San Francisco, California—

I’ve been meaning to write this for some time. Whenever I write one of these, there’s a deep sense of urgency and an emotion I can’t contain. This blog has been dear to me - it’s my public diary, a way to express myself with maximum freedom. I write for myself and for the future me who’d be curious about whatever it is that I think about on the daily. I don’t journal a lot. In fact, I’ve tried hard to journal everyday at various points in the last decade, but I’ve never stuck with it. It’s because I am far too self-critical and I subconsciously think that I don’t have a happening life with very much to talk about every single day (I can already sense the lifetime journalers? coming at me with a “oh bro, let your mind run free, don’t overthink this”). To be honest, I actually quite dig a good routine and the peace that comes with it. I now only write whenever I desperately need to get things off my chest and to somewhat derive joy from the process.

I haven’t published anything in a long time, but I have been thinking about writing a long-form since the end of last year. Usually, I have a semblance of a storyline in mind, but this time, I have none. In any case, this is about the thoughts I’ve had on the overarching themes of life as well as the deep conviction I have around some core beliefs. This may get long-winded and jump from place to place, and for that, my sincere apologies.

With the preface out of the way, I’d like to begin by saying that I’ve been practicing gratefulness. One month back, the stars aligned, and I woke up feeling … content. Crazy concept, innit? I wrote a draft of what I thought would turn into a warm-up blog to the one you’re reading right now. It didn’t. It did give me a chance to count my blessings though.

There’s a lot of pain out there. People lose their parents. There’s no friends or family to hold them at the funeral. There’s people dealing with severe PTSD and chronic illnesses. There’s people who slog away their lives as slaves, be it househelp or manual labor in horrible conditions, and their children won’t know any better either. People are unhappy that they aren’t in a relationship. People are unhappier that they are in a relationship - the one they are in is manipulative, abusive, etc. In essence, there’s endless misery if you go looking.

It’s not like I don’t moan about the slightest of inconveniences, I very much do. Sure, everyone’s suffering is unique. Yet some pain is more painful than other pain (woah, faulty stars in the forecast). All this to say, I am not special and can fall prey to any of the unfortunate circumstances of life, at any time really. It’s a reminder that I have a great deal to be thankful for.

I am grateful for my mother who’s the strongest woman I know, for my father whom I can draw inspiration from daily, for my sister who can move mountains, for the few friends whose company I cherish deeply. I am grateful for the many opportunities I’ve been afforded, the ones people beg for a thousandth of in their lifetimes. So glad to have an able body and a mind that can formulate opinions. No debt. No overbearing manager. Unlimited falafel in the fridge.

These days, I get extremely annoyed whenever someone around my age conveys this all-too-common feeling that they are growing old and that they haven’t “done enough.” First off, this is often categorically false - people have a tendency to denigrate and undersell themselves at their low points, I know this because I am guilty of doing it too. No grace to myself. Though what irks me the most here is not that someone feels a certain way but it is that they are in denial, and from my observation, this drives a lot of their depression.

Now do I wish I didn’t have to pluck out the single gray hair off my beard every few days? Yeah bro, you bet. But I am in no denial about age. Maybe I feel unusually optimistic in this moment, but I am convinced that time is not running away and that there’s so much of life yet to experience. Of course, this is no permission to dilly-dally. I barely remember anything at all from a decade ago, I have five more left to live… To wrap, a few words from my all-time character Count Rostov from A Gentleman in Moscow -

[…] he should walk among the willows, read a timeless text, converse with a friend, beneath the pergola, or reflect before the fire - engaging in those endeavors that have no appointed hour, and that dictate their own beginnings and ends.

Poetic.

Specifically on lessons I’ve learned from my father off late. Over the last year or so, the depth of our one-to-one conversations has increased materially. He’s almost 60 now and has lived what I consider to be a full life, eventful and borderline insane. He’s fierce and leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of his dreams which he still has plenty of. Recently I asked him what he prays about every morning. He told me, pointedly, that he wishes to have the strength equivalent to that of a collective of ten thousand elephants. He prays for a mental fortress. He has a big ego and, for as long as I can remember, he has stood up for himself and picked up disputes with people in the community. I asked him why that is, and he mentioned that on average, only one out of a hundred thousand people has the self-belief to do whatever it takes (he’s the one out of the lot, by the way). Everyone else, especially true for where I come from, revels in the opportunity to bring the one person down and in turn somehow feel fulfilled in their life. Jealously. People hate to admit that they’re jealous. It’s a very human emotion - good fuel for the proverbial fire, for better or for worse.

My father came from poverty, yet he, alongside my mother, was able to provide my sister and I with a childhood of abundance. We have enough now, bang average middle class as per both Indian and Western standards. There’s no substitute for experience - he’s had his fair share of fumbles, which strangely has given him the confidence to trust himself and go all in.

I believe I too have a mildly obsessive personality. Over the last three years, I have spent a good chunk of time trading crypto, outside my 9-to-5 job. As Jared Vennett aptly put it, I can feel you judging me. I generally hate discussing this in person because a) often people roll their eyes and I don’t care about convincing them one way or another, b) I’m insecure about this myself - the state of being always on drains so much energy that I prefer to white lie to keep conversations short, and c) there’s more to me than trading. Now I’ve never been a gamer myself, but the best way to describe whatever it is I do is through the lens of an MMORPG (credits to jez). A community, levels/xp, money, etc.

I’m not daytrading, that I think is too skilled for me - I’m a smoothbrain after all. I’m trying to find pockets of arbitrage that I can exploit, whether through better tools and sources of information or simply faster hands. It’s a game of selling to the greater fool. In this space, I am of the belief that I’d rather make money than be right, i.e. even though I may not be delusional enough to consider crypto as actually useful, it doesn’t stop me from trying to extract +EV from the market.

In other words, I like to win. I have always been competitive, though I try hard to not be a sore loser. It’s a space with asymmetric opportunities with unfathomable outcomes (both upside and downside) for anyone willing to grind and hone their edge. Please understand that whatever I say here carries a ton of survivorship bias - it’s not like I’ve “made it,” in fact far from it, but the fact that I am not zeroed out already puts me in the top 10% percent of the players in this game. I am dangerously passionate about the things I enjoy. You spend enough time with me, I can convince you to put your bankroll on worthless shitcoins or, worse yet, watch test cricket with me, maybe even both at the same time. Jokes aside, I don’t lead my friends astray. My risk tolerance has built up over the years, paying a lot of tuition to the game along the way. I don’t sportsbet, nor have I been to a brick-and-mortar casino. I simply refuse to partake in bets that are a cointoss at best.

All this is cope from my side and perhaps a gambler justifying his addiction. The overarching idea that there should be a balance in everything rubs me the wrong way. The concept of work-life balance is so ingrained in society, and for good reason too, that it’s hard to know when to take the leap and go all in on something. A friend reminded me recently that average people do average things. People are often unwilling to give up on anything and they much prefer balance because it’s the natural progression of life. Everyone loves a shortcut to the destination (more money, happy home, fit body - same concept).

I sacrificed my sleep, mental and physical health, a budding relationship, countless events to connect with friends and family. My dopamine receptors are fried. Do I have regrets? Absolutely. On bad days, I am miserable. I am unfortunately not at the “live life with no regrets” stage yet. On good days like today, I am content and can reflect, be reasonable and a little kind to myself. I am slowly internalizing that there’s no comparing the two sides on a scale. Can’t have it all. You take whatever you’ve learned and carry it forward. The space is so toxic (I was new to this as I had never previously participated in online “communities”) - people casually throw around rape jokes, the n-word, etc and are openly xenophobic and homophobic - that it’s tough to always remember your why. The entertainment is also non-stop and there’s always something spicy happening on Twitter.

After having been on the rollercoaster for a good amount of time, I can confidently say that you simply have to want it 10x more than the next person. Anyone I’ve known who’s made it truly lived and breathed the game for months or years on end. For the sake of brevity, I won’t try to recollect the various crazy events I’ve spectated. I’ll share tidbits of my own experience, straight from my journal.

  1. The end of 2023 was a low point for me. I had the hollow feeling that after months of pulling 16-hour days and running myself into the ground, I didn’t have much to show for my input. Separately, around the same time, I shipped a bunch of niche products, got 1k+ users, and even made a few thousand dollars. Immaterial amount in the grand scheme of things but a rewarding feeling nonetheless. I rediscovered the joy of coding.

  2. In Nov 2024, for 48 hours, I felt sublime. Every trade that crossed my screen just made sense. Flow state. The same month, I also fumbled two $10m trades which is an unimaginable sum of money. Had I gone into a coma and got woken up after a month, I would’ve been day-drinking bottomless mimosas instead of writing this. I’m now way more mature when it comes to the whole “shoulda woulda coulda” mindset, so I am not sad about it. To be frank, I find it hilarious. It adds to my lore.

  3. On Jan 17, 2025, I felt small - no other way to put it. I was visiting India for a vacation. Soon after arriving, I got sick and spent a good two weeks nursing myself back to health. Just as I was finally starting to get a full night’s sleep, Trump launched his memecoin in the early hours of the fateful day. I woke up a few hours late, and it instantly hit me what had happened. After spending thousands of hours building intuition, I knew I’d missed one of those moments that everyone salivates over. I was in fact not in the right place at the right time. I know of over 20 people within my extended network of acquaintances (degens) who made over $1m, some even banked 8 figures. I felt envious, not because they made money and I didn’t, but because they got to feel validated for the hard yards they’d put in over the years - oh what I’d give for the satisfaction!

I don’t have a success story to sell you. As I said earlier, it’s not lost on me that I am simply a survivor and that everyone comes across as a genius in the bull market. In the past, I have been asked multiple times as to whether there’s a number in my mind. No, there’s no number - attaining FIRE (specifically, the Retire Early part) is a made-up concept. I plan to extract from the market so long as there’s value on offer (that I can realistically capture with my skills). That said, I can’t manufacture opportunities out of thin air either. I am currently hands-off and, for the time being, have shifted focus to other aspects of life.

This brings me to the point that finding meaning is hard. I don’t have many material needs. I’d like my family and I to have a secure life, but that’s about it. I occasionally think about what it means to be charitable. I am unsure if it’s my age (aka too young/not wise enough), my company, or that I am not religious, but charity rarely comes up in conversation. It’s as though we’ve grown so individualistic that the act of charity seems like a foreign concept. Something reserved for the rich, done either for tax write-offs or to rid themselves of an unspoken guilt.

Of course to some extent, yes, not everyone’s in a position to give. This is the case especially for newer generations that barely have assets of their own, can’t afford houses, and face an increasingly uphill battle with regards to social mobility. Still, I’d like to believe that you don’t need very much to be able to make a significant impact in someone else’s life. Again, my father just gets it. As an example, he routinely provides his employees with no-interest, long-dated loans to help marry off their children. He tops it up with a healthy kanyadaan (read: a monetary gift from a wedding guest) and obviously does not deduct this sum from the loan, which by the way he’s already kissed goodbye. This simple yet meaningful act goes a long way in easing the stressors of those living paycheck to paycheck.

Whether you believe in farming karma is irrelevant. You help others -> you feel good about yourself -> you feed positive energy to your brain -> you want to help more. You don’t need 10 self-help books for this. If you die before your good is rewarded (i.e. your karma is returned), tough luck.

There’s other examples of generosity I can point to, especially from my travels. However, here I’ll mention something from home that left me floored. Our househelp, let’s call her didi, once told me with visible distress that she’d forgotten to bring a gift for my parents’ anniversary. Just as she said it, my mother walked into the room, and didi burst into tears. Now imagine this: you’re stuck in an unhappy marriage, working multiple jobs barely enough to educate and feed your two kids, and yet you have the capacity to care so deeply about making someone who’s largely a stranger feel special. How is that even possible?

I am not here to nitpick or debate charity versus kindness. My point is simple - if you broaden the notion of charity, it’s about giving without expecting anything in return. I am not there yet, but I aspire to build that muscle as I grow wiser. I am also tired of the transactional nature of friendships in the West. Oh, you helped me move boxes? I owe you a pizza. Ah, I posted about you on my socials! Now you’re expected to do the same. In a way, it’s a blessing in disguise that I keep a small circle - it spares me the constant disappointment of people not living up to my expectations, whether just or not.

More on inequality. I will caveat this by reminding you that I am a capitalistic hoe. Regardless, I still want to see all my friends win, and if that means paying more taxes, then so be it. I’ve come across plenty of hardworking people in my life, and yet I can count on one hand the number of people who’ve successfully leveled up and broken free from the socioeconomic ceiling they’re born into. Lately, I’ve been listening to Gary Stevenson, a trader turned political reformist, on inequality and broader macroeconomics. One of his claims is that most economists in academia don’t know what they’re talking about - they don’t put their money where their mouth is, and as a result, get a lot of predictions wrong.

I don’t have a rebuttal, but this idea got me thinking. It made me realize that maybe we shouldn’t listen to people who haven’t done it before themselves. In the crudest words possible: if you’re so effing smart, why aren’t you rich? Calm down, I get that not everything revolves around money. Focus on the sentiment here, not the words. This logic applies to everything in life, whether it’s marriage, fitness, investing, or “follow your dreams.” I find it incredibly unattractive when someone yaps on about a topic they have little to no authority over. On the flip side, it’s so cool to just accept that you’re dumb.

I am running out of juice here. I’ll end with one of the most fascinating views I’ve read off late. It’s from Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is anything but your average, lame self-help book. Would recommend.

Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods—the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts.

It made me wonder - do parents get envious and so they subconsciously subjugate their children to a way of life they had once lived themselves? A lot of that “when we were young…” energy. Or is it that they don’t know any better than to draw from their own lived experience? I guess I won’t truly know until I’m a parent myself. Parenting has to be one of the toughest and most thankless jobs out there.

Thanks for reading. I’m shocked that I wrote this in proper capitalization. I’m in my lowercase case arc, yeah very edgy I know.

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  • Cool words: Kalashnikov, McIlroy (from the golfer)
  • San Francisco is a vibe
  • Punjabi music slaps