Stepping off the conveyor belt

I spent my 20s chasing 30% raises. My 30s start differently.

Every virtual job interview setup looks the same. Blouse on top, shorts on the bottom, rehearsed smile, practised enthusiasm about spending 40 hours a week helping a hedge fund rock the world through content. The interviewer says he’ll be in touch within the week.

I close my laptop. And then the weird part sinks in: I don’t feel relieved. I feel completely and utterly bogged down.

Am I really about to give up another year or two of my life to another company? A job is still a job. A full-time commitment is still 40 to 80 hours a week dedicated to something that isn’t my life.

My 20s were all about maximising earnings. I hopped from company to company, trying to get a 30% increase each way because that was how one steps up in the corporate world. Tech reporter at a trade publication. Banking reporter at a household name. In-house writer at an investment bank. Every move driven by the digits that would arrive in my bank account at the end of the month.

It was the whole reason I moved to and stayed in Hong Kong: one of the most expensive cities in the world, but also one that pays accordingly, thanks to low taxes and a capitalistic drive that doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

I have been on this hamster wheel of school, school, school, work, work, work for pretty much my whole life. I haven’t ever had the time or space to evaluate if I’m headed where I want to be headed. I was just chasing the next carrot that gets dangled across my face and strapping in to reach it faster.

On LinkedIn it looks like ambition. In practice it’s a conveyor belt. And not the kind that has sushi.

But now that I’m at the brink of leaving my job, the idea of having another full-time job lined up sounds like a really bad trade off.

Settling into a new job would require at least three months of figuring out how the company works and pausing everything on the side. Then I’d want to spend a year or two giving my all because that’s the time I need to prove myself. Every job derails my life by a year or two. I’ve done this four times already. Do I want to do this once more?

This is the exact script my friends and classmates follow. It’s pre-programmed: get the job, climb the ladder, repeat.

When I quit corporate to work for a YouTuber, I got a lot of comments, mostly along the lines of: Woah I can’t believe you did that, but also your job sounds so cool.

I understand why people stay on the script. A “conventional” life involves a full-time job because that’s the straightest path to stability, to the nuclear family, to the safety net.

This, compounded with how education was my ticket to moving up socio-economically, and how I needed to sustain a full-time income in Hong Kong because I was scared that my homophobic family would not be my safety net… yeah ok, I can see how I got here 😅

It makes sense to optimise for money. That’s the most tradable currency after all. I can’t pay for dinner with “curiosity” and “excitement about the world.”

But with every decision there are tradeoffs. If I take a full-time job, I will have a full-time income. If I don’t, I will have uncapped growth. The full-time income would actually undercut my growth. There is too much upside to give up.

It’s weird to view my future in a way that is not dictated by money. I’ve never valued myself this much, for one.

But the ultimate currency I want to optimise for is my life.

Some people buy their life with money, and fair enough. But I’ve been leaning towards owning my time. Life is short, and I’m quite content with what I have, so I just want to experience more of it. The only way to do that is through having more time.

So from the second half of 2026, when employment ends and I’ve sorted the logistics… what do I do with it? Do I get on my reading plan and read more books? Do I dip back into my art and start painting again? Do I go hard and try to get clients in the first few weeks of funemployment? Do I take it easy and just fill in 2 days/week with work? Do I build a new AI tool and deploy it every single week?

I don’t know how to spend my 30th year. But I know I’ll figure it out as long as I keep living it day by day. I don’t know the full roadmap.

But I can feel what next move feels right. As the great Queen Anna of Arendelle says, do the next right thing. And the way to do that is to just keep going.

Dear reader - what advice do you have for someone who’s about to turn 30?

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Update log:

• 👰‍♀️ Celebrated a friend’s wedding over the weekend! The best part was chilling with the newly weds with a small crew until 3am in their hotel room. That was a good time.

• 🤓 Built another Chrome extension but for formatting comments on frame.io.

• 📖 Went back to reading Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness (60% completed).

• 🤖 Been learning a lot about OpenClaw and 100% convinced of its use cases, but I just can’t fathom how to run it without racking up Claude API costs.

• 🩻 It’s always overdue, but I went back to see my chiropractor on Friday. She costs a handful but I really do treasure her back cracking.

• 📷 Caught up with michaelroni over the weekend and geeked out about cameras. It’s fun to meet in all corners of the world after having been online friends since… maybe 2011??

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