Read My Biography

My early childhood was spent altering between life in a rundown Transylvanian village and the copy-pasted concrete blocks forming the soulless monstrosities Eastern Europeans call cities. I was raised by:

My society was devoid of aesthetics, for that reason, it also had no ethics or meaning. Survival of the savviest and most brutal was the norm. I was fat, scared, mildly antisocial, and addicted to computer games.

In my early teens, I had few friends: classmates, and people I drank with at metal bars. This period was intellectually dissimulating and frustrating. I was destined to work some menial customer support job in order to fuel a slow suicide via binge drinking, eating, and smoking.

Through the influence of psychedelics, great video game stories, and anglosphere literature I glimpsed the possibility of configurations of my mind where I’d no longer be miserable. Then I spent the next 3 years working towards them: dropping out of college, joining various outlier communities (mainly kinksters and junkies), taking up work as a self-taught programmer, and finally moving to Ireland to cast away the yoke of my native culture.

After dozens of thousands of hours of deep reading and experimenting I became an excellent programmer, reaching a point where any further improvements are unsignalable. I also started my journey into biology through Sapowlsky’s Evolutionary Psychology courses and into philosophy through various 2-bit commentators (partially examined life, very bad wizards, philosophize this)

By age 22 I was a “functional” adult, I had a few friends, a fwb~ish girlfriend, a body that wasn’t falling apart, and was in the top whatever% of earners in Dublin, able to afford mortgages and steakhouse visits. But I had no meaning, what little I had done to improve my condition I did mainly out of fear and anger, out of not wanting to die, out of not wanting to suffer. So I said fuck it, took up remote work, and started traveling, a little at first, but it soon became my full-time lifestyle.

In my crisis of meaning I discovered Westernized Buddhism and the less wrong rationalist community. I was really into both, especially the latter. I decided I ought to pursue human healthspan extension as a higher goal for my life, started becoming an expert at anything to do with machine learning and applied probabilistic reasoning, and went down the typical rabbit hole of trying to make sense of science and mathematics using reason (not realizing they were primarily social phenomena).

Traveling made me fiercely independent and culturally agnostic, to fault. I can provide good company for a Wahabist Imam and an Orthodox Rabi. I can “get” a mystic awaiting his death on the shores of the Ganga, a Polish punk awaiting his death in the tech clubs of Berlin, and a Kiwi dad farmer awaiting his death among his many children and more cows. From a shy nerd, I became a social butterfly - creator of friendship circles and events, from a comfort zone conservative coward I became a reckless explorer that holds nothing sacred for the sake of security.

Alas, traveling for so long also resulted in me not being as in tune with my body as I ought to have been, and lacking a stable community has taken its toll on my psyche. As of the time of writing (July 2023) I am focusing on:

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