Things I Wanted

Clarity in California.

I like to play a game with myself: what happened and what didn’t happen.

Like many creative people, I mostly live inside my head. I plan, I dream, I worry, I rage. I love, I picture, I try to find out. At the end of the day, reality is what happens. And so it is a good idea to parse through what did happen and what didn’t happen.

Happened since when? I never know where to start the calendar! Was it when I decided to leave Budapest, at 29? When I decided to become well-read and well-spoken, at 5? Looking the volume and violence of my family straight in the eye and teaching myself how to be articulate and calm because only that stopped the one shouting? (I was 5, is that when it started?) In the cacophony of everyday life, a thin thread runs through everything, the timeline of the things that happen. The things that have happened since then.

We measure what happened against what we wanted to happen, and what we would have liked to have avoided. We keep ledgers of what never came to be and what was successfully escaped or evaded. We all imagine ourselves as Odysseus; we survive some monsters only at a terrible loss. Other stops in life are tempting and numbing — and we are very happy to have left them.

I wanted to create a life where I could write freely, where I could say more or less anything I wanted. This, I believe, has happened. Check, check. I wanted to acquire a good education, and to continue learning, always, to be in a position to do so. This also has happened and keeps happening. Good job, Anna. Good job, encyclopedias, and then computer CDs, and then Google and Wikipedia, and then ChatGPT and Claude. Thank you, thank you, Thesaurus.

At some point I also realized that I did not want to spend my life lost in fiction — like my parents with their TV series — but to use my knowledge and strength (if I had any) to serve people in the real world. The way I decided I could help was by building a better discourse culture and around it a better cultural institution than what was available pre-2016. This is, happily, happening: I ended up founding Interintellect and we still exist.

I wanted to build a strong research foundation to ground what I am doing. This did happen between 2013 and early 2019, but has since then been much less prominent amid all the daily work at Interintellect. So: a half-success. I hope to improve on that.

I wanted to understand AI and to build and research tools that can help with discourse health in a way that is of practical value to people. This happened from 2017 until early 2019, and picked up again from early 2025. Again, a half-success, something that features heavily in my future plans.

Crucially, I wanted to move to the USA to be able to do my job on a larger scale, and to lead a freer and itself larger-scale life. I wanted to be where I belong, where I am not the odd one out. This ended up taking a very long time due to Brexit, COVID, Trump, and other interesting challenges, but in the end I could move here in May 2024. So: ✔ happened. A thousand-mile stare.

I wanted a lot of people to use Interintellect. This has not happened: while we have a good user base, Interintellect has not yet experienced anything close to hypergrowth. We have been cautious around the “current thing” hypes as an editorial principle, and remain a relatively small and very pure brand. People come to us for the high-quality density. I somehow created a luxury brand which is very interesting considering that I am a zero-institutional-inclusion solo founder working from my kitchen. I am also a weird neurodivergent person and communicate in ways some people don’t like, so it would be hard to call us “elite” in any way. (I always joke that I teach Aristotle to the people for 10 bucks, and I do. Every day.) And yet somehow we count as premium beauty, some kind of Fabergé egg within technology; elite people who have a lot of choice use the platform I built, and I am very proud because that’s hard to achieve. But hypergrowth: has not happened.

I thought I would somehow during these tumultuous years of yearning and wandering get married, and that I would obtain a husband with whom we would be writing our books on the weekends, sitting at the two ends of the table. There would be a cat and a dog. A lot of books. Of these only the books have happened.

I thought I would have already written a book by now. I cannot blame nonexistent husband for the nonexistence thereof. I am angry at myself (greatly) that this has still not happened. Turns out running a company and writing a book — those are two different people, rarely in the same room at the same time. So to my sadness, this has not materialized. But will soon, I promise.

I also thought Interintellect would place me into a professional community similar to what I grew up in among the TV studios of my parents, with deep friendships and love, people hanging out together, a lot of collaborations year after year. This — in all honesty — was my biggest dream. It is painful to me that this has not happened. I still find myself very much outside categories, too much of a founder for the intellectuals, too much of a cultural weirdo for the founders, too “woman” for this gatekeeper, too old for that one, too poor for this dinner, too rich for that circle … Too close to some billionaire for this conference, not close enough to another billionaire for that retreat organizer. Too foreigner, too centrist, too quiet, too loud, too acquiescing, too defensive, too religious-curious, not devout enough — this one wants from me more than I have; this one finds me too needy —; there is always something, and I have recently just given up trying to figure it out. I wish I was more legible, but at what cost? What has to go, which part of the truth? Which parts of the self…?! (And some of the people who do figure it out become so insufferable — that also lowers my ambitions at this a bit.) I have worked a lot on myself during the past two years to accept this not happening, to decouple 1:1 relationships from the mass of this not happening, because this not happening has been the hardest. A learning curveball of a nonsuccess. Into my face. The only way to go on is to step outside the court.

While the passive part of this is so brutal, the active side of intellectual and professional convening is my natural element. This has been happening, oh yes: my salons, festivals, dinners, and group chats are buzzing and warm and no-filter and fun. The joy, the joy! Books! Music — and ideas. This will always be so, this will always be happening. My brain is like a Rolodex: it organizes culture and creates it too. I hope it will remain useful to others. I hope I will.

I never expected to become super rich super fast, but I definitely imagined myself to be financially more secure than I ended up being. So, another half-success.

Running a startup, especially solo, as a new immigrant, as a standalone person, is tough even with great salons, friends, books, plans, and a good team. And so the big misses for me — the thing I really wanted, the thing that drove me, the thing for which you sacrifice and never look back — are my half-successes at building a good intellectual family. Don’t get me wrong, I do have a few beloved interlocutors and maybe-someday-collaborators, people who send me drafts and their advance copies, people I can send my drafts of half-baked ideas to, but I definitely feel outside, above, and below most currents of thought. Some of these relationships are a lot of work too, which is surprising and sometimes humiliating to me: I always thought I would be in demand. I always thought that if you work, think, and choose well then these quasi-familial bonds of learning and enjoying-thinking-together somehow would arise organically out of life. That if you invite you will be invited. That if you love you will be loved. They did not arise in mine, at least not so cleanly and not so simply. Interintellect existing is both indispensable — it is exactly this cultural and relational engine in the lives of so many people — and an obstacle in cases where I personally am not included because potential co-thinkers see me, correctly, as fixed in my territorial loyalties toward my own creation. And so I still feel that however important and abundant the work Interintellect is doing, if all of it disappeared tomorrow, maybe no one would notice or care. I think what I hoped for the most was to matter. Intellectually, emotionally, professionally, as a person — in a way I can be sure of. When I tell this to my friends they say, oh, that way nobody matters. But I think this is not true: to me, they matter. And I have thought a lot in recent years about who is visible and who isn’t. Who is valued and heard and supported, and who isn’t. Whom people invest in, whom they promote, whom they let enter the market trade of ideas, who gets a seat at the table.

What I want is to give people a seat at my table. That is what’s going to happen.