Some notes from Berlin

February 01, 2025

From September to December 2024 I lived and studied in Berlin. I learned the basics of German (ja, ich spreche Deutsch), lived independently in the city, clocked ~35 hours in Berghain, spent noctural weekends powered by U-Bahn station croissants, and saw unfamiliar parts of both the world and myself.

To call it educational is an understatement; I genuinely feel that it was transformative. I think through the stark contrast with my “normal” life at Stanford, living in Berlin amplified the personal evolution I’ve undergone in recent years. It was refreshing to be removed from the intense landscape of campus (and broader SF) – ambition-obsessed, workaholic, often judgmental or at least anonymity-free – and to have the breathing room to grow. I relied on my “when in Berlin” mentality to justify, or push myself towards, risk-taking and unfamiliar-feeling adventures.

I think if I had nothing tying me to the U.S., I would move to Berlin. I’ll miss attempting to order in German at restaurants, learning new words from street signs, dancing with strangers, walking past little artisan workshops on my street, camera stickers and coat checks in the clubs, and riding the U-Bahn every morning¹.

 

I. on “normalcy”, personal plasticity, and situational selves

The first observation I made was how different I felt after just a few weeks in Berlin. Coming into the quarter, I knew I’d be experiencing my first independent adult-ish life in a city, and I sought to embrace and experience all Berlin had to offer. For better or for worse, I think my sense of self is strongly swayed by my environment; I’m happy to lean into the versions of myself elicited by the cultural tide of a city. To that end, Berlin whispered to me² that I should be more free, more expressive, more subversive.

There are many things in Berlin that an American, or a Stanford student, would probably categorize as “weird”. Public nudity, very contemporary performance and visual art³, body modifications, clubs swirling with open sexuality and maximalist atmospheres⁴. But I found it shockingly easy to become desensitized to these out-of-distribution experiences, to embrace them as normal and exciting forms of expression. I think I have quite a high tolerance for the absurd and the uncomfortable, and I’m willing to keep becoming more open-minded, especially when alone or with friends I really trust. If the knee-jerk immune response can be overcome, there is so much beauty and human freedom to be found behind the walls of “weird”.

I found that I like things that surprise me, that reveal and play with a new dimension of expression. Most of all I really enjoyed trying on “different versions” of myself and understanding the boundaries of my own identity. And I realized that it’s easy to believe certain truths — that morals and standards are arbitrary, that life is meaningless, that you shouldn’t care what other people think, that cultural standards are all relative — and yet still live a life of self-conscious shame and self-imposed boundaries⁵. What kind of life do you live if you only constrain yourself to experiences you think are normal? For me, it took actually living in an intensely different culture to understand my subconscious barriers, and also my own plasticity.

 

II. on the joys of construction and destruction

Construction. I didn’t expect this coming in, but I got so much joy out of a completely foreign place slowly becoming legible. Bootstrapping the language from nothing, eventually the words on the subway announcements and grocery store signs started taking on actual meaning. On my last day, I walked the length of Goltzstrasse, reflecting on how confused I was on my arrival day, and how familiar my neighborhood streets had become. I loved feeling like I understood the unspoken rules of techno clubs, the day-to-day lives of Berliners, even some parts of the German collective psyche. Yes, I knew I was an outsider, but this strange world was slowly coming into focus.

Part of understanding a new place from the ground up was revisiting, and rebuilding, my own cultural raison d’etre. I had always taken for granted that I love reading, or dancing, or going to museums. In the contrast and chaos of learning Berlin, and also maybe just thanks to growing up more, everything I consumed felt viscerally deeper, like I was re-acquainting myself with old joys.

Destruction. I found myself fearful of, and yet gleeful about, self-destruction. Perhaps it was because I knew my Berlin experience was limited to those three months, and that I had my “normal” life to return to afterwards. Underneath the late nights turning into mornings, unpredictable eating habits, weeks without any exercise other than dancing, the random Berliners coming in and out of my life, being completely physically spent at the end of the night, and crawling into a messy bed at 8AM there was a sense of romance. Going into Berlin, some part of me wanted to really live out the freedom of the city, to embrace the haze of my youth; I wanted to have this self-destruction as a singularly beautiful chapter in my life.

 

III. on self-expression and the good life

Berlin may not be a famously happy city – almost every theater show or artwork I saw was some kind of dark and morbid – but I think Berliners (and maybe Germans/Europeans in general) live truly good lives. The city is full of casual leisure: walk down the streets of Schoneberg or Kreuzberg on a weekday, and you’ll see overflowing restaurants, families on evening strolls, clusters of friends smoking on the curb. You’ll find people in in saunas, flea markets, techno clubs, and Berlin’s lakes any day of the week. Coming from the pressure cooker of Stanford and San Francisco, Berlin reminded me that most people are just trying to live good, fulfilling lives.

There is harsh, deep beauty in the graffiti, the scars of destruction, the Brutalism, the all-black dress. Berlin, a city best known for its arts scene, embraces its gleeful messiness: “arm aber sexy” (poor but sexy) is its unofficial motto. I deeply admired the Berliners who took self-expression to its limits, who were subversive not to be contrarian but as the most honest form of themselves. Their streetwear and club dress and dancing would always be good because it was just an externalization of their deeper selves; it wasn’t confidence, but pure groundedness, that was palpable.⁶ It is my belief that channeling self-expression turns us into instruments for forces and feelings greater than ourselves.

 

IV. on flirting with subjective extremes

Generally I’m the kind of person that is deeply curious about the broad spectrum of human experience, and although I lead a relatively peaceful life at Stanford, Berlin was a testbed for the extremes. It sounds obvious, but the way we feel in the world⁷ is such a strong function of our brain chemistry and psychological idiosyncrasies; our subjective experience so strongly influences our external behavior, and is sensitive to even seemingly small perturbations.

Coming into Berlin, I feared experiencing something really good, or really extreme in any direction, would make the rest of my life feel more muted: it would set the new dynamic range of sensation, and become my new mental standard. I worried that I would always have this curiosity, but that ignorance was bliss. In Berlin I realized that we can consciously construct our subjective experience of the world. Extreme things don’t have to set your standards, or downgrade other things by contrast. Instead the long-tail experiences I had in Berlin made me more deeply attuned to the emotions and sensations of my day-to-day life; they became beacons in the vast landscape of subjectivity, sources of magic to draw upon in much mundaner situations.⁸ It takes active effort, but those transient moments can indeed become part of your day-to-day foundation.

At first I called Berlin my “hedonism era”, imagining that I was going to better understand myself and my happiness through “going out a lot” and “not having any real responsibilities” and “just having a lot of fun”. That is somewhat true, but what really happened was, by leaning into certain experiences and leaps of faith and sources of pleasure, I became much more familiar with my most basal feelings. I had some group of things that I knew I should feel, or wanted to feel more of – attraction, presentness, messiness, loss of control, self-confidence, instinct, freedom, intensity, love, empathy, pure unadulterated joy – but of course, feelings can only be learned on-policy⁹. Three months of embracing Berlin gave me a crisper map of my subjective reality and a deeper attunement to my self.¹⁰

 

V. on techno

I didn’t think I’d like techno; I didn’t even listen to EDM before coming. But I thought I might as well be open-minded, and I was particularly drawn to the idea that the techno scene was some final bastion from Berlin’s anarchic glory days. Over the weeks Berlin gave me a love not just for the music itself, but for the freedom, the raw self-expression, the dissociation, the all-consuming atmosphere, and the judgment-free, loving community.

I didn’t personally feel the love for techno until I spent time in techno clubs. Being completely surrounded by the music, feeling the frequencies in my core; the visual intensity of the smoke, lights, and concrete; the crowd of people offering up their most honest self-expression, engaged in a collective hallucination of a universe in which music is the only constant. The club atmosphere was intoxicating in and of itself, anchored to the intensity of the beat. In Berlin clubs I felt completely unafraid of judgment. On top of the no-phone policies, the unspoken mutual respect of the crowd, I felt acceptance simply by contrast: everything happening around me was so much crazier, so who would bother judging me?¹¹ And because no one was allowed to document it, what, beyond the freedom and feeling itself, could last beyond the morning?

I danced classical ballet for ~15 years of my life, and yet “dancing to techno” was totally alien to me, probably because ballet is all about proper technique and external aesthetics and being good at something. I didn’t truly understand that dancing should simply be the physical expression of music until I began loving techno itself and realized that I didn’t even have the physical vocabulary for the music. Unlocking some vast new parameter space of movement, learning how to feel the music physically (thank you so much Adrian & Taiyo, my dance partners) allowed me to lose myself completely in the atmosphere; it also changed what I loved most about dance, from “getting better” and “beautiful lines” to the ecstasy of free movement. My last few Sundays I found myself up on the balcony over Berghain, watching the crowd pulsate and dancing ballet with my favorite 10+ year regular.

Techno is tribal, animalistic, dark – the music itself is a prison of rhythm, the only dependable constant – and yet it feels completely safe. In Berlin’s clubs I felt complete freedom to dance and express myself knowing that everyone around me is buying into the same wildness, and that the beat is the unrelenting constant on which a transcendent experience can be built. With its constant, unrelenting darkness of sound, even the music itself encourages the listener to shed appearances, to lose themself completely, to embrace the humanness and crudeness of the experience, to become the physical manifestation of the beat, to notice and meld with the layers of the music, and to feel as deeply as possible because our memories are only record of the moment. I think the music just begs, demands to be moved to. I still get surprised sometimes by how deeply I get sucked into the atmosphere, and how it manages to override all my anxieties¹². When I dance, the music becomes the beginning and end of my reality, and my movement accesses the basal well springs of self-expression.

So Berlin clubs are a somewhat solitary experience, and in fact I would almost always find myself dancing alone at some point in the night; though the techno experience gets shared with friends and neighbors through the club’s atmosphere, it’s created mostly in an internal world. Berliners are famous for referring to their techno clubs as their “church”. Honestly I’m pretty religiously agnostic, and I used to think was some overdramatic term, but I think it’s true that everyone worships something and that everyone has transcendent, spiritual experiences in some context. Certain music and movement can be deeply and profoundly moving. Especially on Sundays there is overwhelming community and togetherness, but also a collective solitude, the mutual love of a crowd experiencing something deeply internal.

 

VI. parting thoughts

I feel so deeply grateful to have gotten to spend part of my youth in Berlin. I am amazed that I actually got to experience these things, that I get to call these twelve weeks part of my life story.

I still have a lot of questions, perhaps saved for a future Berlin visit. For example, what is the relationship and reflexivity between the narratives we create for cities, the versions of ourselves we are curious about, and the experiences we prescriptively or naturally desire? In general, because one’s subjective experiences are both so fleeting and so influenced by “external” observation¹³, is it bad or prescriptive to over-examine them? What is the balance between probing an experience versus living it out, unperturbed?

I was also struck by the feeling that Berlin’s most expressive communities – those with the most specific, idiosyncratic, and passionate tastses for something – exist only in transient spaces (abandoned buildings on the border strip, the anarchy of post-Wall administrative chaos), as small patches of resistance against society’s relentless march towards efficiency and progress; the decline of Berlin’s techno clubs feels very similar to the death of Brooklyn’s Roxy. It feels true to me that we are able to have spaces like Berghain because of economic progress, and yet because the most authentic culture usually comes from those who can’t necessarily afford rising rents, perhaps these spaces are doomed to finite lifetimes.