64 · Trophies for Slaves

Status is a bait that slaves are given, to keep feeding their ego until they fester into forgetting freedom and the truth of who they actually are.

Prestige, in an evolutionary perspective, loses all meaning. It's just something that is named — a pendulum at the most fundamental Transurfing level. It's a cult. All prestige is a cult that people massively subscribe to. The only reason a Rolex carries any so-called prestige is that people believe it's worth so much. It's erroneous, it doesn't get the job done, watches are cumbersome — it's just stupid. Same for everything else in that category. Why would it matter?

To wave the title of an entity as a label that makes you feel comfortable — to show you're a human within an entity — is choosing modern slavery that feeds you comfort. Stay awake. When you subscribe to an entity — a football team, a religion-as-brand, a school, a company — you are a slave with a label. People are all slaves; this is the reality of the matrix. We are all bound to be slaves in some direction. But there is one move to escape: are you going to be a slave for yourself, or a slave to someone else? Work for yourself, or work for someone else? Be proud of what you've built, or be a tool that helps an entity achieve its things? Billions live the second way. And it is a choice.

But then — what is your version of freedom? That is the real question. You could be financially free and a slave to your work. You could love your work and use that love as a rationalisation for toiling to survive. You could be financially enslaved but spiritually free; geographically enslaved with a free soul. You could build your own business and have it be nothing but a prison cell you built yourself — for you and for others — and label it status, pride, dignity. And you will say that isn't true, because the truth is too painful, and you will avoid it like everybody else. Then every once in a while you'll earn enough to travel, and you'll do that for fifty years, and die. And right before you die, the ten seconds flood in: what if — what if this was not the life I could have lived? And what if that was my fault? I should write a novel with this. You know you can be a living legend doing all kinds of things in today's day and age.

The biggest thing I have to break free from is the Korean — the Asian — obsession with academic accolades, titles, looking good on paper, the flashing CV. LinkedIn is literally the canvas for that propaganda. The route to focus on is engineering your life toward institutional support that actually bootstraps your growth, not toward looking good on paper because a name is famous. Don't do Part III at Cambridge for the prestige. If you're passionate about mathematical modelling, do scientific computing over pure maths and explore the maths on your own. Do the DPhil that aligns with the work YOU want, with the highest investment in yourself — not the flashiest paper. But then — how do you build credibility and reputation if that's the optimum? That tension is real, and I hold it.

Korea is just mentally poor. Almost everyone chases high salaries — and if that's not slavery, I don't know what is. "Wow, this pays a lot, let me go there," with no interest in which work fulfils them. Yes, it's a luxury to even pose the counter. But at some point you realise the salary is just a number, like your jersey number or your shoe size. Why are you scaling it? For what? Why can't you realise you are already rich in the soul? There is not much beauty left when everything reduces to finding the minimum dosage of effort for maximum output. Where is the beauty, the time, the real depth?

I don't care if you're a vice president or a dice president or some Brice Crescendo — I want to know who you are, not your fake names. What is it with Korea and the business card?