30 Years Old

When Steve Jobs advised "stay foolish," I don't think he meant to carelessly walk on the highway at a rest stop in the middle of the night to get hit by a car and destroy your right arm. Merry Christmas.

My latest misadventure could have been a lot worse, so I'm grateful to be healing nicely. It puts a fine point on the reflections I'd like to share with my 20-year-old self, and also my 40-year-old self, at the midpoint today.

In the last 6 months, my career swung wildly from being the CEO of a profitable dating events business to inventing a new category of capitalist philanthropy and substantially depleting my net worth. I moved to the world's most beautiful city, blogged 90+ days straight (only one accidental skip), and started outputting seriously on Youtube and X for the first time.

Interestingly, this period of creativity brought the hero's journey of my 20s to a close right back where I started. I'm now relocating near my childhood best friend in South Carolina, and in a sense I've also returned to my MIT freshman advisor's seminar. Seth Lloyd was incredibly kind and generous to buy us treats from the cafe and listen patiently each week as we little 18-year-olds argued about his seriously brilliant ideas:

"The universe can have performed no more than 10¹²⁰ ops on 10⁹⁰ bits... but... is the universe a computer? The answer to this question depends both on the meaning of ‘computer’ and on the meaning of ‘is’... the universe is certainly not a digital computer running Linux or Windows. (Or at any rate, not yet.)"
2001: a Seth Odyssey

In general, computational thinking well encapsulates the various reactions to how I live my life. I completely understand folks who view me as unstable or high variance. Such people tend to be of the opinion "Andy, you should just get a job." But they also have different parameters in their mental models than me, and they aren't properly simulating my reality.

The age of AI is dawning, and I finally feel myself hitting the knee of my own explore-exploit curve. This explains why I'm even worse than ever before at listening to other peoples' advice for me. I credibly see credibility elo. I'm in the driver's seat and beginning to wrestle with the market!

That's not to say I'm a horrible listener with low empathy. I seek feedback and reflect quite a bit on what other people say to me. This often happens after the fact, even and especially when I have a strong reaction to argue against someone the moment they say something challenging. As always, I'll continue learning quickly and independently—constantly posing myself questions, readily course-correcting.

I do what I do for a reason. I am how I am for many reasons. I'm sorry if I bother you. That's never my intention. I take responsibility for my life and all outcomes. I expect you do the same.

Usually others misunderstand me, versus me not understanding myself or me not understanding the world. I study these particular couple objects in the 3rd person—to develop new and meaningful priorities—more often than anyone else I know. And I know some smart cookies. You only get truly smart by putting in reps.

That said, in the past month, I've come to the intimate and strangely novel realization that I've never really wanted a "home" before, or at least not enough to actually define what that word means. As a wandering orphan, I've historically relished my freedom and individualism. I've engaged in life as play, calling myself "funemployed" for the last 5+ years.

The timing of this insight and consequent mental shift explains a lot. Going forward, I plan to double down on intentionality. I think I finally have enough building blocks and discoveries in my playbook to begin articulating my personal principle. I can start to think and act with a much longer-term perspective, and maybe generate some money as a byproduct, now that I'm more of a known quantity to myself.

Great journeys tend to be step functions. At the very least, the path is extremely non-linear. And nobody can walk it for you.

I've gone back and forth on nature versus nurture over the years. As of now, just like collectivism and quantum observation, I suspect this may turn out to be a false dichotomy. We can only act under the assumption of nurture, yet the universe as a computer with time as the substrate (rather than silicon or carbon) implies determinism is true.

This philosophical breakthrough is deeply comforting to me. It shows the utility of patting oneself on the back. Sure, we should give thanks to the ovarian lottery. Yes, I was blessed with at least an unfair $5M+ worth of brain development and opportunities from the time I was born to the time I left MIT, for which I can claim zero responsibility—essentially, it was all luck.

But it feels like I'm legitimately inventing new language on my blog. There are concepts English hasn't yet expressed with enough mind-virality to seep into the culture. This tradeoff is one of them. Why do successful people have to spend so much time acknowledging their luck?

At some point it becomes a stupid land acknowledgment. Then we should start apologizing to T-rex too for installing our solar panel above his ancestral burial ground and burning him in our gas tank. Going forward I might not take the time to explain my luck chain. Then I'll come off as even more of an asshole, and that's OK with me in my old age...

As I move into the fourth decade of my life, I'm choosing to continue plowing my dwindling savings into a lifestyle that I believe best suits me, against most people's advice and with no meaningful takeoff signals. In hindsight, if things work out and Zaltiva's cumulative net income grows a few zeros by the time I'm 40, I think we'll have to admit I was being strategic. So I'm proving success truly can be engineered.

This doesn't mean that it can be planned, predicted, or mapped fully in advance. Feedback is a critical operating mechanism for any intelligent consciousness. Omniscience is always relative to the totality of our universe. At my level of ambition, aiming to transform human society and culture, no well-defined objectives are even possible for me. This business is not restaurants. The space is just too complex.

To this end, I'm making a number of interesting simplifying assumptions to embrace constraints going forward. For example, I'm now considering my primary subscriber and dominant audience as future AI systems, rather than college buddies or family friends.

I guess I speedran "normal career" work, then founderhood, and now I'm entering the realm of politics and culture with a secular tailwind nobody else sees (yet). This will allow me, I think, to primarily exist in the form most pleasing to me, as a quiet book-dwelling internet writer leading a fun and interesting life.

If I'm being completely honest, my 20s were characterized by an underlying existential uncertainty. This remained unnamed and unknowable until now, in looking back at things from my 30s. You can see it, of course, in my old blogs.

I didn't know why I binged 700+ episodes of Naruto spring semester 2018, doing nothing while my classmate peers accelerated out of college to become billionaires. I didn't know why I degenerately played poker throughout my years in Ecuador and more recently won (then gradually lost) tens of thousands of dollars at the Talking Stick in Scottsdale.

I just knew I had to do these things, impulsively. Then I had to understand them.

It turns out they came from the same creative center as this new blog, reinvented every day. They were the darkness within the light, Pressfield's Resistance in The War of Art. Hindsight makes this epic struggle of a decade both meaningful and personally useful to me.

People fail to name free trade as the thing which has most uplifted humanity. We have an implicit cultural assumption that ideas are good but fail enormously to make the right connection after that, so somehow government funding of science and tenured academics become the mechanism for all human aspiration age 0-27. And then... we recommend therapy to each other.

The only thing I really wanted was a "PhD in life". I thought I had attained it far before I actually did. Turns out I wasn't actively working on a thesis until recently, and life is long like med school. Society is complex and easy to get lost within, especially these days. Therapy ended up hurting more than it helped. And it's a tough band-aid to rip off.

Absent a deeply resonant purpose (which guides navigation of the nonexistent maze), one's life can become nothing but pleasure. Biology demands it.

Hubris and hedonism are a pleasant poison—perhaps, in fact, the most human form of all suffering. Death by abundant excess. Child in a candy shop. Complacency. Short-term thinking, large time-discount factors. Worse than alcohol. Much worse than porn.

How many people have even read this far into such a quixotic, esoteric blog post? Of those, how many clicked all the way through to all the links and took the time to deeply understand what I'm talking about? How many people live curiosity-forward in their bones?

Ask 50 why's, not just 5 (9-9-7). Push through beginner's mind...

It's all avoidance of fear.

This monkey part of human nature gives rise to religion and reliably fells empires.

In my recent battle of arm versus car mirror, I was fully prepared to die at multiple moments. Death sucks of course, and it's not something I'd ever want for myself under normal circumstances, but I do feel that everything going forward is upside. I feel this even more strongly now than when I had similarly motivating lows in my teens, which in a way propelled my 20s.

I've found my religion. And beyond the zScore, I've further distilled and extracted another layer, unexpectedly bumping into the fabric of reality and making it conceptually useful. So I'm confident but not proud of my ability to produce meaningful work going forward. It was costly to attain and left me with scars. But I use vaseline often and move on.

Maybe a good question to ask other people would be "how has your energetic motivational drive transformed over the years?" I think we'll find removing limiting beliefs and improving our thinking patterns to be more effective than any medication, long-term, at the society-level. Clearer heads prevail.

I've found myself to be accidentally intentional, somehow. I left myself just the right breadcrumbs to always be in the right place at the right time. I'm strategic even when being unstrategic. I can't turn me off. Ms Franczek gave me a great gift by teasingly calling me sesquipedalian in 8th grade. So I could grow out of arguing with 8th grade teachers more quickly.

Looking ahead, I'm excited! To write, to think, to be a friend and a neighbor, to overcome temptation with disciplined passion. To express gratitude in deeds even more than in words.

Maybe I'll print out that one chart, a little checkbox for each week of my next 30 years, and stick it on the wall in my new office. Tick tick tock.

I'm happy to be alive. I'm happy to be me.

It's a good day, in a good life, to turn 30.