I haven't successfully written a blog post for nearly two months now, but not for lack of trying. I think my mind has been in too many places for me to see one idea all the way from fruition to a fully-fleshed post, and so I've been left with a handful of half-grown, unfinished drafts. I've decided to share some of these drafts below, as I don't want them to go to waste. The highlighted texts are my notes from reading these old posts back.
A week ago was the last day of my software engineering internship at a big tech company. Since then, I've been floundering about. I'm not really sure what to do with my time, to be honest. I tried writing a couple of blog posts, but they sort of spiralled into pseudo-philosophical mess, and I hastily abandoned them. (this trend would continue indefinitely)
In this short period, where I'm sort of in-between things (the internship and the start of my third year of university) I've had a lot of time to think. Doesn't necessarily mean that I used that time to think, but amongst the brief flashes of lucidity I've had in the past week, I did actually manage to formulate some thoughts, and I'm going to attempt to document them now.
Currently, I feel quite aimless. For a brief period, any semblance of structure has been removed from my life - no courseworks, no lectures to catch up on, no pull requests to merge, no meetings to have. And in the removal of this structure, I think the skin of my surface-level desires has been peeled back, to reveal a fleshy, squirming mass underneath. I no longer have someone to tell me what to do. I can't justify my choices by saying 'someone else told me to.' My time is mine, only mine, and in many ways, that is a burden.
If I were a nerd, I would bring up JP Sartre here, and how he describes the nature of man as utterly free, yet in constant anguish as a result of the unrelenting responsibility that results. And if I was a slightly lazier writer, I'd reference that Sylvia Plath quote about a fig tree, where each fig on this tree represented a tantalising future, and yet as she looked up at it she could not choose one fig at the expense of all the others, and eventually they all decayed at her feet. However, I am neither of those things (I hope), so I will not be referencing either of them.
Instead, I'm going to write about the different things taking up my mind, each pulling at a part of me like horses at a quartering. I'm being a bit melodramatic, but you get the gist. Unfortunately, this mostly relates to my career, not deep-rooted emotional issues, so if you were looking for that sort of thing, sorry (I'm saving it for later).
The way I see it, I have roughly 3 main paths to choose from. Working at a large company, with comfortable pay and a comfortable (but meaningless) life (Big Tech), working at a smaller company, with extremely comfortable pay and an extremely uncomfortable (and even more meaningless) life (High Frequency Trading), or a startup, with (hopefully) comfortable pay, (hopefully) a comfortable (and meaningful) life. I acknowledge that amongst the infinitely broad spectrum that is life, this subset is a minutiae of the endless possibilities the world has to offer - but I'm fairly certain that my life will continue along the trajectory I've followed so far, barring a mid-life crisis. That being said, check in with me in 20 or so years.
I think if I were to return full-time to the big tech company (assuming they let me), I'd have a pretty good life. The work is interesting, the people are nice, and there's decent potential for growth. My qualms with this option are, I don't feel like I'd be doing anything important with my life. I suppose that this is a reckoning that everyone has at some point, and it's almost an accepted fact of corporate culture, that it's absurd to seek meaning in one's work, and that you should simply accept the fact that most of your time will be taken up by something you care very little about, and the rest of your life will be relegated to the smidgens of time you get in between. It's almost sacrificial - give up your will to live, to branch out, to pursue your true passions, and in return you will receive a pension, a medium sized house in a suburban neighbourhood, and adequate PTO.
Yet, I don't think there's a single other area in our life where we're expected to make this kind of sacrifice. For example, if you were in a relationship where the other person treated you like shit, ready to drop you as soon as having you around became inconvenient, you'd be called crazy for staying in it. And if we are asked to make a sacrifice (e.g. paying taxes), the justification is that it's for the common good - that someone else will benefit as a result. But when it comes to a job, you are asked to act to your own detriment, with the only plausible justification being 'this is just how it is'. I suppose this complaint turns into a full-on critique of capitalism if followed to completion, but I'll spare you the champagne socialism.
Of course, what's 'important' is entirely subjective. My team's work was 'important' to the products the company was building, arguably even critical, but I don't really give a shit about the product itself. I do think that the product will make the company a lot of money, but A. I would not see even a proportional share of that money, and B. It's literally just another B2B SaaS. Do I want to spend the rest of my life building uninspired, uninnovative products, for no reasons other than job security, a tolerance for the work and a decent retirement? Most likely not.
Another qualm I have is the financial component. Yes, working in big tech makes you solid money. Within a short period of time (say 5 years, or even less depending on the company), you can easily be taking home a sum that puts you in the top 1% of income earners in London. However, there is an unfortunate economic reality that I have trouble reconciling. A top 1% income in London (let's say this is about 200,000 GBP) does NOT buy you a top 1% London house, not even close. Let's be generous, and assume that you're able to get a mortgage which is 5x your income (typical numbers are around 3-4.5x). This means a mortgage of around 1M GBP, or a two bed central London flat - nowhere near the level of 'nice' one expects when discussing salaries in the multiple hundred thousands. The level of 'nice' that I assume (which, admittedly, is likely extremely inflated, and has no basis in my lived experience) is more like a semi-detached / detached house in the likes of Hampstead or Little Venice, which will put you back some arbitrary number of millions. The difference between the two is a literal order of magnitude, and honestly it's quite depressing. I think my view now has shifted, where I'm not too concerned about figuring out where exactly I'll end up, but more on setting myself up as much as possible for the future. Also I don't know what I was on about here, as 1 million -> 2-5 million isn't exactly an order of magnitude. I think what I meant instead was the underlying salary required - e.g. ~200k for 1 million, ~1 million for 5 million+. I also didn't take deposits into account, but I think I just wanted to illustrate how out of reach living a 'nice' lifestyle feels to me at the moment.
Since we're on the topic of fuck-you money, I suppose it's time to talk about HFTs. (For those unaware, HFT is a term used by CS bros to refer to any sort of financial trading company - think less Morgan Stanley / Goldman Sachs, and more Jane Street and Citadel. The name itself is a misnomer, and actually pretty vague, but at some point it stuck.) To be honest, I think there are only 2 real main draws of working at HFTs for me, 1. the opportunity to make a lot of money, very fast, and 2. the opportunity to work with very smart (albeit likely somewhat arrogant) people. On the other hand, the list of drawbacks is far lengthier.
For one, the hours are brutal. One of my fellow intern's friends is working at DRW full-time, and he pretty much works 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. For contrast, at my internship you could definitely get away with working 7 hours a day, probably even less if you pushed it. The content of those 14 hours won't be particularly relaxed either - due to the nature of the work (assuming your work will be related to the core trading infrastructure, and not random internal tooling), those 14 hours will be filled with stress and tight same-day deadlines. Hell, even if you're not working on time-critical things, they'll still push you to the brink. I heard that someone else interning at the same firm is enduring similar working conditions, despite only working on the front-end of an internal tool. Apparently, GUI has never been more mission critical.
The obvious costs of working these hours are shouldered by your physical and mental health. But unlike a typical 9-5, you also don't have the opportunity to form a life *outside* of work. There are no late night movies with your flatmates, no spontaneous outings to the pub. No, instead work becomes your life. As someone who sees a lot of value in joy and whimsy, this personally is a no from me. Also, if the vast majority of your time is being taken up by a single thing, you'd at least want it to be meaningful, right?
Well, no. For one, the fundamental goal of the work itself is utterly meaningless. Unlike big tech, there aren't even any pretences of 'changing the world' or 'improving people's lives'. The entire goal of such firms is to extract untapped value (aka 'alpha') from inefficient markets. It is a free-market capitalist's wet dream - supply and demand in its purest, unadulterated form. Whether or not this is unethical presides entirely on one's worldview - and I won't really get into that. But it is fundamentally amoral work at best. There are only two real main arguments for this sort of work being a net positive, and I would argue that both are equally limp.
The first is that trading firms (particularly market makers) provide 'liquidity' -that by filling the gap between buyers and sellers, these firms are making the markets more efficient. Of course, how this benefits the everyman remains to be seen. The second is essentially effective altruism (EA), a philosophy highly subscribed to by the likes of FTX / Alameda Research and OpenAI employees, as well as other highly intellectual and cultish organisations. The core principle behind this is that one should make as much money as possible, so that it can be allocated as efficiently as possible to places where it will cause the greatest good. It's essentially utilitarianism with a smear of egoism rooted in delusions of intellectual superiority (I know better than you, so you should give me all your money). However, I would argue that entrusting cold and calculating quant bros with the future of the world is likely not the best idea. I hope I don't have to elaborate on why.
Of course, you may find meaning in the content of the work itself. And if that's you, then by all means. But while I'm easily satisfied with a supply of problems that tickle my brain, I don't think this is a sustainable long-term path to a fulfilling life. While the money is tempting (and yes, it is extremely tempting. An HFT starting salary is essentially a fast-forward button for a Big Tech SWE), I do not think this would be the right path for me.
And so, that leaves startups. With startups, you can either start your own, or work for someone else's
And that's where this post ended. I think my view on HFTs has changed a bit. If I were to work for one which wasn't particularly cultlike, and had reasonable working hours (I'd probably be able to tolerate up to 50 hours a week), I think I'd be pretty happy, but this is something I'm still thinking about, and probably will continue to think about as I start working.
I haven't read Chomsky, apologies.
I grew up with war in my living room. CNN was the go-to choice for my household, and every evening as I ate dinner, pundits would tell me about world events. I met them so often that I even memorised their names - Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper became idols in my prepubescent mind, dictating what was happening across the globe, with an air of American-made pompousness that a younger me saw as nobility.
Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq - these names meant nothing to me, yet I heard them more than I heard my own mother's. And all that I associated with these places were the images relayed to my living room - ashen, sand-white buildings crumpled, sprawling deserts, a camouflaged helmet atop a brave, grinning American head. Really, they blend into one - show me Yemen and Syria on a map and ask me which is which, and I would never be able to tell you. All are subsumed by the identifier 'the Middle East'. When I hear that term now, I don't think of markets, or mosques, or students at a university. No, I think of the contrails left in the sky by an F-35 (F-35 here is inaccurate, it should say F-16 instead. amateur mistake), or a pile of rubble that was once a residential building, or the movie Jarhead. Because that's what I was taught.
I cannot help but feel that this is all deeply intentional. There is a reason I can tell you what an IED looks like, but not a Syrian street. The images and words relayed to us normalise what we see, and it extends beyond simply desensitising us to it. Because when you see something so many times, only in one context, it becomes defined by that context. There is no war in the Middle East; the Middle East is war.
But surely, when we see images of war, it horrifies us? It elicits an emotional response, rather than desensitising us to it? Yes, it horrifies. But the detail is in the presentation. To viewers, the corpse of a dead child is a corpse before it is a child. We don't see them going to school, or having dinner with their family, or playing football with their friends. We only see the aftermath. Here it is easy to accuse the viewer of lacking empathy - how can you see a dead child, and not be enraged? But my point is this - when all you know of a place is its destruction, and all you know of its people are their corpses, what image do you form of that place? It is not a place full of life, but rather a place that is dead by default. And this is incredibly dangerous.
I see the impacts of this programming now. With Gaza, I knew what was happening - it was just more of the same. 'Conflict in the Middle East.' In fact, I didn't even need to see images of the war to know what it looked like. I'd seen it all before, dead children, collapsed buildings, arbitrarily rising death tolls. But when I saw headlines of bombing in Lebanon, it felt different. That was strange, I thought Beirut didn't get those sorts of things. In fact, I went to Google Maps, and spent a few minutes just looking at random roads in Beirut on street view. I didn't see rubble or death. No, I saw life. Stores with glass fronts, people going for walks, hedges and trees. And I realised what had been done to me.
Perhaps it shouldn't have taken me this long to realise. By all rationality, nothing makes the deaths of those in Palestine worth less than the deaths of those in Lebanon.
I suppose this is my attempt at political writing. I think it gets quite clunky at the end, and I was struggling to convey my ignorant perception of the Middle East in a way that doesn't make the reader go 'duh'. When I wrote this I also felt quite emotional about what was happening in Palestine, but since then that feeling has faded. I consider that a moral failure on my part (but I'm too lazy and pessimistic to do anything about it).
In the past few years, we have seen giant bounds in technological process that threaten to fundamentally change how we interact with the world around us, and, of course, each other. Technology has obviously made our lives much easier across many fronts. For services, we now have the gig economy to thank, goods are a few clicks and a day's wait away, and ideas can now propagate online faster than ever before. In all of these cases, progress was made by reducing friction. I think this opening paragraph is quite generic and lame, but I never got around to rephrasing it, so this is what you're stuck with. Sorry
However, these have obviously come with significant costs. While there are many to argue, the one I'd like to address is the human one.
Inadvertently or not, a lot of these changes have drastically reduced our face-time with other people. This is largely due to the underlying principle of software - code scales, people don't. It is much faster to have 12 self-checkouts than 4 human cashiers in the same space. Deliveroo can handle dozens of orders at once, while a single front-of-house member of staff at a restaurant can only handle one. These systems are more efficient, relatively frictionless, and as a result, more profitable for those that use them. But software is not always the right answer.
Dating is a much talked-about space where I would argue software is largely failing to replace human frictions. In theory, you should be able to immediately filter out thousands of people by the setting of a few filters, and only interact with those who fit your specific criteria, vastly increasing your chances of meeting 'the one.' In practice, you end up seeing thousands of profiles that blend into one, each a surface-level representation of a much more nuanced person whose rough edges have been artificially sanded down to appeal to 'the algorithm.' You end up with likes without matches, matches without conversations, conversations that turn to ghosts. It becomes a quantitative, rather than a qualitative, process, where in this case, the quality lost is genuine human connection. Of course, another fundamental flaw of dating apps that makes them so terrible is that the user's benefit comes at the detriment of the platform - a successfully kindled connection means two less (potentially) paying users. However, I would argue that even if these apps were 'perfect' (i.e. matched you with the 'perfect' person every single time), the experience would still be similarly draining.
It's almost as if the thesis that Silicon Valley is subconsciously putting before us is that human interaction is not necessary. That there is no qualitative aspect in interacting with a human when it could be done through an interface instead. And I think that that's complete bullshit. Even products that are supposed to increase connection, like social media, are making people lonely, insecure, and suicidal, and they have been for some time. The counterargument to this is of course that by reducing friction in the 'non-essential' aspects of our lives, we're able to put more time and effort towards the people that *do* matter to us, but of course this is never the case. Tech companies have refined the art of attention-capturing so well that it is not uncommon for teenagers and young adults to spend the majority of their waking hours on TikTok, or Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Netflix doc-series have become noticeably padded-out as well, prioritising artificial watchtime over the viewer's time. Everywhere, across almost every sector, tech is digging in its tendrils with the promise of making something better, and making it significantly worse for the end user.
And if these arguments sound well-trodden, it's because they are. These are not new phenomena, but they're becoming a lot more egregious now, and in my opinion it feels like we're at a tipping point between having to uproot technology from various parts of our lives, and fully absorbing it.
Take the latest announcement from Meta - the 'Orion' Augmented Reality glasses, that are like the Apple Vision Pros, but less intrusive, and geared more towards day-to-day use. They're a prototype, meaning they're not available for purchase yet. It's quite rare for a Big Tech company to unveil something that's not actually ready for release (Apple did this too recently, I'll talk about this later [I didn't]), but in this case it's essentially Zuckerberg's attempt to prove that the billions they poured into the 'Metaverse' didn't just evaporate into thin air.
Zuck's prediction (or goal, I suppose) is that AR glasses will wholly replace smartphones. Thinking about this for more than two seconds, this would basically mean having a screen attached to your face 24/7. Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone wearing one of these things, not knowing whether they're looking at you or an Instagram Reel. At least with phones, you can tell when someone's not paying attention to you.
<imagine a segue here> There are obvious benefits to ChatGPT as a product. It is very good at explaining things, and I use it near daily alongside my university material. But people are using it as a therapist, as a confidant, and as an emulated romantic partner. It's like the most depressing form of the Turing test - not only is it advanced enough for people to believe it's human, but also for people to use it to fulfil their emotional needs. There is also much talk of GenAI replacing workers in the creative industries, which has already started to happen to some extent. In many ways, the process of 'creating' for both an AI model and a person are very similar from a black box perspective - they take in an input (in the case of AI, training data + a prompt / base data, in the case of a person, their life experiences and influences) and produce an output. But of course, AI will *never* be able to truly 'create'. AI is fundamentally derivative - all it can do is take in what it 'knows', and produce something based on that. Yes, an artist's art is a product of their influences, but people have something that AI will never have; ingenuity. And no matter what Sam Altman would have you believe, all AI can do is replicate this behaviour to the point where it is almost indistinguishable from a human's, but it cannot, and never will be, identical.
I don't really know where I was going with this. I just wanted to express my distaste for the current trends in technology and how they're trying to replace every qualitative 'human' aspect of our lives, and it sort of turned into an essay. But I realised partway through that if I wanted my essay to be good, I'd have to plan it and structure it, so I gave up.
If you're curious about what I was going to say about Apple, my point was going to be that they've built an entire brand around sleek, polished products, and the fact that they've released an iPhone that's missing its main marketed feature (Apple Intelligence) should be a pretty big indicator that something's very wrong. Another interesting thing is that they pulled out of OpenAI's latest funding round, despite Apple Intelligence largely being built on top of OpenAI's GPT models.
I really wish I could stop thinking so much.
I'm in a place where my life is good on paper - I have friends, I have hobbies, I have a job lined up for me after I graduate, I am financially secure. But there is an unshakeable dread that hangs above me, and no matter how much thinking I do, I can't figure out why.
I realised it was there when I got the call for said job. As I hung up, I felt a brief period of elation, but it quickly dissipated and my mood was no different from 15 minutes prior. In fact, even when I called my mom to tell her about it, I found myself struggling to smile. I should be so happy - weeks of preparation and planning, difficult interviews, and ~3 months of hard work and effort had finally paid off. If I thought back to a year ago, when I was applying to internships, I couldn't even have imagined myself in this position. But now, all I felt was an undirected anxiety.
It's likely made up of many things. One of those is probably my mindset - I've never been satisfied with my achievements. I've always been a glass-half-empty person. Photos I take are never good enough, grades never at 100%,
yeah the voices kind of got to me in this one. I'm better now though, and I think I've kind of figured out the answer to my woes, which I'll be discussing with my therapist tomorrow :)
These past few days I've been ill - not bedridden, but ill enough to make forming cohesive thoughts difficult. When I do get ill, a couple things invariably happen. One, my diet rapidly declines in quality. On the first day of my illness, I bought around six or seven cans of Heinz soup (some cream of tomato, and some cream of chicken, for the sake of variation), and two sliced loaves of bread. My diet for the first two or three days consisted of only this - cans of soup, and sliced bread. Yesterday (or the day before, I can't seem to remember), I ran out of bread. Today, I had a mixture of plain linguine and spaghetti (leftovers scrounged from my pantry), with a side of bacon (leftovers scrounged from my fridge), topped with tomato soup (the aforementioned) for dinner. I realise as I'm writing this that my rations have been exhausted, and I'll probably have to trudge to the store in the morning if I want to make it through the weekend. It has been a miserable few days.
Two, I become a complete hermit. Under the guise of self-sacrifice, I lock myself in my room and indulge in the consumption of whatever mindless content I want, guilt-free. No, I cannot do my coursework, and how dare you even suggest such a thing, I am so ill! Of course, there comes a point where the illness has diminished to the point where I probably could do my coursework, but I still choose not to. It's more like an excuse than a valid reason, but of course the only person I am really lying to is myself.
This indulgence mostly came in the form of gaming, and watching YouTube videos about gaming. It got to a point where I no longer enjoyed the game that I was playing, so I'd turn it off and do something else, until I became bored enough with that other thing to the point where I was able to go back to the game. Over the past few days I've cultivated this mindless cycle, until it became too much to bear.
The part that became too much to bear was the feeling that I was running from something, and that running from it wasn't making me feel any better. I was telling myself that I was enjoying the game I was playing, or the video I was watching, and at the beginning it was true - but over time, as that initial high faded, it just became another exercise in escapism.
I think the thing that I was running from, in this case, was university work. Nothing particularly existential, but probably just a simple case of procrastination. However, I think this pattern extends much farther than academic procrastination.
I recently watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1cWUtgQe_Q) by a former neurosurgeon. In it, he described how when he was 18 or so, he faced a crossroads in his life; pursue a degree in philosophy and linguistics, or go to medical school. The former were passions he'd discovered in his first year at college, and he wanted to continue pursuing, the latter was the 'logical choice' laid out to him by his (Asian) immigrant parents. Of course, he chose the latter, because who can support a family on a philosophy degree?
Twenty-odd years later, he realised that something was wrong. He was no longer sure of himself, agonising over simple decisions like whether or not to get snow tires for his car. He was drinking too regularly, and had put thousands and thousands of hours into gaming. He felt like he was no longer himself. And he realised that this all stemmed from that decision he'd made when he was 18. He'd spent half his life pursuing a path that didn't fulfil him, that actively made him unhappy despite the financial and societal security that it bought him, and in doing so he'd deeply betrayed his true passions, his 'heart'. All the indulgences, all the insecurities, they all were caused by this foundational lie that he'd bought into and built his whole life around. And it ate away at him, like a corrosive substance. So he quit his job.
This resonated with me because of how he described it as a betrayal of his self. It wasn't something that was done to him by someone else - sure, there are always external pressures, but ultimately it was his decision. And what worries me is that on a macro level I could very easily see myself falling into that trap, taking the easy, well-trodden path (A job that slowly kills you..),
I feel like every time I pursue some form of escapism, it's like a littler version of that betrayal
I feel like I'm at that same crossroads now, and in him I see a future version of myself, one who was never brave enough to
Another messy post. I kind of got stuck doing two things at once by the end of this one - I wanted to describe the guilt behind my feelings of procrastination, but also the feeling that I'd be betraying myself (like the neurosurgeon) by going down the Big Corpo route. I never managed to figure out how to get the balance right in my head, so it never made it to the page. Looking back though, I don't think it was that deep lol, I was just sick and suffering from a bit of cabin fever.
I hope you got something out of this, and if not, sorry for wasting your time. Bye! ⚭