Today is my birthday. This is a good opportunity to review the previous year’s event and make some plans for the next year. I will share some of the things I learned this year, some of the things I experienced, and a coupon.
Perspectives
Tomorrow is Anna’s birthday. Today is my birthday. Next year I will be 50 years old. So I have some perspective I lacked a few years ago.
- Aggregated advantage usually beats high-risk high-gain situations. It is almost always a good idea to invest in something that makes work a little bit more effective and an investment portfolio a little bit more diversified.
- The basics are awesome. We may want some incredible achievements, but what we really value are the basics: health, family, friends, a comfortable home, and safety. A great achievement or an epic journey is a nice memory or something we can put on a working table or on a wall. It is a distraction for Pomodoro break, and it is not there when we truly work or truly rest.
- Lifelong learning is a satisfying calling. Even after so many decades, I still choose lifelong learning as a worthy path. I think this is the only decision I never regret. You may point out that I do not regret making a family and a business with Anna. This is true today, but the first couple of years together were turbulent.
- Patience is the best gift that comes with aging. Seriously, aging sucks. My muscles peaked when I was 21. I reached my peak as a mathematician at around 28, measured by the output of articles. As a programmer/engineer, around 39, is measured by the output of patents. As an author, I am destined to peak soon, planning to publish new books over the next two years. However, as a patient person or an investor, I guess the peak age is above 65. I already know more, I see long trends I used to miss, and I am ready to wait as long as it takes.
- Uniqueness is both a blessing and a curse. Probably every human being is unique. And yet if we put many people on some multidimensional grid we will see clusters and outliers. I think I am an outlier. I remember one of my mentors telling me: “All of your leadership instincts are wrong. Think what you naturally want to do and do the opposite.” The positive thing about being an outlier: I can come up with creative ideas few other people can come up with. The negative thing: my ideas rarely work, and very few people can even understand them sufficiently to have an intelligent discussion. With time, I learned to present my ideas as anecdotes. Currently, I am well respected, and people find me entertaining. So I am doing something right.
- Safety should not be taken for granted. I will talk about this below.
The war
It is quite hard to describe a war for someone who did not experience it. I thought that I had seen some action before, but the events in Israel since October 7 are different. I will show some very limited personal viewpoints.
October 7th is my wedding anniversary. I woke up 6am to drink coffee and prepare an anniversary breakfast. At 6:30 we got missile alarms, and they continued for several hours. Between the sirens there were noises of explosions. Then there was gray smoke in several directions, as I could see from my window.
And then we started to get awful videos over Telegram and echoing reports from the official news. This is beyond “war is horrible”, medieval in its brutality. A terrorist kills a father of small kids, and while the kids weep over the body, he starts opening the refrigerator to eat. Or worse. Reports of smells of blood, death, fire… I did not allow my family to watch this, but I cannot undo the imagery.
I went through all 5 stages of grief within 24 hours. Some of my friends took a month to go through the stages. The war routine is simple. Work as usual, and 3-4 times a day sirens and explosions. And meaningful news. Believe me, you do not want to see meaningful news. Seeing so much death on TV is not right. But life overall continues almost as usual. In the evening some coffee, listening to the roar of aircraft we cannot see and feel the pulsation of far explosions under our feet.
Relocation
The word relocation in my mind is associated with something big, like emigration if not to another country than to another province. Between April and October, I was relocating within my town, around 3km. And yet this was a massive undertaking, in many ways more stressful than COVID and the war.
I have an ADHD variety that makes me struggle more with adaptation. It is one thing to be on a short journey and understand that your home is waiting, and very different to understand that there is no home. The home itself is being slowly moved part by part from one location to another.
It was extremely hot until the air conditioner started to work. It was very expensive. Most of the professionals did a lousy job and constantly needed to redo it. Anna asked me to make the critical decisions, yet she would also ask me to reconsider 80% of my decisions. We have A LOT of stuff and I did not want to throw away anything. We had to move stuff between the rooms of both homes to make space for more stuff or for professionals and so on. And all of this, while working a full-time job as an engineer in a startup company.
I prepared all my texts well before the event, and when I finally moved I had to work a lot, completing the texts. As soon as we settled even before the home felt like home I started writing. Once I had a reasonable buffer of texts to breathe, the war started.
The writing
I wrote A LOT during COVID 19 crisis because there was not much else to do. I slept a lot and worked a lot. I used polyphasic sleep to write more. The feeling was suffocating, and yet extremely productive. Nobody interfered.
During the relocation, I did not write at all. I was too busy dealing with heat and day job, moving furniture and hacking the floor plan to maximize the real estate, dealing with financial loans and finding cost-effective solutions… It was brutal. Especially when I got lower back pain and could not function for a couple of weeks.
The war is almost business as usual, with some shock 30% of the day. The productivity drops, because some part of the mind is waiting for a siren and an explosion that follows. Also, there is unhealthy consumption of extremely eventful and meaningful news, followed by emotionally charged human tragedy stories.
History rhymes
When I was a kid I lived through the Chernobyl disaster and saw strawberries the size of watermelon. I had appendicitis surgery followed by a staphylococcus infection that took me a year to recover. There was a very painful immigration process, where I had to learn almost everything from scratch.
There is a huge difference. Kids are more adaptable than 49-year-old males. As a kid, I did not have any control, and yet there was a strong feeling of control. I knew what were the right things to do, and I knew that if I followed the recipe everything would be fine. Today I know that it was an illusion, and the whole strategy was wrong. But I did not know that as a kid. Today my critical skills are significantly better. I know how to read between the lines, and what I find is really scary.
The history rhymes and does not repeat itself. Today’s history rhymes with the world wars of the previous century and that does not feel good. And yet, the rise of AI is well beyond life-threatening. I find AI more scary than pandemics, wars, relocations, and minor nuclear disasters.
The rise of AI is an existential threat to the entire human culture, filling me with cold sweat when I wake up. If this rhymes with anything, for me it is the October Revolution of 1917 and the destruction of an entire way of life. Since my family is currently in the top 10 percent, it is our way of life being threatened. Probably yours too: you have electricity, running water, housing and food security, and maybe even a decent education.
Coupon code
This is me 25 years ago. I can hardly recognize myself.
Around 5 years ago I wrote an autobiography course: https://keytostudy.thinkific.com/courses/Autobiography. You can watch it free of charge if you use the coupon code: BIO100. Do not skip the coupon phase!
