Category: finance nomad

I’ve been getting a lot of stress dreams lately over my future. It’s specific and not specific: over my contribution to this world, over the risks I am taking, over the question if it’s all going to be all right at the end. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that. People usually say things will be all right, but I’m not so inclined to believe them. I am not like other people. What people think is okay is rarely okay to me. Mediocrity is not an acceptable outcome for me, only greatness.

I feel like there’s a series of escalators in life. When you get on, the outcome is predictable. You go from one floor to the next, from one job to the next, from one promotion to the next. There’s not much change between these paths. Every escalator is similar to one another. Every job similar to the last. Every now and then, you have the option to get off the escalator and carve a path out for yourself. It’s scary because it’s not an escalator, and you have been used to escalators your entire life.

I am not necessarily throwing away everything I have built, but I am close. Instead of taking another escalator, I’ve decided to take a rocket ship. A rocket ship could take me to the moon, or it could fall and explode in spectacular fashion. I’ve never enjoyed rollercoasters or skydiving that much. I want to, but I just don’t. The idea of plummeting to my death is not appealing to me. The idea of going to the moon doesn’t appeal to me much either. But I just want to live an existentially meaningful life. To do that, sometimes you need to take a rocket ship even when you don’t enjoy the experience of rocket ships that much.

I feel like a lot of my life has been culminating to this. All the difference I’ve felt from others at every point in my life has led me to understand that I am not someone who is content taking escalators in a world where people can only contextualize their career in terms of escalators. I am and always have been so different from others. I used to hate that. I now accept that. I’ve learned that being different from others has its advantages and disadvantages, and I should lean into these differences instead of running away from them.

I’m guessing that this will be one of many essays of the sort. I haven’t felt a deep angst about my future since undergrad. Life has been fairly predictable in the past couple of years. It might get unpredictable somewhat soon, to the dismay of my anxiety, but to the excitement of my soul.

“If you could start your life from start to finish, would you change things?”

Most of the movie Arrival takes place during sunrise. At least the scenes that made the final cut of the the movie. There’s a certain quality to it. It’s symbolic of new beginnings. It’s pure. It’s vulnerable. When I was in undergrad, I tended to index heavily on sunsets because they were symbolic of endings. It made sense considering how dramatic I was back then. And, while I could appreciate a good sunset, I’m more of a sunrise guy now. Not only because I have an east-facing apartment and can’t really see sunsets, but because I find the prospect of new beginnings to be a lot more poetic than endings. Sunsets often are defined by magnitude and intensity, while sunrises are subtle and blue.

We have unlimited room for redemption in life. While I always want things to end beautifully, the truth is that there is more to life than how things end, even though that is how I pay attention to. I’ve always liked the imagery of phoenixes because it symbolizes the cycle of death and rebirth. This preference has grown stronger over time. Unfortunately, I’m at the age where it’s getting too painful to get new tattoos, so I probably won’t be able to get a (large) phoenix tattoo in my lifetime. Or, more accurately, I don’t want to endure the pain required to get a large back piece.

The song that plays at the beginning and end of Arrival is called On the Nature of Daylight. What is the nature of daylight? Why is there a redemptive quality to it? Why do countless humans before me find meaning in the cycle of day and night? Sunrise is a bridge between the glory of the day and the stillness of the night.

I wonder if everyone changes from being a sunset person to a sunrise person in their lives. Maybe that’s why people wake up earlier.

And so, I don’t know if I would change my life. There is a poetic quality to live life as it is, but I’ve never been one to err away from change when it was presented in front of me. I reside in some contradictory middle ground between acceptance and agency, where I accept my life as it is but also willing to change when I desire to.

I’ve been having a lot of stress dreams lately. I’ve been waking up earlier than expected. I’ve been in a low-stress environment for so long I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel stress.

In college, I was stressed about not knowing what was next. Now, I am also stressed about not knowing what is next. When the future is not yet determined, it has infinite possibilities. In the making, everything is so tumultuous. After it has been determined, everything seems so inevitable.

Successful founders and entrepreneurs always recommend you take more risks when you are younger. Well, I’m “younger” right now, and the prospect of risk still scares me. I thought it would get better over the past couple of years, but it really hasn’t gotten significantly better. I still feel delicate. I still feel like I am flower in violent storm, singular in beauty, but struggling everyday to merely exist in a violent world.

I wonder if it will get worse over time. My ability to switch jobs decreases over time. My depedencies increase. While I would like to think that my stresses about my career would decrease over time, there is very little to suggest that would actually be the case. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. People become more risk-averse and more stressed over time.

People say I should spend more time networking. I have an idea of what that means, but I also don’t have a good idea of what that means. How is that different to how I am living my life currently? What is the point of superficial connections? There’s a lot of advice that I get that I accept but don’t understand. Perhaps that will make more sense to me when I’m older. But at the moment, I’m just focused on doing things in a way that I don’t entirely understand.

I thought I had a good idea of what I wanted to do a couple years ago, but I’m more confused now. Plans I made three years ago are still applicable, but just less obvious. 

I embark on a series of journeys in life, each more exciting and perilous than the last. Stagnation. Followed by professional, romantic, or social change. Back to stagnation. This is the journey of life. This is the way. In each step, we give up a little bit of ourselves for another identity. I’ve stopped thinking about it as becoming my more authentic self and more about going through the motions in the passage of life. Life has a build-up period. Life has a peak. Life has a plateau.  Life has a decline. Life has the same properties as companies and chemical reactions and friendships. We should lean into that as opposed to leaning away.

The past couple years of my life have been defined by transition: to college, to professional life, to New York, to San Francisco, to my most recent apartment. I am about to make another transition, one which is unlike all other transitions that I have done in the past. For most of my life, I have been doing all I can to minimize risk. In high school, I did I could to get into the best college I could. In college, I did all I could to get the best job I could. One job led to another job. There was always something to be achieved. The road was clear, and all that was left is to put in the hard work to walk the predefined path to success.

I have reached the end of that path. I could continue to walk the path I am walking on, which would lead me to a modest and predictable level of success. Or I could do something crazy. To add risk to my life. To go for greatness as opposed to comfort and insignificance.

We are propelled to take the path of most taken. Humans are risk-averse creatures. Rising up the ranks is a low-risk activity. However, by nature of entropy, rising up the ranks means falling in line with lesser greatness. True greatness only exists in isolation or in context of other greatness. Greatness, in a field of platitude, is not perceived to be great. Very few individuals are great. Even fewer pursue the path of greatness despite having the potential to be great. I will choose that path. It’s a crazy decision, but I must do this.

I had a discussion with my mom at dinner today about all of my exes and where they were now. My mom asked me if I kept in contact with any of them, and I said no. She asked me why, and I didn’t know how to reply.

It’s strange that I have to explain to people how frequently I go on 1-on-1 trips with girls I have crushes on — some of whom who like me back I end up dating but most of the time whom don’t like me back and I never speak to again after the trip. It’s a staple of my development and explains 99% of my personal growth. I am motivated by these short bursts of intense interaction where I am able to push the boundaries of conversation to revealing deep truths about myself and my traveling companion. I oftentimes feel that these trips are more valuable than relationships themselves. You are able to push the envelope and learn more about yourself in a intense week with someone you don’t know that well than you are able to in a mellow year with someone you know well.

I’ve always thought it was interesting how quickly you can lose touch with someone you have shared such intensity with. It’s always me trying to keep in touch. It is often my counterpart that is slow to reply or leaves me on read. The memories is always still fresh in my head, and I wonder if they meant as much to my travel companion as it did to me. Unlike investing, you can’t really do a post-mortem on one of these trips. You never know what your counterpart is thinking. You don’t know how you messed up, if you messed up at all. All you can do is label the data you have, let it run in your subconscious, and move on with your life. It’s like reinforcement learning without human feedback.

We coexist in a world with residual horrors, peripheral indifference, and illuminated stars, and we are expected to do so silently and independently.

I’m in my Ibis hotel room in Budapest, and I bought 10 postcards. I know I am going to send nine of them, but there’s one I’m not sure if I am going to send yet. Every year, I re-evalute who I am going to send postcards to. I try to keep it less than 10 for my sake, so when I travel, I don’t have to spend more than 20 minutes addressing postcards. This gives me a space to reflect who I want to keep in my life and who I want to take out. My postcards are my art project, and I choose carefully who I want to be the recipient of my art.

Very rarely in friendship do you have a fallout that is irreparable. Friendships do not follow the same up-or-out model as relationships, so oftentimes friendships can be left unattended and pick back up at a later date, with the caveat that doing so would depreciate intimacy at some rate. However, there are so many factors that go into how active a friendship is at a given time. Proximate friendships are stronger than distant friendships, but that could change at any point given a change in proximity.

I still don’t have a cohesive algorithm for how I decide who I want to send a postcard to. I have rules, but then I also have exceptions to the rules, and so the rules are not that helpful. The rule of thumb is that if I have not talked to someone in the past year, then they are off the list. In some cases, I reach out to someone to confirm if there has been a change in address. More often than not, it just comes down to a feeling. I have a thing for poetic ends, but I’m not sure what is an ending and what is not.

I feel like all friendships, and relationships, can be boiled down into potential and kinetic energy. There is a set of unique attributes between two people, or a group, and the course of the friendship is more-or-less mapped out in the beginning. The strength of the friendship is dependent on the uniqueness of the traits. But once energy is spent, it cannot be restored to a previous state. There is little use trying to recover things to the “way things were.” There is a natural course in which friendships run, moving towards heat death.

It is for this reason I feel especially drawn to certain people. I see potential energy yet to be unearthed. There is a set of conversations to be had, a set of experiences to be shared, a set of memories to be made. Friendship is a process of exchanging energy. Change is a process of exchanging energy. We enter a friendship one way and leave a friendship another way.

There are so many things you thought you would eventually get to that you never did. So much alcohol accumulated from high school that you thought you would drink one day. The excitement of alcohol was so great in high school. The experience was so unique, and the thrill of breaking the law embodied an adolescent excitement that is very hard to replicate later in your life. Adulthood is characterized by a state of less energy. There is just less energy to go around. Experiences are less exciting in experience.

Growing up is learning that all of those classmates you had in high school are now considered friends. Growing up is a process of consolidation. The world is full of strangers, and we are clinging for any inkling of familiarity, even one as tenuous as spending four years together in your teens and witnessing each other’s traumas. Closeness is defined by proximity, and proximity is interchangeable. Proximate could be three stops away on the F-train, and distance could be the difference of living in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

I am reminded that I am the same person as I was in the past but also so different. We have come so far, but we always revisit that places we came from. That’s like what coming back during Thanksgiving represents. I am so different from how I was the past, but also the self that I am now seems so inevitable. As much as I’d like to believe that I had agency at each step along the way, it seems that I am far from that. I am able to change my state of mind depending on what medication on what dosage I am using. Now that I am not on any medication and returning to my childhood bedroom, I am reminded how I felt all those years ago, when I had such inspiration to write, when I had realizations about the world.

People say you shouldn’t compare yourself to others, which I don’t for the most part, but I truly emerged from all of this significantly different from how I was in the past. It seems like the people around me don’t change. I don’t change that much either, in my absolute terms, but it certainly seems that I have changed more than others around me. I am so recognizable but also unrecognizable to myself. It makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense, but it also makes sense.

I find it easier to stop eating. I look back on videos of myself, observing how skinny I was in senior year of high school. I must’ve really not eaten back then.

Things are clearer to me now, which I guess is why I am writing again. I don’t think I want this state to last, however. Seeing the truth about the world in all of its despair is quite a burden, one in which I do not seek to bear. This is who I am, and as much as I try to have a growth mindset, it seems this part of me always catches up to me when I least expect it.

I always liked boarding planes and looking out the window. When I land, my despair cannot catch me. I bounce from hotel to hotel, doing activity after activity, and in those moments, I feel free from all the flaws I was born with that make me “like this,” as I like to call it.

People stay in cities when they have a reason to stay. All of my friends from college are still on the east coast because they found a reason to stay. I am on the west coast. I couldn’t find a reason to stay, so I moved onto the next place I could not call home.

I bought a car recently.

I thought this purchase would set me free, but it really has made me quite stressed. I knew there would things I would have to worry about like insurance or parking. What I didn’t realize was how annoying these things would be to get. What I didn’t know is that in California, there’s a mandatory 15-day underwriting period for any new insurance policies. Since I’m parking my car at the dealership for a month, and since they require insurance on cars they’re holding on the first of every month, this means that I would need to buy their expensive insurance for the duration I am parked there, at least for the first month. For subsequent months, I’m between addresses right now, so I don’t even know if I would be able to secure an insurance policy.

To be honest, I thought being an adult would mean that I would be free. In actuality, it just means you are tied down by other things, like rent and insurance payments.

I’ve been staying in Oakland in the past week in one of the less glamorous Airbnbs I have stayed at in my life, and I think it has made me realize how much I care about comfortable living accommodations and privacy. There are other people staying here. One of whom has been talking to himself very frequently. I can hear because the walls are very thin. I often seek out accommodations that are clean, and I maintain pretty clean living quarters myself, so it’s not often I find myself sleeping somewhere dirty.

I’m about to go to Costa Rica. I haven’t decided for exactly how long, but I’m thinking about a month at this point. I don’t really need to do more travel, if I’m being honest, but I didn’t want to turn down the only opportunity I would ever have to be a digital nomad in my life. With my car, I would probably be better off staying in SF, maybe commuting between LA for a little bit. But this is the only opportunity I would ever get in working out of a tropical island, trying to learn how to surf. It’s also something uncomfortable, which I need more of at this point in my life.

I’d like to think that I am immune from my environment, but I am not. Being in this Airbnb in Oakland has demotivated me. I have been staying in the office until 10 PM most nights, including weekends. I will do anything to not come back here in this windowless box. It’s just not a comfortable place to be. There are some places that make you less depressed, and then there are some places that make you more depressed. This place makes me more depressed. 

I feel like I’m in college again, with an opaque idea of how to solve my problems and only my willpower to keep me doing. I think money has solved a lot of my problems, and it has made the remaining problems I need to solve easier. But then there’s the direction of where my life is heading, and it is a satisfactory direction, but it’s not really the life I’ve always dreamed of. I feel like I am getting by, and that is okay, but I just want more than getting by.