2023

Let’s keep this short.

2023 was the best year of my life. I went from being a conscripted nolife to having one of the best jobs in the world. I met people and went to places I would’ve never thought about, much less cared about, much less thought possible. I fundamentally escaped monotony, and pursued things that felt right but were baffling to my peers. I became financially well-off.

I also got lazier, and dumber. I reflect less and less on my beliefs, spend less time seeking out novel information, and generally lost all alpha. I allowed opportunities to die on the wire, ignoring the things that matter, in favor of staying relaxed. I suffered more tears, migranes, nosebleeds, eczema, cataplexy attacks, etc. this year than the last. I took the novel step of voluntarily seeking out doctors for health concerns (novel for me!), and found some help but not enough. I gave up on the last holdout of my personal philosophy that still mattered to me.

In short: materially & situationally way better; subjectively worse in spirit & health.

Resolutions

What I want out of 2024, are 5 simple things:

1. Increased willfulness
2. Social Exploration
3. Better Health
4. Corrected Information Streams
5. Excitement for the Future

Predictions

Nil.

I don’t know anything especially secret or poorly reported about the future, anymore, so I cannot make probable-but-interesting predictions. This was a lot easier a year ago; past me nailed a lot in private chats. Current me is extremely confused about many different things, like:

• how does the moat hold?
• why’d stability win in court?
• what follows llms?
• when will the levee of VC OSS funds break?
• what are the current events going on in the external environment that actually matter

I can’t even predict what I’ll do tomorrow, much less what happens a year from now.

History

Redacted.

Monthly progress report - Jan

I clicked on my blog on accident and noticed I had written resolutions at some point. It’s a bit bad that I’ve forgotten about them already, but let’s run down the list anyway for fun.

1. Willfulness
   • Complete abject failure. I have made no explicit good choices in the last month.
   • I have explicitly thought about making good choices on some occasions, and explicitly rejected the good choice in those situations. Arguably this is progress, if you consider flipping a sign to be easier than changing magnitudes.
2. Exploration
   • A bit IRL. Not much.
   • Exploration online is more important than in-person, so long as I continue to live in the backwater of Southeast Asia.
3. Health
   • I have decided that all of my problems are psychosomatic. This includes the parts that involve physical evidence, such as waking up to dried blood. The idea that problems cannot be surpassed by sheer willpower is mentally degrading & I choose to reject it.
4. Epistemics
   • Nil progress.
   • I have an idea of where I should be starting, but haven’t blocked out the time to do so.
5. Faith
   • Negative progress; increasingly undetermined to deal with the real world.

Having gone through this, I realise I don’t actually agree with the premise of some of these goals anymore. I am more determined to solve (1) and (4), but I don’t particularly want to touch the rest.

But because I’ve yet to implement (1), my desires remain unanchored, and it’s likely I’ll oscillate into pinning more value on the other tasks at some point in the future. In particular, I expect unavoidable change over the next week.