Fear
I barely attended university.
At 18, I touched a computer seriously for the first time, and for the next two years, I was consumed by personal projects.
Looking back now,
I realize what drove me was fear.
I was fiercely competitive, vain, and constantly aggressive.
I obsessed over scores—and, for better or worse, I had the ability to achieve them.
I fixated on technology and capitalism as a way to justify my aggression.
At 18, the crypto media outlet I founded took off, earning me more money than I could have imagined at my age.
At 19, I joined a startup as a founding member, and within a year it was acquired by a publicly listed company.
Yet, despite the praise from others, I couldn’t praise myself.
Every time an investor told me they wanted to invest, a hollow pit opened in my stomach.
All I could do was raise my “score” in the form of money, and that realization felt suffocating.
I was vaguely afraid of people.
Believing that others could attack me simply for existing, I sought refuge in competition.
Defeating others became a buffer against that fear.
Looking down on them was the simplest disguise for my own vulnerability.
I suspect this is a path many who are fiercely ambitious, especially young men, inevitably walk—and perhaps the greatest misfortune is reserved for those who keep winning.
It was around this time that I instinctively began to explore my inner world.
I was searching for something bigger, a light that had been inside me since childhood—immense, beautiful, and indescribable. I thought I could find it at the top of capitalism, in the energy of the real world.
But ignoring my own fear, pain, attachment, and sadness was a mistake.
Eventually, I realized something profound: all the answers I had been chasing outwardly were already within me.
In a silent moment of clarity, I felt it—the light I had been seeking was not somewhere out there.
It had been quietly waiting inside me all along.