I Chose Jehovah

The easiest way to misunderstand what I did at seventeen is to begin from the premise that I secretly knew Jehovah's Witnesses were wrong and sacrificed college anyway because adults pressured me. That is not what it felt like. FROM INSIDE MY HEAD, the decision was morally obvious. If Jehovah is real, Armageddon is actually approaching, eternal life is actually possible, and the worldwide preaching work is the most important thing happening on Earth, then maximizing a secular career because I happen to be good at school is almost embarrassingly shortsighted. A full engineering scholarship sounds enormous only if the next sixty years are the horizon. If the horizon is eternity, the denominator eats it alive.

So I chose Jehovah. I turned down the future other people expected from the top-ten student and oriented around pioneering instead. There was tension in the household. [add exact conversations] Mom and Isaac did not necessarily interpret the decision the same way I did. But part of the point, psychologically, was that a morally serious person SHOULD be willing to choose the right thing even when people close to him thought it was impractical. Every story about faithful people had trained exactly that move.

The problem is that the alternative trajectory did not instantiate into anything coherent. Pioneering gave me hours and structure but proselytizing often bored me and felt pointless. I applied to Bethel and waited. [embed: application / dates if recoverable] No reply. I had imagined there were internal paths where unusual seriousness and technical ability could become useful to the organization. Instead I was just... waiting. Working. Going in service. Trying to infer what I was supposed to do next from a system that had been very specific about what NOT to optimize and remarkably vague about what a technically ambitious young person should actually build a life around.

The eating disorder belongs somewhere in this period. [write exact experience carefully] So does the tension at home. So does the strange coexistence of moral certainty and practical confusion. I could believe with extraordinary confidence that I had rejected the wrong path without having any positive model of the right one beyond "be faithful." That turns out not to be enough information to schedule a Tuesday.

Curiosity kept leaking through everything. I studied for AWS certifications. [embed: certification records] I learned technical things because apparently you can remove college from the plan without removing whatever part of my brain wants to understand systems. I worked at McDonald's, and I would eventually print arXiv papers to read in the back room. This juxtaposition still feels almost comically representative: I had voluntarily declined the prestigious/legible route, was wearing a McDonald's uniform, and meanwhile my head was filling with deep reinforcement learning and neuroscience because I could not stop pulling the thread.

About a year and a half after graduation, the outcome was getting harder to romanticize. This was supposed to have been the decisive moral choice of my youth. I had given up real optionality. And now what? I was not at Bethel. I was not building some extraordinary ministry project. I was not progressing toward a technical vocation. I was directionless in a way that began to feel insulting to the seriousness with which I had made the decision.

Then the pandemic hit and blew up the social/operational structure around pioneering anyway. Eventually I had the conversation with Mom and Isaac. I had cried. Isaac said something like, "you had your good cry"—[verify exact quote]—but now what was I going to DO? And this time I had an answer at least in the negative: I was not going to continue living this directionless life.

That was not yet me rejecting Jehovah. It was me rejecting stagnation. There is an important distinction. I could still hold the religious model while deciding that whatever I had been doing operationally was not working. I could go to college. I could build. I could study. Maybe all of that could still be made subordinate to the faith.

But another process had already begun underneath. Years earlier, in 2018, I had discovered arXiv. Once I realized that the frontier of machine learning and neuroscience was sitting on the open internet waiting for me, I acquired a second source of revelation, and unlike the first one it updated every week.