what does fulfillment really mean?

a reflection of what i've learned b/w 2022-2024 + life update

May 21, 2024

i’ve spent the past year or so trying to understand what fulfilment means beyond its textbook definition. i think the idea of fulfilment breaks down into 2 sub-categories:

extrinsic fulfilment: validation from others that induces self-glorification
intrinsic fulfilment: excitement + desire to get out of bed every morning

what’s interesting about the idea of extrinsic fulfilment is the fact that it’s misleading; you almost feel like the actions you take to elevate your status in other people’s eyes are the exact same actions that you would take in order to become more intrinsically fulfilled. i’ve struggled with sometimes, too.

i’ve often been finding myself in situations where i’ll take actions that maximize extrinsic fulfilment and not intrinsic fulfilment. luke breaks down rene girrard’s idea of mimetic desire into two parts: the desire itself and then the idea of “scapegoating,” where competition and rivalry ultimately produce environments where you aren’t thinking for yourself anymore.

even though i was extrinsically fulfilled, i never thought about the lack of intrinsic fulfillment i had in my life. the idea of being validated by other people felt much more important to me than my desire to get out of bed every morning. it didn’t occur to me how unsustainable that was until i found myself in situations where i’ve completely stopped thinking for myself. unlearning this was hard, but i do believe that the idea of fulfilment is all about thinking for yourself; once you figure that out are you able to have conviction in yourself.

life update #1 - moving to austin

i relocated (with my family!) to austin, tx at the end of june 2022. in hindsight, i think there’s a lot i really learned about myself after i moved. the feeling of “rebuilding from scratch” taught me what it means to have genuine friendships, find people that support you in the work that you do, what my core values are, and the person that i want to be 10 years in the future.

the biggest thing that i think sri back in 2022 can appreciate in the current sri is his ability to create an environment where he can thrive. i’ve learned to let go, say hi, find success in independence, and reflect on who i am as a person and the delta between where i am and where i want to be. the idea of reflecting and actively thinking about actions i’ve taken has allowed me to understand the world better and gain more self-awareness.

life update #2 - graduating high school

this week will be my last week of high school here and i think reality hasn’t hit yet. there’s this sense of immense gratitude i have for the amount of friendships + learning i’ve had over these past 2 years but also a sense of nervousness as i slowly let go of the training wheels that i’ve been bounded to and learn to ride the bike on my own.

i’m also excited to publically announce that i’ve committed to carnegie mellon where i’ll be studying robotics in the fall! i’m extremely grateful for my parents + friends + mentors in my life who’ve spent countless nights giving me feedback, debugging code, and helping me understand what it means to be your authentic self.

i visited campus last month and walking down RI and Newell-Simon Hall has sparked so much genuine awe in the amount of smart people that i have access to + the amount of research that’s going around at cmu. i’m grateful for the conversations i’ve had with prof. kantor, prof. steinfield, and josh for the lab tour, you guys are the best!

i’ve spent the past little bit also thinking about what i want out of college + the person that i want to be 5 years from now. i’ve bucked it down into 3 main “do’s” that i want to be intentional about over the next 4 years:

be present

regardless of whether i’m in a club or in class studying robotic systems, i want to make sure that i’m present in the moment and am focusing on learning. one point of failure that i see over these next 4 years is that i neglect school and see it as a lower priority compared to the “life” that i have outside of class. the mindset of being present is what allows you to grow as a person while also combining school + your “life” to do work that fulfills you.

your environment

the people that you surround yourself with dictate the person that you become. i want to be intentional with the environment i’m finding myself in, and create meaningful relationships with people who push me to be a better person. cmu is filled with extremely capable people in all sorts of areas and i want to able to create an environment where i can thrive while also learning and failing fast.

explore

my biggest fear going into college is that i restrict myself from learning + exploring different clubs/areas/projects because of an inability of time/lack of commitment. i want to learn skillsets like videography, study economics, travel, play soccer, and make music. maximum fulfillment comes from the ability to go really deep into something that you enjoy while also finding other areas that i enjoy working in.

life update #3 - research updates

the smartest people I know are masters over these two main traits: their ability to be extremely technical and also understand the problem they’re working on to a high degree. it’s a combination of these two traits that allow them to create meaningful research that has the potential to disrupt industries.

i’ve spent a lot of time these past 2 years going back into the fundamentals and making sure that i’m growing technically while also exploring other problem spaces that i find interesting. a lot of time over my past 2 years were in the computer vision and autonomous vehicle space and learning what it means to create reliable vision-based systems at scale. right now, i’m learning about gpus + chip optimization, geopolitics + the changing world order, and probabilistic robotics. quick jot note updates as to what i’ve been up to:

spoke alongside tarik at austin’s first computer vision meetup back in nov 2022. talked about what it means to solve end2end self-driving, the fundamental computer vision problem, and the importance of simulation in self-driving
did a 4-week sprint where i dove deep into CUDA and c++ architecture, built semantic segmentation networks on PyTorch’s c++ API (LibTorch)
attended the explore fellowship, a 7-day fellowship in connecticut with 55 ambitious teenagers learning what it means to make impact from an effective altruism lens
worked on stable diffusion research with viraj @uiuc and learned a lot about what it means to create high-quality simulation that’s able to optimize for the performance of end2end models
had another sprint into LLMs x self-driving. learned about saliency maps, encoding-decoding structures, and the calculus behind neural networks
spent my past 8 months learning calculus 3 and statistics. i’m planning to also dive deeper into bayesian statistics over the summer and understand its role in probabilistic modelling.

life update #4 - my summer

i’m excited to announce that i’ll be continuing my work with a PhD at ut austin over the summer! we’ll be looking into SLAM-based object systems for long-term data association. my past couple months have been focused on diving deep into SLAM architecture + understanding why SLAM works the way that it does.

the problem behind long-term data association is that you want to be able to recognize changes in your environment and re-map it accordingly while also keeping track of objects that might be moving dynamically in your environment (which is the main idea behind global consistency).

i’ll also be spending the majority of my time learning physics (and filling in the gaps) while also going back to more math. i want to focus on spending as much time as i can on solidifying my technicals so that i have the freedom to be able to go into whatever research area i’m interested in and understand the industry in minimal time. there’s a couple of robotics + computer vision textbooks that i’ve been wanting to go into so i’ll be heads down working through those!

looking ahead

i’m a point in my life where i’m surrounded by ambiguity and constant change; graduation, summer, and moving to pittsburgh are all events that i’m looking forward to but there are a lot of things i’ve been feeling uncertain about.

i’ve made a shift in focus from self-driving to robotics late last year and i’ll occasionally i’ll have moments where i feel conflicted on what i want to be working on. there’s so many things that i want to do over the next year, but figuring out what to prioritize has been difficult.

long-term planning is something i’ve generally struggled with; it’s hard for me to think about and see the person that i want to be 5 years from now. i know for a fact that i want to be working on really hard problems somewhere in deep-tech/robotics but i don’t know what or where. at the same time though, i think that the ambiguity i have with the trajectory that i’m on allows me to have the freedom i need to become really freaking smart.

what i’m optimizing for right now is my ability to be a generalist. give myself the freedom to both explore and also go deep technically. and this is the mindset i want to take with me as i continue moving forward.

hey, thanks so much for reading this newsletter! would love to hear your thoughts and updates on what you’re working on, feel free to get in contact via twitter or linkedin! check out my personal website if you’d like to learn more about me.

Sri’s Newsletter

Discussion about this post