Zero To One: For Love pt.1

Infinite Player: Don’t burn your life force in games for prizes that don’t matter. People make Love, matter.

Sep 08, 2026

Dear n of 1,

Know that you are loved, just as you are, being, right now.

If you don’t know yet, life is free. The best things in life may not always be, but love happens to be real. I want to find out if human evolution is as simple as every person getting freedom for love. A fearless freedom.

Sailing in dark, uncharted waters is moving toward the future.

It is irrational to tread darkness, and yet—hope is how we survive til’ light returns. Picture a ship caught in a violent storm at sea, no lighthouse in sight, no lanterns on board—yet they must steer. Likely, the waves will drag them under or throw them against rocks—yet they must steer. Why would the crew just wait to die while still breathing? How must they steer? They shine their light from within, and expand it in action. Once their light is lit, and only if they survive, they’ll see darkness not as a threat but rather as a story to tell. Have faith in hoping to stay optimistic about your future. You aren’t condemned to walk in fear. You can walk in joy through love, with reason, starting right now.

We’ve been taught that love is a game of chance: a gamble, a dice roll, a hope for favor from something outside us. We’re told some will win but many will lose, and that if you lose, it’s nothing money or status can’t eventually smooth over with life force in exchange for status. But love is an immutable principle, and it is the only currency in learning. Being imitative by nature, we treat family, friendship, jobs, and our own self-worth as products of exchange, priced and judged by external eyes through competition.

Success gets determined by social norms, in “best practices,” with celebrity models as exceptions; things instrumentally valuable and that expire the moment the culture shifts. Today’s best practices lead to dead ends in the future. The paths worth taking are the new and untried ones, the one you create for yourself. This confusion of purpose is all caused by the mentality of the sticky ideology of competition, but as Peter Thiel puts it, competition is for losers.

So don’t be one, be you.

Being "N of 1"

Being “n of 1” means you are a sample size of one. We come out of the womb already winners of being: conscious, particular, singular. Being a sample of one means you carry infinite variance. You cannot be statistically predicted, because as an observer you are conscious moment to moment, and that consciousness only becomes real through what you actually create in the world. This is why the present moment is the only reality that counts.

You decide how far you go with what you have. You are only as good as you allow yourself to be, and you are only as limited as you choose to remain. You get to decide, moment by moment, how much of yourself you bring to the table. All you can ever do is all you can do. But the second you stop measuring your worth through other people’s eyes, you stop playing someone else’s game and start creating your own.

That’s the actual lesson competition can teach if you are open to listening to your ego: not how to win existing games, but how to notice what rules don’t apply to you and why. Finite games are played to bring play to an end, to categorize a winner and a loser. Infinite games are played to keep the play continued. Do you know what game your playing, and when?

Life chaos > Algorithmic order

We are socially engineered through media to treat our interests, our relationships, even our friendships as a feeds to be curated: scrolled, selected, discarded, rinse and repeat; underneath, forever chasing the fear of missing out on someone or something better to look at. We race to avoid or remove anything that doesn’t match a prior preference that might change in six months or once we’ve met new people or new ideas.

So it’s worth asking: what are your rocks? What endures underneath the preferences and interests that keep fading away?

Life is not an algorithm. It doesn’t care what you want, and it won’t hand you exactly what you prefer just because you liked something in your head. To truly love something is to invest in it. To pay attention, to pay with your heart and mind.

It is irrational to accept and love what you’re handed by nature’s wheel of fortune, we all have complaints; but what’s funny is—the parts you didn’t select on the life menu often turn out to be the 20% we value most about people and our lives. When you find something you love, you don’t just scroll past it and forget. It sticks to you. You can smell it, taste it, or feel it in your bones. Finding it doesn’t feel like “consumption”, the idea touches you like a conspiracy, you can feel the energy, the quiet agreement to join worlds instead of just looking at each others from a distance online or as nosy neighbors.

Infinite 8-Ball Games

How did I get so lucky?

In December, James and I were in Brooklyn, his hometown, he asked me to go on a double date to play pool… and I complained beforehand because pool is not my idea of fun, but I also had never played and didn’t know how so I was fully ignorant. But James, his friends, and I used to play this video game For Honor for years, so we’re all comfortably competitive with each other; and if there’s a scoreboard—we’re all trying to reach the top. So of course, we all wanted to compete! First, I sat in my head, quietly manifesting our win because I’d never touched a pool stick in my life and was overstimulated by the environment overall. But then, I got motivated by the hype from my lucky shots. James, who is good at everything, was apparently less good at pool, so it was my time to shine!

We went to 8 on Eighth Bar and Billiards in BK!

Love gives me a delusional faith in beautiful games with low probability of winning. But I was totally convinced we were going to win, I just knew it. When it was my turn, James coached me well. Sometimes I had bad shots, but I didn’t care! I loved the loud sounds and get hyped up by the music. He reminded me to take deep breaths, to lock in, and helped me ‘perfect’ my robot arm so I could strike the ball with ultra precision. We played so well that we came down to the wire. Then, "End of the Road" came through the speakers, and we all started singing at the top of our lungs; our pool strategies completely fell apart, and we were definitely going to lose.

My eyes dropped. I secretly hated to lose, any game.

But James pulled me in close, looked at me with pure warmth in his eyes, and said, “It’s cool.” And we all just started laughing. My anxiety runs a nonstop internal monologue of things, but everything went silent. I breathed, looked into his eyes, and I was happy. All I had to give in my last strike was all that love I felt in the moment.

And we lost.

After the game, we walked over, gave them high fives and hugs, and all I could think was that I wished I’d caught his girlfriends winning shot on camera—but I was too in my head. First, my old programming of doubt and shame from losing started kicked in. But James wrapped me into a hug, and I felt overwhelmingly proud about that loss.

Holding his hands. My body and mind were at war: why does losing feel so good?

Losing the game gave us joy because their win had nothing to do with our loss, it was our medium of play. James P. Carse said, “the most infinite game one can play is friendship.” I finally understood what it meant to be an infinite player. Inside the finite game of pool, I was an infinite player. I was happy and learning from our loss because I was in flow—cheeky, having fun, but still focused, valuable to the game, and completely unafraid of a damn thing!

I asked how did I get so lucky because you have to be pretty lucky to be happy with loss.

This quote helped me too:
“Winning the gold medal is my goal, not my dream. My dream is about playing to win as often as possible with and against the best women basketball players in the world. Winning the gold medal as a goal gives me some direction, but my dream is something I need to live every day. And I’m doing that each time I play to win… When I’m playing to win, that’s when I feel resonance. If I win, that’s great. I want to win, and having the gold medal as my goal forces me to play to win. But what I love to do, what my dream is, is to play to win.”
— Dawn Staley, FS, Brainfood #659

Winning can be a goal, and chasing goals gives you direction; but living your dreams is the daily action. That is how you play infinite inside of finite games. There’s always so much you could’ve done, but we only get 24 hours today. When you find the things and people you love, you’ll be reminded that you’re already a winner!

After we left the pool bar, everyone admitted to being nervous about the whole night before it started. Honesty has a way of dissolving every wall we put up in advance. In the car, I let myself be fully me. Feeling my usual carsickness, I rolled the window down and stuck my whole head out like a dog into the cold night air. Then we turned on “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” and all four of us, against every unspoken rule about who’s supposed to like what, screamed every lyric at the top of our lungs.

Who cared about some scripts. We were fucking alive!