Category: finance nomad

input output

I’m waiting for my Delta flight to Atlanta in Terminal 2 at SFO, listening to my “Repeat Rewind” playlist on Spotify. I find that I listen to music differently from others. I don’t really listen to albums or have a well-rounded playlist. I just listen to the same songs on repeat every day until I get sick of it, and then I repeat the same routine to another set of songs. Eventually, I revisit the songs I’ve listened to on repeat in my past, and I am able to extract some memories from it from whatever I’ved saved into the song as I was listening to it.

I wonder if I’ll listen to the songs I am listening to now with the same sad nostalgic lens that I have put onto my past songs, even in moments that were objectively unglamorous. By all standards, I’m living a pretty good life right now, and I never know if this is going to last. Things can change for all sorts of reasons, and I always find myself being sad again. 

It’s slightly more than halfway through my time in SF. So little has changed, and so much has changed. I have lived in SF for 1.5 years, and I have 1.5 years left to go, although I’m not going to count the disjointed couple of months I spent in Iceland, Costa Rica, and Morocco.

I came because I wanted to start new, and I guess I was able to create a new identity for myself in absence of any inherited friendships I may have. I got what I want, but I’m not sure if it’s actually what I want. I feel very dependent on others. Even though I can survive without forming close connections with others, it’s not necessarily a life I want to live. I have made some friends here in SF, but it feels off. It reminds me of some of my friends in college, when you were friends because you wanted something from one another and not actually because you are interested in each other’s company. I feel the same now. I want something from others, and they want something from me. I get what I want by being what other people want.

I guess I’ve been slightly more artistic in the past year. More so than I was in New York. I’ve made a lot of videos in the past year, and I’ve been getting more into drawing and film photography, to the point where it could actually be considered impressive now. I’m not sure if it is bringing me any fulfillment though. It is something to do, and it makes me have a more well-rounded creative skillset, but it’s just another item I’ve tacked onto my long list of hobbies. 

Art exists in the absence of connection. Or rather, the act of creating art is furthering my connection with myself, whereas the act of socializing is furthering my connection with others. Connection feels like a weird word to describe this phenomenon because it implies two independent sources of being. How does one connect more with oneself?

I’ve also noticed I’ve begun using the third person more recently. Maybe that’s reflective of my increased depersonalization from myself and others. 

I’ve accomplished a lot and nothing at all. I’ve passed Level 2 of the CFA, and I’m studying for Level 3 now. It’s a bit tedious, but I think I’ll be able to get through it. I got scuba certified and did a couple of cool dives. I made a bunch of friends, I’m dating someone now (kind of), and I’ve gotten okay at squash and tennis. I’ve “accomplished” things, but I feel like I’m just moving along with my life, surfacing in and out of consciousness, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. It seemed inevitable that I would accomplish the things that I have. It’s very input-output. I put time into doing something, and then I become better at it. There is no room for serendipity, and I tend to put a lot of meaning on serendipity.

I want something to happen, to be able to once again experience something rare. Occasionally, I get to experience something rare, but rare experiences are hard to come by.

Sometimes, in relationships, I feel like I’m playing a part. I find myself pretty detached most of the time, and I have to pretend like I’m more engaged than I actually am most of the time. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, even to the point of fooling myself, so it’s pretty unnoticeable most of the time, but it’s just something I’ve noticed. I’m not really into people anymore. I haven’t been for quite some time. I find people predictable now. If you compliment them, and act interested in them, and buy them things, then they like you and give you what you want. Since I save most of my income, I essentially have an unlimited line of credit for dating. I’ve decided to start paying for dates recently, and I’ve allocated $2k per year in my head to spend on dates, which goes a long way if you aren’t spending on fine dining. 

Dating is fine, but I don’t really like anyone I am dating. I want to find someone I like, to embrace serendipity, and let myself be consumed by limerence again. It has been so long since I’ve felt like that, and I don’t know when I will feel it again, if ever.

exogenous shock

This weekend has passed. I went to LA for a video shoot and then Dallas.

It was an eventful weekend. I’m on the plane back now. There’s an hour left in my flight. I spent the first half of the flight watching a movie. Then I read more of the book I brought. Then I started to listen to some music and started to get some feels. Just songs from my past. I made a playlist of some EDM songs I liked during undergrad, and I listen to it on occasion to remind myself how far I’ve come. I remember how it was like back then, and then I observe how things are now.

I don’t really think about the trajectory in which my life has taken on a regular basis. I do think about it but not regularly. I’ve been invited to think about it this weekend, and I am still thinking about it. I feel like I have infinite willpower. My past is where I got my willpower from. My past self experienced some hardship, so my present self could thrive. I am thriving right now. There’s not anything that I would change about my life that I haven’t worked on changing already. There’s nothing I want to do that I cannot, subject to certain constraints and still valuing patience as a virtue. I’ve told everyone how I felt about them. I have kept all the friendships that I want to keep. I’m in a continuous state of peace with the world. If I die, then I die.

Compared to my friends, I’m very okay with dying. It’s a personality trait I’ve picked up after being suicidal for so long. It’s very hard to think about the future 20 or 30 years from now. Why would I put money into my 401(k) when I don’t know if I’ll be alive when I’m 59? Why would anyone?

I think about how unconscious I was for most of my life. I still don’t feel awake, but I know that I was not awake before. It comes through moments. Exogenous shocks leaving me with a different secular growth rate than what I had before. I live my life to maximize the number of exogenous shocks in my life. I don’t perceive change. I only perceive acceleration. I perceive when I am changing quickly at an above-trend rate. I feel alive when I am growing at an above-trend rate. I feel mostly dead otherwise. Without exogenous shock, I am just a more pronounced version of my previous self. I don’t want that.

Growing means shedding personality. Shedding personality means that the personality you had before is unrecognizable to the personality you have now. Character stays, but personality is something that we experience momentarily. This is my personality now. That will be my personality in the future, and so on.

Under the neoclassical growth model, an economy grows at its secular rate until it undergoes an exogenous shock advancing total factor productivity.

Without exogenous shock, our current personality is caused by our previous personality. There is no free will to that. There is no room to change in life unless you pursue things that will change you. That’s where exogenous shocks come in. My exogenous shocks are the people I meet. Mostly the girls I like, with whom I share certain experiences and conversations, but there have been some exceptions. I can’t really think about my personality in absence of the people that have changed me.

I once saw a chart in my positive psychology class in college that showed that people become happier over time. I didn’t get it while I was taking that class sophomore year, but I get it now. Things do get better – or we cope better – whatever the case, I continue to pursue things that change me, recognizing that personality is reactionary and recursive and non-cumulative. The self I had before is not the self that I have now. The self I have now is not the result of the self I had before. The self evolves stochastically and intentionally by experiences and conversations we choose to have.

views and likes

I made five posts on Instagram today, updating my friends on:

1. Getting matching tattoos (for a first date)
2. Dying my hair
3. Buying my Acura
4. Three weeks in Iceland
5. Seven weeks in Costa Rica

On Instagram, you are able to see who has seen your story. The only way to see if someone has seen your post is if they liked your post. The difference between the two reveals the current status of your relationship with them.

I don’t use my main Instagram account regularly, so I don’t engage in content from my friends for the most part. It is how I preserve my mental health. If people were to check who has viewed their stories, they wouldn’t see me. I don’t engage with content by my friends. There is no contact. However, today, after I posted a story of my Spotify Wrapped this year, I noticed there are some people in my life who still view my content but choose not to engage with it. I find that to be a somewhat sad state of affairs. They see a bit of my life, and they are offered a window to engage with it, but they choose not to. It is especially sad considering how close to these people I was at one point in my life.

Sometimes, I think about my social isolation, both in the physical and virtual world. I choose not to engage in content that is not my own nor inspires me. This involves most of the people in my extended friend group (i.e. the people I follow and am followed by on Instagram). I do this to preserve my mental health because it hurts to know how someone is doing when they are no longer in your life.

I am a very up-or-out person. Either a friendship is progressing through intentional and fulfilling interactions, or it is not worth the upkeep. This is why social media seems strange to me. Interactions on social media are not intentional and not fulfilling. Yet, they take up time and headspace. This is why I no longer regularly consumer social media in the social sense. I still use Instagram and X as a content aggregator to keep up with some of my favorite tattoo artists and e/acc influencers, but I don’t follow any of my friends on social media. When I see my friends and ex-friends live vibrant lives without me, I am happy for them, but I still wished that I was a part of that.

I write about social media every now and then. It used to be a bigger deal for me in college. I used to care about how many likes I receive. I supposed I will once more when I get my MBA. I feel like the “social” part of social media has passed me after college ending. There aren’t really established social structures anymore, and social proofing is no longer as important as it once was. You meet people at face value, and who you know isn’t really as important. It is more adult. It has also been a bigger part of my personality to not care. Sometimes, like today, I like to flex by how much I don’t care by post five times in five minutes after a year-long hiatus. So I guess I still care to be perceived by how much I don’t care.

It’s my last night in Costa Rica, and I’m feeling quite emotional from my post on social media. I feel like I’ve been burying my feelings about a lot of my past relationships for a very long time, and it only resurfaces whenever I open social media. As opposed to a controlled demolition, one leak at a time, it all comes in at once because I have not drained it. My life is not inherently social, so the social part of social media can be overwhelming whenever I use it now. It is not a part of my life, but tonight it is, and it is a lot.

I feel like I have infinite creative output. Maybe this is what I have been missing since college. My social media usage was one of the larger lifestyle change between college, when I did have creative energy, to now, when I don’t.

far too familiar

I didn’t expect to, but I really miss SF.

Or rather, I miss being able to come home and experience silence, maybe glamorously looking out of my floor-to-ceiling window while sipping some chamomile tea. I miss playing squash at the Bay Club and running along the Embarcadero while listening to my hardstyle running playlist. I miss the familiarity of my morning commute, my view of the Ferry Building at work, and my foggy weekends. I also have routine in Santa Teresa, but the routine I have created for myself here isn’t really something I enjoy. Surfing every day after work was fun for a bit, but it is not a lifestyle I want to have. Cars are loud here, but mostly because they are old and not because people have removed their mufflers. There are a lot of bugs here, and I don’t like bugs. I’ve been eating a lot of meat and carbs and sugar, mostly because I don’t want to cook anything complex when I am surrounded by bugs but also because the availability of fresh produce is limited.

My time in Santa Teresa reminds me of the month I spent in Salt Lake City. I was changed by a couple of people, and I was processing my change, and I wanted to go somewhere unfamiliar where I could process my change. I was also eating unhealthily during that period because I didn’t have a kitchen. It was mostly sandwiches every day since deli meat and bread was the only thing that fit into my mini-fridge. I’m still feeling out the magnitude of my change this past summer. It was less than the change I experienced in summer ‘21 but still significant nevertheless. The feeling might be less, but the magnitude is probably the same.

I wonder how I am going to live my life differently when I get back to SF. It is very hard for me to describe exactly how I want to change my life from this summer. Even now, it is hard to describe exactly how I have changed from summer ‘21 because the change happened so quickly yet so consistently. I felt as if I were pushed off a cliff, but I couldn’t feel the sensation of falling because I reached terminal velocity so quickly. Yet, I am on the ground now, far from the cliff I started. Besides the time I spent in Salt Lake City, I also spent a year in New York, where I was surrounded in a completely new environment for the first time since college. I met a lot of people during that stint who have changed me, and all of this change builds on one another, leaving it very hard to pinpoint where one change started and another ended.

All this change feels similar. More broadly, I just want to be more beautiful, and I have a different understand how I could become more beautiful with every notable person I meet.

I think a defining feature of all these girls I have been into over the years is that I feel that I am replaceable to them, and I feel that they are not replaceable to me. They live a vivacious and meaningful life without me, and I want to take part in it, hoping to learn how to live a meaningful life independently as well. A part of me wants to be them. A part of me wants them to validate me for my own individuality and all the growth I have made in the past couple of years. A core drive of my change is the desire to be irreplaceable. I mention rarity a lot in conversation as the ultimate virtue in what I look for in friendships and relationships, and I am drawn to people I think are rare. I would also like people to be drawn to me because they think I am rare, and I actively work towards that. Rare people hang out with rare people.

I don’t need my feelings to be reciprocated for them to be meaningful. In fact, I derive more value, change and evolve more, when they are not reciprocated. I learn what I do not have, and I grow because of it. And as I tangentially still see these people in my life, I am reminded of what I was not at one point in my life. I am always in a constant state of weakness, and I grow and evolve to remove these weaknesses and discover new weaknesses in the process. I am proud of the progress I have made for myself within the past seven years (four years of college plus three years of post-graduate life), yet I understand that growth is a lifestyle, not just a retrospect. I continue to pursue heartbreak and growth.

This feels far too familiar. There was a time when I felt that change was a unique feeling, and I would relish in it. I would write a lot about my experiences and believe them to be unique. Now, I still feel change, but I don’t write about it anymore. The change I thought was unique is no longer something special, something worth writing about. Change is a familiar feeling. I change too much for my own good. I am too dissatisfied for my own good, but I recognize that this is the lifestyle I chose: to grow as opposed to be happy. I just wish that I could come closer to a life that I want, but I am still so far. I am so far from being beautiful, yet I am moving towards it, one block change at a time.

neighborhoods

Tonight is my first night in Santa Teresa, and I decided to go to a local grocery store and make dinner myself instead of going out. I am curious about the food scene, but that can wait another time when I want to be around people. Right now, I just can’t stand the sound of people. Thankfully, the Airbnb I am staying at is in a quiet area. It is nice outside. There aren’t that many people staying here, so it’s nice and quiet.

It was quite stressful getting here. I woke up at 5 AM for my shuttle, which arrived 30 minutes late. I didn’t mind waiting though. I’m more than grateful the shuttle exists at all. The ride from San Jose to Santa Teresa is six hours, including a ferry ride, and there’s no way I could make that trip myself. Fifty dollars for six hours of transportation services is more than worth it in my book, no matter how tardy the service was.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Santa Teresa was to rent a surfboard, which costs $15 per day. Then I surfed at Playa Carmen for half an hour. I wanted to go longer, but I’m a bit out of shape right now, and I didn’t want to exert myself too hard before surfing again tomorrow. I’m better at surfing than I remembered, and I’m excited to see what I am able to accomplish by the end of this month.

I’ve been looking at apartments lately in SF. I still have a couple of months before I move back, but I wanted to familiarize myself with my new options now that I have a car. I used to live in Rincon Hill, which is defined by its high rises and lack of any sort of neighborhood culture. I like that about Rincon Hill. Now I’m looking for neighborhoods further away, hoping I could find one less expensive and has parking. I’m open to not living in a high rise, at least for one year. I’ve lived in a high rise for the past two years because I hated living in a townhouse in college. But SF is different from New York. SF is defined by its Victorian townhouses, and I think I would be doing a disservice to my cultural immersion if I didn’t live in a townhouse.

There are a lot of neighborhoods I want to live in. I think Marina is very pretty, but I’ve heard it’s very loud, which is a turnoff. Pacific Heights is also nice, but I think it is also too loud. I like Mission Bay and Dogpatch because they have a similar sterile vibe, but those areas are too sunny for me. I am also considering Richmond or Sunset, but those areas are a little too far away. A part of me wants to break the pattern and live in a neighborhood more lively (I chose to live in Roosevelt Island out of all places in Manhattan), but I know that I don’t like neighborhoods that are lively. Some people would pay a lot of money to live in West Village. I would pay a lot of money not to live in West Village.

I don’t know why I am like this. I find it hard to express warmth, and therefore I don’t want the neighborhoods I live in to express warmth either. Will I become a warmer person by living in a warmer neighborhood? I don’t know. If it were that easy, I would do it in a heartbeat. Right now, I could choose to live in the Marina and fully commit to try being a warmer person. Or, I could continue to protect my mental health and live in Mission Bay. 

The concept of a neighborhood wasn’t attractive to me for the longest time. I have never come home and felt as if I am a part of something. I am not really interested in getting to know my neighbors. Among crowds, I feel separated. Among communities, I feel separated. I don’t like that I am like this, but I’m not sure how to change it. I’ve been thinking about forcing to live in a neighborhood that was more lively, but I’m not sure if I want to be lively. 

Sometimes, I ask myself: Why am I like this? but then I realize: I am like this. I like quiet places. I don’t like people. People make noises. I like being away from people, who make noises. I realized through my conversations that people seem to have the presumption that you want to be around people. “What are you doing over Halloween?”, “Who are you going with?”, “You live in Roosevelt Island?” While I recognize my antisocial tendencies are a detriment to my abilities to assimilate in society, it is genuinely a point of difference between me and most other people. Even though I crave connection, I find most social interactions distasteful.

I don’t know if I should accept my difference or fight it. Should I live in Marina and try to full-send to create a social personality, or should I live in Sea Cliff and continue the mostly suburban life I’ve had until now, or should I live in Pacific Heights and take a middle-ground? I feel like I am at a juncture in my life in picking what kind of life I want to life moving forward. Do I want to fight to have a personality more accepted by society, or do I want to preserve my mental health and live separately from everyone else?

matter

Your mind is only you for a defined period of time.

Then, you become someone else.

A year ago, I was someone who enjoyed social interaction. Christmas dinner, then New Year’s Eve party, followed by silence for the next three months. Followed by taking an exam. Followed by some dates. Followed by a trip. And now we are cleaning up my apartment before I dip. Such as been my life. The thing with social events is that even though they exist for me, I’m not entirely fulfilled by them in to the extent I may have imagined myself previously. I used to think fulfillment comes through friendship, which comes through social events. More realistically, it comes through selective social interaction during selective periods in life. Both mood and environment are variables at play, and the absence of one.

When I don’t have the desire to write, I think that I will never have the desire to write again. But then when I do have the desire to write, it seems that I will always have the desire to write. I always think the present is thae future even when my better logic suggests otherwise.

It’s a strange thing — the desire to write. Out of all the thing I could be doing or not doing in my life, I’m choosing to spend time in front of a screen and putting my thoughts down. My friend bought up today that she stored her content in both digital and analog forms, and I found that unrelatable. All my content is stored digitally. My blog, especially, is just a museum of myself that I personally curated. I have control over all the presentation and exhibition. It mirrors exactly what I want to do with my money, once I make money — just curate art.

As I get older, I find it harder and harder to feel connected.

Now that I am thoroughly into my young professional life, I realize that there are some simple things I look for in friendship that are actually a lot less common than I previously thought. Things like, replying to my texts in a timely manner, or going to my party, or actively listening to me when I want to talk about something… it’s all a lot more rare than I realized. I’m not sure if it was always this way or if this is a recent thing. It certainly feels like this is a phenomenon of post-college life, but maybe people were also equally self-interested in college. I certainly notice it a lot more than I did in the past. I find it to be disillusioning. As much as I want to be more connected to the people around me, it certainly feels very hard.

I think especially being a young professional in a big city, I realized that many people in my life only choose to associate with me when it is mutually beneficial to do so. I’m no different, although I would like to think I try to push myself to be accommodating for others. There’s a certain degree of fakeness I have developed out of necessity. If people around me are fake, and fakeness is the standard, I don’t want to stand out by being real. Even though I still keep my realness with me, I call upon it less and less over the years. My life is easier when I am like this. I am not happier now, but I also wasn’t happy before, so it doesn’t make much of a difference in my mental health. I am, however, able to accomplish more this way.

It isn’t until something happens to you until you realize who are actually your friends. And the answer is that very few people are your friends. I realize that there is very little interaction for the sake of interaction. People often want something from me for themselves. It usually isn’t material. But they wanted me to listen to something they wanted to say, or they wanted me to go somewhere with them that they didn’t want to go to alone, or they wanted to spend time with me because it made them feel more interesting. My time is precious, their time is precious, but sometimes I would like something unconditional, when someone wants to spend time with me irregardless of what I can offer them.

I think that is part of the reason I have been growing closer with my parents over the past couple of years. They want something from me, and part of it I’m sure is a desire to reflect positively on their own parenting, but they still love me in absence of how interesting or rare I work to be. My friends, on the other hand, like me for my interestingness. They like me for the rare personality I have, and I appreciate their validation for the rarity I strive to have. However, it’s not lost to me that their affection is not something I have in perpetuity. I can only command the affection of others as long as I continue to be interesting and rare.

I make my friends a priority in my life. I would also like to be a priority. I think that is partially why I like relationships so much. You are the priority of someone you like, and they are your priority as well. There’s no questioning of where you stand relative to each other. I think after matching with all these people on the apps and going on all these dates this summer, it makes me realize that you really aren’t someone’s priority unless they make you a priority. The default status is expendable, most often in a manner that is cold and indifferent and non-confrontational. It is frightening how quickly you stop mattering to someone when they deem you not interesting enough to continue to put energy into.

I’ve stopped taking it personally at this point. This is the way things are. I think after being in a relationship for the past 3 years, I forgot what it is like to meet people in a romantic context. I am so used to being a priority and mattering to someone that I forgot what it is like to be one of hundreds of prospective matches, and how quickly people move from not caring to caring to not caring again. How casually people can enter and exit your life without much of a thought of what kind of impact they had on you. It’s so normal to so many people, and it’s hard for me to find people who relate to my discomfort of how this is what the status quo is.

I like traveling for a variety of reasons, but one reason is that it allows me to get away from all of this. Everything I described… it’s things that I don’t need to worry about when I am abroad. I could meet people. Mostly likely I won’t, but that’s fine because I wasn’t really planning on meeting people anyways. I could derive insight and create art in absence of others. I don’t need to worry about who would show up at my party. There is no pressure to keep up with any social obligations because there are no expectations. How freeing is that. All of these problems living in a city as a young professional… I wish I could get away from it all.

lost and found

It has been raining hard in SF over the past couple of weeks. I’ve only been here for a couple of weeks, but I’ve heard from my coworkers that it’s the most rain they have ever seen. Thankfully, I live on the 21st floor, so I don’t have to worry about the rain, comfortably sipping decaf green tea in my bed while listening to some EDM playlist Spotify shuffled.

I have written an essay on my birthday every now and then for the past couple of years. No matter how much I try to avoid it, there’s something about my birthday that just forces me to confront my reality and judge myself for how I have been for the past year. I remember one post distinctly — “another birthday, another question” — I wrote in a London cafe in the first weeks of studying abroad. I had just broke up with my girlfriend at the time, and I was reading The Myth of Sisyphus and contemplating why I put in the effort to remain alive. It was a different time and a difficult time. It’s hard for me to even access the personality I had back then. I wrote a lot, so effortlessly in a manner in which I find hard to believe I was ever capable of writing.

Last January, I spent my birthday prepping case studies for buyside recruiting. This January, I have secured a seat at a hedge fund, and I have moved to SF for it. I caught up with one of my NY friends earlier this week, and we talked about how so much of our lives have changed in the past couple of weeks now that we have changed jobs. More so for me than her. Our environment has changed, our day-to-day responsibilities have changed, and our future has changed as well. The three months that have gone by for us has been extremely different from the three months that have gone by in the other associates in our class. Time has passed slower for us than it had for them. Three months is just another earnings cycle, and in my two and a half years on the sellside, I have been through more than I could count.

It made me realize that I do value change in my life. I don’t think I need to move every other year anymore, since I have career plans that require staying put for a bit, but I do like the fact that I have moved away from NY. I think I would have been happy in NY, but I would have been the same person I was three months ago or six months ago. I needed to change my environment to change myself as a person, and this move was able to accomplish that.

It’s only been three months since I have moved to SF, but everything feels different. I have been able to get back into making art, thankfully, at the expense of my social life, unfortunately. Although sometimes I wish I had someone to talk to, I don’t think I need it as much as I did before. I’ve always thought of loneliness as a weakness to be overcome, and I think I am better at dealing with that weakness since I have moved here.

In the past couple years of my life, I would say that my social life has, for the most part, been without volatility. I don’t seek the tumultuous life, at least not anymore, and my life has been rather tame as of late. Compared to the lives I hear through second-hand accounts, my life is stable. Although, in the absence of tumult, I tend to find chaos for myself. I don’t deal with betrayal or abandonment that much, but it does happen on occasion. Nothing serious though. However, because I don’t deal with it too much, I have become quite sensitive to any sort of perceived betrayal or abandonment, no matter how small. And lately, my willingness to ghost people has gone up quite a bit. Life is short. No second chances.

I’ve become colder as of late. When people hurt me, my interest to reconcile has diminished. Repairing friendship takes energy and is often messy. It requires both patience and willingness, both of which consume a lot energy, and I am not willing to expand the same energy on patience and willingness as I did before. I am more conscious of protecting my energy, and I’ve become more willing to use passive aggression as a tool to deescalate situations. I’ve been more willing to ghost people without explanation if someone breaks my trust, which has happened recently. As I’ve said to my friends numerous times, “Honesty is for da homies.” If you are not my homie, then you do not get my honesty.

I watch Neon Genesis Evangelion every now and then to remind myself of how much my attitudes towards loneliness has changed over the years. The first time I watched the original series was over covid, when I had injured my back while building my backyard patio and had to be confined to my bed for about two weeks. I couple weeks later, I watched the End of Evangelion. At the time, I don’t think I really understood the series, but I knew that it would be impactful in my life, that I would reflect on it often over the next couple of years.

I was right. I recently got an End of Evangelion poster to hang up in my studio apartment. I do think about the series a lot, not necessarily what happened within the series but how the series made me feel back then and now. Today, I continued the series by watching Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, which is a sort of recap of the original series with a couple deleted scenes. I didn’t feel how I felt when I first watched the series, but it did remind me of that week in my bed peeing into a water bottle because I was in so much pain I couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom. Now that I have moved out of my house, I am watching in under different circumstances, when so many things have happened in between. Since then, I have moved twice, changed jobs, and made and lost friends. The commentary about loneliness, however, still struck a chord despite all the time in between.

I used to be extremely bothered whenever I lost a friend, but as of late, I’ve only been moderately bothered by the loss of friendship. There were two in particular this past year of people who have influenced me a lot who I have lost touch with. One was by my choice, and the other was by their choice. The friendship I chose to end was because someone had let me down in a pretty serious way, mostly through neglect (as opposed to betrayal), and I’m unwilling to trust them again. I’ve often heard the saying, “Trust is difficult to build but easy to break.” I’ve never really understood that saying until now, mostly because I’ve been lucky enough to have the small number friends I do have to be reliable. It is partly due to the luck I have in meeting incredibly healthy people and also partly due to my tendecies to self-select into loyal friendships. But now I do get it. It’s harder to trust someone who has broken your trust than you have never trusted to begin with. It’s a sad moment, when someone goes from “know and trust” to “know but don’t trust”.

The second friendship was more complicated. It was someone I had met briefly with whom I shared a couple of intense moments. Because of those moments we shared, things became awkward, and we never really recovered from that. I have my own view of what happened between us, and I’m sure they have their own thoughts as well. I’m sure that we both saw how things happened quite differently. I still think about this person a lot. Although I wish this friendship could’ve had a different ending, there’s not much I would have changed about how it unfolded. It reflects another saying I’ve heard, “Some people you want as part of your story are only meant to be a chapter.” Although I wanted this person to be in my life, I accept the limitations in our communciation as a necessary part of the events that happened between us. Not all conflict can be resolved constructively. Perhaps there’s a future in which we could reconcile, but I’m not counting on it.

I’m not sure what to expect for the year ahead. I’ve been mealprepping and eating with extreme restraint for the past couple of weeks, but today I decided that I wanted to make myself a pizza. I haven’t had pizza in such a long time. I hope that’s not the attitude I will have for the next year. Ever since I resumed my meds, I have been extremely disciplined and focused, and I hope that progresses onwards. I plan on just studying and making art for the next couple of years, and I’ll decide to be social again when I do my MBA. Until then, I’m not particularly looking for friendship or anything. If something comes along, I won’t reject it, but more than ever before, I am comfortable with my own company.

social activities

I find it confusing when I ask myself how much responsibility I have for my own happiness.

Today, I was perusing some subreddits on some activities I was engaged with in the past, and I was saddened by how I no longer participate in these activities because I no longer have the friends with whom to engage in these activities. It was a reminder of how I moved to a new city, and how some activities were left behind.

I typically try not to reminisce on memories because I find that doing so makes me sad. I try having a distinct separation between activities I do with friends and activities I do alone, as to not remind myself of my past friends when I do things alone. As a result, a lot of the activities I do now are self-guided, not requiring friends with whom to share the experience.

There are social activities and non-social activities. By nature, social activities require friends (although there was a time in my life where I engaged in social activities without friends, and in retrospect that was quite unenjoyable). My current social sphere isn’t as diversified as my social sphere at other periods in my life. There are some friends with whom I can engage in certain activities, but not all my friends want to engage in all the activities in which I want to engage. I am saddened by how certain social activities are relegated to my past because I no longer have the infrastructure to participate in them.

Whenever our environment changes, we have to create new social systems to replace old ones. This, unfortunately, is not a fun process. On one hand, I would like to make some friends as quickly as possible in order to participate in the activities I want to participate in. On the other hand, I find making friends be quite a painful process where compatibility is quite difficult to achieve, and I’m not sure how to make friends in a new city other than to just introduce myself to people on the street, which is quite weird.

The scary part about adulthood is that I’m becoming more and more content with spending time by myself. Activities I previously thought were boring are quite interesting to me now. I spend most of my days either studying finance or working out or making music. I don’t feel the same need to spend every waking moment of my time with someone else, and I think it shows in how little I actively put myself “out there”.

The attitude I have now is simple. If I happen to make friends, I’ll spend time with my friends. If I don’t, then I’ll just get my CFA, finish my album, and do whatever else that requires consistent alone time for a long period in time.

I find engaging in friendship to be an exercise in present-ness. When you are spending time with your friends, you are deriving pleasure from the experience of shared intimacy at a particular moment of time. The experience resides in the experience itself, whereas activities derived from internal motivation have an intertemporal nature to them. Knowledge sourced in one period of time can still be accessed in another period of time, subject to depreciation from forgetfulness, of course. Art created in one period of time still exists in all future periods of time. However, experiences shared with friends — via activity — start and end in the same period of time as they are experienced.

You could make the argument that although experiences are temporary, friendship can exist in multiple periods of time. Friendship could be conceived as an investment, but I doubt that is the primary motivation for engaging in friendship. Friendship exists and continues to exist as long as there is a desirable quality found within the interactions of friendship. There is an element of creation, but creation in friendship isn’t exactly tangible in the same way that it is in art. Creation, in friendship, seems more like an afterthought to experiences experienced in friendship. The motivation for pursuing friendship is still derived from the activities engaged in friendship and not from the creation of friendship itself.

I miss the time in my life when I had the option to choose how I want to spend my time. Optimizing my life is so much more interesting when I have choices, when social activities are a compelling substitute to non-social activities. I’m sure I’ll have that again in my life at some point in the future, but I wish I didn’t have to wait through this cycle to get there.

this is society

There is so much trust that goes on in the modern economy, something of which I do not have a lot of. I just think it’s a bit outrageous how we trust that our data servers are going to adequately encrypt and store our passwords and we trust banks that there is a record we stored money with them in the first place. As I’m writing this, I am having faith that WordPress doesn’t blow up and all of my writing doesn’t get lost. For the most part, this trust has worked out. My money is exactly where I remembered it to be, and my identity hasn’t been compromised, yet. I have not been victim to any serious hacks or scams, yet.

I don’t like that aspect of contemporary existence — that we need to trust people in order to function in our society. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari pointed to our collective ability to believe in myths to be the source of modern civizilation. The collective belief of what has value and what does not have value underpins the entirety of economics. Believing in the same myths, like paper and electronic currency, allow us to make transactions with individuals who we have never met, and I don’t like that very much. I would much rather revert back to a hunter-gatherer society where I develop trust more organically, where I don’t need to trust people if I don’t want to.

What happens if our experience with trust results in a betrayal of trust? Then we are presented with two options: we could either shrug it off and move on, or we could choose not to trust anymore. The problem with option B is that not trusting equates to rejecting civilization altogether and all the comforts that come with it. Eventually, we are going to have to trust that doctors have our best interests at heart when we pay them to perform a surgery or take a drug that might result in our death. When we move into a new apartment, we have to trust that our landlord won’t increase the rent twofold when our lease renews in a year or two.

Trust is the cost of accessing civilization. Trust also operates as a random variable. Although we have become better at identifying what is trustworthy and what is not, there are always some leaps of faith that we need to take in particularly less transparent markets to adequately obtain the goods and services that we need. While the internet has made businesses and individuals more accountable in many regards, there are still areas that the internet has not touched yet and may never touch. We are pushed back to pre-internet levels of trust, where we have to rely on our instincts. That is the cost of wanting something that we cannot create ourselves.