Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.

"Let's keep the AC on, so that the bedroom stays cool when the power goes out again," my casual quip to my wife before we went for a walk sounded quite rational given all that we went through the past few days. After almost three days of constant power outage , household appliances whirred back to life, hopefully ending once and for all the days of sleep on the roof balcony, sweat soaking against cardboard boxes as we waited for the occasional night breeze. But with the giant generators parked around the street corner to power the neighborhood, the electricity could go out any minute.