Adventures

February 26, 2026
By Aathreya Kadambi

I feel like I’m missing a sense of adventure in my life. Everything is getting a little monotonous, which means I’m not taking enough time to build narratives.

I think building a narrative requires knowing who I am and who I want to be, and then finding the story that takes me there. In some sense, many narratives are being built right now but in a very slow way: I’m growing as a researcher, starting to run and exercise more, learning more about the essence of barrista-ing, and probably more. But on the other hand, I wish things would go faster and I could see more things in one place. And I feel like my work right now isn’t driving me to meet enough new people; it’s honestly more isolating than encouraging meeting up, which is something I want to change.

These thoughts are inspired by two things:

1. I need to moisturize my skin, am feeling dry.
2. I saw someone’s Instagram post about how children always want to grow up so they can have more freedom, but as adults many of us seem to prefer using our freedom to doomscroll (a choice that feels meaningless and forgettable).

It’s confusing though how to really satiate that feeling of wanting adventure. Is it novelty we want? Or maybe a crew people to experience the adventure with?

Ok I’m moisturized now, and I feel like there’s a sort of duality of life between adventures and just basic living/ritualism if that makes sense. Sort of like in Fast and Furious, how they call the two guys from their peaceful lives for a once-in-a-lifetime spicy adventure.

Maybe it’s just the risk involved to be honest…

Day 1

I think rain ended up being a pretty interesting adventure: it started my journey in running to some extent. I’m going to try to emulate that in this post to give me motivation to do something exciting in the next few days.

After a bit of mentally-strained walking, I’ve decided that today’s adventure will consist of working underneath a random tree on the patch of grass near upper sproul. It feels a little bit performative, but the recline on this particular tree is kind of nice. And somehow, sitting here feels simultaneously extremely in-view while being extremely hidden. Anyway, time to grade.

Today wasn’t a bad adventure. I finished grading and learned a lot about contrastive learning, along with some other funny stuff at Berkeley Expresso. After all of that though I was pretty tired and crashed for a few hours. Now it’s kind of late so it’s unclear whether I should sleep or wrap up some other unfinished buisness.

My resolution is to have some of my research results run in the background tonight so I can really go all in tomorrow. Tonight I’ll try to create some tutoring materials instead.

Forty five minutes later and I haven’t made those materials yet, but I have started this new cup of ice cream I bought the other day.

Days 2, 3

Today has been nice so far, I went to our math book club meeting after which I went to Idly Express for some food. To be honest, I haven’t been super productive yet though; I’ve been yearning to get some stuff done, like tutoring and research. But alas, today has been mostly spent with other people (yet I was complaining about the opposite yesterday…).

But today I plan to get some research done. Later, I promised to present about an unrelated paper on representation learning for RL at my friend’s ML reading group, after which I’ll go to a club event at night.

There’s actually only two more days of February!

Day 3 was a pretty awesome adventure. I got to grade for a math competition, where I learned of something super interesting that I won’t mention here for now, and later I celebrated my friend’s birthday at his place. On the way, we tried some Andhra food at a restaurant in SF.

Hmm

I feel like I’m starting to better understand the dissonance in my life between wanting adventure and needing peace, though I don’t know how to articulate it yet.