Hello World! - Ice Hotel

What I Learned Today:

• - Wealth Tracker/Budget Apps are a lot better at linking with financial institutions than before

• - Infinite Regress, ie sending things down infinity means you can never get it back (Losing a puppy and asking for it back in an Infinite Hotel)

• - Diagonal Contradiction proof, if you have a set with all the possible real numbers between 0 and 1, and you create a new number by creating a digit that is distinct from each number in the ith decimal place, then you would have created a number that does not appear and thus could not have been in the set of all possible real numbers, meaning this is an uncountable set

• - Knowledge must somehow come from within, it is your interpretation of others directions that give you the directions, not the directions themselves

• - Some people put heaters into their fireplaces to warm the flue and prevent smoke blowback

• - Sweet potatoes can get exceptionally jammy when placed over hot coals

• - The most memorable moments in 2025 were when I traveled

• - I have unknowingly hidden entire swaths of life's experiences behind the curtain of activation energy

• - I have also knowingly put my life on hold for 3 months chasing an outcome that was never realized, but didn't realize the magnitude of how much I put my life on hold.

The sidewalk outside today was packed hard with ice, ice that could not be cleared even after 3 hard jabs with a shovel. Initially I had wanted to spend the day at my favorite local coffee shop, then meander to a comic store to grab a gift for an old friend, and then head home. Instead, I spent the majority of the day inside, tinkering with the fireplace, reading, and reflecting on the past, as well as working on this website.

Something about the stillness of winter, the sun reflecting across the iced over neighborhood, and the new year close at hand has made me unusually reflective. I'm always nostalgic and pessimistic over what I accomplished whenever I do a new year's reflection, but this year, and especially today, has been different. The usual thought still enters my mind: "The year is coming to an end for the xxth time in my life. I really thought I would have done more by now." Put best centuries before, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" are words I remember each December and is the general sentiment that clouds the holiday season.

In many ways, the year(s) has been somewhat disappointing. I am still lifting nearly the same weight as I was 4 years ago, my financial status hasn't meaningfully grown, and I am still more or less the same person that I was then. Or at least that's what I think upon first reflection.

If I dig deeper, I find that there actually has been much growth, just not as much as I would have liked. So it must be that I:

• a) My growth was significant, but my starting point was too low

• b) My growth was significant, but in areas that I did not want

• c) My growth was significant, but the goal was too lofty

• d) My growth was actually insignificant, in which case it does not matter what my starting point or ending point is

I guess the purpose of this post is to find out if the current way that I've been living my life has been meaningful/fulfilling/or any other synonym I would use for "A good use of one's time". Let's begin with examining the past year.

My hopes for 2025 were that I would somehow magically become a millionaire. Pretty thin desire if you ask me. And though thin desire it may be, it confers useful advantages to my present state. I can travel more, largely unfettered so long as I stay at lower end accommodations (or my favorite accommodation: hostels). Retirement will be much closer so long as I follow the 4% rule and spend much less than I do today. And I could also quit my current job without feeling as much guilt that perhaps I am making a critical error in my career.

Using the concept of a thin vs thick desire, is this actually a thick desire then? Would the conferment of wealth meaningfully change who I am as a person?

If anyone answers that in the affirmative, then they probably have failed as a human being. The more interesting question is whether having more money will meaningfully change who I can become?

Now that's a more interesting thought, because it means that I would be able to follow my hobbies, dreams, or passions more meaningfully if I were to have more wealth. Is this actually the case? Having more money would definitely allow me to pursue more interesting hobbies, but it doesn't actually increase the rate at which I learn per unit of time. The slope won't change, though I will have more time to follow the slope.

But even this above thought is not exactly accurate, because it assumes that I need some monetary amount (in this case 1 million dollars) to be able to pursue my dreams. Is that actually the case as well? What benefit does having more money actually give me? It gives me more ability to purchase goods and services and the ability to feel like I can spend my time doing what I wish. And that's probably the most valuable asset, this feeling that I can do whatever I wish to do.

And if I were to be completely honest, I could leave NYC in an instant, rent out some cottage or my dream Westphalia, and just live out my days reading, thinking, writing, coding. Though would this be my best life? What does my best life even look like?

Well, to take the words of Charlie Munger, "Invert. Always invert." So let's invert here.

What would my unideal life look like?

If I were to be doing mediocre/underperforming work at some dead end job with a group of toxic incompetents, which then drag me down into the cesspool of petty infighting that accompanies inability. It would eat up all my time so that I would not be able to have meaningful relationships with the people I care most about, and I am not only technically worse off, I am also more tired than when I began the whole endeavor. I have no money to escape the cycle of minimum wage employment, and I am left with no friends or family. Put simply, I am spending all my time doing others' whims and getting nothing in return. I am not exceptional, and I am living an exceptionally miserable life stuck doing unfulfilling tasks (or stuck doing nothing at all).

So would it be that much better if I were to be employed but still chained to money? Only if it confers growth to me and allows me to become exceptional. If I come out of the experience a significantly improved person, then maybe it is worth it. But will this growth be more than if I were to do my own thing?

Well, as it stands, no one really knows the answer. I think that things like an individual's potential is incredibly hard to tell without actually jumping into things and seeing them try it out over a long enough timespan. Otherwise, it's all just a belief that things will somehow work out. And for me, staking an entire year of employment at one of the world's top companies, during one of the most unstable periods of the industry, on just a small belief is a rather big risk. There are ways to mitigate this risk, but I'm not doing it, which then reasonably suggests perhaps the problem isn't employment, it's just me.

So as it stands, the risk is not worth taking to do my own startup without demonstrating sufficient passion or ability. If it significantly boosts not only my financial prospects and skills, but also my own miscalibrated sense of confidence, perhaps it makes sense to join the next best offer that comes my way.

Put in that light, Scale was not a complete waste of time. I met interesting and talented people, and perhaps even more importantly, I got my foot in the door with AI.

This has put the question of what to do with my career to rest, and all of the previous passage was only related to work. I want to focus on the broader theme of "Am I living a fulfilling life?"

Let's take a look at the average day. I wake up at 9am, putter about for 1 hour, go to work until 6pm, watch Netflix for 1 hour, maybe have read a little bit on the subway, and maybe go to a bar or restaurant at the end. Occasionally the work day is productive, many times it's not, and almost all the time it's only passably interesting.

Now does that look fulfilling to you?

Okay, so I am not living a fulfilling life. To be clear, it is a blessed life allowing many luxuries that have been glossed over, eg a high rise apartment in NYC, the ability to eat out, never having to truly worry about finances, but the actual core of the life I'm leading has not changed. It's still just going through the motions, still living an unexamined life.

What would make this significantly better then? How can I attribute meaning?

• - Doing only activities that energize me 99% of the time

• - Spending more time doing real activities

• - Exploring more of the city

• - Exploring new hobbies

• - Devoting more time to actually doing my hobbies

The underlying theme of the above is I want my days to have momentum towards something. Whether that's an athletic goal or a skill to be learned or an achievement waiting to accomplished, I want to be building each towards excellence. Each day should build upon the previous. Incredibly easy to say, hard to do. Right now, I don't even know what to build towards which is partially the reason I'm writing this.

Several goals that are always valuable:

• - Health

• - Time

• - Intelligence

• - Ability

• - Relationships with Friends and Family

I don't prescribe to the belief that sacrificing relationships or health is a good way to achieve something in life. Sacrificing everything towards the pursuit of one thing seems like a good way to end up with an outwardly good life that is completely hollow. The above goals are more or less what I already know I should be striving for, and yet I am still writing this post and seeking something more.

I think the answer to the above is that I want to be excellent. Really any metric of exceptionalism can be used here, Youtube subscriber count, career status, influence, wealth, Pulitzer, really anything, but I believe that I should be at least exceptional in one regard. What I am now is most certainly not excellent. It's good, but not great.

Why do I constantly have this feeling of needing to be excellent? Because otherwise there is no overarching narrative in my days. I can be the happiest I can be with champagne and caviar every day, but it is wholly devoid of any meaning when all the days are just scattered dots across the page, no connecting lines to create a picture. It is painful to relive every year with the same words, "Better luck next time", because we all realize, there might not be a next time to look forward to. Importantly, working towards exceptionalism gives my days meaning, regardless of if I actually reach my goal.

So now "all" that is left to do is just choose what to be exceptional at, but already, I feel like the day has been building towards it. And with any luck, each day in 2026 will too.

Happy New Year

- Justin