I was 20 years old before I ever indulged in a post-boarding flute of champagne, handed to me by a weathered stewardess steeling herself for a long-haul trek to Hong Kong. It’s not like I was shocked by the pomp and circumstance — I’m probably one of the few people who can claim the odd title of having flown and driven a million miles by 30 — but I didn’t fully understand why I deserved such treatment. In my mind, champagne was associated with the celebration of an achievement — a toast, a podium finish, the last few pedals down the Champs-Élysées — rather than the tepid action of walking down a jet bridge, and the notion that the drink was representative of the fact that being in first class was a form of victory seemed very premium mediocre.
I had a similar experience on my 23rd birthday, where I booked a 3-Michelin-star French dinner (I know, I know) and was the youngest in the restaurant by a solid 35 years. Having made the mistake of showing up to dinner a little buzzed, I couldn’t sit through the monologues as to which farms produced the grain composing the bread I was eating and what the name of the pig that found the truffle on my food was. The courses couldn’t be parodied — one was a caviar-topped lobster tail, and another was a truffle-topped filet mignon. Again, I was left wondering what exactly prompted this treatment beyond money and what the enjoyable part was, let alone the fact that these meals make me feel disconcertingly similar to a duck being fattened up to deliver the foie gras I had just indulged in.
Fast forward about a decade later, and I’m writing this while sipping a glass of “complimentary” champagne in one of those hotels where it’s uncouth to look at how much your Amex is being billed for while your presence is seemingly so treasured that the staff treats it as a personal affront that your feet even touch the floorboards, and you almost believe that they truly feel that way. And, well, I enjoy it nowadays — sure, the handwritten greeting card is, well, unnecessary, but the practice is one I employ myself. My early-20s self would be dismayed to see myself joining in on the “complimentary” fitness classes and actually spending time in the hotel as opposed to booking the value lodging and going out nonstop. What changed?
I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.
While Don’s cosmic invocation was a bit of projection and directed at the kind of person who, in current day America, treats a protest centered around their 401k dropping as the equivalent of 1960s Vietnam, it’s worth considering if you find yourself constantly treading water in the deeply online spheres of big tech, crypto, and AI. (Increasingly, the distance between the 3 is contracting rapidly.) And in such a complex space, with endless amounts of rabbit holes to go down, it’s necessary to take a step back and completely remove yourself from the environment to properly assess things. For this, I had to examine why I spend so much time online, and what exactly that means to me at this point. I came up with a few points which are probably relatable to anyone who ended up reading this blog, and is probably true in a lot of the tech-adjacent areas where you were told to put your head down on your desk after finishing your classwork.
1) My mind literally does not turn off, and processing information is how I prevent internal recursion. This is what led to my explorations of the internet from the mid 2000s onwards — the internet was truly an endless faucet of information with very little demarcated back then.
2) I understand, but don’t exactly relate to people. Interactions are test-data coded when you don’t forget anything. I like people and the odd and brilliant things that result from their lives (clearly, as I’m writing about how I interpret them all the time), but I simply don’t understand how one can genuinely fawn over a new Taylor album, behave like a die-hard sports fan, or feel anxious about a test. Trading was a consequence of this innate wiring — there’s no way for me to “turn off” the hyper-observant mentality, so turning my life into a walking PnL statement graded on how accurate my assessments are was natural enough. (Indeed, most institutional finance types I talk to don’t understand how I find all the trades I do — because, of course, when it’s other people’s money, it’s a job, and you can log off.) As a result, the most relatable people I encounter are ex-athletes and classical musicians, people used to operating under an unnatural level of pressure with the expectation of peak performance.
3) IRL networks can only deliver a certain amount of relatable people to my network, when that layer is so niche, and it gets stale. The internet is the only place where you can expand the search space to the entire globe. But the irl interaction is necessary, you can’t fully trust or relate to people who you’ve only seen on a screen.
Most of my connections nowadays come from group chats or DMs and their derivatives — indeed, I’ve been meeting people off IRC and such for over a decade at this point. There’s about 5 seconds of awkwardness as you put a face and a voice to a handle, then the reality sets in that the rate of conversation with a person on the internet is about 500x that of meeting people to watch sports once a week, or for happy hour once a month. My closest friends are my internet friends, the people who observe the endless stream of consciousness day in day out.
4) Once you’re “plugged in”, you need an actual reason to log off. If you have ambition, it’s impossible to accomplish anything cutting edge without understanding the internet and tech. (Hence my rant about how I hate “monk mode”:
The smartphone is the most powerful hardware ever invented in human history, and you’re not going to use this to accelerate yourself further? Of course, we all know the bad side of too much screen time. But a primitive version of humans merging with a greater technical intelligence is combining human intuition with technological tools to go even further. This is a net good thing!
Everything flows through this graph, you can’t just shut it off and expect to do anything notable and outsized. Eventually, I’ll get sick of it — I’m fairly close to it already, hence my reluctance to commit to trading/wealth management (my edge is derived from understanding the Internet <<>> market relationship better than everyone else, so I’d be forced to engage with it) — but it’s silly to throw away your best skills because you’re bored. Magnus still plays chess, after all, even though he’s long removed from having anything to prove, there’s no time to build up another extreme competency.
Even as someone who lives on the online side of the liminal space between “virtual” and “reality”, I resent the label of being called “terminally online”, a) because I definitely spend a lot of time doing things in the “real world, and b) because we all kind of understand that it’s a bit of a negative descriptor:
The only reason anyone contributing value spends time online is to fill downtime. You can translate “terminally online” as “you don’t have anything better to do, so you spend all your time online”. When you frame all the perennially online industries - crypto, big tech, AI - on this note, you get why their power games are so repulsive to everyone else and, even though it can make you fantastically wealthy, people really don’t want that mentality to pervade through society.
In the past year of traveling and playing golf alone, it almost feels illegitimate that I’ve made money through stocks when I explain how I’m “retired” to people much older than me in these spaces. I’ve exploited the hole between “fundamental value” and “market behavior” ceaselessly, and yet it’s just not an entirely legitimate way to build wealth. Nobody benefits other than the recipients of my taxes and tips. Legitimizing this usurping of wealth derived from attention is one thing - I won’t knock anyone who beats a very, very tough game — but I think it’s totally fair for people to question your fitness to lead when there’s no obvious connection between “what you did”, “how you were rewarded”, and “what value it created”. It should be degrading to make your money on “meme stocks” or “shitcoins”, because if it becomes societally acceptable to explain this to your in-laws, it represents a society gone bad:
The advent of Robinhood combined with pandemic markets truly warped trading forever, which has extended into what I call “shitcoin nihilism”: of course it’s pointless how things trade, but there’s a 10x to be made, so why dwell on it?..
While I think the progression of tech and securitization would have inevitably led to this point, my core worry is that the zero-sum nature of HFT (see: Speed Racing, markets edition 12/15/20) is now the entirety of society competing for the same dollars:
In finance, good ideas are like good restaurants. They come around once in a while, and are enjoyable as long as the people you dine with keep mum, and then all of a sudden, it turns out the entire yuppie population of Manhattan saw it on some blog or video due to some writer/creator who couldn’t keep their mouth shut to not ruin a great thing for the sake of engagement, and suddenly there’s an 8 month long wait to get in.
Meanwhile, my “engagement” is larger than ever before: I’ve framed my problems with systems in enough ways such that my inboxes are filled with people who are seeing the same problems as I am, and now have the words to articulate it, which comes with the constant worry of what do I do right now to preempt a collapse?
There’s a phenomenon in trading where, after years of staring at screens, a trader that “retires” suddenly starts generating heavily outsized returns while looking at the market for only a couple hours a day on average, if that. It’s a situation that only comes from experience, but after a certain amount of time, you realize that your portfolio and the market are a dynamic system that moves in variable discrete time points — volume event to volume event — rather than continuous time points. Rather than the intraday returns being something to extract gains out of, it begins to resemble something like a white collar roulette wheel, where intraday gains operate as organic marketing in the same way a big NFL Sunday parlay does on social media.
Eventually, the best traders will always say something along the lines of how the best thing to do is usually nothing. The transition from scalper to swing trader, from options to delta one, is something I’ve seen many times and experienced myself. It’s just easier, and it lets you live, and your returns get better. But it requires a perspective shift that just isn’t really downloadable when you’re starting out.
Lately I’ve been wondering if there isn’t actually anything at the end of the tunnel. There’s no magic bullet: we’re not going post-Fiat, there’s no AGI, there’s no de-dollarization. Life just goes on and gets more expensive until the balances reset in one way or another, the markets keep moving on emotions and irrational expectations until they correct, and we just kind of dither about at various tiers of success until we die. It sounds fatalistic, but really, humans are more wired to be content than discontent, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume this doesn’t actually go anywhere. This perspective, of course, does not get you invited to group chats and plied with seed round offers.
Though my head is usually somewhere in a nondescript date in the future, it’s pretty easy to be bleak in the present: we are in a time of destruction, where every system has lost its credibility and the population is in the process of arguing against each other as to whose fault it is. Very few have seen where this is going, and it’s a necessary step to the next stage of progress, but it’s happening a lot faster than I expected on the day of the election. But making major decisions is a form of timing the market in and of itself, and the worst time to make a major life commitment is when there’s a frenzy to beat everyone else to the punch. It’s obvious if you look at how markets trade that we are in a manic stage of a bubble — but bubbles are essential to progress, and each one is kind of like a snowflake. Here, the valuation screams bubble, but the tech is absolutely there to warp society to a new paradigm. I know this because I have been so starved of content to process since people got used to using 4o. In many ways, the internet has become largely unusable for me, and I mostly spend my time writing emails or reading esoteric blog posts rather than interacting with the public algorithm.
So, I choose to do nothing. I had dinner at the F.P. Journe Restaurant a couple weeks ago, and I’ve never enjoyed fine dining more, even if I did, once again, walk out feeling like a particularly stuffed Turducken (I’m American, after all.)
Europe is a great place to walk around, clear your head, and avoid making decisions. If there’s one cultural trait that pervades throughout the entire region in the era of American tech progress, it’s that people want things to stay predictable. There are no spontaneous conversations about p(doom), or discussions about the latest AI engineer buyouts. You can saunter down the cobbled roads, stare at some buildings that are older than the entire US, smoke a cigarette, drink too much coffee, and expect that the next day will be much of the same. While it’s certainly easier to voice this from my purview, it really is just about enjoying that glass of champagne and not thinking too deeply about it. For the time being.