This month, I’ve published a new version of the FML. It’s not as well-edited as the one last month, but it does have many more sections.
I fantasized about retirement a lot back when I was working a full-time job. I remember how my boss once saw me checking out Vanguard’s retirement planner at work, and asked why I was thinking about retirement when I was still young. The main reason was of course financial: because of the nature of compounding returns, the best time to start planning for your retirement is when you first start working, when any money you put into your retirement fund will have the longest possible time to grow over the decades. But it was also psychological: I didn’t enjoy work on a deep level. It was just something I did for money, and I wanted to stop having to do things for money as soon as possible.
I realized at the start of 2024, shortly before the first blog post, that yet another reason I looked forward to retirement was because it meant to me no longer needing to worry about leaving a legacy (or in my words at the time, no longer needing “to prove anything”). I could finally sit back and look back on my life’s achievements — however modest or magnificent they may be — without feeling the need to add any more to the list. “That was me, that’s what I did with my life.” Even if the legacy was a humble one, I could at least stop worrying about making it grander. But why wait for retirement to start doing that? The night I decided to stop worrying about the cumulative output of my life, I rested more deeply than I had in years. Rest became real rest for the sake of rest, as opposed to rest as mere temporary relief for the sake of getting back up and going at it again tomorrow.
(Once again, I can see how my uncritical reading of the biographies of famous people as a kid helped engender such a complex in me. “Look at how this amazing person did X, Y, and Z before he died, forever gracing future generations with the brilliant results of his life’s work!” As a kid, I ate that shit up. If me as a kid was my higher self, he’d be returning back to the store to ask, “Umm, yeah, so I rented this human experience that was advertised as a ‘genius prodigy changes the world’ kind of story, and so far the plot has been super interesting but it’s not actually going where it’s supposed to go,” and the store employee would respond with, “Oh yeah, that’s one of the many ironic titles in that genre. You might want to try out the Elon Musk experience instead — that one’s ironic too, but it might be more your style. Be warned, that one comes with its own unique form of psychological suffering, as all earthly experiences do.”)
Over the course of 2024, I would occasionally catch myself fantasizing about retirement again and realize that I was overworking myself. Some three months ago, I once again found myself fantasizing about retirement, and so I tried to deconstruct the feelings as I had done before. “What now? What is it about the ‘retirement’ label that appeals to me this time around? And whatever it might be, how can I once again integrate that into my current life?” It was a confusing introspective process, and I was getting real tired of always having the same word crop up again and again, when it occurred to me: Why not just take the whole goddamn label for myself if I like it so much?
The obvious reason why not is that with Trump’s tariff chaos and general global geopolitical instability, right now seems like a particularly unwise time to retire. Right now seems like exactly when you’d want to buckle up for the ride ahead instead of relaxing completely. On the other hand, if I don’t feel financially secure enough to retire at the apogee of American politico-economic might and influence, with a personal financial runway that’s measured in decades at current expenditure rates, I think I might just never feel financially secure enough to retire. It would be good to experience retirement at least once in my life, and retiring now with a young body sounds like a much better idea than retiring in my 60’s.
There’s a very good chance that I’ll have to come out of retirement at some point in my life. If I have kids, if American political instability creates a meltdown in US-based financial assets, if I get an expensive form of cancer, if my immediate family needs extensive financial aid after some disaster, if Cambodia leapfrogs forward into becoming a way more developed and way more expensive country over the next few decades, if AI upends the current economic system entirely — if any one of many semi-plausible scenarios happens, I’m going to have to figure out one way or another of making some income again. I mean, look man, it happens. Fucking 95-year-olds get evicted into homelessness for failure to pay rent. But just because you get forced out of retirement at some point doesn’t make you any less retired during your retirement.
Let me just adopt that label and see what happens. I’ve not been working professionally as a software engineer for the last three years anyways. It’s literally just a personal change of label from “unemployed” software engineer to “retired” software engineer. Not a legal change of label, mind you — I’m still legally self-employed in Cambodia, and I have consistent income, just not from actively programming for anyone else. I don’t need anyone else to recognize this label; I just want to try it on for myself, because every label comes with an attitude, and I wish to see how the retirement attitude feels on me.
Presentness
The first major change is that retirement forces me to be present. I grew up with a conception of retirement as an earthly afterlife of sorts. You study hard, you work hard, and you raise your kids to do the same. You do all that so that when you hit 65, you get to retire off of the fruits of all your hard labor and live happily ever after for the rest of your life.
In the past, I could easily brush off any problems with, “Ah yeah this sucks for now, but one day I’ll be retired and everything will be great. I just have to make it till then.” Well, now I’m retired, and some things still suck. I can’t punt my problems off to a happily-ever-after fairy tale future anymore — I am in that happily-ever-after fairy tale future. This is what happily-ever-after looks like, and this is the future I’ve been looking forward to my entire life. What do I do now that I’m here?
I’ve been slowly figuring that out. I finally found the word for it when I went with a friend to a meditation retreat: “presentness.” I’d heard of it before as an appreciation for the present, as a way of being in the moment. It is exactly that, but the framing they gave me at the meditation retreat was new to me. “You’ve arrived,” they said (paraphrased). “You’ve made it. You finally got to where you need to be. You’re here now. The goal isn’t somewhere in the future. The goal is right here and now, and you’ve already attained it.”
Holy shit. It’s such a simple message in retrospect, but I’ve literally never heard that before in my life. Nobody has ever told me that I’ve already accomplished everything I needed to accomplish in life. Nobody’s ever told me that I’ve long completed my main quest: all I needed to do was mark it as completed. All I’ve ever heard from family, school, and work was “Work hard at X today and one day wonderful thing Y will happen.” I’ve once even had a friend bemoan how he had to study through four grueling years of university just for one single day of happiness during graduation, and then it was off to grad school for more years until the next single day of happiness.
I understand why that message was so strongly hammered into me. It is highly conducive to survival after all, and the most powerful institutions and cultures that exist tend to be the ones that prioritize the survival of their power. I mean, just imagine a country going, “We’re already where we need to be as a country. We no longer care about hitting future growth projections on our former trajectory to make ourselves great again.” Access to capital would dry up so fast as investors flee for places with better growth prospects. But as important as such a message may be for survival, it’s not conducive to thrival, and I personally find mere survival to be rather meaningless if there’s not going to be thrival at some point as well.
If it were just this message alone, the meditation retreat may not have had much of a lasting impact on me. It’s a nice idea, but of course we should continue to work towards a better future, and if that better future is just around the corner, then it’s kind of hard for me to appreciate the stupid shitty present. Good ideas that are hard to integrate into practical daily life don’t stick around.
That’s where this other message comes in: “The Future may be better, but if you don’t learn to appreciate the Present as it is right now, you’re not going to have the skills to appreciate that better Future either once it too becomes the Present.” That’s fucking genius! Instead of having to forcefully rip out the “Do X now for future Y reward” drive that’s been so ingrained in me over the decades, this second message simply subverts it with its own momentum like a masterful Judo move.
That powerful one-two punch of “Here now is the only place I need to get to” and “Appreciate the present for the sake of the future” has allowed me to continue living my life as-is, with everything still in the exact same place as it was before, but with a far greater sense of effortless freedom. Even now, I’m writing this very sentence in a waking moment that will not live to see the final publishing of this blog post in a few days’ time. But that doesn’t mean I need to wait for the post’s publishing to retroactively confer meaning upon this present moment. (It seems I’d almost, but not quite, stumbled on this idea last year.) It took me literally my entire life to get to this present moment, and now I’m finally here just in time to savor the experience of typing the middle of a draft blog post in an unsaved text editor tab. Ahh, that is such a part of what it means to be alive.
It is the Cosmic Joke of looking everywhere for the meaning of life, just to realize that you’ve been holding it in your hand all along. (I’ve actually briefly done that before with my house keys.) This ancient piece of wisdom was fucking revolutionary to me. I can’t believe they don’t teach this in schools. Since discovering it, I’ve found all sorts of joy in wearily walking up the final flight of stairs to my apartment at night, in drunkenly fumbling around with and jiggling my keys into the lock, in waiting for a friend who is running quite late with all sorts of amusing excuses — these are all such vibes that you can only get by being alive as a human in a time when stairs and locks and text messages exist. Even the moment when I’d just realized I was salivating so much over being present for the stairs that I’d completely forgotten to actually be present for the stairs — even that specific recursively ironic moment was such a delectable one to be present for. History books can detail the causal turns of the past, photos and videos can stimulate your audiovisual imagination, but if you truly want the vibes for yourself, you simply have to be here for that. There’s just no other way. Only you here right now can ever fully know how it feels to be you here right now.
That’s crazy, man. I can’t believe I’ll be dead one day — in fact, I am already dead at any spacetime coordinate you pick past the year 2100 — and yet right now I’m very consciously experiencing how the universe is at the coordinates ⟨13°21’44”N, 103°51’35”E, 1749444321⟩. (I know, those coordinates can only reliably identify me relative to Earth between January 1st 1970 and January 29th 2038.) I’m a dead man talking. Or well, typing. That’s nuts.
As life-shattering as such revelations may have been for me, they bounced harmlessly off of a friend I told them to. And that’s fair. I think the message of “You’re already enough” would’ve appealed a lot less to the younger me of my early twenties, who was itching to make something of himself in this world. I find that true humility, like true pride, is earned. In my case, it was earned through great striving and struggle, to finally succeed in getting my executive dysfunction under wraps just enough to truly shoot my very best shot at ZAMM — and to come away from that shot with nothing more than the ashes of my dreams, underneath which I uncovered a silver medal with the word “Humility” engraved deep onto its face. I am damn proud of how I earned my medal — in fact, when I flipped it over, I found that the opposite face had the word “PRIDE” emblazoned in resplendent gold. With such a prized artifact now in my possession, I can finally accept these messages and rest in peace.
I’m Internet famous now
I got my first comment ever from someone I don’t recognize, on a line that I hadn’t even put in the main blog post. I was so surprised, I confirmed with a friend I had shared the post with that it wasn’t them. I don’t even know how this Internet stranger found that post because I hadn’t publicly advertised it anywhere. I used to submit my posts to Hacker News back when the main focus was still around a software project, even though the interesting parts of the posts weren’t software-related. I don’t submit my posts anywhere anymore because it feels very me-centric at this point, without even the flimsy excuse of being software-related.
(Another reason I stopped submitting to Hacker News specifically is the fact that my account has been flagged because I was submitting too many of my own posts. Apparently, it’s meant to be a hub for intellectually interesting articles as opposed to self-promotion. It feels like I was operating on the Internet’s default ask culture — submit whatever you want, and others are free to ignore it — but HN instead wants more of a guess culture where you shouldn’t even ask others to take a look at your own stuff unless it’s especially intriguing. Regardless of how self-promotional the forum may appear at times, I respect the moderators’ intentions and will now only submit my own work there if I feel that it’s sufficiently meaningful.)
I’d been used to getting zero comments and zero upvotes on my posts. I didn’t mind at all — it somehow felt like a slightly bitchy badge of honor that I was still trucking on the way I do even if nobody in the world gave a shit. Not submitting it anywhere on the internet at all wouldn’t have worked; I had to find at least a marginally related forum in order to get that sweet satisfaction of “Oh yeah, nobody cares!” After HN, I did submit once to Lemmy, where I finally got a handful of upvotes. That was the last time I felt the urge to submit something somewhere.
But this anonymous comment? My god, that’s a whole ‘nother level of attention. I didn’t even ask for it! This is now a parasocial interaction, and that means I’m an Internet celebrity. You may reasonably point out that even getting thousands of comments on TikTok is entirely trivial for internet fame these days, and you’d be completely right. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s only a difference in degree, not in kind. What is the exact number of anonymous comments I need to get before I am allowed to feel validated by the public? I say it is at most one.
I was thriving off of complete public indifference to my authenticity, and now I get the option to also thrive off of a wealth of public appreciation for my creative outputs. I get to choose which labels I feel like adorning myself with when I step out the door every day, and it feels good to have an extra option in the wardrobe.
While this sort of glib experimentation with labels and narrative has proven to be very powerful for modulating my internal lived experience, part of me worries that it’s almost too powerful. It starts to feel like I’m getting close to wireheading myself. I think I’m still safe so long as I keep an eye out for making sure that all my narratives are congruent with objectively observable reality; narrativization to me is the art of searching for a path from observable facts to desired mental states without making the world any more surprising than it already is. (The more accurate your model of reality is, the lower your cross-entropy loss, and if I’m understanding the math correctly, that’s equivalent to the sum total information-theoretic surprise. So the better you understand the world, the less surprising it will be to you.) I don’t actually expect me to be treated any differently as an Internet celebrity; if I did expect that, then I would be quite surprised indeed when I inevitably get treated like a regular anonymous person. I’m simply an Internet celebrity that nobody on the street recognizes — on days when I feel like being one.
zamm.dev as art
I’ve always harbored a deep streak of inner artistry. I may be intellectually inclined towards the exactitude of programming, math, and physics. I may be temperamentally predisposed to objective truth, self-consistency, and pragmatism. I may have a preferred role in society as the Archetypal Builder: Tell me what needs to be done (I’m not the Archetypal Leader/Manager) and how you want it to look (I’m not the Archetypal Designer/Architect), and I’ll get it done how I see fit. I may remain a complete and utter amateur at dance, paint, and weaving despite having had lessons in all of those. But I am enamored by the idea of those activities. I worship the Quality of craftsmanship that can only come about from the intricate intertwining of practiced skill, natural intuition, and crystallized knowledge, and I greatly wish to forge some artifacts of Quality myself.
To say that “I am an artist” would be implying too much to someone who doesn’t know me at all. I am an artist in the philosophical sense, which I would argue is a very legitimate sense of the word, and “artist” is most certainly a label I happily adopt for myself. But as an artist, I had looked to create some magnum opus — something that could truly quench that deep thirst for artistry within me, if only for a moment — and in doing so show that I deserved the title I’d lavished upon myself. Alas, even if I were to one day do such a project proper justice, the finish line would be untold months and years away from today.
So it was that one morning, as I danced on the roof next to the glorious Siem Reap sunrise, I realized that my life itself is a far grander masterpiece than any work of art I’ll ever produce. Anything I do with my own hands will necessarily pale in comparison to this joint collaboration with Reality. Of course, I don’t think my life is special in this regards. It has been an interesting life so far, but certainly not in any world record-setting sort of way. I believe that everyone can make use of this framing if they want to.
But if my life itself is a masterpiece, then it stands to reason that all I have to do to produce good art is to document my own life. I can simply convey that which I find most interesting and beautiful about the sweeping chiaroscuro arcs and ornate baroque flourishes of my own narrative, for enjoyment by an older me who will presumably still have many of the same tastes that I do. For example, last month I’d documented how I no longer feared doing effortful things to improve my life, which was an enormous changed compared to a year ago. This month, I finally wrangled my finances and budgeting under my near-complete control for the first time in my life, I plan and adhere daily to a schedule that has me waking up at 4:15 AM for yoga and meditation, I regularly complete “random” tasks (like going in for a dental checkup or cleaning my Turkish rug) unprompted instead of leaving them until they’re unbearable, I cook, I work on passion projects, and on top of all that I spend more time than ever pursuing the hobbies I enjoy. Ironically, it is in retirement rather than unemployment that I find myself more capable than ever of returning to work. How did this all happen? I mean, I’m now completely unrecognizable to the me of a year ago. I wanted to do such interesting themes justice.
Yet as the deadline for this blog post approached, I felt anxious about documenting everything I wanted to document for this month. There was still so much left to write, let alone to edit. But then I realized I’d once again had my priorities flipped. I’m not living in order to write blog posts or create other art. I am writing blog posts and creating other art for — and as a part of — my living. The real art is the masterpiece itself, the living of my life. Making-of movies are first-class art objects, capable of going on to earn awards and accolades in their own right. It just so happens that the making-of my art is such a better story than my art itself, that the resultant art is nothing more than an incidental by-product of the behind-the-scenes artful living of my life.
Am I feeling anxious about making a good life decision? Well, I’m not living in order to make good life decisions. I am making good life decisions for — and as a part of — living my life. The decisions are there to help my life, not the other way around. If the decision-making process isn’t helping my life, then something about it needs to change, the most likely culprit being my attitude towards it.
Am I feeling anxious about meeting the blog post deadline for this month? Ditto, the deadline serves my life, not the other way around. Am I feeling anxious about meeting the budget for this month? Ditto, the budget serves my life, not the other way around.
This is not to say that my life now is all bliss. Far from it. There are moments when I think, “Ah, when I inevitably look back on this period of my life with rose-tinted glasses in the future, I certainly wouldn’t be thinking of ‘Ugh’ moments like this one right here!” But it truly is all a part of the journey. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Everything remains in place, and yet the entire interior experience has turned inside-out. I haven’t felt this way since losing my faith in Christianity, when my entire physical and social world remained intact, but I found myself teleported from a reality where the main goal was making sure you got into Heaven at the end of your life to a reality where God never even existed.
There is still a sense of movement and progression in life. But it is a perspective shift akin to riding a train and deciding that you are now in the stationary frame of reference. I’m sitting nice and easy in the present moment as life itself moves about. I’m still jogging, but I’m jogging in place as the forest trees of Angkor Wat decide to brush past me at high speed. There are some locations (aka goals) that would be nice for my life to flow to, but I’m not living in order to flow to them, I’m living while keeping an eye out for them as part of my living.
The question naturally arose: If all of this is for my living, then what is it that I am actually living for?
But why must I live for anything? Why must I justify my own existence, even to myself? Why shouldn’t I simply live?
Old me would’ve asked, “But what do you mean by ‘live’? What are you actually doing when you ‘live’? That’s pretty tautological, don’t you think?” Of course. It’s so tautological that the ouroboros collapses in on itself into the infinitesimal present moment. Whatever you’re doing right now is living. Observe yourself living, and observe the environment in which you find yourself living. That’s living too. Observe yourself living again — that is, observe yourself observing yourself living — ad infinitum. I don’t know about you, but when I do that, I find myself squarely rooted in the sights, sounds, smells, touch and feel of the here and now. I find that I’m alive.