As much as it’s profitable to apply “hyper reality” to assets (i.e., buying Palantir when there’s nationalism, or buying Bitcoin when there’s money printing) - it’s a reductive and bad approach to life as a whole. Reading Soros' later works - you’re left with the picture of an old man who tried and failed to apply a successful framework in markets to politics (Ukraine) and to some extent his own life. And he’s left with more questions than answers - too ancient to explore them further. It’s best to treat people you spend a lot of time with on a hyper-individualized basis rather than a collection of traits. You might have a friend who has sign value as a “fund manager” and everyone in his life treats him fully as a fund manager. Just treat him as a person divorced from his fund manager identity. Everyone is quirky and isn’t easily reduced to abstractions. But at the same time, everyone is capable of “being the meme” if they need to be in a professional context. And if you start introducing the triggers that bring that identity construct out - you will be interacting with a societal projection, not a person. Your relationships won’t be meaningful if you reduce people down to their meme. People aren’t stocks. I only really learned this by being a stormtrooper NPC for my entire childhood and most of my adult life - then due to some health issues - kind of existed in an absurd wasteland for years. It was only after I discarded the 40 layers of narrative that I was able to even connect with anyone in real life. Obviously, this is not a good way to make money. And you can’t have that many personal interactions. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put your personal life on blast on social media for this reason as well. When you see all kinds of reductive statements on social media like “Asian girls are truffle pigs for white founders” or even the more innocent “looking for a co-founder for life” or even just people memeing their trad wife/trad husband lifestyle. It reduces the sacred to a performance. You also shouldn’t be asking LLMs for advice on personal decisions in my view. This also aligns with LLMs' advice - if you actually quantify it — so even if you’re an AI maxi. There should simply be domains where logic and token compression aren’t the main driver. Spontaneity is what makes us human in some ways. More economically. I think the level of profound cynicism that is required to thrive in the status quo can only be supported by a rejection of the underlying alienation in the rest of your life. Like you can’t trend trade relationships. Or map them into business cycles. Or you end up just going completely insane/probably alienating people in your life. If you’re depressed generally, it’s hard to see things clearly in an age when clarity of vision is increasingly the only differentiator. Being able to derive value from your own life without technology is also the only way Westerners will be able to avoid the digital vortex. This is a weird post so I’ll just end it here.