Category: finance nomad

time

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.

new car

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. 

technology

It has been a while since I have been deprived of technology.

The last time I seriously remember living without technology was my summers in China when I was in elementary school. I received my first phone when I was in 4th grade, and I remember playing a lot of free mobile games ever since whenever I was bored, which was often, when my parents would be late picking me up from swim practice or some other activity. Before that, I would preoccupy myself without technology, and it is hard to imagine how I would do so considering the integral role of technology in my life now.

Even when I was in college, I was not too interested in technology in the abstract. I liked data science, but more in the academic sense. I liked statistics and writing code that made me feel like I was smart when I ran it and created a model I didn’t entirely understand. After graduating, I covered transportation for two years, and that was interesting. At the time, during the peak of covid, everyone wanted to cover internet because internet stocks were going through the roof. I also fell within the hype for a bit, but then I realized that covering internet meant more than covering Amazon, Facebook, and Google. When I was interviewing for internet equity research positions, I realized that it also meant covering online travel agencies, and I didn’t want to cover online travel agencies.

Now that I am a tech investor, I think about technology quite a bit. I don’t take the technology I use for granted because I recognize its complexity and the magnitude of its accomplishment. Even though my apartment here in Santa Teresa is multiples cheaper than the one I had in SF, the quality of life is not that much worse. The infrastructure is less developed, both in roads and power and internet, but the houses are still the same, the appliances are still the same, and the food is more-or-less the same. Innovations in materials and production have resulted in everything being so cheap compared to how they were before, and I am able to live comfortably knowing that Beyond Meat costs the same in SF and Santa Teresa.

My power frequently goes out now, which means that my internet also frequently goes out. I lose connection to the internet. Even though I still have access to my e-books I downloaded, I don’t particularly feel the desire to read. I still have all the technology that I really want to have, including air conditioning, running water (but not hot water), and gas stoves, but it does make me miss the internet, which I think is the ultimate accomplishment of humanity until this point. I don’t entirely understand how the internet works, but I find it absolutely beautiful that I can stream an educational video about any topic from mostly anywhere in the world.

I spent the night yesterday watching Attack on Titan analysis videos after finishing the series yesterday, particularly on how Eren and Historia were the true ship in the series, which I agreed with. I originally wanted to work longer and prepare more for a CFO call I had the next day, but then I decided after dinner that I didn’t want to work anymore. It was one of my more unproductive evenings that I have spent this year. I don’t know why I am like this.

In theory, I have the same resources as I did in SF. I still have the same internet, with the same access to information, with the same ability to research stocks. Sure, I have one less monitor than I am used to, and my chair is less comfortable, and the lighting is bad, but I still have everything I need to be a good investor as I did before. What is it about me right now that encourages me to live less than my potential? Surfing in the afternoon and sipping beer in the evenings is the life that I have right now, that I never wanted nor imagined I would have.

moroccan insomnia

It’s 3 AM local time at my hotel in Rabat, and I am reminded of the pleasures of solitude, how beautiful it is to count on yourself to get things you want, and how easy it is to fall into the trap of thinking things are there because it would have been convenient for you.

Whenever I travel with my parents, I am reminded of how much freedom I have gained since I have left high school and how much glamorous my life has been since then. I don’t enjoy coming home very much, and for a long time, I’ve always had trouble pinpointing why. I develop of a sense of claustrophobia, even when I am outside. My furniture is spaced too closely together, and there is an overall lack of intention and charm in my living spaces. It is wild, but my apartments in SF and New York were larger than my living spaces in my childhood house. In addition, since I furnished every detail myself, since I don’t buy from sales, everything is extremely precise and intentional. I arranged my room given effectively unlimited resources, and it is a product of my intention, which is the opposite how much room is like at home — inherited.

I’m a weird dilemma where I want to go on dates, but I don’t like being seen around people who are less attractive than me. If I was attracted to people who want to go on dates with me, this wouldn’t be a problem.

I like postcards because they allow me to reevaluate who I want in my life. I could either choose to send them a postcard, and put them on the list of people I wish to keep a regular correspondence, or I could drop them from my life, and write them out of my life.

People change their minds all the time, and it is very hard to consistently count on people to do things except when you pay them to do so. I have very good follow-through, so sometimes it is hard for me to understand how some people have bad follow-through. I was thinking the other day about how things get done in the absence of economic incentive. Specifically, I watching a cleaner cleaning a unfrequented surface on a table, wondering what drives them to get every spec of dust off the table when it wouldn’t be noticeable if the table was 90% clean vs. 80% clean. They would have been paid the same regardless, so the incremental effort wasn’t based on economics. I realized the answer was pride.

I feel like there is is less pride now than there was before. Maybe it is just the people I surround myself with, but I feel like people are more motivated a lot more by the superficial and self-interested parts of their personality. There is less pride in one’s work, and people just do what they want to do in a given moment, which is different from the last and will be different from the next.

boarding school

I’ve had a couple of drinks, and I’m sitting at the Chase Sapphire Lounge in Hong Kong. I’ve just been traveling with my parents for slightly more than a week. It was eventful. I feel that my parents treat me like an adult now, including respecting my consideration to join the Peace Corps. They seem to acknowledge that I’ve been able to organize a successful life against their advice countless times, making me equipped to understand all the considerations in my life decisions better than they can. I also exhibit a higher level of competence than they do now, making me in charge of most considerations we make when traveling. I feel like I’ve come closer to achieving psychological independence.

For as long as I remember, I really wanted to go to boarding school. A lot of my friends went to boarding school. I don’t know if I self-selected into having a boarding school personality, or if the personalities who selected boarding school also selected me. Boarding school is really just college-lite. Boarding school is more independent than regular public high school, and college is more independent than boarding school. I am an independent person, and I pride myself on my independence. Going to boarding school seems like a logical origins story for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t attend boarding school, so this is not my actual history.

A lot of my past isn’t beautiful. If I attended boarding school, it would have been beautiful. Instead, I grew up in the suburbs, living without an understanding of aesthetics until I left.

After I discovered my sense of aesthetics, some time in college, my life has been organized in the pursuit of beautiful things. It’s a hefty feeling, weighing me own because life was so much lighter when I did not have a sense of aesthetics. Now, the rest of my life is in the pursuit of aesthetic things, regardless of how attainable they are. I am able to accomplish certain things — consumer things — quite easily. I can buy expensive things quite easily, but I’m not choosing to do that quite yet in my life. I like the apartment in which I currently live. I like the gorpcore aesthetic that SF embodies and encourages. I don’t need YSL just yet in my life. What is harder to achieve is being a part of certain societies that I am not a part of. I probably won’t be a part of the founder or modeling community unless I encounter the right combination of initiative and serendipity. Even so, I don’t know if it would be enough.

I wasn’t chosen for some things. I didn’t choose other things. I wasn’t given all of the opportunities, nor did I follow through on all the opportunities I was given. I wish I could change that, starting all the way from going to boarding school.

unfamiliar spaces

I just watched the movie Before Sunrise, and I feel like I have thoughts for days. I don’t do much writing nowadays, so my vocabulary to express my thoughts is quite limited. The movie does a great job at capturing how the magic of how intoxicating love is, and how the most cinematic moments of your life can happen quite randomly. Some things happen, and we don’t know why they happened, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture how we felt at that very moment. I feel that way about SF. Not that I am trying to recapture the magical moments of my life, but the fact that nothing magical has happened while I am here. There is something so euphoric about love that supersedes everything else you could possibly experience, drugs aside.

Something that struck me while I was watching Before Sunrise is that everything that happened on their first date was only possible because they had money. The experiences they were afforded was a lot more expensive than the movie made it look. I have money now. I am able to afford many experiences now. I have people with whom also have money. What I lack is people in my life are specific people with whom to share experiences in a meaningful way. With the right people, walking in the park could be euphoric. With other people, even the more glamorous experiences could be mundane.

I’ve started to believe in soulmates again. Or, at least, I think everyone has a finite number of soulmates in their life. There a few people you can share a meaningful connection with. There are also a few people you could form a future together with. What is hard is meeting people at the right time in the right circumstances. When a connection exists, it exists. I think I’ve gotten very good at seizing the opportunity in the past couple of years, so I’ve seized all the opportunities that have been presented to me. The unfortunate part is that opportunities for meaningful connection are few and far between. If you put yourself out there on a reasonably regular basis, I would venture to say that true connection comes once every two to four years. Not all potential connections turn into actual connections.

The places in the movie seem so different when you are with someone you feel a connection with and when you don’t. I want to travel again. I want to get out of SF. It’s not that I feel suffocated here, but I just like the feeling of unfamiliarity. I don’t see this place as a magical, and I want to find a new place that is unfamiliar so I can feel the unfamiliarity again by myself. I didn’t pick a job that was digital nomad-friendly, which limits my ability to travel while still working, but I realized I don’t like the feeling of being comfortable with my surroundings. The feeling of alienation has circled me my entire life, and I like for my external and internal environments to match up. The reason I like the time I was in Costa Rica so much was because it was so unfamiliar. I didn’t know how to speak Spanish well, and I was immersed in a tropical environment quite different from the northeast climate I grew up in.

I might have an opportunity to move to Eastern Europe in the next couple of years, but I’m not sure if I am going to take it. I’m not sure how much I actually care about moving to environments I find unfamiliar. Is it something I care about only in passing, or am I willing to make sacrifices to make sure I continue to experience unfamiliarity?

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.