3 Takeaways from 2022

2022 has been quite an eventful journey for me personally and professionally. The gap between my personal and professional life has been reducing and I would like to take this to zero i.e do what I love and also have my family and friends love what I do. This shouldn't be difficult, especially when you are working on something really interesting.

2022 has had many lows and highs, but I think the lows can be turned into highs too in the future. Regardless, there are some very important and unexpected lessons I have learnt last year. Here are the top ones:

1. What money means to me

If I look back on those years when money was an issue, and everything was uncertain and then look at myself today, I would get goosebumps and tears of joy. Money and career progress have done wonders for me, but they have also put me in a position where I can clearly see what money brings and what it does not. As much as I would enjoy sitting in a Rolls Royce and dictating this blog to my personal scribe while drinking expensive Champagne, I would never put these as "goals" for myself. That would be being under-ambitious.

Money for me is just a way to communicate with the economy when I want something from the economy. But the problem is, the things I want, today's economy cannot offer. What I want, in order of highest to lowest priority:

1. I want my 25-year-old body to be with me when I turn 100.  
2. I want to live healthily beyond 150 years.
3. I want to artificially create a human body. 
4. I want to transfer my consciousness and memories to an artificial body in case my body is damaged.
5. I want anyone in the world (conditions apply) to have the ability to do 1. - 4.

I am serious, and here is a video that motivated me.

So those are my goals. Now obviously, I am not even close to capable of pulling off any of the above 5 goals alone. That is where the money comes in. I need it to build/fund an alpha team.

2. Software is a myth

There is nothing called software. Everything is hardware. Even electricity is made from electrons. This applies to my body too. I don't believe there is a soul. I am just a really complex set of biological hardware. Without going too much into philosophy, the reason I want to write this down is that I think so far I have had big goals for my "software" but very menial goals for my hardware. 

Learning is a physical activity of your brain hardware reacting to what your sensory hardware is consuming. I have been exposing my sensory/brain hardware to more consumable knowledge, without improving the hardware explicitly. I believe there are some levers I currently haven't explored that can upgrade my CPU. Diet and exercise are places to start.

I usually have utter disregard for the generic advice given on the importance of healthy food and exercise. I play and eat healthy in general, but I did not prioritize either of these as much as I prioritized learning data science or figuring out product-market fits. But this year, someone close to me passed away, in a very painful way. Death does not seem scary till you see it happen. It will seem particularly scary if you see it coming slowly and painfully. My respect to all doctors and nurses who are able to bear seeing this for their entire lives. But this experience has made the importance of food and exercise alarmingly clear, as in, it's a do-or-die situation, quite literally.

I have been reading and talking to people regarding death, health, and age. Initially, in a depressing manner, but now, in a professional sense to see if there are means to fix this. And there are very very particular things you can and should do with your diet and exercise which can essentially make you biologically younger and prevent most of the diseases which come with age. This year I would like to read more and understand some very particular drugs which seem to reverse aging eg. Metformin, NMN, NAD, and Reservatrol. 

Ageing is a disease, and I believe it can be cured and even prevented. 

In 2050, I would like to go to a health clinic every 6 months to measure my actual biological age and find it to be just 29. Then, do a bio-therapy session where they reverse my age by 4 years, back to 25. 

This is much less ambitious than thinking about modifying the brain hardware, giving it more parallel cores, more memory, etc. explicitly, which I haven't honestly thought about.

3. The definition of intelligence

I got into an IIT. I got into an Ivy League grad program. I've worked with some of the best teams in India, if not in the world. Yet, I am really not sure if I am truly intelligent or the dumbest idiot I have known. 

I don't think intelligence is how much knowledge you have, how much money you have, or how happy you are, it is all three. I have more money and knowledge than I have ever had and yet the more I learn or earn, the more difficult it is for me to find joy/happiness/santushti, etc. on a daily basis. The bar for joy/happiness is getting higher. Now there are countless ways to fix this, such as breaking down big goals into smaller steps, measuring progress more often, etc. and yet I am finding it really hard to figure this one out. This year, I really need to focus on this.

How do people find joy in creating reels on Instagram? I wish I could find joy in that too, without compromising the other things I am doing in life. I am truly genuinely jealous.

Now, is this depression? Well, everyone gets depressed multiple times in their life. Some people have to fight quite a lot to escape it. But for me, it is quite the opposite. I am usually happy and jolly. I want to stay happy and jolly. I am not depressed, I am scared that intelligence will lead me to depression. And I worry that some depressions are irreversible. If you learn something you are not supposed to learn, your brain hardware will go thermodynamically in a place from where the change in Gibbs free energy* is so negative in the forward reaction that backward reactions are difficult or next to impossible to do. Once depressed, you stay depressed. This is not a joke, it honestly scares me.

Sometimes I wonder if I could be happy doing purely materialistic things, stay in perfect health because I want to look good, and just take aging benefits from the biological clinics opened by a smart scientist, without ever thinking of any of these things. Would I essentially be smarter then? Is that an intelligent body that has shielded itself against potential negative Gibbs-free energy reactions with harmful effects? Like a mental anti-virus.

*google it

What next?

Counter-intuitively, having such goals really helps me in life on a daily basis. Most of my problems personally/professionally seem too small to worry about, most seem solvable. I find it easy to be hard-working and diligent. In fact, it feels like "hard-working" is just life, you really don't need to have a separate word for it. I think, I work, therefore I am.

Writing these thoughts down has given me much more clarity on what I should and should not focus on in 2023. If there is any significant progress in any of the above 3 points, you will hear from me in another blog post. 

Until then! 

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