Category: finance nomad

It’s almost sunrise, and I’m staying at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. I texted a girl last night, something of a logistical nature to hide my attachment to her, partially hoping that she didn’t reply, and then I fell asleep at 9 PM. It was my first night here in Singapore, and I was adjusting quite well. It’s always easier to adjust for time differences when it depends on staying up late

The effect people have on me is not a function of decay. There isn’t a sort of absolute effect people have, followed by the next couple of months where the effect becomes less strong. I’ve noticed that people’s effect on me follows a function of committed capital curve, where the peak of someone’s effect on me doesn’t occur until much after our interaction is complete. It takes a couple of months for me to digest the experience and for the event to incubate. The actual effect does of the experience resulting in personality change does not occur until much after the event itself, and the tail of that is very long. It could be for a couple of years, or it could be for the rest of my life. Change from one person overlaps with change from other people, similar to how capital is continuously called and distributed in portfolio with alternative investments.

There is this quote in Before Sunset that I really like: “I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people with whom you’ll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.” 

Each time people meeting, if substantial, it initiates change, and that change takes significantly longer to happen than most people think. I don’t know about people at large, but I am very much drawn to the people who have made a change on me, even if we don’t share the same life anymore. This naturally results in some asymmetries in relationships, because we are not all changed equally even sharing the same events. Some people are more changed by certain interactions than others, and some people grow more attached than others.

It often reflects in my inability to go back to “how things used to be.” The nature of change is that it is thermodynamic. Change occurs in a way where it cannot be reversed, like many thermodynamic processes. 

People grow up all around me. People who were with me at one point in my journey fall behind or surpass me. We shared a part of our journey together, and then we moved onto another part of journey separately. I know I shouldn’t hold onto all of these memories that I have, but I do. People come in and out of your life. Some experiences that you share cannot be unexperienced. Friendship and relationships only move forward, not backwards.

I think a core difference in how I see connection is that most people perceive it to be linear. Most people evaluate intimacy isolated at each given moment of time, considering only the here and now with limited consideration of the past. I think differently. I evaluate each episode of intimacy in context to its own body of work, with consideration of the past and autocorrelated factors. Each person represents a collection of memories. I access these memories each time I think or interact with a person. We all suffer from recency bias, but I think I tend to do so less than others when it comes to intimacy. I’ve noticed that people only reflect upon that latest instance in which you have interacted with someone, where I think of a person relative to all of the interactions we have had. Perhaps this is due to my better-than-average memory — it’s certainly not storage-efficient to index memory like this — that I archive the memory of every person based on all of the interactions we have ever had.

The way I process information is deeply visual. Some of my friends remember conversations extremely well, or details like EPS for a company two quarters ago, but I don’t remember these things well. I remember feelings and images, although I don’t know how accurate these memories things are. I am able to keep detailed impressions of people I meet in my head. People live in my head as representation of every interaction we have had. I understand that it is not reflective of the person they are now because the interactions I have had are deeply contextual to the time in which we shared experiences. These people are afterimages. They exist in the space of visual memory as a corpus without a body.

People change, but they don’t change in my head. I have an outdated version of them in my mind. Yet, these versions of people in the past continue to inspire me and push my personality forward today. I’ve often heard of the upward-spiraling loop as a parallel to the Christian ethos of striving to be more like Jesus, and this is my version of it. I create idealized versions of people in my past and strive towards becoming more like them. I’m not sure if this is healthy, to be honest, but this is just how I do things. People come and go in my life. The version of them that I interacted with remains in my head. This is how I grow.

I woke up in the middle of the night again. I moved outside to sit on my balcony. I’m reflecting on whether not I have “what it takes” to start a successful business, or whether not I have the stomach to sustain a life full of risk at all. There are so many ways my life could’ve taken, but my current life led me here, for better or worse. I wonder how deterministic my path has been, if I was presented with a different set of choices I would still choose to take the same path. This is the central question of Arrival, and the main character says yes.

I don’t listen to as much music as I used to. It’s not as important to me anymore. I used to be so concerned with my artistic consumption and output, but now I realized it’s not so important anymore. There’s so many things more important to the world than art.

I think it’s interesting how my life has led me here. All the people who have come in and out of my life. My personality trajectory taking me here. One one hand, it makes a lot of sense because my personality growth is deterministic. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have been able to predict that this has been the outcome of my life all those years ago. I recognize the futility of wondering what my life would be like if I had different people influence me on my journey, but it’s one of the downsides of my natural personality to think like this.

I keep on revisiting the idea that you are not meant to accomplish everything you wanted in life. You aim for the moon. Sometimes you miss and you fall back on Earth. Other times you miss and hit the stars. There are a lot of things I wanted in my life. Some things I have accomplished more than I set out. Other things I have not. Some things in life require selection into exclusive groups or resources or opportunities. You are not always selected, and then you have to work around your initial plan to get to where you want.

For the most part, I’ve been able to accomplish what I wanted if we take a big picture lens. On most majors things I’ve wanted, like getting into Penn or finding a position on the buyside, I have been able to accomplish. Other things I have not been able to accomplish. And, for the most part, I feel like I’ve been able to survive despite not being able to accomplish the things I’ve not been able to accomplish. It’s not been great, especially right now, but I’ll survive, and whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I have become stronger.

I don’t believe that everything was meant to be. I believe that’s just cope. There are things that you want, and not everything you want you are able to achieve. I don’t believe that things we don’t achieve lead us to better paths, just different paths, and we love our fate anyways. But reality is that there are better outcomes for our lives that we didn’t take. These outcomes exist in the ideal, but they are not reality. The world is full of outcomes like this. You can’t index too heavily on them because they are not real. I would rather take unoptimal real outcomes over optimal unreal outcomes any day.

I didn’t get into the schools I wanted to for my MBA. To be sure, I am a bit sad, but I am not nearly as sad as I thought I would be. I have changed a lot in the past year, and this change has taught me that the path I thought I wanted to go down is not necessarily the path I want to keep going down. For a really long time, I thought I wanted to get an MBA. It was the last gated “thing” I wanted to do in my life before I moved onto the next part of my life. A lot of things I did for the past couple of years was in service of this. I don’t regret doing the things I did per se, but I should’ve been more open to the fact that these things I do have an uncertain payoff and asking myself, would I be comfortable with my choices even if they didn’t bring me the achievements I wanted them to bring?

I have made a lot of improvements in this — trying to tailor my life to be more process- than achievement-driven — at least compared to how I handled my life in undergrad, but it’s important to remind myself of these lessons every now and then. You don’t know everything. You don’t get everything you wanted to. You have to be okay with these outcomes and live your life with the understanding that these outcomes are real possibilities.

The change in my trajectory has truly been astonishing when I look at it in retrospect. My life was so flat throughout elementary to high school. Then college, one year after the next, I learn something about myself that propelled me on this trajectory I am now. I used to think growth was linear, but that is just because growth always seems linear in the beginning parts of an exponential curve curve. I feel like I am on an exponential trajectory, that I have accumulated so much momentum that I an unstoppable regardless of the roadblocks that exist along the way.

I had this realization that I can figure it out. Anything. I’m no longer constrained by environmental limitations because I have saved up enough where I could maintain a good quality of life even in the event of prolonged unemployment. This is freeing. I have time now in a way that I didn’t before. I have a dissatisfaction with corporate life that makes me understand that there is a trade off to everything, most notably between freedom and security when it comes to your career. Roadblocks don’t bother me because I can figure it out. You never know when a detour could save you some time.

I forgot how much of my writing used to just be me waking up in the middle of the night feeling restless. It used to be a big part of my undergrad experience, although I don’t recall waking up to write as much as I am doing now. Part of it is probably due to the fact I am sleeping earlier and earlier, like an old person. There are remarkable themes across the things I write: uncertainty of the future, disconnection, trying to live a “meaningful” life. Always longing for a life I don’t have at present.

Life is full of beginnings and endings. I’ve become somewhat accustomed to this reality, although it is still painful when you actually see this in practice. Sometimes, it’s necessary for somethings to end, even though it hurts. You are never full accustomed to it. The realization of some global maximums requires going through some local minimums.

I’ve lived in SF for more than three years now. I take the same walks around my apartment in Embarcadero. The routine exists, and the routine is suffocating. I felt like I was learning a lot, that my life was leading to something in my first couple of years here. I am still learning, but not as much. There is less purpose and certainty to my day-to-day life now. The time I spent away from SF during the remote work period seem so long ago. I made the same couple of drives to my photography studio to develop my film photos. These sunsets and sunrises seem familiar. Everything is compressing closer together. The first couple of weeks I spent in SF were so long ago. Everything seemed so slow back then.

People say time flies when you’re having fun, but I never really believed that. I don’t really enjoy my life right now, but I don’t think it’s slow. It’s quite fast actually. I don’t have that many times in my life when I am having fun, so I remember the times I do very fondly. Those periods seem quite long in retrospect. Like the summer of ’23, I am waiting for the next phase in my life, which is possibly my penultimate chapter before I settle into a life of routine. I left behind in the last chapter in my life. I expect to leave even more behind for the next chapter. Things never endure as long as you think they do or should. Life changes quicker than you might think.

I used to want to escape my life so much. Through video games or books or movies, I always pursued means to forget about how lacking my life is at any moment in time. I’ve filled many of those holes over the years, and my framework for understanding my values and purpose have improved, but there’s rarely periods in my life in which everything feels like it’s clicking. I’ve had a couple of those periods in my life, and I cherish those moments, but I don’t know where things are going from here. I don’t know if I’ll ever have one of those periods in my life again, whether I have already experienced all the happiness I have experienced in my life.

I could feel my heart slowing. I don’t know if I’m meant for this path I’ve chosen for myself. I don’t know if I’m meant for this professional life, which is crazy because it’s also so important to me. I want to do something that matters. I also want to do something that is fun. I don’t know if those two things are compatible with one another. I hope they are. I’ve decided that I want to go off the well-traveled path. There’s more to this life than following everyone else’s footsteps.

What is a romantic partner except someone who is responsible for your happiness?

I have always been hesitant to call people friends because what is a friend? The world is filled with indifference. People who come in your life at one point leave your life at another moment. For most of life, you are fending for yourself against demons, both external and internal. People come in when it is situationally convenient for them and leave the next moment when it is not. People often call each other “friends” colloquially, but these words are often meaningless under the scrutiny of actions.

Romantic partners are the solution to a world filled with indifference. Although there are friends who transcend time and distance, they are the exception and not the rule. Friends operate in absence of commitment. Friends are interested in your happiness, but they are not invested in your happiness. Friends do not have a stake in whether or not you are happy. They would like you to be happy, because happy friends are more fun to be around, but most friends are unwilling to make considerable sacrifices to make you happy. Romantic partners are different; they are willing to sacrifice their own happiness for your happiness.

These types of thoughts have dominated my life for so long. Late last year, I thought I was ready for some permanence in my life, but I realized recently that I was not. I don’t crave loneliness anymore, but I feel like I have one more bout of solitude left in my life before I fully commit to a life without individuality, which is what it means to be in a romantic partnership.

The truth about starting a romantic partnership is that you are trading freedom for security. When you are feeling insecure, this is a good trade because you have an abundance of freedom and a lack of security. When you are feeling trapped, this is a bad trade because you have a lack of freedom and an abundance of security. This oscillation occurs for much of our lives in our twenties, but at some point this cycle permanently ends when you partner up and get married and have children. At some point in your life, you have to choose this security permanently to enable you to live the next chapter of your life.

The world is full of considerations such as how you want to express yourself, who you want to surround yourself with, and what choices you make to feel most authentic. The other day, I retook my Enneagram and discovered my dominant type moved from 6 to 4. The results, I would say, were surprisingly accurate and insightful.

As an Ennea 4 you tend to romanticise life and love, leading you to idealise things that are beyond your grasp. This may be evident as yearning for unattainable love interests, desiring meaning and fulfilment that you’re not feeling right now or a tendency to compare yourself with others and what they have. [] This creates a sense that others have something that you are missing in your life or that something you had before in your life is missing at present. It may also lead you to cling to frustrating relationships.

I write about that very frequently as the concept of negativity collapse, where you are exposed to a part of yourself that you are missing by other people, particularly through limerence, and you spend the rest of your life trying to fill that void. I never knew it could be so easily described in a personality inventory. But I suppose that makes sense. A key attribute of 4s is that they tend to dramatize very simple things.

Lately, I’ve had a new way of understanding my relation to my emotions. The things I feel are feelings, which should be self-explanatory, but I never thought of them as such. I learned a couple years ago that feelings can be boiled down into neurochemistry and nothing else. Even the emotions that I feel like are magical, like euphoria or awe. There is little about these emotions that exists outside of the neurochemistry, which can be replicated through inorganic means. For a time, I found that distressing because I was under the impression that because they were neurochemistry that they were not real. But now I am more okay with the fact that the lack of a distinct, non-physical property to emotions.

My enneagram recommends me to create more distance between me and my emotions. I found this interesting because I never considered myself to be an emotional person, but I guess my actions say that I am. In context of all the art I have created, it makes a lot of sense. Who makes art when they are not emotional? It’s interesting because I tend to think of myself as a very rational person, but I can understand that I probably come across as someone who is very intense and moody. That’s probably my INTJ-ness showing.

I feel like everyone is fake, as if I don’t belong. I know this is just my enneagram talking. When I feel close to others, I feel so close. When I don’t feel close, I feel so far away. I can be either the life of a party or a wallflower but nothing in between. I aspire to find community, but I often find rejection. When I find community, it frequently does not last. I feel inadequate. Although I have accomplished so much, I feel like I have so much more left to go. I have very few periods in my life in which I thrive. I simultaneously both care and don’t care about what people think of me. I’m ready and not ready to do something meaningful in my life. My solitude hits so close and so far. 

I’ve never enjoyed parties too much. I’ve always felt out of place, except when I know at least half of the people there. In those kinds of scenarios, I feel so connected to everything and everyone. I exist in a state of desolation or exuberance and nothing in between. It would be nice to exist in a state of exuberance forever. I’ve been in that state before, but it’s often fleeting. Either do to situations beyond my control or the speed of change propelling me far from Eden.

I really want to be a VC one day. Not now, because there’s something I want to build, but eventually. I like the aesthetic of hosting networking events in my apartment. I like interacting with founders and learning about emerging trends. I like enabling companies to build the technologies that will shape our future. It seems like a lot of my life has been leading to this. I don’t have the skills or network necessary to be a VC now, but I think I have what I need to be a founder, mostly. I definitely have the personality for one, just maybe not the hard skills that I want, yet.