2026-08-03
Update
- It has been a year since I first wrote this post. I still endorse most of it, but I may wanna make some small but still important edits if I rewrote it today.
- For instance I said:
Do the short-term stuff first, like travelling or whatever. Yes, you have enough time for it.
- I no longer endorse this advice. My timelines to superintelligence are now quite short and I would prefer you joined me in working to fix this problem. Every year delayed here is going to be extremely costly, when we may be only 5 or 10 years away from the literal end of the world. I understand ofcourse that you may not be persuaded by timelines to ASI being short.
2025-08-09
Advice for tech nerds in India in their 20s
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- This advice is very context-specific, and I haven't fully specified the context here.
I'm trying out a new writing style here, which is instead of explaining my big picture "theory of everything"-type models to people, I will instead write about themes that come up very often in my conversations with people around me. People around me are disproportionately working in tech, in the age group 18-30, living in India, male, and moderately ambitious.
Relationships
- If you have social anxiety around dating, go ask ten random women out and get rejected ten times. No, this does not mean you will eventually find a girlfriend this way, but yes it may reduce your anxiety. I am yet to meet a single person who counterfactually regretting doing something like this.
- I don't know if the effort-reward ratio of dating apps is worth it for you, go ask someone who is actually good at this. I know people for whom it worked and people for whom it didn't. I have not found a long-term relationship via dating apps personally, although I've been on some dates.
- You have to budget a non-zero amount of hours per week to socialising otherwise you are significantly increasing the chances you'll kill yourself by 30. How many hours is upto you but it has to be non-zero.
- Make actually close friends before you graduate, it gets harder afterwards.
- If you have a group of close friends who will accept you no matter what, it could significantly increase your tolerance for other people disliking you.
Time management
- I have to explicitly tell myself to switch off the part of my brain that asks "how is this useful for my goal" when I'm in my socialising time. Otherwise that part is permanently on and causes some self-dislike at times due to not moving as fast as I could towards my goals.
- You will have to maintain a routine, especially if you're doing something independent like working on a startup or upskilling or whatever.
- Do the short-term stuff first, like travelling or whatever. Yes, you have enough time for it. If I'm 40 or 50 and looking back at my life and feel I have not accomplished what I wanted to in life, it's probably because I burned out or lost interest or had an unexpected crisis of some sort, rather than because I literally ran out of time. Waste a few months if you have to, just maybe don't waste a few years (and even on this I'm not sure, maybe ask me when I'm in my 30s).
Online versus offline
- Every single forum has selection effects. I cannot possibly emphasise this enough. There is always some high-status behaviour in a forum that most people are mimicking. Reddit is full of leftists from the US. Hackernews will be full of extremely technical people who are super bitter about everything. Lesswrong is full of people who value theory more than doing stuff. Dating apps are also exactly the same. You can at this point run a LLM on any internet forum and find out that atleast 10% of the posts on that forum are using the exact same phrases.
Meaning
- I realised in my fifth year of college that making $1M won't be enough to actually change the world in the way I want, and I don't have it in me to make a $1B. Having $1B sounds nice in theory but will probably require 10 years of work on something I don't care about, and I'm not capable of staying motivated long enough to pull that off. Hence I burned out fast.
- I used to be more optimistic about AI timelines, back in 2023 I thought that okay when AI progresses more, then people will get their shit together. 2 years have passed, and the safety space looks almost the same (with the recent exception of Pause AI), its the same funders and the same boring arguments being repeated, and nothing has changed. Meanwhile capabilities have increased by insane amounts in the 2 years I've been ignoring this space. I realised even if ASI was literally dropping tomorrow, a lot of people won't care. I had finally start internalising that unless I personally start doing something about it, this entire world might be fucked.
- For me I've realised the only way I feel good is to actually do something about it. Ignoring the problem feels bad, and just reading about it but not doing anything also feels bad. I've tried both for atleast a few months. Doing what I do now is required for me to feel somewhat sane.
- You have to enjoy both the process and the outcome atleast a little to consistently do something for 5-10 years. You have to consistently do something for 5-10 years if you want outlier-levels of an amazing life. There is no escaping this (yes maybe some people got lucky, dont @ me).
Parents
- If you are planning to disappoint your parents, disappoint them sooner. This is not a problem that is magically going away if you wait another two years. This will directly impact almost every aspect of your life and it is a long-term problem not a short-term one. You have to take time to figure out some long-term solution that works for you.
- No matter how much therapy or emotional processing or rational analysing of the past I've done, the only thing that has actually helped me is to go out there in the world and do new stuff and get new data that updates my priors of how things work in life. For instance priors of how friendships work or career stuff.
- Unless you spent some time not living your parents, it is quite possibly outside your imagination what it is like to live like that. You can't just look at other people and extrapolate, you have no idea what it feels like to be them from the inside.
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