The Things We Thought Would Last
8 min read
I. Repricing
I went through my own version of an existential crisis in early 2023. I watched natural language processing (NLP), the field I had spent years studying and building my career around, transform almost overnight. The expertise I had accumulated, the technical skills I had developed, and the career I had built my identity around were being repriced by the very technology I had devoted myself to.
It still hurts a little when I hear people mock NLP as a “dead term.” The knowledge didn’t suddenly become useless. Language models are still built on decades of NLP research. But the field’s identity, its economics, and what the industry considered valuable changed dramatically.
I eventually found myself in trading, partly because of someone I had fallen in love with, and partly because I was searching for something new to believe in.
Three years later, I hear more and more people confronting the same realization. Their fields are changing. Their expertise no longer commands the same premium. Some are beginning to wonder why they should work at all. I recognize that feeling. Something I had spent years mastering became dramatically less scarce, not because I had become less capable, but because the economics of intelligence itself were changing. And I think that experience fundamentally changed how I see the world.
II. Choice
I grew up believing in a simple formula. Study harder. Work longer. Become smarter. Build expertise. Harvest the results. But the world doesn’t owe us a return on our efforts, especially when the rules of the game can change overnight.
You can spend five years earning a PhD and ten more becoming exceptional at something, only to discover that the world no longer values it the way it once did. And someone else can enter the right industry at the right time, meet the right people, or position themselves around the right technological shift, and earn more in two years than you could in twenty.
That realization is uncomfortable because it challenges one of our deepest beliefs about fairness: that reward should be proportional to effort.
It isn’t.
A single choice can matter more than years of effort, even when we cannot know its consequences in advance. What you choose to work on. Which industry you enter. Who you surround yourself with. Who you choose to spend your life with. And fundamentally, how you choose to spend your limited time on this planet.
Of course, we don’t choose every opportunity available to us. Timing, access, and luck shape what is possible. Some decisions look obvious only after we know how they turned out.
Hard work helps determine how far you can go within a game. Your choices help determine which game you’re playing. And sometimes the most consequential decision is knowing when to stop playing a game whose rules have changed.
III. Money
So I chose trading. Part of the decision was simple: I wanted to make money. I was looking at expected return.
Of course, money is not the purpose of life. But it connects to problems that persist across technologies, industries, and generations. Scarcity. Exchange. Incentives. Competition. Cooperation. Resource allocation.
Across civilizations and cultures, humans have confronted the same underlying questions: Who gets what? Who produces what? What is something worth? How do we allocate limited resources among competing desires? The institutions and instruments we use to answer these questions have changed repeatedly. The questions remain.
Money is not eternal in any particular form. Neither are markets or trading strategies. Yet the human incentives that give rise to them are remarkably persistent. That is what drew me to trading.
I wanted to understand the allocation of capital, the pricing of uncertainty, and the consequences of human decisions. In some sense, I stopped betting on the permanence of a particular body of knowledge and started betting on the persistence of human incentives.
But the persistence of those problems does not guarantee the value of my role in solving them. Trading can be transformed by technology too. I was choosing a different exposure to change, not escaping it.
And money, too, is only a means to an end.
IV. Possession
I have spent enormous portions of my life accumulating things. Knowledge. Credentials. Wealth. Recognition. Status. Relationships. Achievements. Some of those pursuits succeeded. Others failed. I became protective of what I had built because it represented years of my life. These things were evidence of my effort, my intelligence, my sacrifices, and my choices. I wanted them to mean something. More importantly, I wanted them to last.
But what exactly am I guarding so fiercely? A fortune can be accumulated and lost. An institution can disappear. A relationship that once defined an entire chapter of my life can end. Even the people I love are not mine to keep forever.
Perhaps what frightened me most wasn’t simply the declining value of my expertise. It was realizing how much of my identity I had built around things that were never guaranteed to remain valuable. If I was no longer the person who knew how to do something difficult and valuable, who was I?
I had confused what I knew with who I was.
V. Fear
And underneath all of this, there is another fear I find increasingly difficult to run away from.
We are trying to build intelligence that may eventually surpass our own. Perhaps it will coexist with us. Perhaps it will make our lives unimaginably better. Or perhaps we will lose control of something more capable than we are. I don’t know how this will unfold.
I had taken humanity’s position as the most technologically capable species on this planet for granted. Now we’re building systems that challenge the assumption that we will remain so. There is something almost absurd about it. We spend our entire lives trying to become more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more successful. We compete for credentials, recognition, wealth, and intellectual superiority. And meanwhile, we may be creating machines that eventually surpass us in nearly every economically relevant domain.
What happens to the value of expertise if the intelligence needed to produce it is no longer scarce? What happens to the meaning of work if much of what we once considered uniquely human can be performed by machines? And what happens to humanity if we are no longer the most capable intelligence in the world we inhabit?
For me, these questions are also uncomfortably personal. I have spent so much of my life trying to become someone who could think well, understand difficult things, and solve problems other people could not. If I can delegate more and more of that work to a machine, what does it mean for the identity I built around doing it myself?
“I think, therefore I am” never promised that thinking would make me exceptional. Somewhere along the way, I had come to depend on that distinction.
I cannot answer what this will mean for humanity. But it makes one question harder to avoid: how much of my own worth have I tied to being useful, intelligent, or difficult to replace?
VI. Choosing Again
I don’t know how those questions will be answered. But they have changed the question I ask about my own life. I used to think the most important thing was to become good at what I did. So good that they couldn’t ignore me. Now I want to know whether what I am doing is worth the time I am giving it. What am I building? What am I trying to understand? Who am I choosing to love? What am I sacrificing, and for what?
For a long time, my answer depended on what I had already invested. I had spent years acquiring this expertise, building this career, becoming this person. Walking away felt like admitting those years had been wasted. So I kept trying to preserve what I had built, even when I was no longer sure it was what I wanted.
Losing that certainty was painful. But it also made me question something I had taken for granted: that because something had once mattered enormously, I had to keep organizing my life around it. The knowledge was still mine. The years had still shaped me. Neither required me to keep going in the same direction.
The future is not obligated to reward the person I spent the past becoming. And I am not obligated to spend the rest of my life defending that person.
That is the freedom I am beginning to recognize. I can choose a different game. I can love someone who changes the direction of my life, without knowing whether we will share the rest of it. I can leave something I once believed was everything. I can start again without pretending that what came before meant nothing.
Every choice has a cost. Leaving can mean giving up income, certainty, belonging, or a future I had already imagined. Staying has costs too. I am still afraid of choosing badly. But I want to choose based on what I believe is worth my time now, rather than only what I have already given years of my life to.
Whatever I choose next will also be vulnerable to change. Trading cannot promise me permanence any more than NLP could. Neither can another achievement, another relationship, or something I build myself. If I need that promise before committing, I will spend my life waiting.
Perhaps that is what I have been trying to understand all along. Something can matter deeply without lasting forever. A relationship can end and still have been worth the love I gave it. Knowledge can lose its market value and still have changed how I see the world. I can build something that matters to me, and perhaps to others, without knowing how long it will last.
We don’t love because we’re guaranteed to be loved forever. We don’t build because we’re guaranteed to succeed. And we don’t pursue knowledge because it will remain valuable for eternity. We do these things because, for the brief time we’re here, they are worth doing.