68 · Mount Berry, Georgia

I see my vision: an unfathomable master of physics and mathematics, listening to Drake and Carti, who loves scorpions and astronomy, who trades in stock markets using quantum computing, ontological epistemology and quantum-computing HFT models, who has work experience at Chanel, Playboy and Supreme, who does barista shifts at Tim Hortons — and is now a professor teaching theology at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. BERRY COLLEGE, MOUNT BERRY, GEORGIA.

Yes, I can go to Oxbridge; yes, I could work at Jane Street. But there is something that transcends all of that, and it's beauty and love. Be a professor on a beautiful campus just for the sake of it, driving a beat-up 2010 second-hand red Dodge Caravan, working with a great team, doing what you love, travelling to the best places, nourishing the soul. That's the true beauty of life. Not chasing the worldly desires — having your own journey. Get in, get rich, get out, and enjoy the beauty life can offer. Don't waste it. Travel. The world is unfathomably vast and beautiful.

If you're going to play this game of competition, go all in — stake everything and burst out first. But also keep the complete other side of the pendulum: love, peace, joy, travel, and that antique rural heart. That's my philosophy, for life.

Then, after the arc — drive that Dodge Caravan onto the most beautiful campus in America. Twenty-seven thousand acres. Berry College. Associate professor of theology and English literature. Studying scorpions on weekends at Arizona State, writing exhaustive papers in entomology and ontological epistemology, while listening to Drake and Carti. A professor who is also a part-time barista on campus, running an online AI business generating millions a month and an eleven-figure AUM quant firm, while running his own café. Then — you can do all kinds of things. PM at Susquehanna in Singapore. Running your own zoo.

Honestly, at this point, I would actually love going back to U of M to study maths and quantitative finance. More free time to actually do maths, choosing the modules I love — maybe even over Imperial. That's how I know I love maths and physics and quant: at some point the status obsession fades, and the accolades with it. I could do this at Berry College at 26 as some assistant professor and be jolly happy. There is such an abundance of programs out there — even without attending you can access all the materials online. MIT OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, LinkedIn Learning, the whole open shelf.

The focus is enriched experiences — transcending and breaking the concepts of status and fame and everything worldly. Yes those are all fine, but the true richness probably comes from studying epistemological ontology at Berry College, or forensic data analysis with time series and the Merton model, alone in a Trinity Dublin library.

I don't think life has to be a successive line of suffering. Yes, our past generations suffered, and it has always been the case that they needed more tenacity. But that is in no way the single way to live. My dad went through unfathomable things — eighteen-hour days for nearly a decade — just to start his small business making $20k a month. He carries such pride, trauma and visceral force about the road he walked. But someone with an internet connection can build a software business making £50k a month from scratch, from a basement, after six months of four focused hours a day. Sometimes accepting that the methods have changed is painful — and that's okay. The playing field's topology changed; the methods of achieving greatness changed with it.

You have to know that the rules of the game change. The world is genuinely topological. In humanity's primal years it was worse — seven-year-olds in filthy factories, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, watching siblings get chopped up in the machines. If someone told my dad he was weak, would that make sense? Absolutely not. It's the method by which you overcome that differs by era. Every human carries a constant probability of error; we have all made and will make countless mistakes; we are all prone to inefficiency and emotional dysregulation. You learn to deal with it. It is — and is not — sheer force and suffering.