march 2026
Hello!
from scratch
This is what I want to do, this is what I want to watch, this is what I want to cook.
A theme of this month has been doing things from scratch.
It started with me signing up for a subscription box of produce that gets delivered every week. The company ā Odd Bunch ā uses produce that wouldāve been discarded and ships it to people locally.
Whatās fun is that the produce I get is different every week. Thereās usually a veggie in there that Iāve never cooked before (or havenāt in a long time).
It means Iām forced to think about how to cook this new stuff into a meal instead of doing my default prep with my default veggies.
It breaks me out of the monotony really. Perhaps the randomness of new veggies is what will make me a better cook.
Iām also making the following food from scratch instead of buying it:
- sandwich bread
- hummus
- mayonnaise
- granola
- hamburger buns (once)
manual consumption
In a sort of similar way, Iāve found myself behaving differently with my phone.
Iāve been drifting toward consuming things more intentionally. This means:
- scrolling through my YouTube subscription tab instead of the recommended page
- looking through saved albums on Spotify instead of my Discover Weekly or Daylist
This can be referred to as āavoiding the Home pageā.
Itās not like I havenāt wanted to start doing this earlier ā Iāve been trying to distance myself from recommendation algorithms for what feels like years.
I think it took hold because I realized that I actually enjoy the things I choose to consume.
Here are two examples:
- I discovered the podcast ā The Rest is Politics ā by searching āiran war podcastā on YouTube 1
- I found Touristās new album on Spotify by scrolling through my saved artists list
In both cases, I found the content instead of relying on recommendations.
To be fair, the Home page shows me good stuff too. I think thereās a lot of unique, special inspiration on the internet that I derive value from ā and wouldnāt have found by myself.
The problem for me is that easy access to an infinite scrollable feed (especially on my phone) is a fraught, treacherous thing. I get addicted easily and lose my own thoughts in the process.
Anyways, even though Iām realizing that the algorithm isnāt always better than my own free will, I can also acknowledge that itās not all bad either. Everything is a bit grey.
thank you to Ashley for this picture
on pressure
my job has never failed to exert pressure. in fact, few things in my life have been as consistent.
i donāt think itās entirely a bad thing. it gives me the motivation to get better. itās easier to learn when thereās some accountability.
i think pressure is good for a lot of things:
- a band might feel pressure to prepare for a performance
- an athlete might feel pressure to train for a race
- i might feel pressure to cook something good for a dinner party
that doesnāt mean the pressure is wrong ā it helps!
but it also distracts.
pressure means there isnāt as much time to be curious. it bumps all the other stuff down the priority list.
kahvi on the internet
I created my Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2012, when I was 14 years old. I created my blog (kahvipatel.com) a couple years later, when I was 16.
Iāve been reflecting on how each of these places has changed.
beginning (2012-2016)
This is what my blog looked like when I first started:
Back then, I was just excited to create stuff that I could put online. Designing the website was rewarding ā it felt like a natural evolution after spending a lot of time in Illustrator.
I enjoyed the writing part too. I wrote about my future career, my hair length and many other things. It felt very cool to āpublishā 2 that work.
At the time, my Facebook and Instagram accounts were way more active. I would post almost daily, usually directed towards friends or classmates.
university (2016-2020)
Once I got to university, the blog became a vessel for me to learn new web technologies. I rebuilt my blog to learn about projects like React and Typescript. I used it to get my first co-op.
At the same time, social media was undergoing a shift in the culture. I think it started with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and movies like The Social Dilemma.
Regardless of how it happened, I started to trust Facebook less and stopped posting as much. This was also a trend among my friends.
career (2021-2026)
When I started working full-time, I was put on a team whose focus was building products for the web. This forced me to think more about the calculus of websites like Facebook: Your free consumption comes at the cost of being tracked.
That made it harder for me to justify uploading things to a platform that I didnāt even trust in the first place.
It made it easier to focus on my blog where the incentives were much simpler. I own the content I create there. Thatās about when I decided to start this newsletter.
now
Throughout their existence, my website and this newsletter havenāt been well known among my friends. The updates I make often go unnoticed, and things I say here have less reach than they would on a site like Facebook or Instagram.
To me, it makes them feel like a more intimate, private space ā one that people must choose to be in. Selfishly, I wish more parts of the internet were like this.
Or like the front page of Hacker News. Just a list of links that get upvoted.
misc
As usual, hereās a handful of unrelated things from this month:
- I caught a crab with Mason:
- Saw this lede on twitter
Finally, hereās me and Penny (courtesy of Ashley ā„ļø):
See you next week!