It's a little late in the year to be sure for retrospectives. I'm sure most people have already set their new year's resolutions and some have probably already been broken by now. But I wanted to get this thought out into the world anyway, since maybe this might resonate with someone in the same situation.

Over the past couple of months, I've been dealing with the realisation that I haven't been living a life that is authentic to who I am. I've been following a script for 'success'. Do well in school, get a relevant degree, get a good job, earn lots of money and then you will be 'successful'. I grew up associating failure with death (in a metaphorical, not so much a literal sense). To survive, you weren't allowed to fail. So I played the statistically likeliest route of not failing. I gave up wants and desires if they could potentially lead me astray from the path to success. I thought of this suppression as a good thing - as 'discipline'. Eventually, I lost sight of why I was chasing that goal in the first place.

Coping mechanisms, and other lies I told myself

I have a few coping mechanisms that I have in place to deal with the fear of not being able to survive:

• In order to survive, I need to be better than the people around me: this is exhausting. Since I don't really know what I need to be good at to survive, not only do I have to be the best at something (which is already hard enough) but I have to be the best at everything. So I took an already very improbable, nigh impossible requirement and built on top of it to make it completely impossible. So I'm constantly feeling bad about not measuring up about everything

• I may not achieve this impossible ask, but the only way I'll ever get close is if I spend every second of my life productively: What this means is effectively - no play time. No free time. No relaxation. If I'm spending any time at all doing something that doesn't further my goal of becoming more skilled, more capable or more well off, it is a 'waste' of time. I did begrudgingly allow myself some time 'wasted', through sleep or playing the guitar, or watching shows, but only when pushing myself harder would have led to worse outcomes from a productivity standpoint (such as immediate burnout). In some sense, imagine running an engine at 100%, only stopping it to make sure it doesn't explode, but pushing it to the brink of it repeatedly.

By setting myself up with impossible-to-meet standards, I had guaranteed I had set myself up for failure. So I looked for a way out. Something to focus on as a goal. That goal became money. To put it simply, here is the mental model I had, and to some extent still have, about how money works:

Money is a general purpose store of value. It is a generally agreed upon medium of value exchange, and the time and energy I spend doing the work that I do can be stored as money. To use a physics analogy, money was the potential energy to my kinetic. I could convert my time and energy right now into money, with the goal of converting it to other things later.

Why do we approve of this?

The problem with this approach was that I never thought about a later. If I had a million dollars right now, I wouldn't know what to do with it - oh sure, invest it, but the goal of investing it is to make more of it, without much thought as to how I'd want to spend the fucking thing. I had asphyxiated any desire of wanting to own things or do things in the name of financial discipline - saving more and investing more to grow my pile. A pile I have no idea what to do with, except compare it to other's piles as a way of feeling like I'm not good enough. But that was okay - society tells you it's okay. Look at all the people we worship and revere - CEOs, actors, celebrities, titans of industry, all sitting on their piles. Some people we worship just because they've spent their entire life building a bigger pile than everyone else. Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, the most prolific investor of our time - most people worship him for having a bigger pile than most people can build over multiple lifetimes. So my coping mechanism drove me to the building of my pile - constantly comparing and worrying if my pile was bigger than everyone around me, and feeling like a failure when it wasn't.

Building your pile is a socially acceptable way of preventing making a choice of what you want to do with your life. We spend our life energy to amass all this potential, without ever thinking of what we want to do with it, consoling ourselves with the notion that if we do ever figure that part out, at least we'll have a way to put it into action immediately.

This is a lie. It won't happen. The more money I had, the more I started to level up who I was comparing with. The more 'successful' I got in monetary terms, the worse I felt, because from the top of my pile I could see other piles much larger than my own. Growing this pile became my purpose, to the point where the more money I had, the less I was willing to spend, because it would eat into my pile. And all I could think about was how to grow my pile more and more.

Why do so many of us think this is a good way to spend our lives like this? I understand if you're working your ass off to put food on the table for you and the people you care about, or to give your kids a life that is better than the one you lived. But being in tech, and fintech especially, I see people who have more money than they could realistically spend in multiple lifetimes, and they're still chasing more - and we celebrate them for it. If this was alcohol, or cigarettes, or sex, we would throw these people into rehab until they developed a healthier, more well-balanced relationship with their addictions. Instead, we're trying to learn their 'secrets of success' and trying to find shortcuts on how to be like them.

Realisation

In July last year, I got laid off. And I had a lot of time to think. In chasing ways to make my pile bigger, I hadn't fully considered where I was and where I was heading. I was just blindly chasing whatever would make that pile bigger. The silver lining of the situation was that it helped me realise what I was doing, and how it was making my life worse, not better. My desire to avoid making choices about what I want to do with my life other than try to optimise for how much I made led me down a path of conforming to this idea that I need to build the biggest pile I can. And if you find yourself in the socially accepted and validated trap, you might want to look at your pile and think about what you plan on doing with it, and is it enough for that. It's easier to keep avoiding having that conversation with yourself - about what you want, what makes you happy. I certainly did for the longest time.

It was during this process that I realised what money was a proxy for in my life. Broadly speaking it represented the following:

Control:

I thought of what to call this one for a while. At first I thought 'power' but that didn't feel specific enough. What I really want is to have some feeling of control over my life - to feel that I will not be swept up by extenuating circumstances without having any ability to steer the way things go. That an errant increase in rent prices or a wayward hospital bill wouldn't throw my entire life plans off course. I thought of calling it stability as well, since so much of what I want to be able to control comes down to feeling like I can withstand unpredictability in how situations develop.

Acceptance:

This is the biggest part of it, I think. I wanted to feel like I could be part of groups and communities that were forming around me. And a lot of these group hangouts would involve brunch at fancy places, where a meal might cost what I would spend on a week for lunch on a regular basis, and I couldn't justify that expense given where I felt I was. And that just led to a process of feeling ashamed that I wasn't 'good enough' to be hanging out with these groups of people. Not that I would want to even if I could (knowing what I know now) but I did not want to feel like I was less than.

There is a very painful memory that comes up often when I think about this - of being a child in school and being interested in a girl and wanting to go over to her place to do homework, and being told I couldn't come over because I was too poor for them. That girl, in her tactlessness and naivete, told me something that I would internalise as a truth about relationships - platonic, romantic or otherwise. It's not her fault of course. She just said something I already believed, thereby cementing my belief in it. That my lack of money was the reason I was not being accepted into groups I wanted to be a part of.

And while there is truth to both these feelings, it is most certainly the case that I have a confirmation bias that makes me look for evidence that supports these feelings. And while money might help with both of these, ultimately it's a proxy, not the real deal.

Signs of life

If this is something you're struggling with, I wish I could tell you how I got out of it. Truth is, I haven't. I'm still figuring that part out. I have become more mindful of what I want to do with my pile, and it's a process. I asphyxiated my wants a while ago in the name of trying to survive, so being allowed to want things and trying to figure out what those things are feels a little like trying to raise the dead. But I'm looking for signs of life wherever I see them now. I'm factoring in the value of life experiences as well, and trying to optimise for that more than trying to build the biggest pile I can (Die With Zero by Bill Perkins is a book that has helped me with somewhat with that). But most importantly, I'm looking to reframe my relationship with money, and as with all relationships it's going to take a while.

So as to not end this on a fatalistic note, especially if this has resonated with you and like me you're looking for a way out of it, I can tell you what I am doing. I am looking to stop using money as a proxy for what I'm actually looking for. In terms of finding control over my life, I am not seeking money so much as knowledge that I have the ability to create money whenever I choose. I'm doing this by gaining confidence in my professional capabilities, and better learning to communicate my strengths - something I've not been very good at.

As for acceptance, well, conditional acceptance is no acceptance at all. Any group that cares about how much I make or how much I have before accepting me would be as quick to drop me should I fail to meet those requirements. So instead, I'm looking for people connected by interests and passions rather than status - I believe I've found individuals through doing that, and maybe a group or two. And that's good enough for now.