Being the House of the Future: A Poor Man's Self-Narrative of Rising in an Age of Anxiety

2025.12.31

Being the House of the Future: A Poor Man's Self-Narrative of Rising in an Age of Anxiety

Achieve lasting autonomy and accomplish your life.

2025.12.31 - 07:18:23

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Achieve lasting autonomy and accomplish your life.

Author: sysls

Translation: TechFlow

Introduction

The spread of my article “The Cage of Financial Mediocrity” exceeded my expectations. My intention was to analyze the roots of mass behavior and offer a framework for understanding why an entire generation prefers casino chips over climbing the career ladder. The article also clearly presented a hypothesis: if this behavior continues, how should one position themselves?

Many readers felt deeply moved after reading it, as if someone had finally understood their anxiety and frustration, putting into words emotions they struggled to express.

Other readers saw it as a call to action, saying: "Alright, most people are gambling, but I don’t have to follow the crowd. I can be the one in control." That’s fantastic. I hope you recognize the changes coming and prepare yourself for this structural transformation.

For those seeking more concrete guidance—practical advice on what to do and how to move forward—this article is for you. I want you to know that in the world ahead, there is space for you, a place for your hopes and ambitions, and despair is never the answer.

A Not-So-Short Story

At the end of my previous article, I shared a short story about a friend. This time, I’d like to begin with a story about myself.

I was born into an extremely poor and troubled family. Fortunately, I lived in an exceptionally wealthy country, which meant that even in poverty, I never fell completely into destitution. Yet my poverty was real enough that I had to choose between lunch and dinner, accompanied by stories of divorce, drugs, abuse, bloody nights, and trouble.

As I grew up, I carried a persistent feeling that life shouldn’t just be about “living like a dog,” as the saying goes. Watching people around me exist without truly living was hard to bear. To me, they appeared like gray figures in a colorful world, radiating despair, as if they had already surrendered to poverty.

This feeling affected me deeply. For a while, I wondered—was this my fate?

But I always believed I was meant for more, so I began contemplating how to escape. Like each of you, I longed to realize myself. An inner restlessness urgently wanted to experience life fully, rather than remain locked out from things that could bring joy.

I started planning and designing my own path out, realizing roughly that I needed a stable foundation before I could “buy” call options on the life I desired—small bets with low probability but high payoff.

Yet when you’re poor, building such a stable foundation isn’t easy. This isn’t my autobiography, so I won’t go into details, but it involved:

Flipping burgers at fast-food restaurants during school;

Earning my undergraduate degree while serving in the military;

Being crushed under student loans just to afford any form of education.

None of this was easy, but my determination was absolute. Nothing could stop me—not even self-teaching programming in the dense jungles of Southeast Asia, using a notebook and pencil under moonlight. I would mentally walk through data structures and algorithms, rehearsing them by hand, only able to run the code on weekends. This learning process was slow, painful, and grueling, but my desire to realize my potential far outweighed these temporary hardships.

No more suspense—my efforts eventually paid off. After leaving the military, I landed a job as a Quantitative Researcher at one of the world’s largest hedge funds.

Many see quant researchers as adventurers—and some are. But if you think carefully, being a quant researcher is actually one of the lowest-risk jobs out there. You can earn very high income with almost no personal risk.

This role became the stable cornerstone of my life, allowing me to buy call options on my future. Some of those bets succeeded, and today I’m fortunate—no longer trapped in financial mediocrity.

Unlike the people from my childhood, I now live a “colorful” life. Specifically, this means I could travel last spring with my beloved to admire the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and see Michelangelo’s David together for the first time. It means I can spend two hours at the gym on a Wednesday because my time belongs entirely to me. It means when I see something beautiful, I don’t need to calculate whether I can afford the cost of experiencing it.

I hope you too can personally experience the masterpieces of great artists.

I’ve achieved “escape velocity,” breaking free from life’s constraints.

And I sincerely hope you can achieve the same.

A Zen Koan

A Zen master approaches his disciple holding a thick stick, saying:

“If you tell me this stick is real, I’ll hit you with it; if you say it’s not real, I’ll still hit you with it; and if you say nothing, I’ll hit you anyway.”

The disciple reaches out, grabs the stick, and breaks it.

That’s my point—my perspective is always about taking initiative.

Once you see through the game, you can break the stick.

The Choice of Contentment

But perhaps you don’t need to “escape” at all.

You aren’t starving. You don’t fight for survival. You have shelter, people who care about you, and even enough cognitive capacity to ponder questions like “What is the meaning of my life?” or “Have I realized my potential?”

For nearly all of human history, most people’s primary task was simply to survive—to get enough calories to make it through tomorrow, find shelter from extreme weather, avoid violence. Our ancestors would have been thrilled to replace fears of hunger and death with anxieties about “career fulfillment.”

These are “luxury problems.” I’m not dismissing them—they’re real and painful. But having them at all is already a victory.

The world has room for contentment. Room to look at everything you have and say: “This is enough. This is good.”

Contentment might be the wisest choice you ever make.

But.

If that’s not you—if deep inside you genuinely crave more, not because social media tells you to, but because you feel it in your bones, just as I did in childhood—then we need to talk about how to achieve it intelligently.

How to Intelligently Break Through in Life

My breakthrough wasn’t accidental—it followed a clear pattern. Its path can be summarized as: build a solid foundation first, then go all-in.

This foundation consists of two parts: durable education and sustainable income. Only when you possess both do you earn the right to aggressively pursue greater goals.

Life outcomes aren’t fully controllable. You can’t will yourself to win the lottery, but you can control your ability to participate in the game and respond to life’s disruptions. Simply put, if you need to roll a “6” to escape financial mediocrity, you should position yourself in an environment where you can roll the dice indefinitely until you get that “6.”

Luck is uncontrollable, but we can increase the probability of luck striking. That’s the essence of going all-in.

Yet most people get this backwards. They see high-risk, high-reward moves—call options, moonshots, asymmetric bets—and reach for them without a solid base. This leads only to blowing up, ending up worse than where they started, growing cynical, disheartened, and convinced they were doomed from the start.

Maybe the rules of the game are unfair to you, but as long as you engage correctly, you can still win.

Education for Life

When I say “education,” I don’t mean school specifically. Learning itself matters far more than where you learn. MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a perfect example of a free, high-quality educational resource accessible to anyone. If you can read this article on a phone or computer, you already have access to education.

School is one path to education, but what I truly want you to do is: develop skills that appreciate over time and cannot be replaced by automation.

The worst response to “AI will replace white-collar jobs” is retreating into fields that seem safe today. A better response is asking: after this wave of automation passes, which abilities will still matter?

Here are some thoughts:

Judgment under high uncertainty and noisy data: making critical decisions amid ambiguous information.
Directing and coordinating AI as a multiplier: learning to collaborate with artificial intelligence instead of being replaced by it.
Participating in AI research itself: becoming part of the technological wave, not just watching it.
Bridging communication gaps across languages—whether between technical and non-technical teams, or executives and implementers.
Sales ability, fundamentally the skill of understanding others’ needs and showing them how to meet them.
Building trust and calming fears, a deeply human phenomenon.
Managing chaos: handling multiple competing priorities in your mind and making progress across all fronts.

None of these skills require a specific degree, but all demand years of deliberate practice to master.

The good news: you have more tools at your disposal than any previous generation to cultivate these skills. Artificial intelligence—the very force causing anxiety about replacement—is also a powerful mentor. Today, you can learn almost anything for free, from anyone. The excuses that existed twenty years ago have virtually disappeared.

All that remains is your willingness to learn and the discipline to persist through difficulty. I once studied data structures in the jungle with only a pencil, while you now have AI tools like Claude, embodying the collective wisdom of the internet. Use them well.

Building a Sustainable Foundation

“Get a good job” sounds like something your uncle says at Thanksgiving, right before mentioning he bought a house for $40,000.

I know the traditional path seems broken now. I’ve even written about why it’s become unreachable for many.

But remember, “harder” doesn’t mean “impossible.” A well-paying job gives you something no gamble ever can: a stable foundation from which to take smart risks.

In the digital world, if you’re willing to search and improve your skills, countless opportunities exist to earn substantial income. My expertise is narrow, so I’ll mention only a few familiar paths:

Coding bounties (building apps or tools)
Bug bounties
Remote programming jobs (especially in blockchain/crypto)
Data science competitions (like Kaggle)
Crowdsourced quant strategy platforms (like Numerai, BRAIN, CrunchDao, TrexQuant, etc.)

I’ve designed some of these projects myself, so I know they’re thoughtfully structured and economically rewarding for capable, hardworking individuals.

Having a sustainable foundation is crucial. The best performers in the casino aren’t those who bet their rent money out of desperation. They’re the ones who bring capital they can afford to lose, possess the skills to spot opportunities, and have the patience to win over time.

When I started chasing opportunities, I began from a strong starting point. I had income and skills—enough that even if everything failed, I could recover. This allowed me to stay patient, wait for real opportunities, and avoid grabbing every shaky-looking chance. I could endure repeated failures until I found the right path.

Don’t treat a job as your “ceiling”—it should be your “floor” toward everything possible.

Then, Take the Bet

When you have durable education and sustainable income, you earn the right to “place bets.” At this stage, your risks resemble thoughtful risk management—you understand the odds of success and can afford the cost of failure.

This brings us back to our core idea:

If you believe a generation of economically anxious young people will keep pouring money into casinos, prediction markets, meme coins, sports betting, courses, and dreams, then you can prepare for that.

You can build the platforms offering these services, own equity in them, or even create infrastructure to capture a share of the cash flow.

But to do this, you need resources. You need time; as an entrepreneur, you need sufficient runway to experiment; as a speculator, you need the resilience to survive three failures before one success; as an investor, you need enough capital for compounding growth.

And these are exactly what education and income provide.

Hold Noble Ambitions

Let me talk about how you view all this.

Life’s goal isn’t to slog joylessly for decades, only permitting yourself to live in some distant future. That’s itself a cage.

The real goal is to build with purpose. To feel daily that you’re moving toward something meaningful. To find meaning in the building, not just at the finish line.

When I flipped burgers, I didn’t suffer—because I had a mission. When I studied algorithms with a pencil in the dark, I didn’t feel punished—because I knew I was shaping the person I wanted to become.

Pain is real, but pain with purpose is bearable, while meaningless comfort cannot satisfy.

If you choose to chase ambition, go all-in! Use every resource you have, learn obsessively, work harder than you think possible. But let your drive come from the fact that the pursuit itself means something to you, not because you’re desperate to escape.

Desperation makes people stupid. Purpose is different—it lets you endure burdens that mere escapism cannot.

Break the Chains

Let me return to the Zen koan.

The master presents an apparently unsolvable dilemma: every choice leads to pain, and the student seems trapped. But the student is only trapped if he accepts the setup. When he realizes he can reach out and break the stick, the dilemma vanishes.

You are not trapped.

Pressure from the economy is real. Narrowing paths are real. Anxiety about AI, housing, and wealth inequality is real. But these conditions don’t dictate your response.

You can see through the game and choose to play it in the best way possible.

Or, you can choose contentment—truly examine what you have and decide it’s enough.

But you must never sit passively as fate knocks you down; you must never accept a framework that says your only choices are hopeless endurance or reckless gambles.

Don’t settle for being a gray figure in a world full of color.

I wouldn’t wish such a fate even on my enemies.