I still remember how life was before quarantine, being carefree and indifferent to the big problems of the world; living life through the highs of today rather than the worries of tomorrow. And many people say that quarantine made kids grow up too fast, showing them that the world isn’t a perfect place, rather a collection of imperfect ideas that when looked at from the right angle gives the illusion of tranquility. An illusion that was broken in seconds. When people say this, they usually mean it negatively, as if to say being older is being thrust into a world with problems, without the solutions. And I completely agree with this, but is it such a bad thing? As people, we naturally feel lost when there’s nothing we’re working towards, like a big promotion, a group project, or a nonprofit cause. But children haven’t developed this sense of self-awareness. Naturally, as we get older, this universal fact becomes clearer and even self-evident. I feel lucky that I got a taste for this dur...
Generally when we think of a baseline for the future, we tend to assume it's a flat line from exactly where we are now. But this is almost never actually the case. If you're actively investing, net positive returns mean almost nothing. The actually useful question is whether you're outperforming the simple counterfactual: putting your money in an index fund and letting it compound. This concept of comparing to a simple counterfactual generalizes surprisingly well to almost every aspect of life. It's easy to be complacent, seeing how far you’ve come and the obvious differences between you now and you in the past. But it's a lot harder to see which parts represented genuine changes beyond the trajectory you were already on. For example, graduating high school feels like progress, but a freshman version of me was on the path to do this. The reason I’m writing this is because I have a mental list of things I've done that I’m proud of, and I realized that I’m most pr...