🤓 Recently, one thought has kept circling in my mind: why do we work?
Work is usually seen as a way to earn an income. But it also steadily consumes our time, attention, and energy. We trade a substantial part of our lives for money. Is that exchange reasonable? How should we calculate its costs and returns? And why does work so often bring such persistent unhappiness?
Harder still is this question: do we have to wait until decades of work are behind us before we can travel, create, or truly experience life? If life is always deferred to a future we haven’t reached, are we preparing to live—or simply postponing life itself?
I’m not trying to reject work or escape the responsibilities of life. What I want to explore is whether we can find a more sustainable arrangement, one that makes life less entirely dependent on work.
By financial freedom, I don’t mean great wealth. I mean having a relatively stable income each month—enough to maintain a good quality of life and give me some control over my time.
Maybe that’s a little geeky. But I like the combination: using the humanities to question the meaning of life, and the sciences to test what might be possible.
So from here on, I want to study this question with more academic rigor and discipline. First, I’ll build a framework: bringing living costs, income goals, time, and risk into the same equation, using formulas and statistics where they’re useful. Then I’ll test my assumptions through sustained action, record the results, and revise the approach as I go.
In a sense, I want to treat my life as a long-term research project: ask questions, form hypotheses, design experiments, gather evidence—and accept that the results may overturn what I thought I knew.
A week ago, they were still just flower buds. Now, they're slowly beginning to bloom.
Watching them change reminded me of a passage from Goethe's Faust, from the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles.
Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen
If ever I say to a moment,
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
Stay a while! You are so beautiful!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen
Then you may bind me in chains,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!
Then I shall gladly perish.
I asked GPT to turn my own character design into an animated pet. Now my little alien cat, GM, lives in ChatGPT. 🐱
If you have access to Pets in ChatGPT Work, upload a reference image and try this prompt:
“Turn the character in my uploaded image into a custom animated pet for ChatGPT. Keep its original appearance, colors, proportions, and art style. Name: [name]. Main action: [action]. Personality: [description]. Create the necessary animations, check the format, show me a preview, and help me set it up.”
🐱 A little update: I'm taking a break from writing today.
Tomorrow, I'll be sharing something I've been thinking about lately: the relationship between us and our brains.
Here's a little spoiler: we're not really the ones controlling our brains, at least not in the way we think.
There's quite a bit of neuroscience involved, and I want to make sure I explain it properly, so I've decided to save the article for tomorrow.
I'm also heading out for a little adventure tomorrow, so expect some random photos of good food, pretty places, and whatever catches my eye along the way.