EPTI am Release and the thousand of you who have read my blog posts in the past may be more familiar with the petulant 17-year-old kid with too many complaints about life. If you haven't, I'd recommend reading blog 1 and blog 2 to garner a better idea of the type of person that I am.
I am an 18-year-old college student (rejected by all waitlists btw). You (second person seems appropriate since I am already using first-person, which is conversational) should be able to deduce from the title that this blog will elucidate to you that which I believe is wrong with my life. However, before I provide the interesting details, allow me to tell you about my life hitherto and hopefully help you to understand why I am a petulant and avaricious person. For reference, I have a sister who is three years older than I and three years further in education.
2. Detailed Introduction
As a child, my family lived in a small house in a poor neighborhood, although my parents made enough money to be considered wealthy among the upper middle class income strata. My parents lived an upper middle class life, but my sister and I lived as though we were children of minimum wage parents (most of the time at least); my sister and I never received a penny to spend for ourselves. As a result, my sister and I owned no toys (other than those we received from extended family and friends, some of which were taken from us+ Show Spoiler [note] +
Since I am tired of writing my sister and I/me, we/us without specific reference will now refer to my sister and I or me
Meanwhile, my parents slept in a bedroom approximately 8 times as large, furnished with a large television and expensive computer (for which they overpaid instead of buying by my or my sister's equally good but less expensive alternative and giving to us a fraction of the money that they would have saved), a much larger wardrobe, a closet, mirrors, nightstands, lamps, an air conditioner, and probably many more thing of which I am unaware since I did not spend much time in their room. Fortunately, when I was in 6th and 8th grade, my parents replaced their computers and they moved their old ones onto old tables that they moved into the living room so my sister and I had our own computers.
They also spent thousands of dollars every year on expensive wines and beers, various media subscriptions, furniture and decorations, but they spent the majority of their extraneous spending on gifts to anyone but us; at the end of any school year, they gave presents to my teachers; whenever someone visited, they prepared ridiculously overpriced “delicacies;” at any extended-family gathering, they gave presents to relatives (most of the aforementioned “presents” were articles of jewelry). Those thousands of dollars were insignificant in comparison to the amount of money that they spent to upstage others by giving gifts of equal or, usually, greater price (though not necessarily value) whenever they received a gift.
3. Childhood
However, let us regress in time to when I attended kindergarten and elementary. I went to a public school that consisted primarily of racist xenophobes. As one of the only Japanese students at my school, other students incessantly harassed me; teachers and other staff were too lazy or apathetic to stop it so this continued throughout my attendance at school. I "retaliated" by always being the first to answer questions in class and later making snide responses that insulted the intelligence of my classmates (such as "I can't believe no one else could answer this" or "you have to be retarded not to know the answer to this") but these actions only further alienated me from my peers and teachers. This continued until a Korean student experienced the misfortune of transferring into the school; I immediately insulted him as I had done to all the other students, and the other students began harassing him instead of me.
At home my life was much less eventful. I had three hours from the time at which school finished until the time at which I was to set the table for dinner. Since I owned no books, toys, electronics, or other means with which to occupy my time, I watched cartoons (at the time, Yu-gi-oh and Spongebob Squarepants predominantly aired while others shows were replaced every few months) with my sister. These were the most tolerable three hours of my wake everyday regardless of the fact that reruns aired more frequently than new content. At dinner, we listened to our parents yelling and complaining that we are not more productive with our time unlike "[insert name of random coworker here]'s children" whose specific productive actions were never mentioned. Then my sister or I washed the dishes while the other completed other chores (while my parents went to their room).
Now allow me to introduce what occupied more than ten thousand hours of each of my and my sister's childhoods + Show Spoiler [math] +
4hrs/weekday + 12hr/weekend day = 64 hrs per week --> 3328hrs/year --> 19968 hrs over 6 years (K through Grade 5 in american education system). Rounded down since some days were not occupied by the following activity.
As you already know, when I began middle school (and my sister began high school), my parents replaced their computer so my sister and I could share a computer. At first, we disputed the other’s computer usage, which initially caused our parents to revoke our computer privileges. However, we soon resolved the situation; my sister tore one of my father's magazines and blamed it on me. Consequently, he yelled at her and beat me. Later, she told me (paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact diction), "Since our parents are retarded assholes, I can make them beat the shit out of you whenever I want to. You can probably make them beat the shit out of me too, but you'll always have to endure 3 more years of beating than I will," and, since that moment, I have never questioned her authority and obsequiously complied with all her demands. Despite these circumstances, we were not hostile toward each other; she only asked me to do insignificant tasks such as chores or homework. As repayment, she often stayed late at school which afforded me a few hours every day to play Starcraft and Warcraft 3.
At this time, our nights were still occupied with meaningless memorization and beatings. However, one night after a parent-teacher (and student) conference with one of my sister’s teachers, my sister
Middle school was not much different from elementary, although proportion of racist xenophobes was lower. The majority of my day was spent being babysat, with thirty other kids per, by horribly underqualified English teachers who didn’t know the difference between affect and effect, math teachers who emphasized memorization of formulae and guess-and-check, science teachers who frequently neglected conservation of energy and matter, and history teachers who preached personal anecdote instead of unambiguous historical information. Most of the students were compliant with teachers’ requests, but, in almost every class, a few insisted on insulting teachers, damaging property, and using physical violence to gain attention and infamy. During breaks, I became friends with the librarian while most students formed cliques that referred to themselves as gangs.
4. An Opportunity to Improve My Life
During eighth grade, my parents replaced their computer again, and I received our previously shared computer while my sister received the newer computer. Consequently, I played Starcraft and Warcraft 3 (mostly Warcraft at this point) for several hours each weekday and about thirty hours each weekend. Nothing of much consequence happened for about a year until I learned about the Warcraft 3 Resolution Fix, at which point I realized that the graphics card my computer was too slow to play at 1080p resolution. I searched for a new graphics card and the Radeon HD 6000 series was soon to be released+ Show Spoiler +
never even considered the hot, loud, and power-hungry Fermi graphics cards from Nvidia
A few things to note this point:
- Let’s talk about “theoretical money.” Despite having not had any real money, we owned theoretical money. When my sister and I did chores for money, we earned theoretical money. When we did not receive presents on our birthdays, we were given theoretical money. When relatives and friends gathered on special occasions, they gave real money to us; my parents accepted the money on our behalves and repaid us with theoretical money. Each of us kept track of both of our theoretical accounts (in case our parents tried to destroy evidence of our theoretical accounts and they believed that they succeeded, the other would make a copy and disprove our parents) on sheets of paper that we kept with us at all times, and hid at night. When first presented with the concept of theoretical money, our parents claimed that we would be able to use our theoretical money whenever we wished to use it, as long as we wanted to use it responsibly.
- I had no money or credit/debit cards, and everything I owned was given to me; anything that I had purchased was purchased through my parents’ credit cards
- The rest of this blog contains many ideas without resolution, so anyone with an internet connection could have fabricated them. Since you’ve read this far, I implore that you believe what I say.
- There were two ways to invest in bitcoin. The first was to invest directly by buying bitcoins and trading them (hoping that the price would increase, which the price was doing at the time). The second was to invest indirectly by buying computer hardware (mainly graphics cards) and using them to “mine” bitcoins, usually as part of a “pool,” since bitcoin rewards were inherently probabilistic. For a small fee (few to several % depending on the pool), pools paid individuals proportionally to the number of hashes performed for the pool, regardless of whether the individual actually provided the pool with a block.
When I learned about bitcoin, I wanted to invest with the second method; I recognized that it was not only a profitable venture (after calculating the amount of money that I would make over time, heeding increasing difficulty, electricity costs, but also increasing value of bitcoins; I expected to make overall profit, as well as own the hardware for “free”) but also an excellent excuse to buy better graphics cards (so that I could play Warcraft 3 on highest settings while knowing that I was procuring profits). In addition to that, most graphics cards lose about 50% of their value over 2 years so even if the venture were to failure, I would likely have made an overall profit.
Some miners had already identified the that mining bitcoins was not CPU-intensive so choosing the cheapest CPU with a compatible motherboard that had many PCI-Express slots was a candid decision for anyone who wanted to mine bitcoins. Therefore the only decision remaining was to choose the graphics card. The only three graphics cards that mined with reasonable efficiency and volume were the HD 5850, 5870, and the 5970. In terms of relative speed, they performed at 0.8/1/1.8 respectively but cost 0.7/1/1.6 so the 5870 was almost immediately precluded. Choosing the 5850 would have required extra computer components (still marginally cheaper) and outlets; since I had only the few outlets in my room and next to that which was occupied by my current computer (was unsure about permission to use other outlets), I chose the 5970s. I planned the build and wrote a detailed explanation as to why this was profitable and therefore a “responsible” use of my theoretical money.
When I presented this to my parents, they threw my explanation in the trash almost immediately; they said (paraphrasing again because I don’t remember the exact diction), “Release, you’re stupid, and you always make mistakes (reference to my non-100% test scores in middle school). You are a waste of money and so is this idea. If you want to talk to someone about this again, try your foster parents,” [sarcasm]because ad hominem is the best form of argument[/sarcasm]. Unwilling to test their threat, I said nothing and returned to playing Warcraft 3 on lower resolution. I started high school and continued playing Warcraft in my free time. About half a year later, there was a decrease in difficulty and I believed that this was as opportune of a time as any to rehash the plan to invest in bitcoin. Apparently they had forgotten about my plan six months earlier since they made no mention of it or their threat, but nonetheless rejected my plan, again without reading it and with use of ad hominem. They did not make a threat this time so I retorted that they should at least read the plan, and they responded with a threat; I didn’t pursue the matter further.
Let’s take a pause here and consider the amount of money that I could have made (with the false optimism of hindsight). Actually, let’s consider the amount of money that I had planned to make. I owned several thousand theoretical dollars and wanted to spend all of it. I expected to recuperate my investment (ignoring the fact that I would own several thousand dollars of computer hardware, somewhat devalued) in about half a year, and then make a 100% ROI within twelve more months. After that I expected either to make insignificant ROI, or to stop mining since difficulty was increasing exponentially and profitability would no longer remain. Consequently, I would have been able to own some real money and still be able to exchange several thousand real dollars for several thousand theoretical dollars to appease my avaricious parents. Another boon would have been that I would have been able to play Warcraft 3 on maximum setting, but my primary goal at the time was to attain a modicum of financial freedom.
Now let us return to some falsely optimistic delusions of grandeur: if I had invested 4 years ago, I predicted that I would have made approximately 50,000 bitcoins before quitting mining (most of which would have been mined near the beginning because of increasing difficulty). The first significant price decrease occurred at about $30 and I probably could have sold near $25; I could have made $1,250,000. I would have continued to mine but with comparatively insignificant rewards (thousands of dollars, < 0.1% over a year with estimates). The price rebounded at about $2 so let’s say that I bought at $2.5; I would have owned 500,000 bitcoins. Later another significant price decrease occurred at about $230, so let’s say that I sold at $200; $100,000,000 would have been mine or about $60,000,000 after taxes. To be honest, this is probably where I would have stopped trading (ignoring the later inflation from $100 to $1000, which I would probably have bought in with at least some of my investment at <$150 per). Of course, these assumptions are quite erroneous; if I had invested four years ago, I would have influenced the market and mining network, causing the $100,000,000 figure to be too high, but realistically I doubt that I would have even been close to 1% of the market or the mining network for any significant period of time, so I still would have comfortably been the owner of 8 figures. If I had invested 6 months later, I would probably still have been the owner of 7 figures.
Later in the week after the second refusal, I waited until my parents went to sleep, skulked from my room (an offense that would have sent me into foster care if they realized), and scoured the house for anything that would teach about my parents’ financial situation. Fortunately for me, they had not filed their latest bank statements, which lay in a cabinet that I had never opened before that night; the statements evinced that my parents earned an upper-middle-class monthly income and that their savings were a few orders of magnitude greater than the amount of theoretical money that I had asked for them to spend. I replaced the bank statements, as well as everything that I had moved during my scouring, and skulked back to my room.
5. High School
Since bitcoin was to be a memory of the past, I returned to playing Warcraft 3 and some Starcraft Brood War again, and let us return to my life at school; contrary to my elementary and middle school, I went to a public high school that was well-funded and without the hordes of racist xenophobes with which I had become accustomed. Still, I felt as though I were being babysat for a third of every day. I made no effort to actively seek friends nor did I have any extracurricular activities/clubs with which I was particularly involved (I did track, speech and debate, and band—all four years—but ditched as many practices as I could, never took any leadership positions, and never won anything). The one thing that I did manage to do correctly was to listen to one of the physics teachers at my school who recommended several math and physics textbooks for me to read; I read them and qualified for the USAMO but not for the USAPhO. After freshman year, I had accomplished almost nothing except reaching d+ on iccup and having played about 2000 hours of Dota.
At school, Sophomore year was not much different except I insulted my French teacher very early in the year, tried to transfer to no avail, and kissed her ass for the rest of the year to keep a B in her class. I also did some community service nonsense, but again only as a member and not a leader. Also, USAMO but not USAPhO again. On the financial side of things, bitcoin had proven to be too profitable a memory to forget and FPGAs, which had much greater efficiency (albeit approximately equal in absolute hashing power) than graphics cards meaning that they would almost certainly procure profit since graphics cards (which dominated the hashing network), had begun to ship. You’ve heard this story before; I prepared an explanation as to why they were profitable and was refuted by ad hominem and threatened with foster care. However, at this point in my life, I was desperate to find a way to pay for standardized testing and college applications (my parents had promised to pay for one SAT I, two SAT II’s, 4 AP tests, and application to 2 UC schools because this was their “plan” for my future, and I had wished to take and apply to many more). At thanksgiving during sophomore year, my aunt gave $1,000 to each of us, and said, “If you tell your parents about this, I’ll say that I gave each of you $2,000, so please keep quiet and spend the money on yourselves,” which was much strident than her usual pleading. Seeing this opportunity, I told my sister to keep quiet at least until Christmas. On the following Monday, I begged one of my richer friends (whose parents allowed him to spend money much more freely) to invest $1,000 in FPGAs, showing to him the $1,000 with which I promised to repay him. Later that day, I exchanged the $1,000 for 1,000 theoretical dollars and asked that my sister do the same, pretending to have forgotten to exchange the money with our parents earlier. + Show Spoiler +
To me, the fear of being sent to foster care still outweighed the fear of breaking a promise to a friend.
In Junior year, I received a pleasant surprise; my friend had actually further researched FPGAs after my offer and had invested much more than $1,000. He had made several thousand dollars (of which I received half, less $1,000), and resold the hardware for the amount that he paid. Pretty much everything you see in this link I did in my junior year with the money from my friend’s investment. I played less Warcraft and Starcraft second semester. A friend secured for me two internship interviews, but I was not employed by either company. In senior year, I spent the rest of my real money applying to colleges and sending test scores. Applied to many companies, interviewed by a few, employed by none. Apart from that and reading some books, I did nothing from January to August but play and watch Warcraft and Starcraft, before moving to college.
6. College
I have attended college for a few weeks and have been thoroughly disappointed by the vast majority of experiences during this period. In my classes, professors prepare lectures but do not adequately answer questions; the majority of those to whom I have listened misinterpret students’ questions and consequently address the question inadequately, or deliberately misconstrue the question and refuse to address the question. The majority of students with whom I have interacted do little or none of their assigned reading or problem sets so they serve no purpose to me. They also ask stupid questions during lectures, labs, and discussion sections, and fail their quizzes and tests, which further demonstrates their uselessness. I have met some smart and useful persons in clubs, and share some classes with them, but did not meet them in time to include them in my project group for a CS project. I have discovered over the past week that those with whom I had chosen to collaborate demonstrate the useless stereotype that I have associated with the majority of students here.
I have a project due in a few hours, and we were supposed to finish last night. Since we were assigned the project at the beginning of the week, and since I had divided the work so that I completed approximately half while the rest of the group completed half, I felt that asking them to have completed it by last night was overly generous. However, despite having told me multiple times during the past few days that they were “almost done” with their part, they did not render their part to me, and again claimed that they were “almost done.” Since they clearly had not finished, I wrote a much more formal, well-mannered, and coherent complaint (than the one you are reading now) to my professor, and spent most of today, outside lectures, completing their half.
Several hours ago, they rendered their “completed” part, after I had completed their part and sent the complaint. Unsurprisingly, much of their code was disorganized, buggy, and incompatible with my part since they had not followed the outline that I had provided to them. For my entertainment, I told them about these bugs and told them to fix them and they have not replied since. Because I have free time and have been waiting for them to reply, I searched to see the happenings of bitcoin and its current value (which is $470 btw). I stumbled upon this article, which reminded me of the reason that I have student loans instead of financial freedom.
Since I haven’t mentioned it yet, my parents actually decided to let me use my theoretical money; they recommended that I use it on college since they did not plan to pay for it since I “did not get into the college that [they] had ‘chosen’ for me”. [sarcasm]Thankfully,[/sarcasm] they are my parents and I live in the same household as they so their upper-middle-class income and savings caused my expected family contribution (what I’m paying) to be the entire cost of attendance. For the past few hours, I have been staring at my student loans, which are not that significant, but without a source of income, my loans will grow to at least $100,000 (my sister’s loans are >$100,000 at this moment) by the time I graduate. If I am extremely optimistic and predict that I will obtain a well-paying job immediately after I graduate, I will be able to achieve financial freedom, albeit without owning property, in 7 years. Having spent 18 years living restricted by abusive miserly excuses for parents, needing to tolerate at least 7 more years of living as a miser is disappointing. However, I feel more incensed by the fact that, despite having savings a few orders of magnitude greater than my loans and having not granted to me or my sister access to any of it (and having denied from me the opportunity to earn money), they continue to refuse to use even a minute fraction of what they own to pay for our college attendances. Because of them, I never went to any events, never travelled anywhere, and never even ate lunch.
I have eaten nothing but fried beans and multivitamins for the past few weeks since those are the cheapest solutions to having a diet with any semblance of nutritional balance; they are disgusting and cause my bowel movement to be difficult and painful. Over the past year, I have slept on average three hours per night, but only with the aid of 30mgs of melatonin every night. I constantly feel tired, dizzy, and unable to concentrate. I have no interests nor any motivation to be alive.
7. TLDR and Summary
I have been financially restrained for eighteen years and will likely be financially restrained for at least seven more. I’d rather not live for seven more years in the manner that I have for the past eighteen. I have no source of income and don’t enjoy my life. Please help me.
8. Some Thought Experiments
I recently talked to a professor about some thought experiments:
If a tree falls and no one is nearby to hear it, does it make a sound?
+ Show Spoiler [simple enough right?] +
The vast majority of persons to whom my professor (and I, in the past) has proposed this question agree that the answer is “yes,” barring an obscure definition of sound; the tree falls, causes sound waves to propagate, and therefore makes a “sound.” What does not occur is the transduction of sound waves into neural signals and therefore the perception of the “sound.”
How will anyone ever know the difference between the observable truth and the actual truth?
Consider the following situation: there is a windowless building with 3 rooms in a line: a left room, a middle room, and a right room. The left and middle rooms are connected by a door and the right and middle rooms are connected by a door, but the left and right rooms are not connected. The left and right room have one external exit each, but the middle room has none. The building is a leisure building; the middle building has nourishment while the two side rooms have entertainment. Early in the morning, two persons, who know each other well, approach the building and wave at each other; they are alone except for one camera outside. “Hello,” says the first. “Hi!” replies the second. The two usually come here in the morning for a few minutes to converse lightheartedly. The first walks into the left room and the second walks into the right room as they usually did. A few minutes later, both exit through the door from which they came as they usually did. Both appear as they had when they entered as they usually did. Both live the rest of their lives as though the only thing that they had done that morning was having a lighthearted conversation. How will anyone ever know what happened in the building that morning?
+ Show Spoiler [this one is more debatable] +
I propound that the difference is indiscernible. I also propound that the difference is unimportant because our perception depends entirely on observation; if two “different” events have the exact same observable consequences, then they are observably the “same” event.
9. Addressing Some Cliché Responses
+ Show Spoiler +
taken from my previous blogs and others
“Depression… See a psychologist” - Modern psychology in its current state is ridiculous. The Rosenhan experiment demonstrates that diagnostic criteria are insufficient to diagnose psychological conditions. Psychologists are those who were too lazy to become medical doctors.
“Killing yourself is pointless…” I currently feel below neutral. As far as I can tell, death is neutral, and therefore preferable to living.
“You’re young… The world is your oyster…” The world is also the oyster for all the other 18-year-olds who are in an equal or better position than I.
“Find something and do it…” Please be more specific and explain to me its usefulness to me.
“Don’t care about other’s opinions…” My value is equal to the goods and services that I can provide to others. Therefore their opinions increase my value and my freedom in life. I will value certain opinions, such as those of employers, coworkers, (maybe VCs and consumers), and media, more than those of others.
“Your life, you responsibility…” I agree.
10. Closing Thoughts
I am alive because I am horrified that something will go wrong, and I will be forced to live with permanent physical or mental damage (maybe confined to a Psychiatric Hospital or Ward, which almost certainly causes my life to be worse than it is now), not because I am scared of death.
