Embrace The Warm Colors Of Life

Introduction

“The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity” went places I didn’t expect. I had meant for the piece to be a diagnosis of crowd behavior, a framework for understanding why an entire generation is reaching for casino chips instead of career ladders. “Long degeneracy” was also, quite explicitly, a thesis on where to position if you believe this behavior persists.

Waves upon waves of you felt seen, as though someone finally understood your angst and frustration, and took the words you couldn’t find right out of your mouth and put them in writing.

Some of you took it as a rallying cry and said “Fine, the crowd is gambling, but I don’t have to be the crowd. I can be the house.” That is absolutely swell. All I want for you is to know what is coming ahead so you can position yourself for this structural change.

For the ones who wanted something more prescriptive, a guide on what to do, on how to step into the future, this piece is it. I want you to know that there is space in the future for you, for your hopes and ambitions, and that despair is not the answer.

A Not Short Story

I had ended the first article with a short story about a friend. Let me start this article with a story about me.

I was born into an extremely poor and troubled family. I was fortunate to have been in an extremely rich country, so even poverty did not result in dire straits. Still, I was poor enough that I had to choose between lunch or dinner, coupled with stories about divorce, drugs, abuse, bloody nights and trouble.

Growing up, I had this nagging feeling that there was more to life than just being a proverbial dog. Watching the people around me live and not truly experience life was visceral; to me, they were gray people in a world of color, and they reeked of despair and of surrender to poverty.

This had a profound impact on me. For a while I had wondered if this too was my destiny.

But I truly believed I was destined for more, and thought long and hard about how to escape. I craved realization as all of you do. Something in me was restless, desperate to actually experience life and not be locked out of all that could bring me joy.

I plotted and planned for escape, and I broadly understood that I needed a stable foundation I could live from so that I could buy call options (bets that had a small probability of giving you a large payout) on the life I was looking for.

Getting that stable foundation is not easy when you are poor. This is not an autobiography so I will spare you the details, but it involved:

• Flipping burgers whilst studying

• Serving in the military

• Completing my undergraduate degree whilst being in the military

• Being buried in loans up to the neck to afford any kind of education

It was difficult but I was extremely determined. Nothing could stop me, not even if I had to learn programming under the moonlight, deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, with a notepad and pencil. I would think about and try to practice data structures and algorithms by hand and only run them during the weekend. It was slow, painful and torturous. But my desire for actualization was greater than any temporary pain I had to go through.

Without burying the lede, my efforts paid off when I left the military and landed a role in one of the largest hedge funds as a quantitative researcher.

People think that quants are huge risk-takers, and some of them are. But if you really think about it, being a quant is one of the lowest risk jobs you can actually do. You are practically guaranteed a high pay without taking much risk.

This was my stable foundation from which I could buy the call options on my life. Some of them paid off, and today I am in an extremely fortunate position, no longer a prisoner of financial mediocrity.

Unlike the people of my childhood, I get to live in color now. I can tell you what that means concretely: it means I can travel with the love of my life to appreciate the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel last spring and appreciate David together for the first time. It means I can go to the gym for two hours on a Wednesday because nobody owns my time. It means when I see something beautiful, I don’t have to calculate whether I can afford to experience it.

I hope you will get to experience art by the greats as I did.

I had achieved escape velocity.

I only wish the same for you.

A Zen Koan

A master approaches his student while holding a large, switch-like stick in his hands. He tells his student:

“If you tell me the stick is real, then I will beat you with it. If you tell me the stick is not real, then I will beat you with it. If you say nothing, then I will beat you with it.”

And so, the student reaches out, grabs the stick, and breaks it.

This is my point. My point will always be one of agency.

Once you see the game, you can break the stick.

The Contentment Option

You might not need to escape at all.

You are not hungry. You are not fighting for survival. You have a roof. You have people who care about you. You have the cognitive bandwidth to even contemplate questions like “what gives my life meaning?” and “am I self-actualizing?”

For almost all of human history, the primary occupation of almost everyone was not dying. Securing enough calories to make it to tomorrow. Keeping shelter from killing weather. Avoiding violence. Our ancestors would have killed for the chance to be anxious about career fulfillment instead of anxious about starvation.

These are luxury problems. I say that not to dismiss them. They’re real, and they hurt. But having these problems at all represents a kind of victory.

There is space in this world for contentment. For looking at what you have and saying: this is enough. This is good.

Contentment can be the wisest choice you make.

But.

If that’s not you. If something in you is genuinely reaching for more, not because Instagram told you to want it, but because you feel it in your bones the way I felt it in my childhood, then we need to talk about how to do that intelligently.

The Shape of Intelligent Escape

My escape was not random.

It goes like this: build a foundation, then take your shots.

The foundation has two parts. The first is an education that lasts. The second is income that sustains. Only after you have both do you earn the right to swing for the fences.

You cannot control how life will turn out. You can’t will yourself into winning a lottery, but you can control your ability to play and your reaction to life happening. Put simply, if you need to roll a 6 to escape financial mediocrity, then you should put yourself in a situation where you can take an infinite number of rolls until you hit a 6.

Luck happens to us and that is out of our control, yes, but we can increase the surface area for which luck can happen. That is the taking shots part.

Most people get this backwards. They see the call options, the moonshots, the asymmetric bets, and they reach for them while standing on sand. This is how you blow up. This is how you end up worse than where you started, bitter and broken and convinced you are doomed.

The game might be rigged. But you can still win if you play it correctly.

An Education For Life

When I say education, I do not necessarily mean school. It is far more important that you learn than where you learn. MIT OCW is an excellent FREE resource for education that is available and non-discriminatory. If you can read this article on your phone or laptop, you can get an education.

School is one way to get educated. What I really want you to do is: develop skills that compound over time and resist being automated away.

The worst response to “AI is coming for white-collar jobs” is to retreat to whatever feels safe in the moment. The better response is to ask: what capabilities will still matter when the current wave of automation has finished?

I can tell you what I THINK those are:

• Judgment calls when the stakes are high and the data is ambiguous.

• Commanding and orchestrating AI as a force multiplier.

• Contributing to AI research itself.

• Translation between people who speak different languages—technical and non-technical, executive and individual contributor.

• Sales, which is really the ability to understand what someone wants and show them how to get it.

• Building trust and soothing fears, which is a deeply human phenomenon.

• Managing chaos, holding multiple competing priorities in your head and making progress on all of them.

None of these require a specific degree. All of them will require deliberate practice over years.

And here is the beautiful thing: you have more tools to develop these skills than any generation before you. AI, the same force creating anxiety about displacement, is also an absurdly powerful tutor. You can learn anything, from anyone, for (practically) free, right now. The excuses that existed twenty years ago have largely evaporated.

What remains is the willingness to learn and the discipline to keep going when it gets hard. I learned data structures by pencil in a jungle. You have Claude powered by the entire internet. Use them.

A Sustainable Foundation

“Just get a good job” sounds like something your uncle would say at Thanksgiving, right before telling you that he bought his house for $40,000.

I know. I wrote an entire piece about why the traditional path feels closed.

But “harder” is not “impossible.” And a well-paying job gives you something that no amount of gambling can: a stable base from which to take intelligent risks.

There are boundless opportunities on the internet to actually earn decent coin if you look and are willing to up-skill yourself for them. My field and expertise is narrow, so I can only talk about the ones I know about:

• Programming (building something) bounties

• Bug bounties

• Remote programming jobs (especially in blockchain/crypto)

• Data science competitions (Kaggle)

• Crowdsourcing alpha (Numerai, BRAIN, CrunchDao, TrexQuant)

I had designed a few of these myself so I know a lot of thought has been put into these so they are economically competitive for the ones who are willing and able to strive.

It is very important that you have a sustainable foundation. The people who do best at the casino are not the ones who show up desperate with their rent money. They’re the ones who show up with capital they can afford to lose, with skills that let them see edges others miss, with time horizons that don’t require a win NOW.

When I took my shots, I took them from a position of strength. I had income. I had skills that would let me recover if everything went wrong. This meant I could be patient. I could wait for good opportunities instead of jumping at every bad one. I could survive being wrong multiple times before finally being right.

Do not think of the job as a ceiling. It’s the floor from which everything else becomes possible.

Then Take Your Shots

Once you have education that compounds and income that sustains, you have earned the right to bet. And at that point, it starts to feel like calculated risk-taking where you understand the odds and you can afford to be wrong.

This is where the original thesis comes back in.

If you believe that a generation of economically anxious young people will continue pouring money into casinos, prediction markets, memecoins, sports betting, courses, and dreams, then you can position for that. You can be the platform. You can own the equity. You can build the infrastructure. You can take rake from the flow.

But you need resources to do that. You need time. You need runway as a entrepreneur. You need the ability to be wrong three times before you’re right once as a speculator. You need capital upon which being right can compound as an investor.

That is what the education and the income give you.

With Glorious Purpose

I want to say something about how you hold all of this.

The goal is not to grind joylessly for decades and then finally, at some distant point, allow yourself to live. That is its own kind of prison.

The goal is to build with purpose. To feel, every day, that you are moving toward something that matters to you. To find meaning in the construction, not just the destination.

When I was flipping burgers, I was not miserable. I was on a mission. When I was studying algorithms by pencil in the dark, I was not suffering. I was constructing a version of someone I wanted to be.

The pain was real, but it was purposeful pain, and purposeful pain is bearable in a way that meaningless comfort is not.

If you are going to chase ambition, chase it with everything you have. Use every tool available. Learn voraciously. Work harder than you thought you could. But do it because the pursuit itself matters to you, not just because you’re desperate to escape.

Desperation makes you stupid. Purpose is different, it lets you endure things that would break someone who was just running away.

The Stick

Let me return to the koan.

The master presents an impossible choice. Every option leads to pain. The student seems trapped. But the student is only trapped if he accepts the frame. The moment he realizes he can reach out and break the stick, the trap dissolves.

You are not trapped.

The economic conditions are real. The closing paths are real. The anxiety about AI and housing and wealth distribution, all real. But the conditions do not determine your response.

You can see the game for what it is and still choose to play it well.

Or you can choose contentment. You can look at what you have, really look at it, and decide that it is enough.

What you cannot do is sit there and wait to be beaten. What you cannot do is accept the frame that says your only options are grind hopelessly or gamble desperately.

Do not be gray men in a world of color. I would not wish that upon my enemies.

Conclusion

For whoever is willing to listen. For whoever is willing to hold unto hope.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

I escaped. I went from choosing between lunch and dinner to being able to stand in front of the school of Athens on a whim, with the love of my life, breathless.

School of Athens

The path is still there.

Build your foundation. Take your shots. Break the stick.

Long agency.