Grow up speaking more English than Korean. My ex-expat parents encouragee reading so I’d be bilingual, but they don’t anticipate how lopsided my reading:talking interest is. Grow up disconnected from local culture thanks to an abundance of personal deficits + being exclusively interested in fantasy novels my peers aren’t reading
Spend ages 15-18 grinding at one of the ~3 Korean private schools that prepare you to apply to prestigious overseas colleges; my academic performance goes from ‘pretty good’ to ‘notably excellent’ once I take tests and writing essays in my most fluent language
Around this time my shadow life as a porny fanfic writer is taking off; I’m getting an ego high from the respect peers and teachers give me irl for my academic performance and the respect internet strangers give me for my fiction about tortured beautiful men. The unusually high status I feel like I have gives me the slack to catch up on some social development
Go to Stanford
Huh. coming abroad and hanging out smart people who share my interests only solved 50% of my social problems
The rest is that I’m autistic and have severe social anxiety whose extent I haven’t realized. It just felt normal to be terrified all the time to the point of finding it hard to even hold conversations irl (I admit I haven’t fully overcome this)
Discover computer science in college
Holy shit
It’s like doing the best drug in the world except instead of ruining my life it will make me rich and high status
But: full time job at a FAANG is really hard. Not getting a lot done, miserable and depressed, and have no energy for a personal life. Not quite sure what’s going wrong but part of it is that I’m kind of dumb and part of it is that I’m terrible at being mentored
Also in college: stumble onto https://slatestarcodex.com, click with the author and the associated crowd more strongly than I’ve ever clicked with anyone before. okay, it turns out that hanging out with smart people who really share my interests fix 80% of my social problems
Meet a guy at a slatestarcodex-y meetup
Hit on the guy, move in with him after college, get married
He’s poly and that sounds nice so I’ll try it out. 1-2 rough spots adjusting to it, but overall easy-ish and worthwhile
Quit FAANG after a few years, try a couple more tech companies, then stop because I don’t have to work for 5-10 years given runway
Lot of time painting, writing fiction, hobby coding, running social events, while uncertain as to when/how to reintegrate back into mainstream economy, especially given that I
Decided to have kids and moved to an intentional community to parent less lonesomely
Enter my thirties. I’ve been online for over half my life and benefited tremendously from it, but exposure to the public internet – even as someone who aggressively blocks and blacklists – has also made me angry, bitter, and afraid. This crystallizes abruptly. I make this website at the beginning of 2025, and make it my primary residence later that year
