I've written before about stepping away from my MIT self-study to focus on financial independence, because I was over 90% dependent on others financially and wanted to fix that. This post is about the other half of that decision, the part I haven't written about yet: what I actually want to do with financial independence once I have it, and why I think about the world the way I do.
Where This Started
This didn't come out of nowhere. It goes back to 2023, after I was unsuccessful in getting into universities abroad. That wasn't just a disappointment, it was an existential crisis. I remember one dawn, coming back from the public toilet, standing outside our door and just questioning why I even had to go through all of that in the first place, the applications, the essays, the waiting, just for a shot at continuing my education. That's a whole period that probably deserves its own post at some point. For now, that's just where this particular line of thinking started.
One example I keep coming back to is the college application process itself. If you look at any college essay guide, part of the advice is always that all the brainstorming you do trying to find a unique story to tell about yourself has value beyond just getting you into a school, that you end up discovering things about yourself in the process. Maybe that's true. But I don't buy that it needs to take months to get there. I don't think self-discovery needs to cost that much time and energy, especially when there are faster ways to get there if anyone actually cared enough to build them.
The Pattern I Keep Seeing
Once I started seeing the college application process as unnecessary friction instead of just something you have to push through, I started noticing the same pattern everywhere, not just in college admissions. Job hunting works the same way. So does basic survival for a lot of people, worrying about food, or having somewhere to sleep, before they can even think about doing anything meaningful with their life.
Here's how I see it: if the people running these systems, governments, universities, whoever, actually valued human potential the way I think they should, they'd remove the friction instead of adding more of it. Imagine finishing secondary school and instead of spending months preparing applications, writing personal essays, chasing down recommendation letters, you just went on vacation. Three months, maybe. Traveled, met people, built connections, actually lived a little. Then you came back and continued your education, because your records already exist in the system, because you're not being asked to prove yourself all over again from scratch. Getting there with your time and energy still intact isn't just good for you individually, it's better for everyone, because you'd actually have the capacity left over to work on things that matter beyond just your own survival.
That's not how the world currently works. Right now it feels like everyone is striving for themselves, or for their own family, or the people close to them, and nobody higher up is thinking about the collective. I get why. But I think it could be so much better than this, and I think over 80 percent of the problems people spend their lives worrying about are avoidable if the systems around them weren't actively working against them.
Judges, Prisons, and Wasted Potential
Here's the example that bothers me the most: poverty leads to childhood pregnancy more often than not, at least in my observation. You rarely find a girl from a wealthy family pregnant that young. That pregnancy deepens the poverty even further, because now there's a child being raised by parents who could barely take care of themselves in the first place. That child grows up without much of a shot, gets into trouble, maybe theft, maybe worse, and somewhere along that chain, ends up in front of a judge facing years in prison, sometimes life, depending on how far things went.
This is basically the plot of Capernaum, the film about a boy who ends up suing his own parents for giving him a life he was never equipped to survive. It's close to the perfect real example of what I'm trying to say here.
And in most cases, everyone acts like justice was served once the sentence comes down. The judge sees it as simple: you took something that didn't belong to you, or worse, so you pay for it with your time. Case closed, moving on. I kind of hate that mindset, honestly. They don't get it. That whole chain of events, from the poverty to the pregnancy to the crime to the sentencing, was avoidable at almost every single point. And the response to it, years of a human being sitting in a cell doing absolutely nothing productive, isn't justice to me. It's a pure waste of human potential, stacked on top of a waste of human potential that was already happening before any of it went to trial.
I think the reason we don't see it this way as a society is that there are over 8 billion of us. One person losing years of their life to a broken chain of events doesn't feel like it moves the needle. So society calls it handled and moves on. But it's not handled. It's just out of sight.
The Real Problems We're Not Solving
Here's the thing that gets me: even with over 8 billion people on this planet, we still haven't solved some real problems. Certain neurological diseases, for example, which happens to be the space I want to contribute to eventually, are still unsolved. Actual, serious, high-stakes problems that affect real people right now, and we don't have answers yet.
Meanwhile, people spend hours a day on social media doing essentially nothing, wasting potential that could be pointed at problems like that. I don't say that to blame anyone specifically. I think most people are drowning in a kind of low-grade noise, bullshit, honestly, that covers up the real problems and makes it easy to get comfortable. It's not always a personal failing. It's the water everyone's swimming in.
What I'd Actually Do
So here's where financial independence comes in for me. Once I get there, I don't just want it for myself. I want to make the path easier for other people to get there too, so they're not wasting years figuring it out the way I've had to.
The way I picture it is almost like a greedy algorithm, since I'm a software engineer, that metaphor makes sense to me. At every step, invest in the people around you with the most potential, help them get to a stable place, then use what you've built together to reach the next group, and the next, until eventually nobody's potential is going to waste. I've been calling it, half-jokingly, "operation make everyone high potential." I want to build something like a template, a clearer, faster way for people to reach financial independence, and provide direct financial support wherever I can along the way.
Am I the Only One Thinking This?
I wonder sometimes if people who are already financially independent are doing something like this quietly, somewhere I just haven't come across yet. I'd like to believe they are. Maybe I just haven't found them. Or maybe those opportunities aren't going to come find me, and I actually have to go build this myself instead of waiting to stumble onto someone already doing it.
That's actually a big part of how I want to approach this differently from how the world currently works. Right now, the advice is always "go look for opportunity." Job opportunities, research opportunities, education, all of it, you're expected to go find it yourself. I think that's an inferior use of human potential. If I ever have the resources and the power to do it, I'd rather make the opportunities easy to find, or bring them directly to people, instead of making them spend their limited time and energy searching for something that should've been placed in front of them in the first place.
I Know How This Sounds
I know how grand all of this sounds written out like this. I'm aware of it. I don't think that makes it wrong, though. I don't blame anyone for not living this way already, there's a lot of noise covering up the real problems, and it's easy to get comfortable inside that noise. I just don't want to be one of the people who stays comfortable inside it once I have the means not to be.
This is one of those ideas I'll probably keep coming back to, since I have a lot more thoughts along these lines that didn't even make it into this post. For now, this is where it stands. Still mostly a plan. Not yet a reality.
Nobody's Actually Running This
The more I sit with all of this, the more I don't think anyone actually designed it to work this way on purpose. I don't think there's a room somewhere where people decided kids should have to fight through months of essays and recommendation letters just to keep learning, or that someone sat down and decided prison should function as a waste bin instead of a fix. Even the judge in that example almost certainly believes he's doing the right thing, working inside rules he inherited, not rules he wrote.
That's actually the scarier version to me, not the more comforting one. If someone were deliberately running this, you could go find them and argue with them, maybe even change their mind. But if nobody's steering it, if it's mostly just a pile of small decisions and inherited habits stacking up into this much waste, then there's no single villain to point at. It's a system nobody quite chose, that almost everyone is stuck living inside, including the people who look like they're benefiting from it the most. In a strange way, that makes all of us victims of it, just at very different costs.
That doesn't let anyone off the hook, including me. It just changes what I think the actual fight is. Not against people. Against inertia.