Hey, how are you? It’s been a minute. I’m glad to be back on here. I’ve left an update at the end. This piece is shorter than it looks.
The smartest people in my life all seem different. They don’t wear the same clothes (though everyone should shower). They don’t share the same fancy degree, nor have they cleared some magical number in their bank account. Well, many make bank, but plenty talk openly about debt… some thug it out paycheck-to-paycheck, vibing out unmotivated by money. Some are fat; others are fit. Many never want to leave Manhattan; a few reject every returning again and flocked to the mountains. They’re not found anywhere in particular. I don’t think they’re in one city nor found along any coast.
But they all share one trait: Intention. Smart people know what they want.
“Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.” - Alphonse de Lamartine
The smartest people intentionally strike a peaceful compromise in life’s uneasiest tension: they desire for more but find contentment with what’s in front of them. They don’t have everything, but all the same— a calming humility envelopes their hidden horsepower.
The smartest people in my life wrestle with inescapable desire. It’s good. Desire fuels a chase to our highest life possible. Maslow offers the framework: at the lowest level, desire begins with needing the basics—food, water, shelter, safety— before climbing to higher desires that demand more intentional thinking.
Being smart means wielding intention. It’s a luxury that I think you have. Not many people get to think first, then act with so much choice: what do I work on? where do I live? who do I love? And it’s all in such a short life. I’m 26 in 2026 and probably gonna die before 2100. I’m blessed to be born now with this much battery life remaining. You guys, we’re floating through space on a rock named "Dirt”, but it’s the comfiest it’s ever been. I’m free of all the stupidest obligations needed to survive in in the Serengeti. I think you’re able to think intentionally. Hey, you’re reading this. That means you inherited that luxurious intentional gene.
On Stupidity
I’m not claiming to be smart. I’m usually pretty stupid because I don’t know what I want.
Smart thinking is rooted in intentionality. When intention slips, stupidity arises. Stupidity emerges from not knowing what you want most. In an hour, day, or week, my stupidity runs wild, between too much restless desire to restful contentment.
The longer I take to decide, the stupider I am. I spiral in a grocery store when there’s a bazillion sticks of butter— genuinely. who. cares. If we eat out together, you’ll notice I don’t bother looking at a menu until it’s my turn to order. After I got accepted into colleges, I couldn’t sleep for weeks, even deliberating in my dreams. Coin flipping didn’t work.
AI makes me stupid. It’s is still in its infancy as a Promethean tool— fire for sure, but I’m a the dumbass caveman constantly burning myself. I use it for charts, writing software, all sorts of logistics… but it becomes Minecraft: pure productivity entertainment. I’ll spend hours on Claude on a Saturday, creating nothing as I lack intentionality.
Everyone faces constraints to higher living. All the same, dare to imagine.
I know my privileged subscribers: you’re rich, hot, and healthy. Yes, I’m talking to you ;) If intelligence is measured by how intentional we live this life, then I dare you to introspect, imagine, and create the world you want by leveraging whatever privilege it is you possess. That last sentence should not be so dirty and shameful to publish online.
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” - George Bernard Shaw
Higher means oblige us to higher ends. What are those “higher ends”? The intentional person makes that decision for themselves. I see it in all the smarter people than me in my life. They have a why that fuels their intentionality. Both the banker on Wall Street, stimming out of their minds 100 hours a week, and the Peace Corps volunteer, sleeping on the floor in a village in the Congo teaching English, throw themselves into their lives. Fuck happiness. They might be miserable a lot— BUT DO THEY LIVE. THEIR EYES LIVE ABALZE WITH VITALITY.
Sorry for yelling. In my life, an entrepreneurial ethos conditioned me to believe the best life is the one that offers the most control; intentionality is a prerequisite. I notice I opt for personal freedom to explore places, dive into ideas, and connect with the people in them. Consuming more than creating, I’ve done a disservice to the world in my life not writing more about these experiences.
America fetishizes bootstraps as a symbol of brilliance. By intentionally navigating life, individualism emboldened me with the idea that I, alone, should have the “smarts” to navigate any chaos. How do how I want my career to contribute to the world? I have tried, so many times, letting others make the call about job choices. Hasn’t worked yet. Then there’s the future questions we must confront: should I worry about AI killing us all? I can’t control that. Am I sitting across from my future wife? Well, that’s up to us. No arranged marriage for me, but I do see the logic.
Among all the places I’ve lived, I’ve noticed intentional intelligence is especially valued in the Bay Area, a bizarre culture that blends financial nihilism and techno-utopianism to create an economy of borderline-bullshitting companies that will supposedly change the world, while also letting you escape to the Euro-summer-aristocracy-F1-circuit before you turn 30.
If there are higher ends achieved by intentional thinking, there’s no single one. If it were, then there should be one yard stick of enlightenment: the most popular, the wealthiest, most beautiful, and healthiest? No, it’s not an absolute scale.
I still can’t stop thinking about Rawls’ original position. His political philosophies sought to structure society as “just” and “fair” regardless of where you started. But in this lens today, a Rawlsian “intentional” society would be tinted where everyone’s starting privilege—whether its wealth, beauty, health— can be intentionally leveraged for higher ends to get them what they want, in that tension between restless desire and grateful contentment.
Whether its friends, jobs, a family, I urge you to create worlds that make intentionality easier. Let the fashionable walk the runway. Give the passionate singer time in the studio. Sponsor our competitive athletes to train and win gold. If you want to make a gazillion dollars, let’s tee you up to do it and be a capitalistic savage. Or if you want to spend your life’s battery travelling the world, seeing your children, you probably could! But you won’t be living in the same tax bracket or zip code with whoever that was with 5 houses in the sentence before you. Balance those desires with contentment.
"Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with, and you'll do well." - Jerry Seinfield
The “smartest” manage to pick their poison, a Sisyphean pursuit that never stops torturing them.
Here’s to many more, thanks for being here, I’m going to keep trying, writing remains a big boulder of mine of, I love this shit, have a good weekend,
Max
Brief Update to the Newsletter
In that theme of being intentional, I am rebranding this newsletter to long form essays. Grand Technologies sunsets below the email banner and personal long form essays—hopefully titled ”Max Bessler”, like today— dawns in its place.
I’m trying to be smart here… This Substack provided a great platform to host earlier writing samples, but I now have better outlets to publish professional pieces, which will be republished here.
My writing fucking soared this summer. I tried to hit 500-1000 words a day. They flowed into several streams: a personal life on iMessage; work has me in Word writing memos on industry and technology developments; an X account to push my voice and make sense of the news; entering grad school will soon torture professors and peers; and… I want this Substack to stay true to commentary.
Reach out if you want to collaborate and attach your name to something embarrassing.
The Obligation to Beauty - A fantastic essay on the concept of how “higher means oblige us to higher ends”. I think more of us are aristocratic than we realize. I use that term loosely.
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” - Epictetus
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs
I don’t think the answer is being a neurotic, type-A, optimizer. In fact, the optimizers may maximize their time out of fear they don’t have enough of it— because they’re not being intentional with how they want to spend it.
Philosophers debate if reasoning can be measured by instrumental rationality: how we adapt our thinking to achieve real things.