You are Not a Number

After I immigrated to the United States, I took my first standardized test before I had even learned to speak English. I remember matching shapes and patterns, filling out bubbles on a piece of paper, thinking how very much like a Christmas Tree it all looked when the multiple choice was fed into the scantron. My results said that I was special, something that I would have to prove over and over again in multiple choice format over the next two decades of life.

2400, 5, 4.0, 60, 1.0, 10

If you can guess what most of these numbers refer to, guess what? You’re like me. Overly quantified, standardized, and specialized.

At the age of 29, I was one of the youngest female fund managers in the world. It was a reward for having had nearly perfect numbers, both absolutely and relative to my peers. Some reward! What I thought was the best thing I had ever accomplished in my life turned into a great curse as the ensuing years would see the rise of Xi and Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic, inflicting the longest bear market in Chinese modern history. During this time, I lost over half of the assets that I raised, or hundreds of millions of dollars. My daily performance figures were publicly available on Bloomberg and Financial Times, and everyday, those figures told me and the world that I was “useless.” One day I had lost -7% of the fund, and investors everywhere asked me how a fund could be down -7% in a day. I was no longer a person, I was just someone who was reduced down to the individual losses on a Year-to-Date performance chart.

When my funds closed in January 2024, I just wanted to sleep. I no longer had a career, I no longer wanted money because my career had involved too much stress, I no longer wanted love because of too many failed relationships caused by too much stress, and I no longer wanted children because it required love or money, which were two very stressful things. I had seen this behavior across young people across not just Asia during my investing years, but across America and Europe. Millions of young Chinese “lie flat,” and in Korea, “n-po” refers to a generation of young people who have given up on numerous things, including marriage, children, and a career. What if the problem is not them, but the way that society is organized? 

The reason the song, “I’m looking for a man in finance” took off in the summer of 2024 was precisely because of how unattainable – and ultimately utterly meaningless all the metrics are. Two of these metrics, height and trust fund, are accidents of biology and birth. We expect today’s individual to fit into impossible buckets, and then wonder why they just give up. The ones who fit in go crazy trying to do so. 

Yet, the societies of the past were not organized around zero-sum metrics. Confucian society, for example, specifically looked down on utility for 2000 years. Elites were expected to pursue moral cultivation and creative pursuits, and set a good example for society. 

What if today’s society is an aberration to begin with? What if we could direct AI to help us construct an ideal society, where “usefulness” is replaced with “boundlessness?” Welcome to The Boundless Era.