Category: finance nomad

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.

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?

transition

I moved my furniture into a storage unit yesterday, and my apartment is empty. I am also trying to finish off all the wine I got from Trader Joe’s when I first moved in, so I’ve been getting blasted more often than I would like. It is a weird feeling drinking on my balcony in an empty apartment because it reminds me of transition. Every time I moved somewhere, the apartment would be empty, and I would reflect how I have changed since my last transition. In this case, the last time I moved was a little more than a year ago, from NY to SF.

So much has changed, and so much has not changed. I have on record videos and drawings I have made in the past year, so at least I have documentation of hobbies I picked up. I passed the CFA Level 2, so at least I didn’t waste my life on the 300 hours I put into studying. I am still hung up over the same people in my past. I still feel as lonely as I did when I first moved here. I’ve established a good reputation professionally, and I’m about to Hawaii for the winter. I will bounce around different surfing locations until they call me back to the office.

Even though I’ve made progress in my life for the past year, there aren’t that many moments in which I felt alive. In fact, the only time this past year I really felt alive was when I was doing my car tent tour around Iceland or when I was catching up with old friends in NY, both of which definitely not in SF. There were some moments I had fun in SF, like when I got matching tattoos together for a first date, or playing squash at the Bay Club at 2 PM on a Thursday, or my first park day at Mission Dolores. To be honest, these experiences are easily replaceable. Experiences that aren’t rare aren’t special. I don’t really reflect on these experiences. If they didn’t happen, then I don’t think much would change in my life.

The nature of relationships is asymmetric, and it will always mean more to one person than the other. There are some relationships that mean a lot to me, and I wonder if they mean as much as they did to me as they did to my counterpart. Knowing the nature of relationships, probably not. But that doesn’t stop me from still thinking about the people in my past. My friend recently gave me the advice, “You seem to still let people in your past to influence you even now. Maybe you shouldn’t.” I’ve been thinking whether I should listen to her.

I’ve realized recently that I’m a very sterile person. I would like to be warm, but I just don’t feel warm. I enjoy airports and workplace happy hours and international style architecture because they are also sterile, and they remind me of myself. Being warm is very… not me, no matter how much I wished things were otherwise. I feel like I am most attractive when people just look at me from a distance, and once I open my mouth, I just give off the vibes of a networking event. It is hard for me to be genuinely into someone, so the only thing I can offer is business casual chats. I’ve frequently received feedback that conversations with me are reminiscent of a job interview, which I would say is pretty accurate considering the importance and extent in which business casual is part of my personality.

I wonder in this regard if warmness is something you cultivate, or if it is something you are born with. Is this a personality trait I could acquire, like organization, or is this something you are born with, like work ethic? I wasn’t really raised in a warm household, and as an only child, there’s only so many ways I could cope before I run out of any emotion left to give.

I decided to release one of my songs on Spotify. It was a song I wrote and produced in 2021, when I was still living with my parents at the height of covid. I don’t know why it took me so long to release it. Part of the reason is that I didn’t want to engage in any outside business activities that I would have to disclose to my employer. I also didn’t take my own artistic pursuits that seriously either, and if I didn’t take myself seriously then I wouldn’t be hurt by others when my creations don’t live up to my expectations for them. But lately, after this summer, I decided to take my artistic pursuits more seriously. I want to accomplish something. I want to receive external validation, and this is how I get there.

I registered for the SF marathon recently. Today, I ran past a restaurant near the waterfront. There were a lot of people there, eating and talking. I realized that these things were unimportant to me. Besides this trip to NY two weeks ago, I haven’t really gotten dinner with that many people in my time in SF I don’t really enjoy dinner. I like conversations, so I usually ask people for drinks, which is funner and less commitment, in my head. For food, I prefer the same meal prep I eat every day: ground chicken and frozen veggies with lentils. I haven’t really met anyone I would like to get dinner with, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

I asked my friend in Iceland if she would be comfortable living in one of the small Icelandic towns we visited. She said no. I said that I would be okay in a small Icelandic town. What I actually want is routine. What I have is an existential pressure to do things. I would like to live in a small town and do the same thing every day. But, for some reason, I feel like I would wasting my youth and the opportunities I have been given to live in a HCOL city with so many resources, so I choose not to live in a small town and live a simple life. If I did live in a small town, I think I would be a lot happier, but I’ve never thought the point of life is to be happy. The purpose of life is to live a life with purpose, and usually purpose is found in HCOL cities with a lot of cultural and financial capital.

Feeling ugly is a part of growth. Probably why being pretty at a young age is a curse. I feel ugly right now, so I know I am growing. I was too content before anyways.

pod

I’m back in New York for an industry conference. I am staying at Pod 51 in Midtown East, and it is the first time I’ve ever stayed at a Pod hotel. What I didn’t realize is that it truly is just a pod. I don’t even have my own bathroom, and the bedroom has only enough space for a bed and nothing more. I never thought of myself as a person who cared too much about staying at nice hotels, but it is only by staying here do I realize how much of my tastes actually have changed in the past couple of years. I haven’t stayed in a hostel for a long time. Mostly because I feel like Airbnb is more intimate for similar price points, but also because I don’t like sharing things. 

There is a sterile quality to hotels and airports that I like. It feels void of intimacy. A parallel to how I feel. There isn’t disconnection from how I feel versus how the world is. 

I am reminded of some feelings I had in college. A strong feeling propelling me to write in college was the feeling of FOMO. I felt that I wasn’t living the life that I wanted to live. I had this vision for the person I wanted to be in college, and I realized quickly that I wasn’t becoming that person. I felt that people who grew up with the same opportunities as me were living life larger than I was, filled with more professional accomplishment and more intense experiences. I felt it difficult to empathize with myself and my weaknesses knowing the source of the weakness isn’t any environmental variable I faced but just because of my personal weakness. And, as we all know, depression is rage turned inwards. And I used that rage to write beautifully for a while.

When I moved to New York after covid, I was in a relatively good space in my life. I had friends, I was in a nice relationship, I had a nice job, and everything was okay. New York had a lot to offer, and I was in a position to take what it had to offer because I had the people in my life to do so. 

When I moved to SF, I forgot about all that for a second. SF isn’t exactly known for its rampant materialism or self-image obsession or its “never sleeping” quality. Most bars close at midnight. The ones that don’t close at 2 AM, and there is nothing open after that. People wear the same Patagonia sweaters both in their own home and out and about. I don’t get much FOMO when I am in SF. I am acutely aware of how sleepy it all seems and how comfortable it is to stay inside on a Saturday night. I feel like I wasn’t specifically lacking anything in my life when I was filling my weekends with studying. I was uncomfortable because I am never comfortable. But considering that, I felt pretty comfortable on a day-to-day basis.

This time back in New York, I feel like things are lacking. I feel like I am not living glamorously. I feel like I don’t have enough friends to do intense activities with. It is a feeling I haven’t felt in a long time. I feel like my awkwardness is returning. All these feelings and insecurities I thought I had left behind in college are coming back.

I am currently in the process of blocking out my weekend for my friends. There are a lot of friends I wish to catch up with, so my weekend is blocked away already. I don’t really feel close to people at the moment. It has always been a struggle for me, and it is especially hard when I am off my meds. My capability of feeling intimacy has been reduced, and I don’t have the same consistency as I did when I was in my relationship. When I see my friends, I’m sure it will be fine, but my feelings of loneliness or whatever come and go frequently when I am alone.

I am in a state of turbulence when I am alone, when idleness becomes chaos.