Build for Eternity: Reflections from Day 2
Significance of the Egypt Trip
There are places where time folds.
Egypt is one of them.
From the moment I landed, I felt as if I had stepped not just into another country, but into a conversation across millennia… where stone speaks, and silence holds memory. Here, I wasn’t just a traveler. I was a listener, suspended in both time and space.
This trip wasn’t only about seeing pyramids or sailing the Nile.
It was about encountering why they exist in the first place.
Why would a civilization invest generations of effort to erect monuments that pierce the sky?
The answer, at first, seems simple: to defeat death.
But the paradox reveals itself quickly:
The pyramid exists because of death. It is an act of defiance rooted in the most human realization: we won’t last.
And yet we try…
Standing before the Great Pyramid, I couldn’t help but think of it as a Day Zero of engineering — pioneer work, but also spiritual architecture.
This wasn’t just structural ingenuity.
It was an early form of belief system encoded in geometry. A monument built not for function, but for philosophy.
Two coordinates mark every life: birth and death.
Everything between those two points is variation, a waveform (camel?) we ride with desire, fear, effort, and hope.
In youth, we crave longevity — for glory, for power, for love.
In age, we begin to crave healthspan — for clarity, dignity, and grace.
The pyramid is the midpoint of this paradox. Built to be eternal, it embodies our deepest confrontation with mortality.
As an engineer, I see this pattern everywhere:
From bits to buildings, from pyramids to AI… Every leap, from 0 to 1, is driven by our need to create permanence out of impermanence.
The pyramid was humanity’s first mass-scale attempt to engineer a legacy. Today, we do it with code, architecture, and data.
But the impulse is the same.
Even as technology evolves, the history we live is repeating.
Because the story of being human is a loop:
We are born; We fear death; We build something that might outlast us.
And in that act, we touch eternity…
if only for a moment, that I have called koffeemocha.