The Wanderer

The other day my girlfriend looked over at me and asked me a question. If any readers are in relationships you might be familiar with this paradigm. Your partner will look over to you and ask a question seemingly out of the blue. The questions vary from silly things she saw on Tik Tok meant to annoy your boyfriend to genuine deep thoughts, potentially still from Tik Tok. Things like “Would you still love me if I were a worm” or “Do you even like me” come up pretty often as famous examples of this phenomenon. At the end of the day, these questions are just ways to ask the person you love “Hey, is your life better now with me than it was without me?”

My girlfriend is, by all accounts, a question-asker (patent pending). Pretty much every time we hang out, she will bombard me with deep questions in an attempt to get to know me better. We have this card game I bought a while back called “We’re not really strangers” with literally thousands of questions to get to know your partner. She brings it out almost every time she comes over.

But I love this about her. In my mind she asks so many questions because she wants to know what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling, and if I still feel the same way about her. I love answering her questions, for it gives me an excuse to tell her how much I love her. And because the way her eyes light up when I do makes me love her even more.

Anyways, the other day we were sitting on my couch eating handmade pizza fresh out of the oven, drinking wine and rewatching Om Shanti Om. (By the way, the last time I watched that movie I was 7 and man does it still hold up). Tanvi looks over to me and says “Hey, I have a question. How do you think your life has changed in the past year?” As if we’re not currently watching a movie. But when she asks me a question I can’t ignore it. This is what we’re doing now. And it’s not like it wasn’t an interesting question. Growth had been on my mind recently.

The last time I wrote a blog post was 3 months ago around the beginning of the year. I was talking about how far I’d come in 2024, and how far I wanted to go in 2025. I had aspirations to do great things, but that’s all it was. Aspirations.

I mention work pretty often in this blog. What I do is a big part of my life, but it’s also my biggest stressor, my greatest challenge. For the past two years I have been working as a technology consultant. My project was a technology deployment for a manufacturing company, my role was to travel to factories across the country and design and build technology solutions. The work was interesting in its own right, but very challenging. The most difficult part of the job was the travel. Almost every week for the past two years, I would fly out on Monday morning to some place in the American countryside, work in a factory for 4 days, sleeping in hotels each night, and flying back to Chicago on Thursday afternoon.

I’m not going to pretend that I am the only consultant in this position. This is the job, I knew that coming in. But for me, this was not the type of work I wanted to do. There’s this quote from Casey Niestat, a huge influence in my life, where he says that sometimes you might not know what you want to do, but you know you don’t want to do what you’re currently doing. At the time he was working in a crab shack, not a fortune 500 company, but the sentiment remains. I didn’t know for sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew for sure it wasn’t this.

There’s this concept in Hinduism around reincarnation, the idea that life is cyclical, and after death there is rebirth, another chance. I am a firm believer of reincarnation. If you’ve read any of my books the idea of rebirth is a constant theme in my writing. But I also believe in the idea that reincarnation can happen during a lifetime. That at any point, anyone can decide to be reborn into a new person. All they need is the drive.

In November of 2024 I was traveling for a month straight to Iowa and everything finally caught up to me. I was exhausted and frustrated, not sure what I was doing. I woke up one day knowing that I needed to change something. But before I do, I need to figure out what the next step is. Soul searching is a frequent hobby of mine, so I got to work, thinking about where I wanted to be in 10 years, 5 years, even 1 year from now.

When I look at the things I liked about work, like working with clients, developing products, owning relationships etc, I settled on the overall goal of being a data and AI product owner. Product owners are the leads of products, they literally own the design and development of a product. Everything from the goals of the product to the small UI changes is defined by one person. They work with multiple teams of developers, project managers, and shareholders to ensure the product is built and used correctly. Ultimately, the buck stops with them. It’s a job that takes tens of years of experience, and it won’t happen tomorrow, but that is where I want to be.

When I look at the things I wanted to change about my work I landed predominantly on the industry. With all my heart I wanted to be in life sciences and medical devices. I wanted to create tools that could save lives. And more than anything I wanted to design these tools.

For the past 3 months I have been working hard to achieve my goals. I applied for a part time masters in data science. The reasoning behind this was to strengthen my data and AI knowledge while giving myself the business acumen to lead data endeavors. From there, I began to up-skill in data engineering and power BI, taking certifications provided by my company. And finally, I requested to roll off my project. Finally the end was near, and a new beginning was just on the horizon.

March 15th I rolled off my project and submitted all of my applications. Over the next few months I will begin working in the life sciences industry, doing data and Ai related work, and starting my masters in data science. For the first time since college when I switched from medicine to engineering, I feel like I am finally on the right path, moving slowly but surely to a goal not too far in the future.

So when tanvi asked me that question, how has my life changed over the past year, I looked at her with love in my eyes and said

In a way I had been reincarnated.