The Numbers Game

Sunday, a little before three. My mom made phở again. It's a whole morning's work: beef, bones, pork, a bag of herbs. She'd made it on Saturday too, and sitting at the kitchen table I understood something I'd somehow missed for forty years. Sharing a meal is the point. People spent most of their history around a fire, eating together; the brain pays you for it. On the walk afterward I couldn't let it go:

Sunday's lunch was just as good. Then she said something that broke the mood for the rest of the day.

She hasn't been eating well lately, and she's tired all the time. Over the soup she told me how long she thinks she has.

I know what she wants for me, because she says it often enough: a wife, kids, the ordinary things other parents get to watch. If I'm honest, I'd want it partly for her. But to find someone, I'd probably have to move to Vietnam, and I can't tell whether that would be courage or giving up on everything I'm trying to build here.

What I could do that afternoon was smaller. We'll take her somewhere this winter. Sun and sea air, Spain or the Canary Islands, cheap, once she feels strong enough to travel. It was the first plan in weeks that made me feel like a good son.

Here is where things stand, for anyone just arriving.

At forty I left the corporate world. On Sunday I counted the months, and the number surprised me:

Seven months, and I'm not traveling yet. I'm in my parents' flat, in a neighborhood with nothing to walk to, building machines. A live stream that runs itself, seven hours a day. Tools that turn one piece of writing into posts for every platform. A couple of products I'm not ready to show anyone yet. And a trading system, which is the one that pays for everything, or is supposed to.

The scoreboard this weekend: two new YouTube subscribers from shorts. One follower on TikTok. Thirty-something views on my first post on X. It's a numbers game, and for now the numbers are small.

Monday I woke up to bad news from my dad's side of the family.

Then the live stream broke. Everything we'd improved on Friday and Saturday had broken the rendering, and I shut it down before more people saw a glitching screen. The market was down. Elon Musk said the smaller AI cloud companies couldn't raise money anymore, and my positions slid further. My watch flagged my stress in orange.

On a bench, in a thin patch of sun, I tried to describe what a successful day would even look like. Green markets. A stream that runs itself. A bit of sun on the walk. I don't need much, I said. I just need to not deal with failures.

And then, closer to the truth. Anything that ties me down cuts my options, and

Tuesday the market was calm, so I went to the gym at three and danced until six-thirty. Three and a half hours. I was sloppy, but I was there, and the sauna afterward is still the best combination I know.

That day I also posted on LinkedIn for the first time since I left. It scared me more than the stream did. I could picture my old colleagues: this guy still doesn't have a job, and now he's posting AI slop. I'd cleaned up my profile first and deleted half the old positions; most of what once proved I was skilled is now done by agents. Two hundred and eighty-eight people looked. Nobody said a word. I decided the best case was that they'd unfollow.

Wednesday was a national holiday. Everything closed, raining, dark by four. The market was open, and nothing about my day was different. Still, I felt calmer than I had all week.

It took a walk to understand why. Twenty years of nine-to-five trained my body to relax on holidays and brace on every other day. The office calendar was still running me.

I wondered what else the job taught me that I haven't noticed yet. The stress spike when the stream crashes, I recognize that one. It's the same dread I used to carry into the office.

The stream itself was finally watchable that day. After another round of fixes, the shorts crossed a thousand views and brought seven new subscribers. Most viewers still dropped off within minutes. I didn't.

Thursday was the opposite. An hour into the broadcast, the stream went to a black screen, on the one day people seemed genuinely interested. A post I'd planned failed on its design. I closed a position at a loss. A fifth of my weekly AI budget burned on fixes that fixed nothing. Nothing worked today. Nothing.

Friday, Amazon and Google reported, and the market ran from anything with AI in it, which is everything I hold. Since October, since precisely the day I started opening positions under the new strategy, money has been rotating out of my names and into groceries and toothpaste. Bad luck at exactly the wrong moment. Next week those companies' own earnings arrive. On the walk I called it the final nail in the coffin.

The stream crashed again. My AI subscription was at seventy percent for the week with four days left. A job listing came in: an AI product role at a government library, forty-eight thousand a month before tax. I did the arithmetic, fourteen years to a pension, calm work, and for a moment it sounded almost sweet. Then I pictured waking up at seven every day.

My mom asked, again, whether any of this was making money. I said that when people believe in something, the money comes later. She said she was exhausted.

I sat on a bench to catch a minute of sun and said the truest thing of the week:

Nothing on the horizon, only air, and the road you're on running straight to the edge.

What I had left wasn't a strategy, more a stance. Some people get the face, the name, the right connection at the right moment. What anyone can do is keep going long after most people stop, because that's what luck rewards.

On the way home I decided, more or less, to shave my head. There's no one to impress.

Then the sauna, an hour of it, three teenagers on the top bench, and out into the dark at five. I was looking forward to the weekend: no market, no stream.

I didn't know yet that a mosquito had found its way into my room. Or what the next Thursday would do.