Category: yung professionals

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 the 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.

return on existence and cost of vitality

In finance, cost of capital represents the required rate of return to justify investment in a company’s securities. If a company does not generate the necessary return in its debt or equity, an investor might take their investment into other securities.

I think the purpose of life, broadly, is to live a happy and meaningful life. Let’s call the amount of happiness and meaning you generate from your life return on existence. Similar to investments, life also has a cost of capital, although it probably won’t be called cost of capital. Let’s just call it cost of vitality, which includes the time, money, and energy required to do the things that make your life happy and meaningful. Also life is boring and painful, and convincing myself to live is already a hassle, which I also factor into my cost of vitality. For life to be worth living, your return on existence must be greater than your cost of vitality.

Right now, there are a series of conditions for my happiness, not limited to:

  1. Job security and satisfaction
  2. Quality of friendships and relationships
  3. Disposable income
  4. Health of family members
  5. Quality of living arrangements
  6. Physical health
  7. Number of Lululemon joggers

For my life to be worth living, these conditions, among others, must be satisfied. If one of these conditions is not satisfied, then I would be sad, but it would be manageable. If multiple of these conditions is not met, then my return on existence would be less than the cost of vitality, and then I would contemplate the possibility of suicide.

We perceive our life in periods of time. We are happy during certain periods, and sad during others. During periods in which I feel profound sadness, the only reason I wouldn’t act on suicide is if I still think my life can still generate happiness in the future. In finance, the equity value of a company is defined by the net present value of all future free cash flows. Living is only feasible if the sum of happiness generated in future periods discounted to present value exceeds the cost of capital required to sustain live towards future periods. However, future happiness is hard to visualize in the present, so there would be a heavy discount rate applied to perceive happiness generated in future periods.

Right now, conveniently, I happen to have money, time, and energy to do the things that make me happy. I have existential capital. Friends require time, energy, and money. Relationships require time, energy, and money. Art requires time, energy, and money. All activities require time, energy, and money except your job, which requires a lot of time and energy but in turn generates money to fuel other activities that require money. Also, the vibes are good, I guess, so I don’t think living on a day-to-day basis is absolutely horrible, I guess.

However, if there’s ever going to be a period where I don’t have time, energy, and money, then I will be sad. The only thing I could look forwards to is future periods where I would have time, energy, and money. If those future periods don’t exist, then suicide is the natural solution.

nothing better to do

I think one of the reasons people “settle down” is because they realize that it is becoming harder and harder to connect with people as they age. There are only so few people with whom we are capable of connecting to the level of intimacy we want. Dating is like just drawing cards over and over again, hoping something sticks, and we are unlikely to turn down a winning hand when we draw a winning card.

In elementary school, it was quite easy to connect to others. But then as we accumulate more experience, the lives of others become more unrelatable. I think that’s something I noticed as an adult. I remember in high school, getting brunch with people was sufficient. I was happy getting brunch with people. It was enough. I didn’t have much social interaction in high school, so any social interaction was better than no social interaction.

Lately, as an adult, I’ve realized that getting brunch is no longer sufficient. Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten a lot of brunches with a lot of people. Conversation over food used to be exciting as an activity to share with friends. There was a point in my life where I thought I would never get tired of brunch, but here I am, tired of brunch.

There are very few conversations I actively want to have these days. I much rather prefer shared experience to conversation, but shared experience requires trust, and trust takes time to build. It would be great if we had an AI that matched me up with someone with whom I am perfectly compatible, then go through some sort of accelerated friendship simulator to achieve the level of trust needed to share experiences together.

Whenever you hang out with people, you can never be sure if they are hanging out with you because they want to spend time with you or if they’re just hanging out with you because there’s nothing better to do. It’s hard to actually perceive which camp your interactions fall into because it’s a thought that is by nature paranoid. The closest thing we can gather is evaluating how our interactions make us feel. If an interaction doesn’t seem particularly engaging, it probably wasn’t that engaging. The real dilemma lies, however, in evaluating our feelings about our interactions are valid or not.

The natural response to feeling unwanted is just to go back into seclusion. In times when the world genuinely wants nothing to do with you, this maneuver could be therapeutic. There are very few times, however, when the world genuinely wants nothing to do with you. Most of the time, we just project how we see the world as the reality of things. By hiding, we could potentially be wasting time engaging in needless therapy. There’s the possibility of friendship out there that exists, and by hiding from the world we forgo the opportunity to create additional friendship in the name of emotional fragility.

The scary part of friendship is when you feel like a conversation mattered a lot more to you than it did to someone else. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with sharing a conversation and deriving more meaning from it than the other party, but it’s a position of vulnerability. Putting a lot of value on a conversation is acknowledging that someone has a more interesting perspective than you, and wanting to be friends with them opens up the possibility of getting hurt when the sentiment is not reciprocated.

In college, I thought a lot about what constitutes a relationship being real. When experience becomes memory, we tend to romanticize it (or catastrophize it), and it’s very hard to isolate the experience from the connotations of experience derived from memory. So, how do you know something is real when you are in the middle of experiencing it?

The nice thing about dating is that it, for the most part, confirms that your shared experience is actually quite similar. Interactions are not one-sided, and you can confirm that you matter as much to them as they matter to you. There’s a calming quality to knowing that your feelings aren’t there for no reason. Otherwise, you just exist in a constant state of paranoia of pouring in more emotional labor than you are extracting, which is not a good feeling.

I like listening to sad songs because there’s always ambiguity in regards to who the singer is singing about. In some sense, you can imagine they are singing about you, and that makes your life slightly more beautiful than it was before. Relationships are not like that. They are about themselves, about you and someone else, and not you individually. The relationship only exists between two points but does not touch its sources. It requires intention on both parts. It is an act of creation, and an act of creation takes two.

intimacy as a depreciating asset

I woke up this morning feeling extremely sad and lonely. In other news, water is wet.

I’m starting to wonder if I feel lonely all the time because I just have a higher baseline requirement for intimacy than others. This is neither a positive nor a negative thing. It’s just a statement of fact, like my blood type or my hair color. I remember reading a research paper saying that the difference between introverts and extroverts is that introverts just have a higher baseline level of stimulation, so they don’t feel as much of a need to spend time with others to achieve an optimal level of stimulation. Similarly, do I just need to maintain more friendships than most people to feel not lonely?

The problem is that my capabilities of feeling intimate with others come and go like the waves. Last month, when I was still in Philly, I went to an event with some friends. It was only three weeks ago, but it seems so long ago. Moving to somewhere new tends to have that effect on my time perception. At the time, I hadn’t told my friends that I would be moving to New York shortly, but I had an apprehension that that night might be the last time I was happy for a while. It was the last time I was happy for a while, but the transition occurred long before that night. I’m running towards the end of my intimacy cycle, and I expect that it’s going to be a while before I could feel intimate with others again.

I tend to think of intimacy as a depreciating asset. Like depreciating assets, I have to mark intimacy to market every quarter to make an accurate assessment of how close I feel to the people around me. It is quite unfair to assume that our present feelings of intimacy seamlessly transition from one time period to the next without loss. When I was in high school, I no longer felt close to the same people from elementary school. When I graduated college, everything that happened before college seems like another life I never lived.

Most assets use straight-line depreciation over a set useful life. The rate of straight-line depreciation is dependent solely on the useful life of an asset.

Some assets have long useful lives. Some assets do not have long useful lives. Friendships also have a useful life measured by a specific period in which the majority of memories are formed. I made a lot of memories with some high school friends, but they are no longer a significant presence in my life. Some of my college friends are still in my life, but in a few years I suspect I won’t be talking to my college friends either. It’s the natural progression of things. Friendships do not last forever, and it’s unfair to expect that they do. Friendships run through a predictable course of getting to know each other, spending a little time together, spending significant amounts of time together, and then moving on to other friends.

Some assets have salvage values. Some assets do not have salvage values. Friendships have salvage values. Relationships do not have salvage values. If I reach the end of the line with a friendship, I could pick things back up later, granted at a lesser intensity. The promise of Saturday brunch at 1 PM, once a year or two, is still there, and this ending equilibrium is hard to break. Relationships, on the other hand, cannot be picked back up once broken. There is no such thing as keeping in contact with your exes. There is no room in the present for doing so. Keeping in contact with an ex is just keeping something alive that doesn’t have any future. Doing so would be living in the past.

The metric I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the average useful life of a friendship. Unlike friendship itself, this is largely dependent person to person. People who are good at keeping in contact with their friends tend to have longer average useful lives. People who are not too attached to their friends tend to have shorter average useful lives. People who prefer quality over quantity have longer average useful lives. People who prefer quantity over quality have shorter average useful lives. I’m not sure where I end up on this spectrum. I tend to think that my friendships have shorter average useful lives, but that could just be because my standards for what I consider to be an ideal average useful life is longer than what I currently perceive having.

How do you make friends in a new city? Who knows. I didn’t really make friends in college, so the bar for comparison is quite low. I think I big problem I have is that I like getting close to people quickly. I think I expect too much from meeting people. I just want to reach the point in a friendship where memories start to get formed, but it’s hard to truly understand that this process takes a very long time. I understand that the average useful life of my friendships is not long, so I want to cram as many memories into my friendships as possible before I would have to salvage it and move onto another friendship.

To be honest, if I saw someone else with my obsessive desire to be close to others, I would consider it to be a red flag. From my observations (and experience), the desire for accelerated closeness is usually the product of emotional trauma, and it often results in some pretty horrible friendships. It’s weird to know I am the red flag in this case.

the next coping mechanism

Life is quite long. It is the time of life that isn’t continuously filled with pain that is short.

The average life expectancy in the US goes up every year. In 1960, it was roughly 70. Now, it is roughly 80. By the time I will be nearing “dying” time, it’ll probably be around 90 or 100. Since I’m fortunate enough to have health insurance, I’ll probably be on the high-end of the normal distribution. It is quite a long time before I die. What do I do before then?

It is unfortunate that life gets quite boring after I would say… 23? There was a lot of novelty in life before then. Now, it’s more-or-less the same life every day. I thought it was the product of being a student that made life more vibrant. But upon talking with my friends who are doing master’s and PhD programs, it seems like they are also in the same boat as me. I guess it wasn’t being a student. I think it’s just after a certain age there are less new experiences, regardless of whether we experience those experiences in school or not.

I think the first time I took a walk around the city at 2 AM, it was a unique and interesting experience. Now, when I take a walk at 2 AM, it’s just like every other walk I take at 2 AM.

When I wrote for therapeutic purposes for the first time — I think it was when I was deferred from Penn early decision — it was super effective. I was super sad, then I wrote, and I wasn’t as sad anymore. I took a nap. When I woke up, it was fine. Since then, I’ve written for therapy so many times. Each time, it doesn’t hit the same, so I have to find new ways to cope. Lately, I’ve been singing a lot, which was effective at first, but eventually, even singing gets old. Everything gets old. Now, I’ve been running a lot. I’m figuring out what is going to be my next coping mechanism after running gets old.

I think life effectively ends when you reach age 30. I plan on moving to a gated community in Greenwich then, and hopefully, I would have enough income to pay off my mortgage and send my kids to boarding school. That’ll give me something to do for the next 20 years of my life. Kids are always up to something. I haven’t been “up to something” for a long time. Maybe my kids will teach my the latest Tik Tok dance and make life meaningful. I think there’s a 70% chance that people just have kids because they’re bored.

I wonder if people commit suicide because they just run out of coping mechanisms. There are only so many things to do before every hobby is exhausted. Then, what’s next?

altruism and disconnection

Fundamentally, I think I don’t really care about what goes on in the world at large because I don’t really feel connected to the world.

I remember I really wanted to work for some health or education NGO for a really long time in my life. I don’t think I felt connected to the world back then, but at least I told myself did I did. I felt a need to dedicate my life to something more because I don’t really know what I would otherwise do with my life. The problem with trying to achieve a position of real influence in the social impact space is that it’s quite difficult. It’s only possible to reach that level of influence with a lot of grinding, not to mention complete uncertainty whether your hard work will be rewarded at the end. For someone like me who is at best ambivalent about dedicating my life to the abstract idea of “helping people,” this life did not appeal to me. I think in the private sector, your success is a lot more correlated to how hard you work. More often than not, you are adequately compensated for your contributions to your company.

I find it harder to care about the world when I’m unhappy. I used to really care about making the world a less fucked-up place, but now I just want to be happy. I’ve noticed that the magnitude in which the world is fucked up doesn’t have an effect on my happiness. I’ve read that people supposedly find helping people to be fulfilling, but I’m not sure I feel this feeling. I help people when asked for help because I recognize that I’ve received a lot of help over the years, but I certainly don’t go out of my way to find new ways to help people. I don’t really feel that sense of fulfillment a lot of people discover when helping people. It’s hard to rationalize making other people happy when it doesn’t do anything to alleviate your own unhappiness in the process. I’m could do all of this, but I would still be so unhappy, so what’s the point?

I believe that my happiness is solely a product of how close I feel to my friends. I would happily trade my career prospects for friends. I would probably be more interested in making the world a better place if I felt at all connected to it, or so I tell myself. The problem is that that is not a choice that I have in my life. There’s a difference between choices and options. I have the options to make friends or make money. However, I can choose how much money I make. I cannot choose how many friends I have. Choices imply free will, but options don’t. I could focus on my career and try to be a millionaire by age 30, or I could make a friend and get on with some other missions in life other than to make money. These are my two options. However, considering hard difficult I find it to make friends, there is realistically only one choice. At this point, I think it’s much more likely to be a millionaire by age 30 than it is to make a friend. There’s not much of a decision involved.

The thing is — I would always prefer making friends to making money. The problem is that this option is always presented to me. I wish I had the opportunity to shoot the shit with some friends, but instead, I just work in Excel all day and listen to some emo trap album on repeat while wondering why I am unable to have the level of intimacy I want with people. I work because there isn’t much of an alternative. All I want is to do something else.