IN 2026 I WILL CONQUER ALL OF ASIA

Published in Personal - 6 mins to read

Or at least be assassinated by the aristocracy of Macedonia while trying.

YANKING AT THE GORDIAN KNOT

If my interpretation of 2025 was that the universe urged me to change my life’s course, such that I departed from my previous trajectory and found myself cast adrift in existential seas for a few months, then the question for 2026 is, of course; what new heading shall I plot?

As with every other year in recent memory, I begin filled with a gluttony of ambition, a slew of audacious and wholly orthogonal goals and a reckless naïveté about my energetic capacity and marginal free time. I have a whole gam of white whales and if I have to circumnavigate the world’s oceans to wreak my vengeance upon them, then so be it.1

I’ve been thinking about variations of the question “if you are so ____, why aren’t you happy?”. There are many possible ways to fill in the blank that stimulate reflection; smart, rich, loved, accomplished, possessing of exquisite taste. One friend posited to me that clever sorts wield their intellect as a hammer and duly view all problems as nails, and while many problems are indeed nail-shaped, there are still many that aren’t. This causes the alleged boffins to repeatedly smash the absolutely-not-a-nail with the hammer in a perfectly futile and somewhat pitiful manner. They wonder why their problems persist, not realising that their hammer is aimed at their own fingertips - instead going so far as to assume their problems unsolvable or blame God herself for their damnable, interminable suffering.

Any harshness here is intended as purely self-flagellatory, as I have spent half my life trapped in this manner. But I am determined for this year to be different.

LARPING AS ALEXANDER THE GREAT

I’ve tried all of the standard interventions; medication, talking therapy, exercise, meditation, emotional intimacy, eating healthily, spending time in nature, volunteering, working harder, not working at all. Not only that, I’ve tried several iterations of all of these things, almost every permutation of them in parallel, and repeatedly escalating the seriousness and intensity of each, to no real avail.2

So, it is time for a novel (to me) approach; to feel my way through things, not think. To regain a sense of symbiosis with my body; to reconnect, to commune, to atone, to find a path through a forest that has been left untended for years and is now wild and overgrown. To increase my somatic quotient.

I plan to make a fool of myself; to embrace embarrassment, to tattoo my torso despite my grave misgivings about drawing attention to a body part I house such great shame within, to try stand-up and earnestly offer my best efforts at the altar of comedic judgment, to experiment with psychedelics and see whether altering my consciousness might help me shake off my black dog, to play music with others again, to dance led by my intuition and not by a teacher, to make a glorious return to ultrarunning. It is time to eschew both secular techno-capitalist pseudo-intellectualism as well as its perversion of Buddhism, and embrace the Dao. It’s time to eat my shadow.3 It is time to reverse the ancient wisdom and utter the new mantra of sum ergo cogito.

MUSTERING THE ARMIES OF PHRYGIA

To succeed, I will need the right people around me; to inspire me, to both counsel and console me, to hold me responsible. Fortunately, the people in my life already do all this, but I want to take things up a notch. I need new structures to these relationships if I want to unlock the level of intimacy and growth that I yearn for.

While wandering, lost, searching in vain for the garden of ends, I have meditated a great deal on what I want from a community, and where I might find one to meet my needs. The former has yet to crystallise into something articulable, but I already have clarity on the latter; I will likely need to create that which I seek. The GTO Club was transformative for me; it offered the camaraderie, accountability, and passion that have turned me into the person I am today. I long to have these once again. That project’s downfall was, of course, its godhead, Kim Jung Joey,4 under whom the group metamorphosed into a cult of personality. I’m not yet sure how I would avoid my prospective community suffering a similar fate, but I am confident that a more democratic approach could work well; after an initially high barrier for entry,5 members would have equal say on the group’s composition and constitution.6

Not only do I want to construct a new community in order to achieve my goals, I want to build a new company to help me achieve my life’s work. I’ve spent these months envisioning a possible future; one that is desirable, realistic, and that I might be able to nudge us all towards. It fills me with hope. I haven’t yet figured out all of the steps to get from here to there, but I have many potential paths in mind, and I feel excited about the prospect of experimenting, iterating and meandering my way towards this future, with the new company as a vehicle purpose-built for this journey. In the next couple of months I will clarify my vision, seek cofounders and investors who share and believe in it, and begin building the world that I want to live in.

While for now I am being deliberately vague about both new projects, I plan on writing about my plans and aspirations for both in the next month.

CONQUERING THE ENTIRETY OF ASIA

My takeaway from 2025 was that pain is mandatory; now the question is quite how optional is the suffering. Perhaps the only way out is through; to suffer less, first I must suffer more. Perhaps it’ll turn out that every cliché, truism and koan is, indeed, true.

It is time for me to complete my rejection of my previous path, the one I have until now assumed I would walk for my whole life, but which thus far has brought me more pain than I can bear. It’s time to give up on safety, stability and possibly sanity. It’s time to change my goals to be those of an alive person. It’s time to stop caring what almost anyone else thinks, and finally take my life in my own hands.

It’s time to end my suffering, and then end everyone else’s too.

  1. SPOILERS AHEAD FOR A NOVEL FROM 1851: yes, I know how the book ends, but just because Ahab failed and it cost him his life doesn’t mean the same fate will befall me. See above vis-à-vis reckless naïveté. ↩︎

  2. It feels a little disingenuous to claim that I have made no progress whatsoever; I certainly feel that I have got a lot better at managing my suffering and generally continuing to fulfil more of my obligations when suffering from a depressive episode; nonetheless I continue to experience these episodes as overwhelming, agonising and often unbearable. ↩︎

  3. I’m going to count this as a Jungian, rather than Buddhist, idea. ↩︎

  4. i.e. Joey Ingram, of Poker Life Podcast fame. ↩︎

  5. In the sense of demonstrating the appropriate commitment, having similar goals, being a positive-sum addition etc., rather than having any specific credentials or accomplishments. ↩︎

  6. I envisage this as a fairly standard Ship of Theseus that would remain self-sustaining in the event of myself (or anyone else) leaving. ↩︎

See other posts in the Goals series

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