Dropping Out

2020-12-15

I went to university for three reasons

1. To meet curious, driven, and kind people who were my own age
2. To give myself time to explore intellectually
3. 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!