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This is a very public journal of anxiety, existential dread, and way too much tech knowledge. Basically therapy, but with Wi-Fi. <br/><br/><a href="https://asiandadenergy.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">asiandadenergy.substack.com</a>

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1/30/2026

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Episode thumbnail for AI Is About to Crash. Here’s Why.

July 23, 2026

AI Is About to Crash. Here’s Why.

<p>Hello world.</p><p>I’m an unemployed ex Big Tech software engineer with 25 years of experience in the technology industry.</p><p>And lately, I’ve been looking at the AI industry and thinking:</p><p><strong>Is it just me, or is this bubble looking extra bubbly?</strong></p><p>Because something feels different.</p><p>The AI industry is still burning through enormous amounts of money. The companies at the center of the AI boom continue to require staggering amounts of capital to build data centers, buy GPUs, train models, and keep everything running.</p><p>But suddenly, the tone seems to be changing.</p><p>We’re seeing some of the most insanely valued companies in history preparing to go public. We’re hearing calls for government support. And we’re seeing AI executives who spent years predicting an imminent AI driven jobs apocalypse suddenly sounding a little more... cautious.</p><p>Hmm.</p><p>That’s interesting.</p><p>To me, this looks a lot like peak bubble behavior.</p><p>It reminds me of what happens near the end of every major financial mania. Everyone starts looking for the next investor willing to buy into the dream before the music stops.</p><p>Or, as we like to call them in the financial world:</p><p><strong>Bag holders.</strong></p><p>But why is this happening now?</p><p>I think there are several things happening beneath the surface that are starting to expose a fundamental problem with the current AI boom.</p><p>And before the AI true believers come after me with pitchforks and flaming GPUs, let me be clear.</p><p>I believe AI is going to be incredibly important.</p><p>I just don’t believe we have Artificial General Intelligence.</p><p>Not even close.</p><p>We Don’t Have AGI. We Have Very Expensive Probabilistic Parrots.</p><p>Yes, AI has gotten dramatically better.</p><p>We have agentic systems. We have tool integrations. We have models that can write code, analyze documents, generate images, conduct research, and occasionally pretend to be a competent junior employee.</p><p>But fundamentally, today’s large language models are still probabilistic systems predicting what comes next based on patterns learned from enormous amounts of data.</p><p>They can do remarkable things.</p><p>But they still struggle with consistency, reasoning, context, hallucinations, and knowing when they don’t know something.</p><p>And because of that, I’m skeptical that today’s AI is suddenly going to invent the next Warp Drive and increase global productivity by 10,000 percent.</p><p>Claude is not going to wake up tomorrow and announce:</p><p>“Good morning, humans. I have solved faster than light travel. Also, I fixed the economy.”</p><p>Sorry.</p><p>But there is one thing AI could potentially do extremely well.</p><p>It could replace human labor.</p><p>And I think that’s the gigantic bet hiding underneath the entire AI boom.</p><p>The AI Industry Has Made a Trillion Dollar Bet on Human Labor</p><p>Think about the economics.</p><p>The AI industry has attracted and consumed enormous amounts of capital.</p><p>And whether we’re talking about investor money, corporate spending, or debt financing, the numbers are staggering.</p><p>The basic premise behind much of this investment is that AI will eventually generate enormous profits by automating human work.</p><p>Especially white collar work.</p><p>And that’s the only economic story that really makes sense to me.</p><p>Because if you are spending hundreds of billions, or potentially trillions, building the infrastructure required to run AI, eventually you need to make that money back.</p><p>And you can’t do that by selling a $20 ChatGPT subscription to every person on Earth.</p><p>You need something much bigger.</p><p>You need to capture a meaningful percentage of the economic value currently generated by human workers.</p><p>And that’s why, for years, we’ve heard predictions from some of the biggest names in AI about massive numbers of white collar jobs being automated.</p><p>Software engineers.</p><p>Lawyers.</p><p>Accountants.</p><p>Customer service representatives.</p><p>Consultants.</p><p>Researchers.</p><p>Basically anyone who spends their day sitting in front of a computer.</p><p>The logic is straightforward.</p><p>If AI can replace millions of expensive human workers, the companies providing that AI can potentially capture a gigantic amount of economic value.</p><p>And if you believe the more extreme AI predictions, we’re talking about tens of millions of workers eventually being replaced.</p><p>That’s a massive opportunity.</p><p>Except...</p><p>There’s a problem.</p><p><strong>It’s not happening fast enough.</strong></p><p>The AI Productivity Revolution Is Taking Longer Than Expected</p><p>For all the talk about AI replacing human workers, we’re not seeing anything remotely close to the scale necessary to justify the industry’s enormous financial commitments.</p><p>We’re certainly not seeing millions upon millions of white collar workers being replaced every year.</p><p>And my own experience as a software engineer has given me a front row seat to the problem.</p><p>AI can be incredibly useful.</p><p>But getting useful work out of AI is not as simple as typing:</p><p>“Hey Claude, please build my billion dollar software company.”</p><p>Believe me.</p><p>I’ve tried.</p><p>The problem is that getting AI to produce consistently high quality work still requires a surprising amount of human intelligence.</p><p>You have to manage context.</p><p>You have to understand the limitations of the model.</p><p>You have to work around gaps in the training data.</p><p>You have to check its output.</p><p>You have to catch hallucinations.</p><p>You have to design workflows.</p><p>And when the AI inevitably does something completely insane, you have to figure out why.</p><p>In other words, AI doesn’t necessarily eliminate human work.</p><p>Sometimes it just changes the kind of human work you’re doing.</p><p>And this isn’t just a problem in software engineering.</p><p>We’re seeing similar challenges in other areas that were supposedly easy targets for automation.</p><p>Customer service, for example, has long been considered one of the obvious use cases for AI.</p><p>But when AI agents make mistakes, misunderstand customers, or confidently give completely incorrect answers, companies have a problem.</p><p>There have already been cases where AI automation initiatives had to be rolled back and human workers brought back into the loop.</p><p>Oops.</p><p>Turns out customers don’t particularly enjoy being gaslit by a chatbot.</p><p>Who knew?</p><p>The bottom line is that AI simply isn’t replacing human workers at the scale the industry’s financial model appears to require.</p><p>And I think the AI industry is starting to realize this.</p><p>Which brings us to another problem.</p><p>The Open Source AI Problem</p><p>The American AI industry has been built around enormous closed models.</p><p>ChatGPT.</p><p>Claude.</p><p>Gemini.</p><p>These companies control the models, the infrastructure, the data, and the computing resources.</p><p>And the plan, at least in theory, is pretty familiar.</p><p>Spend an insane amount of money.</p><p>Build the best technology.</p><p>Gain market dominance.</p><p>Kill the competition.</p><p>Then raise prices and enjoy enormous profits.</p><p>Silicon Valley has used this playbook many times before.</p><p>But there is one big problem.</p><p><strong>The rest of the world is not sitting around waiting for America to establish an AI monopoly.</strong></p><p>Open source AI models have gotten incredibly good.</p><p>And companies outside the United States, particularly in China, have made remarkable progress developing powerful models with significantly fewer resources.</p><p>These models can be downloaded.</p><p>They can be modified.</p><p>They can be run on your own infrastructure.</p><p>And increasingly, they are becoming good enough for many real world use cases.</p><p>That’s a huge problem for the AI industry’s dream of monopoly profits.</p><p>Because if a company can download a capable open source model and run it locally for a fraction of the cost of paying an American AI company every time an employee asks a chatbot to write an email...</p><p>Well.</p><p>That’s not exactly great news for the people trying to build a trillion dollar AI toll booth.</p><p>And this brings me to another trend that I think is even more important.</p><p>The Rise of Local AI</p><p>You don’t necessarily need a giant data center to run AI anymore.</p><p>With techniques like quantization and distillation, massive frontier models can be compressed into smaller models that can run on increasingly affordable hardware.</p><p>Your desktop.</p><p>Your home server.</p><p>Your laptop.</p><p>Your own private infrastructure.</p><p>And this has two enormous advantages.</p><p>First, you don’t have to keep paying a Big Tech AI company every time you want to use the model.</p><p>Second, your data doesn’t have to leave your computer.</p><p>For businesses and individuals who care about privacy, that’s a pretty big deal.</p><p>And as local models become more capable, something else happens.</p><p>The value of premium AI models starts to decline.</p><p>Why pay $100 a month for the world’s most powerful AI model if a local model running on your own hardware can handle 95 percent of what you actually need?</p><p>It’s the same problem that open source software created for proprietary software companies.</p><p>If the free alternative is good enough, the premium product has to work very, very hard to justify its price.</p><p>And that brings us to the fundamental problem.</p><p>The AI Industry Needs Productivity Gains. Fast.</p><p>The AI industry has spent an enormous amount of money based on the assumption that AI will eventually generate enormous economic returns.</p><p>But eventually isn’t good enough.</p><p>The debt has to be serviced today.</p><p>The data centers have to be paid for today.</p><p>The GPUs have to be purchased today.</p><p>The employees have to be paid today.</p><p>The electricity bill, unfortunately, does not accept payment in future AGI promises.</p><p>So the industry needs massive productivity gains.</p><p>And it needs them soon.</p><p>But what we’re seeing instead is a technology that is incredibly useful in some situations, moderately useful in others, and occasionally produces something that makes you stare at your monitor for five minutes wondering how a machine with a trillion parameters managed to screw up something a reasonably intelligent eight year old could have done correctly.</p><p>That’s not AGI.</p><p>That’s Tuesday.</p><p>The technology will improve.</p><p>I’m confident of that.</p><p>But the question isn’t whether AI will eventually transform the economy.</p><p>I think it will.</p><p>The question is:</p><p><strong>Will it transform the economy quickly enough to justify the enormous amount of money being spent on it today?</strong></p><p>That’s a very different question.</p><p>I Think the AI Bubble Will Pop</p><p>Let me be clear.</p><p>I don’t think AI is a scam.</p><p>I don’t think AI is useless.</p><p>And I don’t think AI is going away.</p><p>I think AI is going to be transformative.</p><p>Just like the railroad.</p><p>Just like the internet.</p><p>But both of those technologies experienced enormous speculative bubbles.</p><p>The technology was real.</p><p>The revolution was real.</p><p>The financial valuations were not.</p><p>And I think we could be heading toward something similar with AI.</p><p>The technology may ultimately change the world.</p><p>But that doesn’t mean every company building AI infrastructure today is going to become the next trillion dollar company.</p><p>And it certainly doesn’t mean every AI stock is going to make you rich.</p><p>In fact, I think the opposite could happen.</p><p>The AI industry has made an enormous leveraged bet that AI will rapidly replace human labor and generate massive profits.</p><p>But if AI isn’t ready to replace workers at the necessary scale, while open source and local models simultaneously push prices down, the economics become increasingly difficult.</p><p>And that’s when bubbles start to get interesting.</p><p>Because eventually someone has to pay the bill.</p><p>My One Piece of Advice</p><p>So here’s my one piece of advice to you.</p><p><strong>Be very careful.</strong></p><p>I expect AI companies will become increasingly desperate to raise capital.</p><p>And when companies desperately need money, they tend to become extremely creative about how they get it.</p><p>I wouldn’t be surprised if we see wildly overvalued IPOs, increasingly aggressive marketing, and even more spectacular promises about what AI is supposedly going to accomplish five years from now.</p><p>The goal will be to keep the machine running.</p><p>To keep the money flowing.</p><p>To convince investors that the biggest breakthrough in human history is just around the corner.</p><p>And there will be plenty of people willing to buy the dream.</p><p>Don’t be that person.</p><p>Because when the music stops, the people who built the machine will probably be the ones who walked away with the money.</p><p>The people who bought the dream at the top?</p><p>Well...</p><p>They’ll be the ones holding the bag.</p><p><strong>Don’t let that person be you.</strong></p><p>Because here’s the funny thing about bubbles.</p><p>The technology can be real.</p><p>The revolution can be real.</p><p>The future can be real.</p><p>And you can still lose your shirt investing in it.</p><p>That’s the part a lot of people seem to forget.</p><p>And that’s why, while I remain extremely bullish on the long term potential of AI, I am becoming increasingly bearish on the idea that today’s AI valuations and spending spree are sustainable.</p><p>The AI revolution may very well change the world.</p><p>But I have a feeling we’re going to have to get through one heck of a financial hangover first.</p><p>And that’s all I have to say about that.</p><p>Until next time.</p><p><strong>Asian Dad Energy</strong></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at <a href="https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe</a>

Episode thumbnail for Time Is Going By Too Fast... Here's Why

July 21, 2026

Time Is Going By Too Fast... Here's Why

<p>One of the strangest things about getting laid off from Big Tech is realizing that, for the first time in decades, I actually have time.</p><p>And as strange as this new chapter has been, I’ve noticed something surprisingly wonderful.</p><p><strong>Time has slowed down.</strong></p><p>Not literally, of course. The Earth is still spinning at roughly the same speed. My clocks haven’t suddenly become defective. Monday still becomes Tuesday whether I like it or not.</p><p>But my perception of time has changed dramatically.</p><p>And honestly?</p><p>It feels a little bit like I’ve been given a life extension for free.</p><p>Where Did All the Time Go?</p><p>When I was working, time seemed to fly.</p><p>Days disappeared.</p><p>Weeks blurred together.</p><p>Months would pass, and I’d suddenly realize that an entire season had come and gone. I’d look back and think, Wait. That was six months ago? It feels like it happened three weeks ago.</p><p>The older I got, the faster it seemed to happen.</p><p>I remember being a kid and feeling like summer vacation lasted forever.</p><p>Now, somehow, I’ll blink and it’s Thanksgiving.</p><p>I’ll blink again and it’s Christmas.</p><p>I’ll blink one more time and I’m wondering why the grocery store already has Valentine’s Day decorations.</p><p>What happened?</p><p>Why does time seem to accelerate as we get older?</p><p>I never really thought about it when I was working. I was too busy.</p><p>There was always another meeting.</p><p>Another deadline.</p><p>Another project.</p><p>Another email.</p><p>Another fire to put out.</p><p>I didn’t have time to stop and ask why I didn’t have time.</p><p>Now that I have more time, I finally got curious.</p><p>And after doing some reading and thinking about my own experiences, I came across a few explanations that made a lot of sense.</p><p>The Aging Brain</p><p>The first explanation is probably the least surprising.</p><p>We’re getting older.</p><p>Our brains change as we age, and those changes may affect how we perceive the passage of time.</p><p>One way I’ve come to think about this is through the analogy of a video game.</p><p>Imagine playing a first person shooter when your computer is capable of rendering 120 frames per second.</p><p>Everything feels incredibly smooth.</p><p>Now imagine that, as the computer gets older, it can only process 60 frames per second.</p><p>The game is still running at the same speed in the real world, but you’re receiving fewer visual frames.</p><p>The experience feels different.</p><p>Some research into the perception of time suggests that something similar may happen in the aging brain. As our neural networks change, the brain’s processing of information can change as well. The details are considerably more complicated than my video game analogy, but the basic idea is that the way our brains process and encode experiences changes as we age.</p><p>And this may contribute to our subjective experience of time.</p><p>But I think there’s another factor that’s even more interesting.</p><p>The Problem With Autopilot</p><p>Think back to childhood.</p><p>Almost everything was new.</p><p>Your first day of school.</p><p>Your first time riding a bicycle.</p><p>Your first trip on an airplane.</p><p>Your first video game console.</p><p>Your first crush.</p><p>Your first time getting in trouble for doing something incredibly stupid.</p><p>When you’re a child, your brain is constantly encountering experiences it hasn’t seen before.</p><p>As we get older, that changes.</p><p>We become experts at navigating the world.</p><p>We know how to drive to work.</p><p>We know how to make coffee.</p><p>We know how to check email.</p><p>We know how to sit through meetings.</p><p>We know how to do our jobs.</p><p>We know how to drive home.</p><p>And then we do it again tomorrow.</p><p>And the day after that.</p><p>And the day after that.</p><p>This is one of the great advantages of having an experienced brain. We don’t need to consciously process every little detail of our lives.</p><p>Our brains can recognize patterns and automate familiar behaviors.</p><p>That’s incredibly useful.</p><p>But I suspect there’s a downside.</p><p>When you’re operating on autopilot, you’re not creating as many distinct memories.</p><p>Think about a typical commute.</p><p>You drive the same roads you’ve driven hundreds of times.</p><p>You pass the same buildings.</p><p>You stop at the same traffic lights.</p><p>You arrive at work.</p><p>You might remember the commute as a whole, but you probably can’t tell me what you saw at 8:17 AM on Tuesday three weeks ago.</p><p>Your brain didn’t consider that information important enough to preserve.</p><p>Now imagine doing that for years.</p><p>Same commute.</p><p>Same desk.</p><p>Same meetings.</p><p>Same projects.</p><p>Same routines.</p><p>Eventually, you look back and realize that five years have somehow disappeared.</p><p>The days were full of activity.</p><p>But your memory contains relatively few distinct markers separating one day from another.</p><p>And when you look backward, those years can feel incredibly short.</p><p>This might explain one of the strangest paradoxes of getting older:</p><p><strong>You have more years behind you, but those years can feel like they’re passing faster.</strong></p><p>Then We Added Social Media</p><p>As if living on autopilot wasn’t enough, we now have another problem.</p><p>Digital overstimulation.</p><p>For many of us, when the workday ends, we don’t actually stop.</p><p>We pick up our phones.</p><p>We open social media.</p><p>We scroll.</p><p>And scroll.</p><p>And scroll.</p><p>One video becomes another.</p><p>One post becomes another.</p><p>One outrage becomes another.</p><p>One argument becomes another.</p><p>And before we know it, an hour has disappeared.</p><p>The irony is that this content is incredibly stimulating, but the experience itself often leaves very little behind.</p><p>Think about what humans experienced for most of our existence.</p><p>There was a lot of boredom.</p><p>A lot of boredom.</p><p>You might spend hours walking somewhere.</p><p>Working in a field.</p><p>Gathering food.</p><p>Making something by hand.</p><p>Sitting around a fire.</p><p>Waiting.</p><p>Waiting some more.</p><p>Modern humans have largely eliminated this kind of boredom.</p><p>Instead, we have created an endless stream of content specifically engineered to capture our attention.</p><p>And there’s something interesting about this.</p><p>Our brains have to decide what information is important enough to remember.</p><p>But what happens when we’re exposed to thousands of stimulating pieces of information every day?</p><p>Everything is urgent.</p><p>Everything is shocking.</p><p>Everything is outrageous.</p><p>Everything is designed to trigger some kind of emotional reaction.</p><p>Eventually, nothing is special.</p><p>Your brain becomes overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information.</p><p>And the result may be that relatively little of it becomes a meaningful, lasting memory.</p><p>You spent an hour scrolling.</p><p>But what do you remember?</p><p>Maybe nothing.</p><p>And yet that hour is gone forever.</p><p>This is where I think the combination becomes particularly dangerous.</p><p><strong>Repetitive routines during the day create fewer memorable experiences.</strong></p><p><strong>Digital overstimulation during our free time creates an endless stream of forgettable experiences.</strong></p><p>And then we wonder why life feels like it’s flying by.</p><p>So How Do We Slow It Down?</p><p>Here’s the interesting part.</p><p>After getting laid off, my perception of time changed dramatically.</p><p>I don’t think it’s because unemployment magically alters the laws of physics.</p><p>It’s probably because my lifestyle changed.</p><p>I started doing things differently.</p><p>And I think some of those changes are things that almost anyone can try.</p><p>1. Switch Things Up</p><p>The first thing I’ve found helpful is introducing novelty into my life.</p><p>Nothing dramatic.</p><p>You don’t need to quit your job and become a professional skydiver.</p><p>Sometimes it’s as simple as taking a different route to the store.</p><p>Going to a different grocery store.</p><p>Learning something new.</p><p>Changing the order of your daily activities.</p><p>I have a bunch of different hobbies and projects.</p><p>Journaling.</p><p>Software development.</p><p>Drone piloting.</p><p>Coaching.</p><p>Gardening.</p><p>And I’ve noticed that when I change what I do from day to day, the days feel longer.</p><p>I’m not necessarily doing more.</p><p>I’m just doing different things.</p><p>The brain has to pay attention.</p><p>And when the brain pays attention, it creates more distinct experiences.</p><p>Those experiences become memories.</p><p>And when I look back on the week, it feels like a week actually happened.</p><p>Not just one generic Tuesday that somehow got copied and pasted seven times.</p><p>2. Be Where You Are</p><p>The second thing I’ve found helpful is focusing intensely on the present moment.</p><p>This can be difficult.</p><p>Our minds are constantly trying to escape the present.</p><p>We’re thinking about something that happened yesterday.</p><p>We’re worrying about something happening tomorrow.</p><p>We’re mentally composing an email while someone is talking to us.</p><p>We’re sitting at dinner while scrolling through our phones.</p><p>We’re physically somewhere.</p><p>But mentally, we’re somewhere else.</p><p>I’ve found that activities requiring complete attention can dramatically change my perception of time.</p><p>One example is my daily 15 minute meditation.</p><p>When I’m meditating, I have to pay attention to my breathing.</p><p>My posture.</p><p>My thoughts.</p><p>My mental imagery.</p><p>And something strange happens.</p><p>Fifteen minutes feels like a long time.</p><p>Not in a bad way.</p><p>It feels like I’ve actually experienced those fifteen minutes.</p><p>Another example is swimming.</p><p>I recently started taking swimming lessons.</p><p>This is a big deal for me because I had a pretty bad experience with water as a child, and as a result, I’ve spent most of my life avoiding learning how to swim.</p><p>Now I’m trying to overcome that.</p><p>And let me tell you something.</p><p>When you’re in the deep end of a pool, you’re trying to float, your face is underwater, you’re blowing air out of your nose, and your brain is screaming, This is a terrible idea!</p><p>You are very much in the present moment.</p><p>There is no thinking about your email.</p><p>No worrying about tomorrow’s meeting.</p><p>No doomscrolling.</p><p>Just you, the water, and the immediate question of whether you’re about to embarrass yourself in front of the swimming instructor.</p><p>And here’s the weird part.</p><p>Those moments seem to last forever.</p><p>But they also become incredibly memorable.</p><p>I can remember specific moments from my swimming lessons days later.</p><p>Which makes me wonder if a certain amount of fear and discomfort might actually be necessary for a satisfying life.</p><p>Not constant terror, obviously.</p><p>But maybe we need to occasionally do things that scare us.</p><p>Things that force us out of autopilot.</p><p>Things that make us pay attention.</p><p>Because those are the moments we remember.</p><p>3. Get Bored Again</p><p>The final thing I’ve done is probably the hardest.</p><p>I’ve dramatically reduced my consumption of digital content.</p><p>Especially social media.</p><p>Yes, I realize the irony.</p><p>I’m telling you to reduce social media consumption through a piece of content that will probably be distributed to you through social media.</p><p>I get it.</p><p>But I can only tell you what I’ve experienced.</p><p>Doomscrolling was eating an enormous amount of my free time.</p><p>And when I stopped, something unexpected happened.</p><p>I became bored.</p><p>At first, this felt terrible.</p><p>Then it started feeling wonderful.</p><p>I realized that boredom wasn’t actually the enemy.</p><p>Boredom gave my brain room to breathe.</p><p>Without a constant stream of content competing for my attention, I started noticing things again.</p><p>I started paying more attention to what I was doing.</p><p>I started having more distinct experiences.</p><p>And, most importantly, I started remembering more of my days.</p><p>My life didn’t necessarily become more exciting.</p><p>But it became more memorable.</p><p>And that’s an important distinction.</p><p>Maybe We Don’t Need More Time</p><p>I started this whole journey thinking that I wanted more time.</p><p>But now I’m starting to wonder if that’s actually the problem.</p><p>Maybe we don’t need more time.</p><p>Maybe we need to experience more of the time we already have.</p><p>We can’t stop the clock.</p><p>We can’t slow the Earth down.</p><p>And we certainly can’t negotiate with the calendar.</p><p>But perhaps we can change our perception of the time we’re given.</p><p>We can introduce novelty.</p><p>We can break our routines.</p><p>We can pay attention.</p><p>We can tolerate boredom.</p><p>We can put down the phone.</p><p>We can do things that scare us.</p><p>We can be present for the mundane moments instead of constantly trying to escape them.</p><p>Because when I think about it, the real tragedy isn’t necessarily that life is short.</p><p>It’s that <strong>we can spend so much of it barely noticing that we’re alive.</strong></p><p>Since losing my job, I’ve started to feel like my days have become longer.</p><p>My weeks feel more distinct.</p><p>My memories feel richer.</p><p>And when I look back, I can actually remember what I did.</p><p>It almost feels like I’ve been given extra life for free.</p><p>Maybe that’s the real secret.</p><p>Maybe slowing down time doesn’t mean making the clock move slower.</p><p>Maybe it means making <strong>more of the time we have count.</strong></p><p>And if that’s true, then perhaps the first step is surprisingly simple.</p><p>Put down the phone.</p><p>Try something new.</p><p>Let yourself get bored.</p><p>Pay attention.</p><p>And for just a little while...</p><p><strong>Be where you are.</strong></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at <a href="https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe</a>

Episode thumbnail for Your Job Won’t Remember You. Your Family Will.

July 15, 2026

Your Job Won’t Remember You. Your Family Will.

<p>Hello World!</p><p>Last week, my family and I spent several wonderful days exploring New York’s Finger Lakes.</p><p>There wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about the trip. We went sightseeing. We ate good food. We laughed. We wandered around. We took far too many pictures that will probably never leave our phones.</p><p>But somewhere in the middle of it all, while watching my kids run around and seeing everyone genuinely happy, I was reminded of something that I think many of us spend years forgetting.</p><p>Time is our most valuable resource.</p><p>Not money.</p><p>Not status.</p><p>Not promotions.</p><p>Time.</p><p>Once it’s gone, it is gone forever.</p><p>There Will Always Be Another Meeting</p><p>Modern life has a funny way of convincing us that everything is urgent.</p><p>Another meeting.</p><p>Another deadline.</p><p>Another sprint.</p><p>Another quarter.</p><p>Another performance review.</p><p>There is always one more project that absolutely must get finished.</p><p>The problem is that while work can always generate another task, life doesn’t generate another childhood.</p><p>Your son is only twelve once.</p><p>Your daughter only wants to hold your hand for a surprisingly short number of years.</p><p>Your parents only have so many healthy summers left.</p><p>Those opportunities don’t get rescheduled.</p><p>They simply disappear.</p><p>The Lesson I Learned After Being Laid Off</p><p>Getting laid off after twenty five years in the technology industry changed far more than my employment status.</p><p>It changed how I value my time.</p><p>For most of my career, I believed what many professionals believe.</p><p>Work hard.</p><p>Do a good job.</p><p>Be dependable.</p><p>Earn promotions.</p><p>Climb the ladder.</p><p>None of those things are inherently bad. Work gives us purpose. It pays our bills. It provides structure. It allows us to care for the people we love.</p><p>But somewhere along the way, many of us quietly allow work to become the center of our identity.</p><p>Then one day the company restructures.</p><p>Management changes.</p><p>Budgets get cut.</p><p>Artificial intelligence reshapes the business.</p><p>Or someone you’ve never met decides your position no longer exists.</p><p>Just like that, years of loyalty are reduced to a brief HR meeting and a severance package.</p><p>The company moves on.</p><p>Eventually, everyone does.</p><p>What Actually Lasts</p><p>That realization can feel depressing at first.</p><p>It can even make the universe seem strangely indifferent.</p><p>But I think there is another way to look at it.</p><p>If careers are temporary, then maybe we should stop expecting them to provide permanent meaning.</p><p>Because when our lives are over, nobody is going to gather around our hospital bed to admire our LinkedIn profile.</p><p>Nobody is going to remember that one presentation you finished at two in the morning.</p><p>Nobody will care how many meetings you attended.</p><p>Instead, people remember something much simpler.</p><p>The laughter around the dinner table.</p><p>The road trips.</p><p>The vacations that almost didn’t happen because everyone was “too busy.”</p><p>The conversations that lasted late into the night.</p><p>The traditions that only your family understood.</p><p>The times you showed up when someone needed you.</p><p>Those become the stories that get told long after we’re gone.</p><p>The Real Return on Investment</p><p>As someone interested in financial independence, I spend a lot of time thinking about investing.</p><p>Stocks.</p><p>Real estate.</p><p>Cash flow.</p><p>Retirement simulations.</p><p>Compound interest.</p><p>Those things matter.</p><p>But there is another investment that compounds in a very different way.</p><p>Experiences.</p><p>A weekend camping trip.</p><p>A family vacation.</p><p>Teaching your child to fish.</p><p>Watching a sunset together.</p><p>Sharing an ordinary dinner without everyone staring at their phones.</p><p>Unlike financial assets, these experiences appreciate in a way that can’t be measured on a spreadsheet.</p><p>Years later, they become treasured memories.</p><p>Sometimes they become family stories that get passed down for generations.</p><p>That is a return no investment portfolio can match.</p><p>Redefining Success</p><p>I don’t think success is about rejecting work.</p><p>We all need to earn a living.</p><p>We all have responsibilities.</p><p>But perhaps success isn’t maximizing every dollar.</p><p>Perhaps success is maximizing the moments that money makes possible.</p><p>Financial independence isn’t valuable because it lets you stop working.</p><p>It’s valuable because it gives you more control over your time.</p><p>And time is the one resource that every billionaire, every CEO, every janitor, and every retiree receives in exactly the same way.</p><p>None of us knows how much remains.</p><p>Protect What Matters Most</p><p>If there is one lesson I hope my layoff has taught me, it is this.</p><p>Protect your time with the people you love.</p><p>Guard it just as fiercely as you guard your savings account.</p><p>Invest in experiences, not just assets.</p><p>Take the trip.</p><p>Go to the family reunion.</p><p>Call your parents.</p><p>Eat dinner together.</p><p>Watch the sunset.</p><p>The emails will still be there tomorrow.</p><p>The meetings will still be scheduled next week.</p><p>The corporate ladder will still exist.</p><p>But today’s memories can only be created today.</p><p>At the end of our lives, our greatest legacy won’t be our job title.</p><p>It won’t be the size of our investment portfolio.</p><p>It won’t be the number of promotions we earned.</p><p>Our legacy will be the happiness we created, the love we shared, and the memories that continue to live in the hearts of the people we cared about.</p><p>That, I think, is a life well lived.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at <a href="https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe</a>

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What is AsianDadEnergy's Substack Podcast?

This is a very public journal of anxiety, existential dread, and way too much tech knowledge. Basically therapy, but with Wi-Fi. <br/><br/><a href="https://asiandadenergy.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">asiandadenergy.substack.com</a>

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