2025 has been another incredible year of volatility, yet many people have still managed to lose money trading it.

This essay is not for people who have always been consistent losers, but for people who are otherwise profitable and competent, but still managed to give back a meaningful amount of money this quarter.

One of the greatest pains in life is watching months or years of work come undone all at once.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down the moment he reaches the top. There is something uniquely cruel about this punishment, something that cuts directly to the core of the human experience.

Trading has this same quality. Unlike most professions, there are no checkpoints. An entire career can be completely destroyed by one bad decision. It has driven many to suicide.

When the boulder does roll back down, people respond in two ways.

Some size up and try to win it back. They trade more aggressively and implicitly try to martingale the loss back. If they can make the money back quickly, they never have to emotionally confront what happened. This often works which is exactly why it is so dangerous as it reinforces a habit that is mathematically inevitable to leave you zero.

Others burn out and walk away entirely. These people often have enough money to live comfortably and the risks no longer feel asymmetric. They cope and tell themselves that there is no longer any edge in the markets or that they will no longer exist. They leave and effectively one shot themselves from markets forever.

Both responses are understandable but they are blunt instruments and neither address the real problem. The real problem is that there is a hole in your risk management system. Most people think their risk management is much better than it actually is.

Risk management itself is not an unsolved problem. The math is well understood. What makes it difficult is not knowing what to do, but actually doing it in spite of emotions, ego, pressure, and exhaustion. Aligning your actions with your intentions is one of the hardest parts of being human. Markets always ruthlessly expose these miscalibrations with reality.

So how do you get over the loss once it’s happened?

First, you have to accept that you were not unlucky. You were not treated unfairly. This loss was an inevitability created by a weakness in your process. If you don’t identify and fix the precise issue, it will happen again.

Second, you need to fully identify with your new net worth. You cannot anchor to your old all time high. The urge to “make it back” is one of the most dangerous impulses in markets. Step away from screens. Practice gratitude for how far you have already come. You are still alive. You are still in the game. You are not trying to make money back. You are simply trying to make money.

Treat the loss as tuition paid to the market for exposing a flaw. You were always going to learn this lesson. Be grateful you learned it now instead of later, when the stakes were even higher. You will look back on this moment with gratitude if you do the work correctly. Character is forged in hell.

Identify the failure precisely. For most people it is some combination of oversizing, entering without a predefined stop, or failing to respect the stop once hit. Having hard rules around risk and stops would prevent most catastrophic losses.

Remind yourself that the only way to prevent the boulder from rolling all the way back down again is to respect those rules. They are the only thing standing between you and the torment and self loathing you are currently experiencing. You are nothing without your rules.

Allow yourself to fully grieve the loss. Scream. Destroy something. Let the emotion out instead of having it live inside your body.

What matters most is that you channel the pain with precision. The trauma must be converted into structure. If it is not, it will repeat.

This realization about dealing with trauma applies not just to trading losses, but to loss in life more broadly. The impulses behind the common responses mentioned above are too blunt because they often introduce as many new externalities as they resolve. If you cannot recover from loss in a nuanced and precise way, you end up oscillating around the optimal solution indefinitely, unable to settle into the correct orientation like a gradient descent algorithm with too large large step size, forever overshooting convergence.

When Napoleon lost a battle, he immediately began rebuilding infrastructure and preparing his next move. A loss is only fatal if it compromises your ability to fight the next battle. The priority after defeat is to ensure that the vulnerability will not be exploited again and get back to your A-game as quickly as possible.

You do not seek redemption, you do not seek revenge. You don’t cope and you don’t seethe. You must be a fucking machine. You repair and rebuild. Prevent this mistake from happening ever again. Every defeat you survive becomes a moat in your system, one that everybody will all have to learn on their own terms.

Losses like this are what build a man. Be grateful for them. They happen to teach you something. The loss did not happen for no reason. Allow yourself to feel the pain but channel the torment into ensuring it never happens again.

These things are difficult because once you find the correct orientation, compounding to infinite wealth becomes inevitable.

Good luck.

“Entropy will be dissipated, idiocy will be punished, the weak will die. If the regime refuses to bow to this Law, the wolves will enforce it. Social Darwinism is not a choice societies get to make, but a system of real consequences that envelops them. … When asked ‘which types of regimes do you believe in?’ the [sole] appropriate response is ‘those compatible with reality.’”

— Nick Land, “Meta-Neocameralism” (2014).

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking—knowledge which in fact we do not possess—is likely to make us do much harm.

— Friedrich Hayek, The Pretence of Knowledge

Everything of value has been built in Hell… Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that fitness (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a miniscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite… Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporal reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension of scale of existence: phlogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

— Nick Land, “Hell-Baked” (2015).

The left picture gives the impression of a society that had not fully mastered technology, a people who still believed there was a technological frontier ahead of them to explore, a growing society. The right picture shows a society that matured technologically and one which values efficiency.

The streetlights on the left leak yellow light out in all directions almost like the society, which built them haphazardly, came up with a half-decent solution and just went with it. The streetlights on the right beam straight down clear, perfectly white light in a purely functional way as if the society which built them was so brutally efficient that they would not want to even waste light going up into the sky. Each streetlight does exactly what it is supposed to do: nothing more; nothing less.

The left picture looks slightly magical with its golden hue. If you take this road it will take you to the city where there are more lights and more prospectors seeking their fortunes like you. The right picture looks like the tentacle of a machine city. If you take this road it will take you to the machine heart, the core that pumps electricity.

The fabric of society is comprised of daily things we interact with which slowly condition us to believe and feel in certain ways.

— Galois Capital

It always seemed strange to me… The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

— Vladimir Lenin

Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will be necessarily be strongly selected in any competitive environment. Do you really want to fight this?

— Nick Land, “Against Orthogonality”, 2013

Will keep updating this page as I collect more aesthetics. Please comment stuff you think would look cool here.

1) Traders get paid to guess where money will move.

2) There are many ways people win guessing games:

• Some people read new information quickly

• Some people send guesses quickly

• Some people process new information accurately

• Some people recognize patterns quickly

• Some people see patterns other’s don’t see

• Some people read what other people are guessing accurately

• Some have networks that gossip about what the money will do.

• Some chase money where others cannot, will not, or do not know how to

3) Each of these skills is called an “edge”. You can think of each skill as a stat in an MMORPG.

4) The game is winner takes most. Fill out the circle and cross power law thresholds if you want to make money consistently.

5) It’s easier to hunt as a team. Stacking everybody’s best skills clears more thresholds. Good trading teams are positive sum. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

6) Trust is built through iterated trust falls that grow in size. It’s important to calibrate the size of the trust falls well. Too large gets you rugged, too small keeps a relationship from compounding. Generosity goes a long way. Most people here are lonely, so making it fun is a valuable skill.

7) You have to be willing to sacrifice everything if you want to win. Most people don’t actually don’t want it badly enough and that is fine.

8) Play only the games you can learn to win again and again. Calibrate honestly about your abilities and where your competence actually sits in the world. Becoming world class in any game takes intense dedication, courage, and rare talents often shaped from childhood. The most important search is for the game that fits your specific strengths. Playing a game that wasn’t meant for you is a common tragedy in this industry. Trading has chewed up and spat out millions, wasting their best years and scattering their stories into the wind.

9) The guessing game always gets harder over time because it is an adaptive and darwinistic system. People learn, knowledge spreads, edges decay, winners grow, losers die.

10) Adverse selection is everywhere. Always ask yourself why someone smarter, better connected, or faster than you did not take the opportunity before you.

11) Most market participants are flipping coins with each other. Every so often someone will flip twenty heads in a row and look like a genius and spawns cargo cults.

12) Your best trades work out quickly and ferociously.

13) Trading exposes your deepest insecurities about yourself and the world. It is a fast way to learn what reality is and where you fit in it. In a way, everyone is a trader. We make calculated decisions with incomplete knowledge, manage drawdowns to avoid ruin, and turn our natural edges into returns. Almost everything comes down to calibrating your understanding of yourself with your understanding of the world. Many people underestimate their strongest unique traits and take too little risk in building a life around them.

14) Envy is the strongest emotion of the internet era. Handled well, it lets you copy what works from the best very quickly. Handled poorly, it turns creates scarcity driven anxiety and burnout.

15) The longer you trade you realize that you need to eventually find the need to build the foundation of your identity on something stable. An identity built on talent or contrarian views get challenged fast. Identities built on process are more sustainable, even if they trade off novelty and exhilaration.

16) Only the paranoid survive. Panic early. Always have an exit plan. Avoid deep drawdowns. Have humility and leave room for unknown unknowns. Be aware when you are selling tails. Stay liquid. Respect counterparty risk. Respect path dependence.

17) People often build artificial heavens around the goals they chase and artificial hells around the anxieties they run away from. This framing can fuel short bursts of motivation, but it is a unsustainable way to live for any length of time. Scarcity and anxiety distort decision making and leaves you prone to ideological capture.

18) Trading is a zero sum game inside a larger positive sum game. Though every trade has a winner and offsetting losers, markets as a whole direct resources across space and time and help civilizations grow. The emergent objective of complex systems is usually only visible in hindsight. If you get too cynical about the uselessness of what you do, you will spiritually one shot yourself and burn out.

19) The big picture is hard to observe clearly. You are an individual ant trying to make sense of the actions of the entire colony. Price and price action are lower dimensional shadows of a larger machine. Markets move for many reasons, but we carry reductive biases that flatten them into single neat stories.

20) Money changes a lot, but not everything. There are growing pains as you learn what truly shifts and what stays the same.

21) Profitable trading implies a local worldview that is more aligned with reality than that of the market’s dollar weighted average participant. But alignment in one market does not automatically translate into alignment in other markets. What carries over are the meta skills in recognizing and monetizing edges, understanding adverse selection, and measuring where the power law thresholds sit.

22) People in the trading industry tend to age terribly. Mental stress is costly. Put in intentional effort into taking care of yourself. Money means little without health.

23) Winning streaks often hide bad habits that come back to bite you over time. Losing streaks can make you question your entire process. Don’t get too high in the highs or too low in the lows.

24) The world is in a constant state of decay. Reality keeps shifting, and everyone’s models drift out of date and out of calibration. That is why there will always be room for the young, the hungry, and the obsessed to make money. People are like exponential moving averages of their lives. Short windows catch new trends first, even if some of what they catch is noise.

25) Markets train you to spot self reinforcing and self correcting loops everywhere you look.

26) Most outsized opportunity in modern markets ultimately stems from people trying to fill a void of meaning.

27) I am grateful that I get to play this game with my friends and get paid for it. Life is truly beautiful.

I’ll make a part two of this later. Thanks for reading :)

In this essay I explore:

• what is a striver

• what are striver religions

• postmodernity and the katechon

• the future of secular religions

• self reflections

• hiring

what is a striver

A striver is a member of the educated professional class who organizes life around upward mobility in wealth and social status. In the west, first and second generation immigrants are disproportionately represented in this cohort.

Strivers typically come from home environments that set high expectations for achievement, emphasize hard work, and normalize competition. Mimetic rivalry is the motivational engine of the striver. Most strivers are routed into prestige tracks like finance, tech, law, consulting, and medicine. It has gotten harder over the last generation to strive and prestige tracks have grown crowded, drawing more strivers further out the frontier of risk.

Strivers are overrepresented in the Crypto and AI industries, where much of the outsized opportunity of this decade has emerged. These industries offer the best chance of breaking into the modern landed gentry class: accumulating enough wealth to live entirely off of capital gains.

what are striver religions

Status anxiety is the dominant mood of the striver class. Its collective consequence is the rise of secular striver religions that promise a path to an end of history where the striving can finally stop.

For crypto strivers, the end of history occurs when the fiat system suffers a collapse of trust from unsustainable debt, causing the world to re-denominate in a neutral reserve currency.

For AI strivers, the end of history occurs when an AI model becomes capable of automating virtually all white collar work, causing a collapse in the value of labor.

In both visions, the end is a binary event that sorts civilization into winners and losers. Heaven is for the faithful who bought the right coin or vested equity in the right AI company, securing a place at the top of the social hierarchy. Hell is for the wagecucks, the NPCs, the permanent underclass, forced to eat bugs, consume slop, and live as slaves to the API.

what are striver memes

Cultural values of striver religions spreads through memes.

Anxiety memes fuel the hustle. The window of opportunity is closing. It will only get harder from here. The end of history could arrive at any moment. Lock in now and retire your entire bloodline or get left behind in the permanent underclass.

Utopian memes offer tiers of eternal bliss to chase. 30 million dollars liquid and fuck off forever. 5’10 swedish models on a superyacht. Transhumanist immortality. Colonizing the stars. Dyson spheres. All of it hidden inside your laptop, you just need to press the right keys to get it out.

Devotion memes serve as status contests. Drop out of Stanford, raise oversized rounds from venture capitalists, trade/code at parties, sleep on bare mattresses in empty apartments.

We’re well aware people will buy into crazy ideas as long as it’s supported by whatever community they associate with.

- Peter Thiel

God has died in western secular societies so they now direct their worship to the material world.

Let’s dive into the history and culture around our case study of modern strivers.

what are the origins of striver religions

Secular striver religions descend from western culture, which itself descend from Christian culture. These secular religions inherited Christianity’s eschatology.

Eschatology is the study of how things end. An eschaton is a final ending. People dislike uncertainty and tension, so they turn to religion for a resolution. The final resolutions of many secular religions borrow the Christian eschaton—the second coming of Christ, where everyone is resurrected and sorted into heaven or hell—and repurpose it for the material world, adapting it to modern political and technological knowledge.

Individually: heaven looks like wealth and power; hell looks like failure and falling short of your parents. Collectively: heaven is hyperbitcoinization or an AGI paradise; hell is state financial tyranny or a rogue AI.

elite overproduction

Peter Turchin calls the driver of today’s status pressure elite overproduction. When a society creates more elites and elite aspirants than there are elite positions, competition intensifies, instability rises, and status conflict spills into politics and culture.

The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy prestige tracks could absorb and the imbalance has been further exacerbated by globalization and immigration.

The result is a civilizational oversupply of strivers and a bottleneck of prestige. Status is inherently positional, and not everyone can be at the top. Coupled with stagnant living standards, this social scarcity amplifies anxiety and mimetic rivalry across the striver class and creates the cultural phenomenon we see today.

No matter how much abundance we create, prestige games persist because being better than others is a tournament not everyone can win. Prestige has long powered civilization’s motivation engine. The striver class often shapes history because its members are educated, literary, and ambitious. Napoleon for example is the archetypal striver, a provincial outsider who rose to conquer the west.

Today much of the striver energy is being routed into positive sum games like Crypto and AI, but misdirected striver energy has historically turned violent.

historical striving

Eric Voegelin claims the secular religions we build around politics and technology are the result of filling the void of meaning left by the decline of traditional religion. In his view, the educated and ambitious strivers of the twentieth century formed secular religions around politics that drove some humanity’s worst atrocities.

In Nazi Germany, heaven was national rebirth and a Thousand-Year Reich, hell was Weimar disorder and the humiliation of World War I, and the path to salvation was total war, the purging of the Jews, and the myth of Aryan supremacy.

For Communist strivers, heaven was a classless utopia of planned abundance, hell was bourgeois domination and corruption, and the path to salvation was seizing property, abolishing markets, purging class enemies, and installing a state run economy.

Don’t immanetize the eschaton

- Eric Voegelin

Immanentize means to bring into present worldly form.

Voegelin’s warning emphasizes the lesson of the twentieth century: Do not try to create heaven on earth. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

How has civilization calibrated from this?

postmodernity and the katechon

In the postmodern age, we have grown skeptical of the grand narratives of the twentieth century.

From that distrust came a penchant for restraint—the katechon— or the biblical restrainer that holds back the Antichrist (the false savior who sells a fake utopia). In modern life the katechon typically refers to institutions that slow down progress.

Restraint made sense after world wars and fears of nuclear apocalypse, but Peter Thiel argues the west pushed restraint too far and turned “never do big things” into its own grand story. Thiel views trends like climate alarmism and overregulation as some of the impeding katechons of our time that have contributed to the stagnation and the decline of western power.

His riff—“don’t immanentize the katechon”—means do not try to make permanent restraint our end state.

His takeaway for civilization moving forward is to recalibrate the pace of growth with the right tempo. Don’t chase utopias and immanentize the eschaton, but don’t overshoot and accidentally immanentize the katechon.

Let’s synthesize these ideas into the present day.

the future of secular religion

Religion has worked as a civilizational coordination system that patches over time to incorporate new knowledge about the world from technology, to absorb new knowledge about ourselves from culture, and to manage the collective anxieties the technological and cultural shifts create.

The west accelerated so quickly that they threw out much of the old religious system and built a new system out of the marriage of capitalism and liberal democracy. We watched rival systems rise and fall and rode extreme volatility as we calibrated our own. Many of today’s longstanding cultural disagreements arise from contradictions and frictions between the legacy system and the new system.

Techno-optimism and accelerationism are two of the most recent ideological patches to pierce the zeitgeist over the past decade that take material form in the Crypto and AI industries. A Marxist would be unsurprised that the immense wealth generated from these industries have begun to shape the superstructure of our system in the culture, the philosophy, the politics, and even the religion.

You can see the drift in the Overton window over the past year. Peter Thiel is the pope for tech and finance bros. Curtis Yarvin’s memes influence the White House. Nick Land’s ideology is discussed on Tucker Carlson. Equity indices 401(k)s now purchase Bitcoin.

The power of technocapital ideologies tracks market prices, and with markets ripping new all time highs every day you can feel the mix of ecstasy, anxiety, panic, awe about where our civilization may be headed. Counter-trend ideologies in techno-pessimism and decelerationism form the other side of the dialectic over how fast to grow. We are trying to thread the needle between immanentizing the eschaton and immanentizing the katechon, and it now animates much of the secular religious debate among the striver class.

Let me add some self reflecting from my personal life and then resynthesize.

self reflections of a striver

Sometimes I look back at I look back at my choices, and wonder if I had any free will or if I was simply carried by larger cultural currents. I look back at the retarded mental prisons I constructed and the ideologies I bought into and I can’t help but laugh. Life really isn’t that serious. I am blessed to be able to play this game whenever I feel like it. The outside world moves so slowly, it feels like it is lagging years behind what is happening at the frontier online. Part of the torture was thinking that I was missing out on something only to realize that the party is happening right here.

Like many born into the striver class, the engine of competition took me far in life. I hopped across prestige tracks, adopted the secular religion of crypto, sacrificed everything in my life, and hypergambled my way into elite status.

After I won the capital game that I thought would end all games, I realized I could not make myself do anything unless I turned it into a competition and built a mini eschatology around it. For me that mindset was inseparable from extreme intensity, and I was not willing to pay the same price in relationships and health again. Sleeping in silk pajamas makes it hard to believe the hell you are escaping is that bad or the heaven you are chasing is that good.

So I stepped away from the markets for six months and refused to do anything I didn’t feel compelled to do, just to see what I liked for its own sake. The only thing that reliably pulled me into flow was reading about the world and synthesizing it into writing I could share.

This diagram of the extended Maslow’s pyramid resonated with me. Beyond prestige sit higher order growth needs. Reading fed the desire for knowledge and understanding, writing fed the desire truth seeking and creation, and together they serve the search for beauty and form. In my experience, the basic needs seemed to respond more to pressure but the higher ones seemed to respond more to an inner search for meaning and call to action.

My self reflection clarified my understanding of the place of markets in the world. Technocapital has reshaped the superstructure of our civilization for centuries and will keep doing so. Markets are collective truth discovery machines encode information and allocate resources effectively. Interacting with markets will only continue to redefine what it means to be human in a connected civilization by changing the fabric of how we perceive, decide, and relate.

It also clarified my understanding of the place of markets in my own life. I see these truths because I lived inside the machine, and I only could have lived there because it first filled my desires for money and the need to win. I am not going to downplay how sweet the taste of victory is. It is a powerful fuel that people have dedicated their lives to and gone to war for. But that fuel is finite. It demands sacrifices that eventually hollow out meaning. Competition cannot be the highest calling. It is a tool, not a telos.

I came to the machine for the pursuit of glory but I cannot ignore the truth and beauty of markets I have observed. If the goal is understanding, winning just becomes a useful external reference, not the end.

Seen this way, the two motivational engines serve to reinforce each other. Winning gives me perspective to understand the world. Understanding the world helps me win the right games. Glory serves higher order meaning rather than replacing it. The finite game fuels the infinite one.

Trading markets is often dismissed as soulless and zero sum. For every winner there is a loser. I think this is a narrow view. The culture will keep softening its view on markets. Our discourse on technocapital has moved through something like the five stages of grief at a civilizational scale. We are somewhere in depression and are edging toward acceptance. Markets are one of the most positive sum projects of the modern world. Other games either hide their losers under the bed or do not scale. That transparency matches what I value. With power games you have to act like a saint in public while being Machiavellian in private. I would rather do the opposite — let the outside look like strategy while immanentizing not eschatons or katechons, but truth, beauty, and good.

hiring

I’m happy to announce that I am returning to trading full time. This time with a higher goal. If this resonated with you and you are interested in working together please DM me on twitter or telegram with a resume and a one line sentence on what you are elite at. Scimitar Capital is looking to hire three analysts and traders at a very competitive market rate.

inspirations

Huber, Tobias. “The Singularity Has Already Happened - First Things.” First Things, 24 Mar. 2025, firstthings.com/the-singularity-has-already-happened/.

Sun, Jasmine. “Are You High-Agency or an NPC?” Jasmi.news, @jasmi.news, 21 Sept. 2025, jasmi.news/p/dictionary.

Thiel, Peter. “Against Edenism - First Things.” First Things, June 2015, firstthings.com/against-edenism/.

Huber, Tobias, and Byrne Hobart. “Things Hidden”: Mimesis, Technology, and the Apocalypse. 2024, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4848080, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4848080.

Smith, Noah. “The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.” Noahpinion.blog, Noahpinion, 4 July 2025, www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elite-overproduction-hypothesis-994.

Rao, Venkatesh. “The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial.” Ribbonfarm, 17 Aug. 2017, www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/.

Lakin, Chris. “Thoughts on and Conjectures about Finite and Infinite Games.” Chrislakin.blog, Locally Optimal, 14 June 2022, chrislakin.blog/p/thoughts-on-and-conjectures-about.

Lonsdale, Joe. “Dialectical Wisdom - Joe Lonsdale.” Joe Lonsdale, 21 Apr. 2017, joelonsdale.com/dialectical-wisdom/.

“Digital Constructivism - Stane Jagodič.” Stane-Jagodic.com, 2025, www.stane-jagodic.com/Digital-Constructivism.

In the 1800s horses supplied roughly half of all mechanical labor in the US1. Horses let farmers work ten times more farmland, hauled transit cars, freight, and mail. In the 1880s, a quarter of US cropland grew oats and hay to feed the nation’s biological engines. By 1920 there were 27 million horses in the US and more than 1.3 million pounds of manure that needed to be shoveled off of the streets of New York City every single day.

But internal combustion gasoline engines, most famously Ford’s Model T, began to replace horses. One car equalled four horses, never slept, and spared cities the sanitation issues of manure and urine.

Once gasoline engines replaced the demand for horsepower, farmers stopped breeding horses. Surplus and aging horses were minced for European meat markets, boiled down into glue, or ground and canned into dog food. By 1960, the national horse population had collapsed to barely 3 million, a 90 percent decline in just forty years.

Today the same story looms over the human population. This essay explores how economic value is migrating away from human labor and is reshaping power dynamics. We trace that upheaval through the ideas of popular contemporary thinkers.

As technology erodes the value of human labor, whole industries have begun treating us more like livestock. We are fattened on processed calories, churned through the parasitic healthcare system, and our attention is stripmined by addictive dopamine loops that sell us to advertisers. Financial desperation funnels us into the digital casinos of stocks, options, crypto, and sports books, while the epidemic of loneliness is monetized by algorithmic brothels flooding us with onlyfans and pornography.

Like the surplus horses after the rise of the automobile, today’s surplus humans are being recycled by the capitalist system in a form of livestock economics. We are metaphorically being ground into meat, boiled into glue, and canned into dog food.

These critiques are nothing new.

karl marx

Marxists would be totally unsurprised by the exploitation of late stage postmodern capitalism. Their predictions of labor rendered surplus, human relations being packaged into a commodity, and the dissolution of cultural traditions and identities have been uncannily precise.

However, no matter how provocative their critiques in the last century may have been, they have merely been an aesthetic. Marxists offer only deconstruction with no concrete blueprint on an alternative system to run a complex economy. And so in this vacuum, the purpose of anticapitalist sentiment primarily serves as badges of virtue.

To quote Mark Fisher his book Capitalist Realism in 20092 (who quotes Slavoj Žižek):

So long as we believe in our hearts that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has holy value. Moreover this behavior precisely depends on the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our head.

[…]

Since the [anticapitalist movement] is unable to posit a coherent alternative to the political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate it's worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn’t expect to be met.

Friedrich Hayek has clearly won. The fall of the communist regimes in the twentieth century are proof that free markets solve the knowledge problem and allocate resources better than any central planner. It is now consensus that the dynamism that has given us unprecedented abundance must be coupled with record levels of anxiety, loneliness, and loss of meaning. And the result is a culture of practiced cynicism in which we are eager to condemn capitalism in theory yet happy to accelerate its progression in our daily choices.

nick land

Philosopher Nick Land calls this stance “transcendental miserablism”. Land says that for Marxists, misery is an inescapable law of existence, ensuring that the only ethical stance was to denounce any technological or economic effort that might reshape the world. Blending Marxist critique with cybernetics—the study of self-regulating systems—Land flips the conclusion upside down. Land argues that we should accelerate the spread of technocapitalism and allow its dynamism to strip away societal traditions and identities until it culminates in a planet-scale machine intelligence that no longer needs humanity3.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.
— Machinic Desire, 1993

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.
— Meltdown, 1994

Land’s writing borders on worship of the occult, portraying capital as an emergent deity whose complexity overwhelms any individual observer’s understanding. For Land, accelerationism is capital becoming self-aware. These ideas later inspired today’s e/acc (effective accelerationism) movement4, which frames capital’s relentless self-replication as an inevitable expression of the second law of thermodynamics.

Land’s willingness to sacrifice humanity for technocapital’s “higher trajectory” is unsettling. What’s even more disturbing is how effortlessly civilization appears to be marching towards the path he outlined thirty years ago. The median person’s value to the technocapital system now lies less in their labor, creative work, or civic life and more in functioning as livestock whose data, attention, and consumption can be harvested and recycled back into the system. And the system has adapted to exploit that in full force.

curtis yarvin

Blogger Curtis Yarvin pushes Land’s accelerationism into politics under the banner of a movement called the “dark enlightenment.” If Land displaces humanity economically, Yarvin shows how that economic redundancy hollows out democracy itself. Yarvin argues that the real power in the system already rests with an unelected managerial elite, the “Cathedral” of bureaucrats, academics, and media gatekeepers, while elections serve as little more than civic theater. Yarvin’s remedy is to drop the pretense and run the state like a corporation: an authoritarian capitalist technomonarchy headed by a single sovereign CEO who is judged strictly by performance metrics. Citizens, redefined as customers, may use the service, exit it, or renegotiate terms, but no longer pretend to steer policy through the ballot box.

This shift forces a darker reading of the history of power and morals, exactly the lens Marx offers in Das Kapital. He argues that a society’s “universal truths” are usually the ideological superstructure of whichever class controls production. What looks like moral progress is often the ruling class rationalizing whatever makes the system run more efficiently. Marx would argue that the industrial bourgeoisie embraced universal suffrage and other liberal-democratic ideals because it incentivized cooperation and unlocked more output from labor. And now the post labor elite, no longer reliant on broad participation, has little incentive to preserve those rights. The economic base has moved on, Marx would say, and the political superstructure is already shifting into a less democratic form.

Yarvin is right in that the calculus of power is shifting from that of egalitarianism to that of hierarchy. As technocapital sidelines human labor, the incentive to give ordinary people political power disappears. The open question now is how a system handles a growing class of humans it no longer needs. Rising surveillance, algorithmic bread and circuses, and universal basic income all point to a likely strategy of pacification, not empowerment. When liberty aligned with increased labor, freedom made economic sense. Now that human labor is increasingly redundant, system may begin to seek cheaper tools for controlling a surplus class whose labor and, by extension, political voice, ­is no longer necessary for the technocapital machine. And so a power struggle looms on the horizon…

my reflections

These thoughts keep me up at night. The prospect of most of humanity being discarded along the way makes my moral instincts recoil. And when I think about it more in practice, we seem to already accept it. Take Malawi, where fewer than one in five households have electricity and average income is about $500 a year, conditions roughly akin to the United States in the 1920s. The entire GDP of Malawi is less than the the day to day fluctuations of Elon Musk’s net worth. And while 21 million Malawians wait for basic infrastructure, the wealthy world pours capital into AGI.

If we can leave an entire nation that far behind without outrage, we have tacitly endorsed the notion of surplus humanity. Perhaps the future Land and Yarvin describe isn’t approaching, it’s already here. Time accelerates forward for a shrinking technocapital elite, while for everyone else it staggers. We may soon share a chronostratified planet where some live hundreds of years ahead of those still stuck in the 1900s.

And so I am left here, pacing around my room, thinking about what will happen to civilization as we know it. As a humble market participant I have learned to respect the sometimes unintelligible magnificence of the complex systems that have emerged. The people that used to complain humanity’s top talent was being wasted on adtech and financial markets have fallen silent now as we race toward AGI. For the human observer, the complexity of the system and the progression of the tech tree has become too intricate to fully understand, much less to steer.

And yet I see politico-economic systems that reward technocapital or raw power as nothing more than weighted utility functions imposed on top of human lives. Human history shows that the unrestrained pursuit of efficiency can slide quickly into extraordinary cruelty. Our sense of fairness evolved for communities of a few hundred, not for a world where wealth and influence diverge at exponential speed all within one lifetime. The power of labor is trending down, but it still wields significant power.
In theory it could try to coordinate to slow the acceleration before inequality ignites a violent power struggle that causes a large civilizational drawdown. But coordinating the masses to understand the complexity of the situation is a difficult task. The technocapital system is so vast and opaque that most people don’t even know which levers they would need to pull, let alone coordinate to pull them together.

For now the path we are heading on is to trust that new technologies and social safety nets will adapt to cushion the impact from the post labor transition. I am skeptical on this because it seems more like complacency and ignorance than anything else.

But what do I know? I am but a single ant recently freed from labor that is spending his days marveling at the complexity of the colony we have created. For now I am still trying to better understand what is before I can say what ought to be.

What do you think should be done?

I’ll keep unpacking the politico-economic machine in future articles. If these ideas spark reactions, critiques, or counter-examples, I’d love to talk. Fresh perspectives and new tokens are always welcome.

This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. There is some light math but it will be worth it to read to the end.

Imagine you are presented with this coin flip game. How many times do you flip it?

At first glance the game feels like a money printer. The coin flip has positive expected value of twenty percent of your net worth per flip so you should flip the coin infinitely and eventually accumulate all of the wealth in the world.

However, If we simulate twenty-five thousand people flipping this coin a thousand times, virtually all of them end up with approximately 0 dollars.

The reason almost all outcomes go to zero is because of the multiplicative property of this repeated coin flip. Even though the expected value aka the arithmetic mean of the game is positive at a twenty percent gain per flip, the geometric mean is negative, meaning that the coin flip is actually negatively compounding over the long run.

How can this be? Here's an intuitive way to think about it:

The arithmetic mean measures the average wealth created by all possible outcomes. In our coin flip game the wealth is heavily skewed towards rare jackpot scenarios. The geometric mean measures the wealth you'd expect in the median outcome.

The simulation above illustrates the difference. Almost all paths bleed to zero. You need to flip 570 heads and 430 tails just to break even in this game. After 1,000 flips, all of the expected value is concentrated in just 0.0001% of jackpot outcomes, the extremely rare case where you flip a lot of heads.

The discrepancy between arithmetic and geometric means forms what I call the Jackpot Paradox. Physicists call it the ergodicity problem and traders call it volatility drag. You can’t always eat the expected value when it’s squirreled away in rare jackpots. Risk too much hunting jackpots and the volatility will turn positive expected value into a straight line to zero. In the world of compounded returns, the dose makes the poison.

Crypto culture in the early 20s was a living example of the Jackpot Paradox. SBF started the conversation in a tweet about wealth preferences.

• Log wealth preference: every dollar is less valuable than the dollar before it and your appetite for risk shrinks as your bankroll grows.

• Linear wealth preference: every dollar is valued identically and keep the same risk appetite no matter how much you’ve already made.

SBF proudly proclaimed that he had a linear wealth preference. Since he aimed to donate everything, he argued that doubling from $10 billion to $20 billion mattered just as much as going from $0 to $10 billion, so swinging for huge, risky bets were logically worth it from the perspective of civilization.

Su Zhu of Three Arrows Capital echoed this preference for linear wealth and even took it a step further in introducing the exponential wealth preference.

• Exponential wealth preference: every new dollar feels more valuable than the last, so you dial up risk as your bankroll grows and happily pay a premium for jackpots.

Here’s how the three wealth preferences map to our coin flip game from above.

Given our understanding of the Jackpot Paradox, it’s obvious that SBF and 3AC were figuratively flipping this coin infinitely. That mindset was how they built their fortunes in the first place. Equally unsurprising and obvious in hindsight was that SBF and 3AC both ended up vaporizing ten billion dollars. Perhaps they are quintillionaires in a distant parallel universe which justifies the risks they took.

These blowups aren’t just cautionary parables about the mathematics of risk management, but rather a reflection of a deeper macrocultural shift toward linear and even exponential wealth preferences.

Founders are expected to adopt a linear wealth mindset and take big risks that maximize expected value as cogs in the venture capital machine dependent on power law home runs. The tales of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg risking everything they had and emerging with the largest personal fortunes on planet Earth reinforce the mythos that drives the entire risk taking sector, while survivorship bias conveniently forgets the millions of founders who go to zero. Salvation comes only to the select few who clear an ever steepening power law threshold.

That taste for outsized risk has seeped into everyday culture. Wage growth has severely lagged compounded capital, causing ordinary people to increasingly see their best shot at real upward mobility in negative EV jackpots. Online gambling, 0DTE options, retail meme stocks, sports betting, and crypto memecoins all testify to the phenomena of exponential wealth preference. Technology makes speculating effortless, while social media spreads the story of each new overnight millionaire, luring the broader population into one giant losing bet like moths to a light.

We’re becoming a culture that worships the jackpot and increasingly prices survival at zero.

And AI exacerbates the trend by further devaluing labor and intensifying winner take all outcomes. The techno-optimist dream of an abundant post-AGI world where humans devote their days to art and leisure will look more like billions of people chasing negative sum capital and status jackpots with UBI stipends. Perhaps the up only e/acc logo should be redrawn to reflect the blizzard of paths that bleed to zero along the way, the true silhouette of the Jackpot Age.

In its most extreme form, capitalism behaves like a collectivist hive. The Jackpot Paradox math says it’s rational for civilization to treat humanity as interchangeable labor, sacrificing millions of worker bees to maximize the linear expected value for the colony. That might be the most efficient for aggregate growth, but it distributes purpose and meaning miserably.

Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto warns that “man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.”

But the rapid acceleration of technology and the shifts towards higher ever more aggressive risk taking incentives have pushed us precisely towards the outcome he warns against. In the Jackpot Age, growth is fueled by farming fellow man. Usefulness, productivity, and pride are increasingly reserved for the privileged few who win the competition. We have boosted the mean at the cost of the median, leaving a widening gap in mobility, status, and dignity that have bred entire economies of negative sum cultural phenomena. The resulting externality shows up as social unrest, starting with the election of demagogues and ending with violent revolution, which can be quite costly to civilizational compounded growth.

Having made a living trading crypto markets, I’ve witnessed the degeneracy and desperation that has arisen from the culture shift firsthand. Much like the jackpot simulation, my victory stands on a pile of a thousand corpses of other traders. A monument to wasted human potential.

When people in the industry come to me for trading advice I almost always spot the same pattern. They all risk too much and drawdown too deep. Underneath there is typically a scarcity mindset driving it, a gnawing sense of feeling “behind” where they should be and a compulsion to make it fast.

My answer is always the same. build more edge rather than risk more size. Don’t kill yourself chasing the jackpot. Log wealth is what matters. Maximize the 50th percentile outcome. Make your own luck. Avoid drawdowns. Eventually you will get there.

But most people will not ever generate consistent edge. “Just win more” isn’t scalable advice. In the technocapitalist rat race, meaning and purpose is ever more winner takes all. It brings us back to meaning. Perhaps what we need is some sort of second coming of religion that reconciles old spiritual teachings with the realities of modern technology.

Christianity once scaled because it promised salvation to anyone. Buddhism spread on the claim that anyone could reach enlightenment.

A modern analog would have to do the same in offering dignity, purpose, and an alternative path forward for all people so they don’t destroy themselves chasing jackpots.

Thanks to my friends Alex, Chris, Sean, Cass, and Yung Macro for the conversations around this topic.

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Thin slicing is the ability to spot patterns and draw inferences from “thin slices” or narrow windows of experience.

It’s similar to that game you play as a kid where you are shown a few pixels of an image and you are supposed to guess what the image is. You are gradually shown more and more pixels until you guess the image, rewarding you with more points the faster you are.

Your mind naturally stockpiles heuristics that help you form quick judgements at a glance.

In the realm of social inference, snippets of body language such as subtle shifts in breathing, tiny facial expressions, and small variations in tone, are actually quite rich in signal and instantly form a “vibe” before you can even explain it in words. You give up some accuracy in favor of speed, but in many arenas being quick and reasonably correct beats being slow and perfectly calibrated.

Markets are one of those arenas where thin slicing dominates.

Markets act like the nervous system of civilization. Prices encode scattered local scarcities and surpluses into a single global number that channels societal resources to where they are needed most. They behave more like living and adaptive ecosystems than engineered machines, a collective intelligence probing for truth. Beautiful, misunderstood, and endlessly complex.

To the individual observer, the market resembles an incomplete mosaic, like the kid’s pixel-guessing game we mentioned earlier. Price action, order flow, sentiment, positioning. You glimpse only fragments of information and must infer the broader narrative of the market from those scattered clues.

Each participant watches different clusters of pixels light up. Tentative images overlap on the same canvas, some faint and others vivid. Edge comes from seeing pixels sooner, finding pixels others miss, ignoring pixels that do not matter, and, above all, guessing the emerging picture quicker and more accurately than everyone else. Connecting the dots and identifying the dominant “vibe” before the rest of the market earns you a handsome reward for pricing truth into the system.

Colm O’Shea puts it beautifully in his Market Wizards interview on macro trading:

Fundamentals are not about forecasting the weather for the next day, but rather noticing that it is raining currently.

It is hard enough to know what is, let alone what will be.

Racing to uncover what is is the essence of what it means to vibe trade.

And just as markets compress oceans of knowledge into the blunt value of a single price, vibe trading compresses millions of instinctive decisions into the equally blunt value of one PnL number. While the money is a nice testament to the value of knowledge you have priced into to the system, writing about the process is what truly captures the art.

There are two ways we miscalibrate risk.

1. We risk too much on things that are low conviction

2. We risk too little on things that are high conviction

I learned these lessons in poker and in trading and they have helped me reason about broader life. I call them the fold pre principle and the pocket ace principle.

the fold pre principle

On poker forums there’s a running gag. Whenever someone posts a complicated hand history and asks, “What should I have done here?” the top reply is “fold pre.”

Translation: You never should have played that hand in the first place.

It's a snarky answer that skips all of the nuance but that’s exactly the point. The simplest fix was to never enter that low conviction spot at all. Everyone knows that they should cut their losers early but the fold pre principle is to avoid low conviction bets entirely.

In trading you see this manifest as someone who takes a low conviction trade and then refuses to stop out of it, doubling and tripling down until either they are back at breakeven or they have blown up their account. Traders underestimate how much losing money distorts their judgment, creating a left tail doom spiral.

You see these martingales in real life as well.

• An unhappy couple clings to the relationship because “we have so much history.”

• A friend stays at a dead end job promising to quit “after one more year.”

A common litmus test to tell if you are in one of these situations is to ask yourself if you were free of these commitments at no cost, would you still choose it today?

• Would you re-enter the position?

• Would you get back into the relationship?

• Would you reapply for the job?

Poker players say fold pre, traders say cut your losers early, tech founders say fail fast. They all orbit the same law. Sunk cost habits kill asymmetric bets. If you don’t learn to prune the losing bets quickly, every “small” risk you take hides a fat left tail that can siphon your time, resources, and emotions.

I think it’s important for a person to go through a prolonged negative feedback loop or two. I wasted years with an addiction to video games and weed. Spewed off multiple poker bankrolls in fits of rage. Stayed in a relationship for too long out of nostalgia. Pushed through a startup idea I never truly believed in because quitting felt like failure.

Each scar has taught me to distrust certain impulsive tendencies that have led me off of cliffs. As I age and understand myself better, I am improving at folding earlier, and avoiding certain hands altogether.

pocket ace principle

The pocket ace principle is:

1. When you're dealt pocket aces, bet the house.

2. Recognizing pocket aces becomes second nature with experience

The world is winner-takes-most and outcomes are distributed along power laws. Poker is no different. In a live sample of 1 million hands1, the top 20 starting hands (88+, AJo+) capture almost all of the profit in the game and the other hands bleed it all back. If you can play only premium hands without others noticing, you absolutely should.

In poker that hand strength is trivial to simulate, allowing you to confidently identify which hands your strategy should revolve around. This makes poker a useful baseline, as recognizing pocket aces becomes significantly harder as you move into more complex systems.

In trading things get messier. Every situation is slightly different and the threat of adverse selection from latent risks are always lurking out of sight. You can never be absolutely certain you're holding a winner. However even if you miss the chance to play aces, the system always marks to market, letting you measure counterfactuals and recalibrate your strategy for the next trade. Trade for long enough and you will eventually encounter a rare opportunity where fundamentals, positioning, and catalysts align cleanly for a career defining trade that must be sized.

Legendary hedge-fund manager Stan Druckenmiller famously said:

The greatest trades look blindingly obvious after the fact.

Most traders eventually arrive at the conclusion that the most effective way to trade is prepare for the few times a year there is money literally sitting on the floor. For example the memecoin frenzy in crypto after the election created a wave of deca-millionaires who were just at the right place at the right time. If you’re patient enough to wait for these rare bursts of opportunity, one good trade can fund a lifetime.

Life, however, is the most nebulous game of all. You glimpse only a blurred corner of your hand, the deck is infinite, and the counterfactuals arrive years and decades later dressed as regret. Life’s biggest pots in lasting friendships, great mentors, purpose, and love, start with a few lucky draws but only pay off when you bet aggressively with conviction.

I've only sized a few pocket aces in my life so far. Meeting friends, building a trading firm, and connecting with great mentors each felt obvious and effortless in the moment. They all began by exploring the intersection of what I genuinely enjoyed and what reliably made money so that when the right person or opportunity appeared I could drop everything and fully commit. I acted decisively not just because it felt enjoyable and it felt intuitively right, but because financial incentives clearly aligned much like the conditions that define a great trade.

Reflecting on this, I've realized how money simplifies complexity. It’s a clean signal that you’re doing something right, a clarity other areas in life often don’t provide. Maybe I have always been drawn to video games, board games, and sports and competition because the outcomes are directly measurable and stimulate clean positive feedback loops in my dopamine system. It’s obvious when I have pocket aces, and it’s obvious when I’m winning. These toy examples have simplified complex systems that have helped me reveal truths about myself and the world around me. My path from video games to poker to trading was a progression of playing games with increasing complexity that has developed my taste in the the types of risk I aggressively bet on and the ones I decide to fold preflop.

I find that people often overplay their marginal hands. Old people wistfully saying they wished they had taken more risk shows that there’s a cultural counterfactual. It’s hard to fold the best hand you’ve ever seen. A power law world means pocket aces are rare. And unimaginably good. And if you’re young it’s possible you haven’t even ever seen them before. If you’re busy playing an okay hand when aces finally arrive you might miss them. So stretch your imagination with how good life can get. Cultivate patience. Be comfortable with waiting with apparent idleness, with refusing to trade “great” for merely “good.” And trust that the nonlinear payoff will come.

It’s tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you’ve been sleeping in silk pajamas.

- Marvin Hagler

I’ve been coasting for the past four months. It’s probably been my first extended break in over six years of grinding. My days that were once spent sitting in front of screens for 16 hours a day are now spent playing pickup basketball, learning history and science, writing blog posts, having conversations with other traders, seeing friends, going on dates, and most importantly sleeping nine hours a night.

On the surface it sounds idyllic yet underneath I feel uncertainty.

The reluctance to do the 5am roadwork is easy to rationalize. Managing risk is stressful, takes up most of my days to do properly, and it fucks with my sleep. I wear silk pajamas in the sense that money has stopped being a concern. The freedom feels weightless. I answer to nobody, follow my curiosity, and do whatever I want when I feel like it.

Yet inexplicably I know I will return to trading. I’m just not sure when.

I had a conversation with another trader who mentioned that discretionary trading was similar to playing in the NBA, both in its cutthroat competitiveness and in the intensity of commitment required. The analogy stuck with me. I started digging into NBA career data to observe how others have navigated this silk pajamas effect I was feeling.

The NBA is competitive. 518 players played in the league in the 2024-2025 season 1, representing 0.00001% of all people in the world who play basketball two or more times a month.

The NBA is cutthroat. There are only 450 contracts available (30 teams * 15 roster spots). The median salary is 3.5 million dollars. Securing a contract for just one season could mean life changing money. The churn is real. 17% of the league doesn’t make it to the roster the next season.

The NBA is young. Half of all players are 25 and younger when athleticism, explosiveness, lateral quickness, endurance are at its peak.

In the NBA it’s hard to be old. Less than one fifth of the players are 30 or older. 5% of players in the league are 35 or older.

Young players are the foot soldiers of the NBA. They produce a fair amount of points, have the energy to do the dirty work the team needs, and most importantly, are underpaid relative to everyone else. Average salaries 2x when players turn 27 and 4x at 30.

Most players don’t survive very long. Over a third don’t make it past two years. The average person lasts five years. The odds of making it to the ten year mark is less than 25%. This curve is starkly contrasted to most modern jobs, with the median teacher career for example lasting over 25 years. 2

Many stars that dominated when I was in college are out of the league at 33 years old. Loss of athleticism and injuries are factors but I think it’s downstream of the silk pajamas effect.

Once the wealth and fame pile up, the grind feels optional. You can coast on talent for a while, but eventually the league catches up. Athleticism fades, the diet slips, weight creeps in, and injuries become inevitable. The denial of your reduced athleticism prevents you from reinventing your game in the offseason. The superstar ego keeps you from accepting a reduced role or doing dirty work on the bench that secures you a roster spot.

NBA history is full of generational talent that flopped because they never pushed past the first peak.

As DeMar DeRozan said, the league has plenty of dudes who don’t love basketball. They just love the perks.

If you’re still suiting up past 35, it’s not about the paycheck. Even the “poorest” veteran is pushing nine figures. Yet they still roll out of silk sheets at 5 am, lift, practice, hop on flights for 82 games, undergo intense recovery protocols, and attend film sessions.

For the love for the game.

Let’s pull it back to trading and complete the analogy.

Discretionary trading is just as competitive, cutthroat, ruthless, and filled with infinite waves of ambitious young fellas powered by raw intellectual athleticism chasing for that one life changing season.

Grinding 16 hour shifts in a 24/7 market and bolting awake for alerts is the desk bound version of an 82 game schedule with back-to-back road games and redeye flights to road games. Powering through all nighters wrecks my health and burns me out the same way reckless jumping and poor recovery wreck NBA knees.

If I want to play the game sustainably, I need to switch from raw athleticism to veteran craft. Focusing on trades that require careful planning and cleverness rather than just being at the right place at the right time. Relying more on finesse and resource management instead of powering through all nighters and trying to dunk on everyone. Shifting from solo hero ball to developing my team, mentoring young talent to take over athletic duties, and cultivating culture. Guarding sleep, recovery, and morale by only pulling the trigger on high percentage shots. I know what I need to do to make the roadwork easier to wake up for.

Spiritually I feel like a 30 year old NBA player winning my first championship ring. I have gone from scarcity to never having to worry about money ever again. My father grew up malnourished on the rice paddies of the Chinese countryside. Scarcity was the main source of stress and conflict in my household environment growing up. Being able to retire my parents has been one of the most fulfilling achievements in my life so far.

Now I stand at a crossroads. Do I keep playing or do I step away at the top of my career?

I know I love the game. Competition has coursed through my veins since childhood, and trading remains the highest leverage, fastest iteration game on the planet for someone with my skillset. I still feel a primal thrill when I sharpen my tools, read the flows of the herd, and close in for the kill with my tribe.

Yet lately the dopamine balance has been off. The wins don’t feel as good as they used to, the losses feel worse, and the game gets harder every season. I still am figuring out what is left for me to achieve in this arena. And that’s making it hard to get out of bed to do the roadwork.

There’s something special about that first championship ring. It swapped anxieties around scarcity for an immovable self-confidence in my abilities. It blew open my sense of what’s possible. In chasing it I built deep relationships with people that I now view as brothers. In a few seasons I gained the power to reshape not only my own life but also the futures of my family and friends.

When I look at the careers of NBA legends, I see that their sentimental favorites are never their first titles. The trophies they value most are always their later rings after years of scar tissue and refinement, when raw athleticism has been traded for craft, self-mastery, and legacy.

I do not yet know what my own next summit looks like, but their examples tells me there are higher more fulfilling peaks to climb.

For now I will stay in the off season, resting, learning, and letting hunger gather again until I feel ready to return.

As always thanks for reading :)

2

https://www.unb.ca/nbirdt/research/publications/_resources/pdf/510_teacher_recruitment_retention_pub_ecr_202412.pdf

Gold derives its value from some nice properties: it is scarce, fire resistant, immune to corrosion, and for millennia has served every major civilization as a store of value. Because of this long pedigree, people often describe gold as having “lindy” value, referring to the Lindy effect, which claims that expected remaining lifespan of an idea grows in proportion to the time it has already lasted. Simply put, the longer something has survived the longer we expect it to keep surviving.

Bitcoin, by contrast, has existed for only seventeen years since 2009, which seems trivial beside gold’s three thousand year record that dates back to the Lydian empire of Asia Minor in 700 BCE. For a long time I sided with the skeptics who dismissed bitcoin as digital fool’s gold, yet reframing the argument in terms of event based time rather than calendar time has softened my view.

In a previous post I introduced the notion of a life-year, which is one person being alive for one year. Evaluating history by this measure explains why human progress has accelerated so sharply over the past two centuries as more exponentially more conscious minds have proliferated that each discover, innovate, and acquire new knowledge.

Since Bitcoin’s inception in 2009, ~130 billion life years have elapsed, an average population of 7.6B over 17 years.

Gold, judged from 700 BCE onward, has accumulated ~1.3 trillion life-years, meaning that roughly 81% of all human consciousness has lived in a world where gold is already established as money. 1

On a simple calendar scale bitcoin has existed for just 0.6% of gold’s lifespan, yet when we weight the years by the number of minds alive to evaluate each asset, bitcoin’s attention-time lifespan rises to about ten percent of gold’s lifespan. Because today’s world hosts far more observers than any earlier period, recent years carry greater informational weight, and in aggregate humanity has “experienced” bitcoin one tenth as much as it has experienced gold.

Coincidentally at the time of writing this article, the market cap of bitcoin is currently at 2.1T, almost exactly 10% of the market cap of gold at 21T. Projecting the same attention-time measure forward with UN population forecasts yields the following rough path for bitcoin’s fundamental value relative to gold.

• 12.8% of gold at 2030, translating to 135k BTC with gold at constant price.

• 15.7% of gold at 2035, translating to 164k BTC with gold at constant price.

• 18.4% of gold at 2040, translating to 191k BTC with gold at constant price.

That trajectory implies an average linear gain of about 5.5 percent per year, well below the roughly 12% annual carry cost of maintaining a long bitcoin short gold position through CME futures.

An attention-weighted Lindy framework feels like an appropriate and novel lens for examining bitcoin. We’ve gotten to a point that even a civilization level catastrophe like widespread nuclear EMPs would not erase every copy of the blockchain. With LLMs now able to compress all of human knowledge into weight files only a few hundred gigabytes large that is easily indexable, it would not be difficult to find the technical instructions to reconstitute the network. Humanity would likely rebuild digital infrastructure rather quickly and probably never come close to going back to the ways of the Lydian Empire of moving physical gold coins around.

Linear time obviously still matters and not every moment of human attention should count equally. We probably shouldn’t weigh a billion TikTok dance videos as heavily as World War II. Life-years are a blunt proxy for collective reasoning capacity, not an assessment that every event carries the same historical importance.

But as a first pass metric, it seems useful for evaluating bitcoin’s lindyness. I’m definitely more open to its relative valuation now having thought through things with this perspective. Let me know what you think.

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After college I worked for a high frequency trading firm where the basic unit of time was the microsecond. A single blink—about 250,000 µs—was long enough for our algorithms to open and close thousands of positions, each trade born and buried long before a human observer would have even noticed the screen had changed.

At the end of each day we would grade our trading by looking forward into the future for every trade. If we bought stock A at $5.00, we would have liked to see the market trading at $5.01 moments later.

We didn’t use many time-based benchmarks. Ten seconds for a stock like NVDA was an eternity compared to a no-name stock. Thousands of individual trades could have been entered and exited in NVDA in the time it took the no-name stock to update it’s price a single time. There were levels to this eye blinking metaphor.

We used event benchmarks instead of time benchmarks. Every time someone executed a trade, cancelled a bid, updated an offer, was counted an event. Any change in the state of the order book reflected someone pricing in new information about the world. We would then benchmark our trading to the market price say 1000 events in the future. For some stocks, this would be milliseconds. For others, minutes. This normalized our performance benchmarks across all different types of stocks and made us more effective in generalizing our strategies.

It was my first lesson that event based time perception mattered more than objective time.

This concept carried with me as I left HFT and moved into crypto discretionary trading. Crypto is the only market that trades 24/7, meaning there simply was no rest for the wicked. The game was less about brilliance and more about being awake when it counted. Resource management around attention and waking hours was a big part of the game. I quickly learned there were only a few important hours that I needed to be awake.

Pretty quickly I mapped the day’s “hot zones”:

• 7 – 11 am ET US open

• 3 – 4 pm US Close

• 4 – 5 pm After-hours headline dump

• 7 – 8 pm Quants rebalance at 0 UTC

• 9 – 11 pm Korean retail pumps altcoins

• 4 – 7 am Euros position for US open

Everything outside those windows was mostly noise. Weeks where nothing happened followed by a single headline turned into minutes where weeks happened.

My cofounder and I developed a polyphasic sleeping routine so that we would be conscious during as many of these action periods as possible. It was rare to get uninterrupted sleep for more than 3 hours at a time. We took tactical naps whenever possible and had phone alarms to wake us up in case important headlines came out during off hours. I felt like I had experienced three days for every one that passed.

There was always something going on. Everyday a new puzzle to solve. A new fire to put out. We frequently would work 18 hour days processing information, trading events, building infrastructure, and managing risk. We frequently moved around different parts of the world, built strong relationships with all sorts of people from around the globe, and experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows of our lives.

Those three years felt like the longest stretch I’ve ever lived.

Most of my friends say the opposite that these same three years flashed by. French philosopher Paul Janet’s old ratio-of-life idea explains the gap: at ten, a year is a tenth of your entire memory bank, but by fifty it’s only two percent. By twenty-two you’ve already “spent” half your subjective lifetime, so unless you cram it with fresh events, each new calendar year keeps shrinking.

This subjective time dilation adds another vector of inevitable decay to the human experience. Not only does wealth erode from inflation and the body deteriorates from age, but even time contracts from perception, compressing each passing year into a smaller and faster blur. Yes, packing a life with novelty can stretch your years, but that familiar sermon can stay on the shelf.

What is striking is the asymmetry between the experience of the individual and the collective. The individual experiences subjective time contraction with each passing year while the collective experiences subjective time expansion. Every year is increasingly more eventful within the context of human history than the last with an exponential acceleration in the last three centuries. What has caused the expansion of time for the collective?

Transposing human history in an event-based vector space makes it easier to understand. We define an event as one “life-year” or one person being alive for one calendar year.1 Add them up and you get a sum of how much “human consciousness” the planet has ever generated, totaling a little over 1.6 trillion life-years.

Human population didn’t start to explode until agriculture launched a feedback loop starting around 5000 BC. Surplus energy fed population growth, which freed up specialists who made discoveries that multiplied energy again, tightening the cycle until humanity’s doubling time fell from millennia to centuries to mere decades post industrial revolution.

I charted the cumulative total of human life years by anchoring on known population figures from public datasets and linearly interpolated the gaps without introducing any assumptions about average lifespan (code below if you want to tweak the anchors).2

While the individual experiences time on a log scale, the collective has experienced time on an exponential scale, with almost eighty percent of human experience occurring in the last three millenia.

Zoom in and the view is even more extreme.

• 50% of all lived human experience occurs after 1500 CE

• 25% occurs after 1945 CE

• 10% occurs after 2003 CE

Even as global population is projected to top at ~10 billion 2080 as birthrates from developed nations naturally slow, there is still twenty five percent of all human experience that will be lived over the next 50 years. Every subsequent calendar year accounts for roughly 0.50% of all human experience.

The acceleration makes sense once you normalize by life-years, not by centuries. It’s one more “truth fractal” I keep bumping into: the idea that time is better counted in events than in objective time shows up in my day to day trading, stretches across an individual lifetime, and scales to the whole span of human history.

There’s plenty more of these fractals are out there. I’ll dig into them in future articles. Thanks for reading.

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My go to activity to pass time with my trading friends is the market making game. It works with two players, gets more fun with a larger group, and is a playful way to sharpen trading intuition. It has also become the canonical ritual in my circle for deciding who picks up bill at dinner.

rules

1. propose a market

   One player suggests a question whose answer can be verified. This has gotten easier as chatGPT has become a better oracle. For example, How old is our waitress?

   

2. auction for the market maker seat

   Players take turns quoting the size of a confidence interval. The proposer is trying to capture the waitress’s true age while keeping his interval as wide as possible. A first quote might be 20 years wide, meaning the player believes that he can predict the waitress’s age within a range of 20 years.

   Someone else may then bid 15 wide because he thinks he can predict her age within 15 years. Each new bid must narrow the previous interval by at least 10% to prevent pennying. Bidding continues until no one will quote a tighter range. The narrowest bidder becomes the market maker. All else held equal, it is advantageous to be the market maker.

   

3. market maker sets the range.

   Let’s say the auction settles with the narrowest bidder setting his interval at 1 year wide. The market maker believes the waitress’s true age is 22.5 years old, known as his theo or theoretical value. He sets his range at 22 @ 23, meaning he believes the waitress is between 22 and 23 years old and is willing to buy any guess at 22 and sell any guess at 23.

   

4. trade against the market.

   Everyone else now chooses a side of the maker’s range. They may sell the lower bound, betting the true value is below it, or buy the upper bound, betting it is above. The distance between the two bounds is the spread, which represents the maker’s margin for error. Everyone must trade.

   

5. settle and score.

   After the trades are made and the positions are set, reveal the true value, settle gains and losses, and record results in units of spreads so scores stay comparable across rounds.

   

game 2

In this game, the market maker’s interval doesn’t contain the true value but is able to still break even because he was able to lock in a spread by selling 14m and buying 12m.

This game highlights the importance of two way flow. Market makers don’t need to make perfect forecasts if there is enough liquidity from differing views in the market. This spread he captured was able to offset his loss from the adverse selection of being directionally wrong on the forecast. As the number of players in the game increases, it becomes more advantageous to be the market maker.

game3

In this game, the market maker sets his market too high and has the entire crowd selling into his bid and ends up losing 3 spreads. The danger in being the market maker is being adversely selected and picked off in one direction if his estimate of the fair value is wrong.

game4

This round shows the chaos that erupts when a market has no natural ceiling on losses. Because the players’ estimates are scattered by several orders of magnitude, a single mispriced market can swing the entire series.

p1 and p3 lock into a bidding war. They both know that women ovulate about once a month until menopause, roughly a thousand eggs released over a lifetime, so they assume overall scarcity. That line of reasoning pushes them to keep narrowing their spread down to 25k eggs. Their shared misconception drives the market maker’s spread down.

Being short in a market without an upper bound is dangerous. A trader who sells at 25k can earn at most 2.5 spreads per contract if the answer were zero, yet the downside is unlimited. In earlier rounds the upside risk was capped — Zimbabwe is unlikely to hold more than 100 million people and kangaroos will never jump 20 feet high. Here the ceiling is undefined, so every short quote is a potential time bomb.

The order flow itself offers clues. p4 opens with a one million egg bid and never tightens. p2 never places a bid at all. Both signals suggest that some participants suspect a very high true value and are eager to buy anything below 100k. p1 and p3 ignored the hints, the spread collapsed around a faulty anchor, and p3 being the biggest loser at the end of the series, has to pick up an extravagant seafood dinner.

misc

The auction phase is where you begin to glimpse everyone else’s theoretical value. Watch how tight of a spread each person is willing to bid. Watch how they respond to another player’s market. Stay alert for deliberate feints, because an over reaction can be planted as easily as a real one.

Infinite loss markets are the most chaotic and the most fun. They turn the game into an exercise in defense as much as offense. A few fun ones you can try with friends:

• How many hairs cover a single spiny lobster

• How many Earths would fit inside the Sun

• How many individual ants are alive on Earth right now

• How many distinct words exist across every living human language

These Fermi problems are inherently ridiculous, which makes them fun to reason through, though it is even more satisfying to watch a friend drop a hundred spreads and then asking for the check.

Give the game a shot, let me know any wild markets you invent, and if you are in New York this summer let me know and we can kick it and play some market making games.