Sad how he just goes adventure hopping to try and find meaning. The problem is no matter where you are you are also there. Time to look inward and not outward.
I truly mean this in an entirely non-judgemental way. I wish the author luck in achieving his dream of becoming high agency rather than simply high freedom. I wish it for everyone who wants it.
The article author hasn’t figured out that he got to where he is because he was lucky, not because he was special in some way.
The cringe comes in with the way he does it. He seems to realize he is an Elon bro but still thinks DOGE is an important national priority and not a problematic oligarchic downsizing of our important federal services and regulatory bodies.
It’s amazing how even millionaires and billionaires don’t understand that national debt doesn’t work like personal debt.
But anyway, that’s a tangent. The guy dumped his girlfriend so he has no family to spend time with, and he’s wondering why he’s bored. His only attempts at stimulation involve self-service: how can I be smart and successful especially in a way that everyone will know it?
I can only imagine how being financially set for life would positively impact a typical fiscally responsible family (people with the restraint to hire a financial advisor). Imagine being able to cancel daycare and spend your days with your family instead of burning your life away in the office.
I even know a person who has no children but thanks to a windfall just does his hobbies and hangs out with friends. Still works a day job for health insurance but now work doesn’t define their life. They’ve done things like learn how to DJ and travel to see their international friends on longer visits and not just little two week vacations that corporate zombies get to take.
But the author is struggling to find a way to make work define their life, to get their life to return to capitalism that they have been blessed to escape.
Hey author if you are reading this, try doing something positive like help people. Volunteer. Everything you have tried so far has been self-centered.
> The article author hasn’t figured out that he got to where he is because he was lucky, not because he was special in some way.
It seems like a lot to assume that suggests the author is not a fast technical learner and builder.
> Hey author if you are reading this, try doing something positive like help people. Volunteer. Everything you have tried so far has been self-centered.
That sounds like good advice for me, but not to the author. I sometimes follow orders from random people for fun, but I infer that the author does not.
The author traveled off the paved path. Reality gave him with wealth and time, but unsatisfaction instead of satisfaction. His role is now to figure out a path back to satisfaction, perhaps it will be a short path or a long path, a common one or a one the world hasn't seen before.
People often find a similar lack of purpose (albeit much, much shorter lived) after being engrossed in a book series, very hard video game, or any other pursuit.
The big difference here, IMO, is this is a game that society is literally constructed around - for its own survival. The ‘rat race’ puts food on everyone’s table, provides care when we’re sick, defines what future our children can have (and if we can even have children) - even what rights we have (or don’t have) in many cases.
Is it so surprising that having won that game, some people - often the ones most obsessed with it - struggle to figure out what is next?
Unless you think one can choose to be a "fast technical leaner and builder", then that is still luck.
I'm a fast technical learner and builder. I will never be where this guy is, in part because most of my resources are going into keeping myself afloat. I live my life as though "luck" isn't a factor (what's the use in declaring defeat?), but it's certainly not merit that separates the rich from the poor.
There are a lot of really, really, really smart people who never become generationally wealthy. Generational wealth almost always includes either luck, or intentionally heading down a morally reprehensible path.
You’ll have a tough time convincing me the guy who invented loom is smarter than or contributed more to mankind than Nikola Tesla.
Which is probably a perfect example because Edison took the morally reprehensible path.
The article author is essentially on the wrong side of the class war. I don’t really care how well he self-actualizes and I don’t think anyone should.
At this point he’s a <1%er who essentially thinks it’s a good idea to help the richest man alive fuck up the government.
What this guy is missing is creativity. And we don't have data to determine if it's contributor, detractor, or tangent to the position where he is at. I'd bet it's a bigly contributory, as gains from x-factors are called gambling.
[1] See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
Get rich? Move to a small or mid-sized city, marry your girl, have some kids, and get involved. Need to be busy? Run a local business that hires locals. Use your money and expertise to improve your community, which is a lot easier to do as a big fish in a small pond.
"Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups."
DOGE is run on Signal, and his conclusion is "so smart," not "that seems like a huge red flag." This guy sounds like he's in line to be the next George Papadopoulos, the guy who gets thrown under the bus when everything goes sideways.
Anyways, the quote is:
>> You are a pathetic victim of an idle mind.
I think this aptly describes the author.
It's a common enough idea to tell someone rudderless to volunteer, but I feel like it's never tempered with the perspective of having volunteered and reflected on how the donated time has effected one's own life. Shaming someone rudderless into volunteering doesn't help them for exactly the obvious reasons it won't. At least no more than anything else you can lean hard into in life to avoid something else. Suggesting it as a fix to ennui is bad advice, the virtuousness of volunteering just masks how terrible it is.
What are these "obvious reasons" that volunteering won't help someone seeking direction?
I also don't follow why you haven't stated whether you've personally tried volunteering and whether it's "worked" for you, particularly when you seem dismissive of it and seem to looking for personal reasoning from others.
my suggestion to the author would be: spend some time volunteering and get over yourself (by that i mean their own ego which seems to be putting them at the centre of everything).
in my experience, some things tend to come out of it
- gratitude for where i am at in life because i’m struggling less than the people i’m helping
- empathy because jesus yeah these people are struggling and i’m seeing just how much it’s affecting them
- humility because you know what, i really am limited in what i can actually do for these people, none of my “technical prowess” is actually useful here
- purpose because man i feel bad for these people and id like to do more to help than just showing up once a week
i don’t volunteer because it’s “virtuous”. fuck virtuosity.
i do it because i need to for my own sake — to experience the stuff above. it’s selfish-selflessness. by helping others i also help myself.
edit — added the one about humility which is quite important
edit 2 — donating money (philanthropy) is not the same as volunteering. in case there’s any confusion. boots on the ground are required.
Is there any single daily life situation where any person from around the globe and in the entire history of humankind who is not judgemental? Perhaps not at a job interview? Or maybe at dating or when trying to sell or buy something or simply when looking at that person?
I know I'm an asshole, but I've never had good experiences with people who call themselves super smart.
And of course, they were identifying all problems with the government on signal in very short, super effective meetings... yeah sure, dude.
Based on this blog and the needs of the overseeing oligarch, DOGE appears to be a therapy programme for millionaires and billionaires.
But we shouldn’t downplay what the program really intends to do: gut federal government spending rather than raising taxes on the wealthy to a sensible level.
Most federal government spending has very real benefits to the average person and should be thought of as more of an investment than a cost. But the DOGE mafia wants to cut programs that help the average person to protect their own fortunes.
E.g., the average person is harmed by shutting down the department of education. The wealthy who go to private school their whole lives are not.
I'm not convinced it's the later. There IS a looming financial problem with our government and nobody else is doing anything about it. Federal spending is up trillions of dollars (per year) in the last 5 years with nothing to show for it. There is huge inefficiency and Elon wants to take a stab at fixing it. Yes, the man has his flaws, but he's trying to fix things nobody else will even try. Not sure why people have to hate on that.
BTW, I do expect so over-cutting will happen and there will be fallout from that. But hopefully the budget gets fixed and congress learns something about fiscal responsibility.
I'm confused by this belief. Anyone who has ever interacted with a big government in the West knows they are a knot of old and confusing regulations that cause every thing to be slow and expensive. A leftist should be happy that the state gets to accomplish more with it's existing budget.
Remember, Elon downsized Twitter by 80%, and then Twitter lost 80% of it's value. Simply firing a bunch of people doesn't accomplish more, it can actually destroy the value of the thing to begin with.
We've all seen this with republicans before. They take over, make things worse, and then use the fact that things are worse as an excuse for why the government shouldn't do the things it does. Elon isn't an expert in efficiency, he's an arsonist coming in to destroy the government so he and his buddies can extract more value out of this country.
The problem is that we picked a billionaire professional internet troll to do it whose stated goal is cutting 2 trillion from the budget.
And ignoring the fact that Elon is already running 3 companies, you couldn’t possibly find someone with more conflicts of interest than the richest man in the world.
Here’s a quote from Reason (hardly a left wing publication) that sums up how absurd their goal is.
“Musk and Ramaswamy's public pronouncements thus far do not inspire confidence. Musk's promise to save "at least $2 trillion" annually—approximately one-third of all (noninterest) federal spending—suggests a lack of familiarity with the federal budget. Roughly 75 percent of all federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans, and interest, and the final quarter includes priorities such as infrastructure, justice, border security, health research, national parks, unemployment benefits, disaster aid, and disability benefits.”
Large organizations are inherently inefficient because id the non linear growth in communications overhead. If you don’t understand an organization, coming in and hacking away at it is insanely dangerous. How many companies have been ruined when hedge fund buys then and starts trying to “maximize efficiency”?
Most people struggle with meaning, most people don't have it figured out.
So what, dude who suddenly fell into massive wealth tried a bunch of cliched things to find meaning. Did they work? No, these types of cliched things usually don't. However you don't find meaning without trying things. You have to fail before you suceed.
No, your coworkers are complex human beings with complex lives of their own seeking stability and a content life for themselves and their families. Blaming people for not always maximum pushing and risk taking is very simple minded. It is fine to enjoy a content, stable life without aiming for the stars all the time. It doesn't block you from being a star seeker yourself.
Responsibly raising a family is a massive and tiring task on its own but of course you can take the easy way out like Elon and delegate "family" to others starting at insemination because you burned your brain with drugs and had too many conversations with Peter Thiel. Most people don't want that.
And when he mentioned DOGE it was an immediate red flag. These people do not care why or for what purpose governments exist. They only see the inefficiencies and blockers and fail to understand that governments are not profit oriented companies. This is pretty much like failing pre-school. These folks belong in emotional special needs schools.
They did not say that all coworkers are NPCs.
What they said is "I knew that staying at the acquiring company was not it for me for the big company reasons you might suspect (lots of politics, things moved slowly, NPC coworkers, etc.)".
You should read that as "in a big company, there are more coworkers who don't do anything useful" rather than "at a big company, nobody is doing anything useful".
Which isn't really surprising. That is kind of what a job is. Company gives you money in exchange for them telling you what to do for a little while. There is a very real way where "becoming an npc" for 8 hours a day is what it means to be employed for a lot of people. That is not a dig at the person; we all need to do what we need to do to put food on the table.
I've read that lottery winners frequently become seriously unhappy.
Maybe some of us aren't ultra-rich like this guy, but we might deal with some of the same existential issues either planning or encountering retirement.
Would it be so much better for the author to hide this phase of personal growth, and then later on comment on other people's struggles to mock how far they are from them?
I cannot but help think that there's a fair bit of truth behind Terror Management Theory [1], which paraphrased states that a lot of human activity is centered around the need to get our minds off the topic of our mortality, or to find something meaningful in it. I can totally see that someone who spends much of their life working towards a goal of essentially getting rich now finds that he is somewhat rudderless after that point. Is finding something interesting to do meaningful? I mean, it's completely subjective.
Ultimately, that nothing ultimately matters, also does not really ultimately matter.
All we really have is now, and the conditions which have led to now, and our ability to do things within our power now. And that does matter, as much as anything ever can. Which is something. Getting through to that point is not a given.
IMO, part of what made the Buddha, well, the Buddha, is he tried to make it better. Despite knowing all this. And despite it being much, much harder, messier, and more painful than the path he could of taken - which is opting out.
Will you make it better (in your judgement)? Make it worse (in your judgement)? Rely on someone else’s judgement? How accurate is your judgement?
Or opt out (and what does that mean)?
Buddha (depending on the tradition) taught a path to reduce pain, and in some cases opt out (for Monks, at least, to some extent) by hopefully seeing the truth as best as one can.
That form of Buddhism is not very popular.
Religions that give a narrative involving conquering (Islam, Christianity in the recent past), surrendering (Modern Christianity, Jainism), or being chosen/made (Judaism/Hinduism) for/by a deity to achieve heaven or have one’s fate decided are much more popular.
I expect for much the same reason that action movies, dramas, and epics are more popular than quiet walks in the woods.
I walked through this by myself and it took a decade to do so.
Always crazy to see that these things are as old as we are
Be careful to not confuse reading a map, for walking the road.
Take some steps, and see if where it seems to be going makes sense to you.
I watch a youtube video about anything like creating my own door fixtures through 3d print and metal casting.
I would immediadlty buy a nice old house, start working on it.
I have so so many things i don't have time due to money and work, he is so so far away from being intersting, it hurts to read that
But then he realized it's not what he wants to spend his time on
He doesn't care to help people or getting into robotics because he is interested in it.
He doesn't have a real deep relationship with someone to share his live with (he mentions his ex-girlfriend).
He is the type of human being who got lucky rich, but doesn't realize he is empty inside. Elon Musk is even worse.
Captialism as an endgoal for society doesn't bring us any closer to a Star Trek future and there are probably a Billion happier but a lot poorer people ou tthere than him.
He doesn't want to spend his time on it because his capitalistic thinking is so narrow that he doesn't care about the things which are already around him.
When you read the last thing from him " It’s the only thing that feels authentic." even his 'just learning physics' is not even authentic. He doesn't do it for being curious, he does it to " I can start a company that manufactures real world things. "
And the only interesting thing about this blog post, which i will forget tomorrow, is because we tent to like to read things which are more rare than others. There was not much insight or brilliance in his live at all.
How do you know what he did at the company? When you get acqui-hired for large sums you are dropped somewhere in the management block where lets be real most people have no idea what they are doing and they dont even care they are there just for the money.
There are countless stupid fun in the world that money can do that isn't about buying out a human or legally punching an NPC in face. As well as legit meaningful businesses that may or may not make money but kinda fun and useful. The fact that this person is being unable to come up with such a task suggests existence of a problem, though I wouldn't know if it's mental or developmental or physical or circumstantial.
So, go join that boxing/bjj gym and learn just how pathetically average you really are!
Familiy is an option. But being curios and having hobbies also. Or helping people around you. Or starting to think about the people around you and enjoying the support you can provide.
I had my nihilistic depression phase for a decade. There is not much to it.
i went to therapy for 2 years with this perspective that the therapist would fix me like the mechanic fixes my car. I spent 2 hours a week with a psychiatrist & therapist bitching about my life thinking eventually I would get "better".
but then i realized that wasn't getting any better. it's not their responsibility to "fix" me. the only person that could help me was me.
the first thing we reach for is an external solution to solve or escape our current problems and everything is so commoditized that there is something that we can fixate our attention on.
i think that reflecting this fixation inward has made all the difference for me personally.
> The modern cure to all problems. Going to the gym if you feel unfit. Incredible insight.
Before that you are irresponsible to bring new people into this world and should be ashamed.
There are many people struggling with far greater challenges in life and with far less support, but feeling directionless and without a purpose is a common struggle that many people go through.
Possibly speaks more of the culture I am surrounded with than "generals", but maybe not.
Seriously, that's kind of a "fuck you" moment to all the people who helped him earn those millions isn't it?
Between this and hanging around with the head-cases at DOGE, I think the first thing he should spend his money on is a shrink.
Dude really sounds like a bozo again, being brutally honest is no excuse to be unkind
I've seen several founders who kept their team together within a bigger company after a buyout, and went on to do pretty significant projects together with big company resources. It's not a given that you have to be swallowed up by the bureaucracy
> So I broke things off after almost 2 years of unconditional love.
Men need purpose not some consoling words.
From what I've gathered in his post, this guy needs to be told he pushes people away and has trouble forming non-professional relationships (platonic and romantic) as well as as a deep seated desire to be liked, which he can't get out of a professional setting that he was at the top of. But it could also be much more deep than that.
Of course, finding the right therapist is like finding the right mechanical keyboard. You'll go through tons you hate before you find the right one.
One source of skepticism is that they are not really invested in you. If you succeed or if you fail, if you're happy or if you're sad, what's it really to them? Will they have to live with the consequences? At least in a relationship the "therapist" maybe "has some shares" in the other person. (Granted, you can also reverse the logic, e.g., "my parents didn't pay attention to my happiness and just pushed me to become a doctor" / "my wife just wanted me to have money because she wanted to spend it".) This is also why I am skeptical of startup advisors: I'm sure they mean well, but, if you really don't know what you're doing, it's probably better to be an employee for a while, under a boss who succeeds only when you succeed.
Another is that, when I hear therapistic language, a lot seems to embed assumptions of omnipresent psychic violence, and this disturbs me. Perhaps there are people who truly are trapped in situations of "psychological abuse", "gaslighting", and so-on, but my sense is that these words usually become weapons that people wave around, as they adopt darker and darker interpretations of their own, imperfect but basically good, relationships. Then the cynic in me says: Wouldn't causing people to reject their "organic" relationships, create dependence on the relationship with the therapist?
That "therapy" grew out of psychology also is grounds for caution, to me. There is an underlying manipulativeness in the field. Many of the famous experiments, stories of which attract students into the field, were quite manipulative. Some of the core theories of psychology that you learn in school, like operant conditioning, are fairly inhumane. If this is the ground that you build on, what kind of structure do you get? Who is attracted to the field to begin with?
Also, the very fact that the meme is gendered tells you something. Sure, men don't trust therapists, any more than college-educated women trust bearded imams. If a whole school of thought seems somehow not to be on your side, you're not going to trust it. (And I do not mean to imply that to be "college-educated" is ideology-neutral, or that the hypothetical imam is not actually on the hypothetical woman's side.)
...
In the context of this blog post, though, I kind of get it. The guy literally climbed, if not Everest, then some similar peak in the Himalayas. So when you focus on that it's kind of funny.
I'm not sure how what he's doing is "wrong" and what other thing he could be doing would be "right" though. What is the therapist going to tell him to do, and why would that thing be superior to climbing mountains at random? Does existential angst even have a solution?
...
Some of the religions have their own answers, which would encourage different behavior, I suppose. E.g.:
a.)
> 36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
> 37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
> 38 This is the first and great commandment.
> 39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
> 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
If the author of the blog repeated the second half of verse 39 to himself over and over, he might do something different. You do pushups, you develop muscles. You repeat mantras, and, if those mantras are really meaningful, you can shape your own mind.
Or, the works of mercy:
> feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead
> admonish the sinner, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses willingly, comfort the afflicted, pray for the living and the dead
Add in Galatians 3:28 and you've got the high points of Christianity. If you take the words seriously they can affect how you think and what you do: "Right thought, right speech, right action".
b.)
I recall also once reading a Jain text and seeing the Ten Virtues, and reflecting on them altered my behavior at the time, in a positive way. These can be found e.g. here: https://jainworld.jainworld.com/pdf/Ten%20Universal%20Virtue...
One virtue that it emphasized, which is not emphasized to the same degree in Christianity, is honesty. Yes, Christianity inherits the Ten Commandments (which are actually good), but "thou shalt not bear false witness" seems like a somewhat more narrow thing. In much the same way that "though shalt not kill" is really, debatably, the more limited "though shalt not murder". Indeed, Jainism seems to go further than Christianity in many respects. Those virtues, by the way, are (per the previously-linked text):
> 1. Uttama Kshama - Supreme Forgiveness (To observe tolerance whole-heartedly, shunning anger.)
> 2. Mardava - Tenderness or Humility (To observe the virtue of humility subduing vanity and passions.)
> 3. Arjaya - Straight-forwardness or Honesty (To practice a deceit free conduct in life by vanquishing the passion of deception.)
> 4. Shaucha - Contentment or Purity (To keep the body, mind and speech pure by discarding greed.
> 5. Satya - Truthfulness (To speak affectionate and just words with a holy intention causing no injury to any living being.)
> 6. Sanyam - Self-restraint (To defend all living beings with utmost power in a cosmopolitan spirit abstaining from all the pleasures provided by the five senses - touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing; and the sixth - mind.)
> 7. Tapa - Penance or Austerities (To practice austerities putting a check on all worldly allurements.)
> 8. Tyaga - Renunciation (To give four fold charities - Ahara (food), Abhaya (fearlessness), Aushadha (medicine), and Shastra Dana (distribution of Holy Scriptures), and to patronize social and religious institutions for self and other uplifts.)
> 9. Akinchanya - Non-attachment (To enhance faith in the real self as against non-self i.e., material objects; and to discard internal Parigraha viz. anger and pride; and external Parigraha viz. accumulation of gold, diamonds, and royal treasures.)
> 10. Brahmacarya - Chastity or celibacy (To observe the great vow of celibacy; to have devotion for the inner soul and the omniscient Lord; to discard the carnal desires, vulgar fashions, child and old-age marriages, dowry dominated marriages, polygamy, criminal assault on ladies, use of foul and vulgar language)
In particular, I note both Arjaya and Satya.
(A new thing to me, that I notice now, is the inclusion of abhaya (fearlessness) as a kind of tyaga -- a kind of renunciation, a giving-away, a charity. This is food for thought.)
(And personally I would moderate Sanyam.)
My point is, if one needs direction, perhaps these are where one should be looking?
Just miscellaneous thoughts.
People need meaning, not therapy. Meaning used to be provided by religion and philosophy. Religion is diminishing and philosophy is too difficult.
IMHO, the author sounds like he's missing a lot of perspective on things, and talking to other people could help with that - preferably even in a group setting.
It follows that completely removing any potential scarcity might separate you from other people. And how long would you last stewing in your own mental urine before you started thinking of others as less?
Honestly I read this as something to pity; a situation to avoid. Megalomania robs otherwise interesting people of all their humanity and having read a few more comments here , the best thing he could do would be to throw as much money as possible into therapy. You don't have to spare any sympathy for him but Vinay desperately needs help.
But IMO it's not surprising. When I left my first "real job" after ~4 years, it took months before I stopped dreaming about that job. I was amazed how wrapped-up I was in it.
What is surprising is that they put this out there so plainly. Unless they're just trolling .. but I'm going to go with "not trolling", because cynicism just leads to sorrow.
Because if they were, that would have been a crime, and a tort, and at some point in the past 7 years you would have seen a class action lawsuit or criminal investigation over it. Hell, at the very least a short report about their business model being extremely risky. But even though the details of their business model have been public for 7 year...none of those things has happened. (What's the next counter argument guys? That prosecutors in 50 states and countries around the world are all in league with Honey? That absolutely every shortseller on Earth didn't want to make money? That thousands of supposedly aggrieved influencers in the most litigation-happy nation on earth all decided not to pursue any sort of litigation because they were all too embarrassed?)
Honey used its own affiliate codes because that is how it tracked purchases. Sales platforms generally don't provide multi-level affiliate reporting, so that is the only technical way they have to capture transaction-related data. Before the Paypal acquisition (and for some time after) they shared their commissions with marketing affiliates. Whether they still do or not depends on the particular arrangement the marketing affiliate makes with Honey, though based on their current website it appears that revenue sharing is now the exception to be negotiated and not the norm.
Seriously, honey is not the evil conspiracy you all think it is.
As soon as people saw this, they started filing class action lawsuits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H4sScCB1cY So I guess we'll see!
So yeah - it’s fine to call me an NPC. I just have my priorities figured out better than the author.
If you think of yourself as “Player One”, you are literally thinking inside the box. The first step to freedom is to stop thinking about games and scores because they are not the world.
The freedom you have in college is a shallow, parasitic kind of freedom. College is the apex point of your being an uncontributing member of society. Up to that point all you've done is receive. Becoming an adult is taking on responsibility, contributing to society and earning the real freedom to live a life you value. If you maintained the supposed freedom you have at college you're just blind to the fact that you're totally dependent on other people. A more authentic version of the college freedom would be to go live in the woods and forage for sustenance.
