This wasn't news to me, but it was still a jarring fact to internalize. I'm not getting married at 25. I don't think my mom's experiences in the late 70's is a benchmark for me, but part of the challenge I find now is having any benchmark or measuring stick. I'm at a place in my life where I don't quite see too many people in similar situations, with much of my peer group older than me, and so I'm entering uncharted waters largely unsure of where I am, where I can be, where I'm going and where I can go.  It's been a great thrill so far, but I am hoping the path becomes clearer as I venture further.

One of my mindsets when I moved to Hong Kong two years ago was to learn more about the world. I didn't know what that would exactly mean, but I figured it would involve a lot of traveling. I wanted to understand why taxi drivers in DC were often very well educated Africans, why young people get radicalized, how the people away from cities and technology see the world. I don't think I'm close to answering those questions, but I've learned so much more about the world just from absorbing what's around me and being curious. What would have surprised the me that came here two years ago would be how much my perspective has changed. I was very ideal and very proud when I got here, and there's no doubt that in the past 24 months I've become a lot more jaded and had many humbling and sobering (ironically) experiences. I had a conversation with a mirror when I had dinner with my friend who had just graduated Georgetown. I saw in her the exact same attitude and demeanor and optimism for breaking the bounds of society that I had held when I took my diploma without a real good idea of what I would do with it. We have been given so much, are so talented and willing to work so hard - what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing has gone wrong, in the grand scheme. There's just a lot less guarantees, and a lot more time required for real change to occur than I understood two years ago. Or perhaps I understood and just chose to believe it'd be different for me. I remember my mom telling me when I started at Arup that I should expect to stay there for at least two years. My feeling at the time was "don't be too sure" because man two years was a long time. Well it's been two years and I'm still here with no plans to leave. In an industry where buildings routinely take 5-10 years to go from concept to occupancy, 2 years isn't really very long.

To sum up my mindset coming in, and indeed my generation's mindset, this tumblr has really put my experiences in perspective: http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html It explains so much about our generation, the millenials who grew up in a very hopeful world where previous technological and social barriers routinely fell, how we want so much and thus often find ourselves so disappointed. It's very true, this blogpost really did speak to me, even if it did simplify everything into stick figures. It reinforced the lessons that I'd already been learning the hard way, of hard work and humbleness and lack of entitlement. Along the way I've picked up an edge that I would have previously called "jadedness." 

I've seen people get more excited by hope and the call for change, rather than change itself. I work in environmental sustainability, an industry or buzzword that came about entirely to address longterm problems. A direct consequence of this is that the impact of good work isn't easy to conceptualize in a human time frame.  It's hard to get excited about the well-maintained operation of a building or a society that gradually reduces its reliance on fossil fuels. The metrics of success have either not been well-defined or not well measured. Thus it's the rollouts of sexy new plans, schemes for a new technological rollouts, setting of ambitious carbon reduction figures that get the attention rather than the completed actions that are invisibly not hurting the environment (as much).  Two years has shown me how easy it is to talk about the great things we want to achieve, and how promises can be empty even if there is conviction in them when they are made.  This doesn't apply just to the environment. Think about the scenes from Tahrir Square in Cairo from January-February 2011. The mass demonstrations and popular uprising against Mubarak inspired so many all over, and the dramatic tears of joy shed over Mubarak's resignation was a generational moment of raw emotion associated with societal-altering events on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you had told those ecstatic Egyptians how little things would change and how they'd be right back at it with their next president, I'm not sure if their celebration would instantly deflate. A parallel exists in the United States. So much effort was exerted getting Barack Obama - "Change You Can Believe in" - elected in the President. His victory was equally emotional. Far less emotion has been spent on helping Obama accomplish all that change. We are so much more excited for hope, for the prospect of potential change in the future, than for the victories in a real world which does not clearly define victories. Yes We Can elect Barack Obama, but no we can't eliminate poverty, failures in the educational system, violence, racism, pollution, injustice and disease.

But this blog post shouldn't be a giant typhoon over our collective parade. I think I've made my point that my cynicism has grown since entering the work force. Fundamentally though, I don't think I've changed. I haven't wavered from wanting to make a difference in this world. I believe we can prevent catastrophic global climate change. In fact I don't think there's a choice. In a lesson I learned writing crossword puzzles in college, you have to believe there's a solution in order to find it. And to get this solution, it's going to take understanding a lot of very different but interconnected processes.

So back to understanding how the world works. I really feel that here I've come a long way. I think a lot more now about the lives that we lead and what makes them possible. I think about all the items around me and how they got there, from concept design to the materials behind them to the manufacturing to the shipping. I come from a decidedly not blue collar town, and here in the city of finance I still notice how much the world is driven by working class industry. I see how the factory workers that make leather in Vietnam, T-shirts in Bangladesh and just about everything in Guangdong are pushing the world economy. Through a combination of traveling, observing stories and great podcasting journalism, I understand much better how people are moving from village life, the backbone to their whole lifestyle for generations, to cities. The trip to Burma the spring of this year was great for me as I saw people with less wealth and more measurable problems than I'd ever seen before. I gained an image to reference when I next hear about rice paddies or remote Southeast Asian villages. A growing understanding of this world helps to complement the world of first world cities with which I'm already quite familiar.

Hong Kong is one such first world city, and it's a busy one at that. If it were a superhero, it's kryptonite would be its busyness, disguised as productivity and success. It's a city where everyone spends their short commutes engrossed in their smartphones, an unfortunate consequence of the incredible underground 3G coverage. I am fully aware that this infrastructure is double edged. It enables productivity and communication, but it takes away from the reflective time and makes days go by faster and less meaningfully, and even while I'm aware of this, I find myself trapped by the ease of it all. I play it off as me being extra productive, reading CNN or doing social tasks so that I can be more productive at the office or at home. But I'm not sure if these tasks are really freeing up my day, plus half the time I'm playing CandyCrush. Between a demanding job, a social life, an obsessive athletic hobby, family and a dozen books on my reading list, I'm struggling to figure out how to best organize my day to learn more about the world.
Perhaps I can spin that into the greatest blessing about being 25. I'm at an age where I've actually done some stuff and learned some stuff, but I'm far from being done. My habits are still evolving, my life views well-based but open to change. I have the excitement of not knowing what I'll be able to do, but I've eliminated the fear that I'll completely fall flat on my face on my own.

Sustainability

So I work in "Sustainability" now.  I put that word in quotes because it didn't take long while working in this industry to realize that many of my peers hate the "S-word" and consider it a misleading buzzword. It also didn't take me too long to realize that many of my coworkers doing the same job as me might not identify as working in Sustainability.  Also during my short tenure, my team changed its name from Building Physics to Building Sustainability, to capitalize on this buzz.

Here are some quick numbers behind why I wanted to join this field:
-China emitted over 9.7 billion tons of CO2 in 2011
-The US emits over 5.4 billion tons of CO2 in 2011
-The world emitted around 33 billion tons of CO2 in 2011 (all data from EDGAR)
-The UNEP predicts that 44 gigatons of CO2 by 2020 will lead to our world increasing by 2 degrees celsius from a pre-industrial level. We are currently on target for 58 gigatons.  The 2 degree mark is one that many models predicts will render life on earth unlivable
-The breakdown of end-use energy is approximately 37% industry, 20% transportation, residential and services 36%
-Coal is the most common energy source
-16.1% of the world energy consumption now comes from renewable sources. An additional 2.7% comes from nuclear energy.

However, over 12% of that comes from biofuels in some way and 3.3% comes from Hydropower. Biofuels are technically zero carbon because when they are consumed for electricity, the carbon they emit is equivalent to the carbon they absorbed during their life. However, according to jobsandenergy.com, "The biomass-is-carbon-neutral story line put forward in the early 1990’s has been superseded by more recent science that recognizes that mature, intact forests sequester carbon more effectively than cut-over areas. When a tree’s carbon is released into the atmosphere in a single pulse, it contributes to climate change much more than woodland timber rotting slowly over decades."  For biofuels like corn, they can be used more efficiently as food rather than energy.  Hydropower is zero-carbon, but it's obviously a limited commodity and has potentially devastating environmental issues.  The renewable sources that come with the least baggage seem to be solar (heat and electricity), wind, geothermal (heat and electricity) and perhaps ocean tidal energy. These sources have some flexibility in their placement and create clean energy with minimal adverse impact to environmental or human activity. Still, they do have their own drawbacks and are dependent on resources beyond our control such as the weather and need to be placed in areas where these resources are high. None of these technologies are yet economically competitive with fossil fuel.  Lastly, nuclear energy is essentially zero carbon and very powerful, but obviously has its own dangerous consequences and are being phased out of Japan and Germany.

When I look at this current situation of global energy, I do get scared.  I don't know what will happen in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. I worry that the planet will not be so enjoyable during my later life, much less for future generations. We really don't know for sure, as this has never before happened in human history, and the globe is so complicated that the best of models need to be taken with an ocean's worth of salt.  Not everyone believes in global warming, and even I'm willing to say there is a slight chance that the climate change we have observed is not anthropogenic. Slight. Even still, as someone who has lived in China, it's very very obvious to me the terrible deleterious effect that air pollution can have, and my experiences in Beijing are a main reason why I decided to enter this field.

To be sure, plenty is being done and plenty of incredible advancement has been made. At my job, there are plenty of developers who want to create energy efficient buildings and no shortage of projects that are pursuing LEED or other Green Building Certificates. The market is going in that direction on its own. There are large scale projects that seek to create more energy efficient districts and cities, built around mass transit, wind corridors and green space. District cooling/heating technology is improving, where local power plants are used to supply power with minimal loss to the district, and the waste heat that is a necessary byproduct of the generation process is used to provide heating (or cooling in a different process). Similarly, combined cogeneration plants are producing electricity more efficiently.  People are working on improving the grid itself, making it more efficient and less susceptible to peaks and troughs of the human behavior cycle. Car companies are working furiously to produce more fuel efficient cars, including electric cars, driven strongly by consumer demand. There are more and more energy efficient appliances. And renewable energy is growing just about everywhere.  Yes I have noticed that the world at large is more energy conscious, less wasteful and more concerned about the environment.

But when I think of what is left to be done, I get even more overwhelmed.  The world is growing, and energy demand is growing even faster. China is already the largest energy user in the world, but its per capita use is about 40% that of the US.  As rural dwellers rapidly move to the cities and the standard of living improves, the per capita energy demand will increase. At a presentation at work, I saw data on Hong Kong's energy situation. In many ways, Hong Kong is a model city with its very efficient public transportation. However buildings use a ton of energy. I noticed that even if all future buildings in the city use 50% less energy than current ones (an impossibly ambitious number), AND all current buildings are retrofitted to use 25% less energy, the entire island would need to be covered in solar panels to reach a zero carbon figure. It made me realize that though we can put a lot of effort and ingenuity into what we do, we can only do so much.  And energy is such a complicated global political issue, with far reaching security, economic and environmental consequences that very often there are multiple competing factions over any new developmental.

So what needs to change? I think first we need to reduce demand. The cleanest energy is the energy you don't use. I believe that we need to change our culture towards energy consumption and that not enough impetus is given in this regard. You can design an energy efficient building with plenty of natural sunlight and natural ventilation, but if people leave the lights on and run the air conditioning all night, it won't be so energy efficient. Energy data can also do wonders - I do strongly believe that if we were all aware every minute of how much energy we were consuming, most of us would change our habits so that we could see those numbers go down. So that would help. But a bigger question is whether we're willing to give up some of our comforts. 60 years ago almost nobody in the tropics had air conditioning - is that something we can or want to go back too? Will we be willing to give up driving?

There needs to be a drastic increase in renewable energy production and perhaps an even more dramatic advancement in renewable technologies.  Geothermal and tidal energy are relatively new and untapped and potentially limitless sources. Solar and wind have been around for a while but are still improving, and our mapping of solar irradiation and wind patterns make it easier to predict the performance of individual units and help plan projects better. Perhaps the most important driver for these technologies is reducing their cost and making them competitive with fossil fuel energy. If solar panels can be produced cheaply (and cleanly) and the price for solar energy drops and the price for fossil fuel energy rises, the free market forces may allow the solar industry to boom. However, though the I think the scarcity of oil and gas will reemerge as a key issue this coming decade, coal is extremely plentiful.  It appears that government policies will need to be around forever to encourage renewable energy investment and use and discourage dirty coal.

Battery technology also really needs to develop. The ability to capture energy and save it for later consumption without too much loss is crucial to a sustainable world.  The question with solar and wind energy is always, "What happens during a cloudy day? What happens when there's no wind?" The ability to save energy for rainy days is a necessary development to parallel the growth of solar technology. It's also a technology that plays an important role in smart grid models (where energy users can store electricity when they aren't using it, then feed it back to the grid when there's a demand) and for electric cars. More efficient transmission is also vital, so that we can carry electricity from windy and sunny areas to less exciting climate zones.

Who are the biggest drivers here? During my time at Arup, I've been trying to figure that out. From this post, it should be obvious that this is an immense undertaking.  Fundamentally, it seems that we are currently most reliant on scientists.  My company doesn't develop any low energy appliances or solar panels, but as these products come out we pay attention and incorporate them into our design. It's still people in the laboratory that need to make magic happen.  Government of course plays its part in funding the engineers and scientists, and creating the appropriate policies to regulate carbon and encourage green growth.  It will have to play an even greater part in auditing buildings and forcing underachievers to get retrofitted, and in creating large scale eco-city projects.

We also need outside the box answers. I think there could be more human-generated energy going into the grid, such as capturing the energy from revolving doors. Office dwellers could carry weights at the bottom of the lift, take it up to their floors and then drop the weights down some sort of slide, where their energy could be captured. Gym goers could have their elliptical and biking work captured and sent into the grid, or at the least to power their machine.  And then there's this bike designed to clean the air in Beijing. Maybe none of this sounds like a lot but it seems like we need to look at every possible opportunity to be nicer to this planet.

The sad thing is that if we succeed - if we successfully pull off the largest international engineering-social-political-technological-environmental transformative effort ever and dramatically alter the course of human behavior, no one will really know. We aren't too sure about the real consequences of all this carbon in the air, of the broad effects of global warming - we even have people who argue against anthropogenic global warming.  The 2 degrees celsius limit is a fairly arbitrary limit that is now being ignored because we're going to blow by it.  But if we pull off a miracle and stop global warming short of this limit, the end result will be a world similar to how it is now.  Nothing will change.  There won't be blue skies and birds chirping every day. The people who questioned the seriousness of climate change will say "I told you nothing would happen" and the people passionate about sustainability can only trust that we've averted something disastrous and that we will continue to do so for generations.  There won't be a "We Saved the World Party", though that would be awesome.  The best we can hope for is approval from future historians. They will either look back on our era as the people who screwed up the earth for them, or the ones who banded together for something very large and changed human history.