Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote, “Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort,” is flawed. It overlooks the various other sources of happiness and repeats the western idea that individual worth is defined by how productive you are by implying that achievement is one of the only sources of happiness. In my reality, I find certain unproductive activities to be productive as well. When I spend time with my family, there is no overarching achievement or creative effort going on. To try and describe this source of happiness, it's the feeling of belonging and being together. Likewise, when I do art, I don't do it just for the achievements of competitions, but for the exciting aspect of exploring an idea or creating something new. These different forms of happiness show up in video games: games like Geometry Dash, or the Portal series, are about solving a problem to advance the character in levels or the story; whereas Minecraft allow the player to indefinitely, aimlessly explore the world, or just creativley build. Of course, there are even more games that exploit other sources of joy that I haven't mentioned here. I seek out joy by being around other people and being myself, having my own "energy", and allowing other to tune into the way I behave. I also enjoy achievements and the thrill of creative effort, so I take joy in doing those too. When I'm too stressed out, I hit the gym. And when I'm too stressed out and can't hit the gym anymore, I hang out with friends and play board games or take walks. I hope my essay highlights the difference between what society defines as sources of happiness, and my own. Thanks for reading.

I'm a freshman at the University of Washington, looking into pursuing a career in smart-contract programming, which I believe is the future of justice-oriented policy implementation. This specific interest stems from my motivation to learn and improve my world. I find the concepts of cryptocurrency fascinating but have studied the space enough to know that while money can be made trading crypto coins and getting lucky, the real gold is in building the tools for this technology to be useful to society. Because cryptocurrency provides an open-source, decentralized approach to finance, it can be used for sending money to anyone else who is connected, indiscriminately. Additionally, cryptocurrency will one day be a more trustworthy medium of transaction than cash, as all transactions are publicly available, thus making black-market transactions tracible and more expensive to liquify. Imagining a world where everyone--including traditionally suppressed groups--has access to financial institutions makes me excited for the future. To bring the conversation back to smart-contract programming, smart contracts represent a decentralized, autonomous approach to governance, voting, resource distribution, wealth management, and privacy management to name a few, through cryptocurrency. Of course, affordance analysis teaches us that these features, and how they are implemented will determine which groups of society they impact positively or negativley. These features of smart contracts make me hopeful for the flourishing world of inclusivity, creativity, and the possibility that they could unlock, which is why I'm motivated to learn about them, and one day implement justice-oriented policies written in the code we now call smart contracts.

I can write and manipulated code in 13 programming languages, and compose art. However, these skills are just a byproduct of my greatest skill. I began an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory during 2019. In this internship, I applied machine learning to the problem of tumor detection in pathology slides, and then found the failure points of these trained models. I was mostly self led, especially for a high-school student. This was possible because my mentors were amazing at making me learn; so when I asked questions that they already knew could be googled, told me to "google it". After a bit of this, I began to understand where they were coming from, and also began to see the power behind google. Looking back, they might not have know the exact answer to all of my questions, but instead gave me the skill of being a good researcher so that I could figure them out for myself. Understanding how to do research helped me immensely later on, when learning how to construct websites for a local retail company, and again, when I tried selling my own NFT project and had to learn all about the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Throughout my career as an artist, the skill of research has unlocked powerful tools to me. A quick glance at my artist portfolio (http://www.artstation.com/charles07) will show you several of my experiments, including digitally-generated nebulae, futuristic and dystopian cities, CGI mountains, planets and moons, rocket ships, and floating buildings. I exercise my research skills every day by learning something new through sources including friends, books, classes, and of course googling. Currently, I'm learning about the future of finance, bureaucracy, and gaming!

I would share these two words: "Nobody knows!". Because nobody knows the secret to being cool, they just act like they do. Nobody knows the secret to making a ton of money, not even the people who have money. Nobody knows how to be happy in life. Accept for the people who know that nobody knows. The people who know that nobody knows are the ones who aren't afraid to be themselves because they know that nobody knows why they act the way they do, and because nobody knows, nobody truly has the objective right to judge them. If everyone knew that nobody knows, then we would become liberated from trying to fit in, and conforming to social pressures. You could wear anything you wanted to express yourself in any way you want. Since nobody knows, they could only make speculations as to why you look and behave the way you do, but can only begin to understand once they have asked. This is why everyone has something to learn from anyone else.