Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Sometimes being a consultant feels like providing advice, but also chasing the raw materials needed to give it. As I approach the four-year mark of my current job helping high school students with their college applications, I have, unfortunately, become a bit more cynical about what "helping" entails. As much as the job seems to be rooted in collaboration between the knowledgeable advisors and youngsters motivated to absorb the knowledge and put it into action, the reality can sometimes be a bit different. Specifically, the amount of following up I do as part of the job is surprisingly high.

Alone. Low income. Unemployed. 40 Years Old. No friends. No partner. No kids. These are some of the keywords that decorate perhaps the oddest new export from China. Thumbnail after thumbnail on YouTube features seemingly ordinary people living in nondescript small cities and villages in the country, describing their everyday struggles and offering glimpses into their daily lives. Between trips to parks and supermarkets, touring apartments, working at their desks, and cooking simple meals at home, they talk about their lives in a crushing Chinese economy.

A mother-and-son team, a budget of less than USD 1,000, and five years of handmade graphic work on secondhand computers, and a production company that used to be a house decoration firm...by now, the story of Niu Lai has become well-known not just in China but around the world. The summer "blockbuster" and allegedly the most profitable film in the history of cinema has certainly come a long way from its initial reputation for terrible animation, monotone dialogues, and an almost entirely nonsensical plot that attracted wholesale ridicule.

As I approach another birthday on August 30, I face another big life decision that entails quite a bit of both sweat and money. Soon I will be applying to renew my Malta digital nomad residency, but it will be the last time I am legally allowed to renew for the one-year extension. That means, come December 2027, I will have no choice but to find a new home and say goodbye to the islands that have treated me so wonderfully for the past four years. And given my desire to continue with the remote-only working style that I have come to cherish, a new move opens up quite a few possibilities.

If you knew that the time you spent browsing the news, playing games, and indeed writing this blog post could instead be put toward doing some tasks that earn you a healthy hourly wage, would you get on those tasks? As my side gigs in AI annotation take off and pile up, it is a question that I cannot help but keep asking myself. Any time spent not doing work becomes a money-losing proposition, as foregone wages become quantified in the mind every minute that ticks by. The value of the day is subconsciously measured in the number of billable hours.

Searching through past posts in this blog, I am surprised that there is one important topic that has never been mentioned across its 1,240 posts: stock trading. Having worked for more than two decades now, my savings have mostly been converted to shares in dozens of companies across the world, some of which are earning healthy returns while others have been pretty much written off as the share values approach zero. As my jobs take me across multiple countries and companies, I have no hope of relying on savings set aside in pensions, so those stock positions are, in essence, my retirement funds.