The last time I was in New York City was the last summer before the pandemic. My book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors had just come out, and I was in town to do whatever promotion I could pull together. My friend and Autonocast cohost Alex Roy let me use his beautiful Soho loft for a discussion about the book, which we streamed live over Twitter.

One morning, when there was no book promotion work to be done, I joined Alex and his then brand-new family for a wonderful morning at The Met, where we took in an exhibit on camp. Alex’s daughter Coco was barely a toddler, but she was enthralled by the art and costumes on display, which her parents explained with infectious enthusiasm. It was a beautiful experience to be a part of: the loving transmission of insight, passion and joy from one generation to the next.

Last week I returned to New York for the first time since that 2019 trip, and the visit revealed just how much has changed during the pandemic. New York itself certainly felt different, but in ways that were difficult to specifically identify on the basis of such irregular visits. But more importantly, I felt different: instead of scheduling extra time and reaching out to online friends and colleagues I rarely (if ever) get to spend time with in person, I just planned to show up, work, and fly home. I didn’t even make an effort to seek out favorite foods that I can’t get at home, which is historically my top travel priority (I still can’t believe I didn’t even try to get a snack at Xi’an Famous Foods).

I would have called Alex, but his personal pandemic era odyssey had taken him away from his beloved home city, first to Miami to work at the now-defunct autonomous vehicle company Argo AI, and then to Arizona to be as close as possible to Coco. As it turned out, Alex and Coco just happened to be in town anyway, and I was overjoyed when he saw my Instagram post of the Manhattan skyline and called to see if I wanted to go to a museum with him and Coco. Of course I did. After the last four years, any opportunity to see old friends and revisit pre-pandemic experiences must be embraced whole-heartedly.

And so I found myself with my old friend and his now shockingly grown-up daughter, waiting in line for tickets at the Natural History Museum. As we caught up, it struck me that so much of the news we shared was so… hard. Breakups. Death. The near-disappearance of the autonomous vehicle sector we both worked in and around. Deep uncertainty about the future. The struggle to find work that is both meaningful and rewarding. As we spoke I thought about how many people I know who have found themselves unexpectedly struggling with similar issues in the last few years.

As we spoke, I took in the spectacular interior of the museum’s entrance, a Roman-inspired memorial to Teddy Roosevelt rendered in pink granite. Directly above us, a mural depicting the construction of the Panama Canal in gorgeously allegorical terms held my attention, until my eyes wandered to a massive engraved quote above the ticket desk on an adjacent wall. “MANHOOD,” read its massive heading. I braced for the inevitable cringe.

Obviously Roosevelt is trafficking in some massively outdated conceptual hardware, which conflates the imagined attributes of a single gender with values that wildly transcend gender. I say “obviously” because the first person I thought of when I read this passage was my (female) partner, whose unshakeable sense of courage in the face of both duty and joy is a constant source of inspiration and strength for me. Once you adjust for the considerable evolution of language and social norms since Roosevelt’s time, and replace “manhood” with something like “humanity” or “citizenship,” his quote turns out to be anachronistic and provocative in far more interesting ways.

For starters, what does the term “duty” mean to an American in 2023? We might think of professional duties in certain contexts, perhaps soldiers and doctors, but that’s hardly the kind of core value that Roosevelt is talking about. A lot of what we might casually identify as “duty” today is, at its core, just a variation of the fundamental “duty” to survive, which isn’t what Teddy was gesturing at either. Surviving in modern capitalism doesn’t require living up to any kind of ideal, or enduring misfortune to forge a finer, nobler version of yourself; indeed, success today seems to lie in the opposite direction of these activities.

But Roosevelt wasn’t dishing out Instagram hustle porn in this quote. His entire framing may be deeply sexist, but the core values he espouses are bracingly tonic at a time when “inspiration” tends to be little more than glib tropes that seek to tamp down the rebellious conscience, and assure the reader that they need not think of anything more than their immediate self-interest. Live up to your own ideals, he says. We all struggle, so do what you can to ensure that your struggle makes you stronger. Do not let fear rob your life of the joy and duty that give it meaning.

This is a remarkably simple, non-prescriptive and, I’ll just say it, profound philosophy. Especially in the wake of a pandemic that seems to have raised the ambient levels of fear among so many people, trapping us in self-reinforcing cycles of isolation and anxiety, there’s a refreshing simplicity to this mandate. Try to figure out what really matters to you, the thing that provides both joy and a sense of duty, and struggle to live up to whatever that is. If “follow your bliss” sounds directionally accurate, but somehow not quite the entire story, Teddy’s alloy of duty and joy might just provide the additional detail you’re looking for.

As these thoughts, and many more swam through my head, I looked back at my old friend and his young daughter, and there it was. Duty and joy, bundled up so tightly together that you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. His dutiful care enabling her joy, which in turn re-ignites his own sense of joy and purpose. The beautiful virtuous cycle of their love and devotion kindling a magical light that banishes the shadows that have grown around and over us. Alex has had more than his fair share of tribulation in recent years, but the absolute clarity with which he understands what matters to him has gotten him though the earth-shaking changes he has needed to stay connected to his duty and joy.

For just a moment, I envied him. My duty and joy will never take the form of a tiny human that I have created, a singular entity of infinite possibility in which everything that matters to me resides. My path to fulfilment, my duty and joy, will always be my own. But if the pandemic made anything clear to me, it’s that finding and staying on my path depends far more on other people than I realized before the world came to a sudden stop. A few hours with an old friend and his daughter, wandering a museum and sharing a sense of pure joy in the place and each other, proved it beyond any doubt.