Dropping Out
2020-12-15
I went to university for three reasons
- To meet curious, driven, and kind people who were my own age
- To give myself time to explore intellectually
- To relax and enjoy life
I was surprised by how quickly I was disappointed.
Nobody at my university there was driven to do anything outside of coursework. They weren’t curious about the world, how things worked, or how to live. And I was scared because, little by little, I was becoming more like them.
It felt like I could see the next four years of my life. Wake up, go to classes, cook dinner, study, sleep. Learn something interesting every once in a while. Take a four month intermission for an internship once a year.
It felt like life was passing me by and all I could do was watch.
Part of me wants to write that dropping out was scary. That I couldn’t see what my future would be like outside of university, and that this frightened me so much that I shit my pants.
But once I thought of it, beyond “Maybe I should do a gap year eventually…” - dropping out seemed almost inevitable. It was all I could think about, and it took less than a week from when I first seriously considered dropping out to actually doing it.
I have no clue what the next four years of my life will be like. I hope I enjoy working at Numerai and stay there for a long time, and eventually go live at Stanford and see what university is like without Covid. Maybe I’ll go join a monastery for a month, or not work for a year and just make generative art.
Now, I can live any experience I want. Let’s see what happens!