Personal Growth

Lessons from 2025, personal reflections, book list, traits to cultivate. For philosophical frameworks see [[philosophy]].

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Lessons from 2025

Source: raw-sources/Life and Finances/Lessons from 2025.md

The Defining Experience: Ego Death

Hakyun went through an identity dissolution event — what he describes as "ego death." The experience revealed that much of his self-concept was constructed rather than essential.

Key realization: Identity fragility is not weakness. Disillusionment is not failure. Liberation often comes through the loss of false certainties.

Karmic resonance: A non-religious but personally felt sense that actions and their consequences return — not as supernatural mechanism but as a structural feature of human relations.

42 Life Lessons (Selected)

Organization & Discipline

• Systems over willpower
• The environment shapes behavior — design it intentionally
• Completion matters more than perfection

Emotional & Relational

• Emotional control is not suppression — it's knowing when and where to express
• Listening is a skill that requires practice, not just silence
• Patience compounds like interest
• Spontaneity is a muscle — atrophies without use

Family & Mortality

• Awareness of mortality is clarifying, not paralyzing
• Family relationships have long time horizons — invest in them
• Regret about not having children comes late; the choice is made early

Honesty

• Honesty with self precedes honesty with others
• Self-deception is expensive — pay the price of clarity early

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Personal Reflections & Wisdoms

Source: raw-sources/Life and Finances/Personal Reflections & Wisdoms.md

Observations

The elderly couple: Two people who over-calibrated their decision to have children — "we'll be ready when..." — and found themselves childless in old age. The regret was not about the decision itself but about the illusion of infinite time and readiness.

Children selling Pokémon cards: Joy is destroyed when commerce enters play. The moment value is extracted, the intrinsic pleasure collapses. A caution about monetizing everything.

Language prejudice: Code-switching and language barriers create invisible hierarchies in social spaces.

Performative industry exhaustion: LinkedIn-style professional performance culture as mimetic trap — everyone signals the same signals, the signals lose meaning.

Delugs transition: The shift from working at Delugs (a boutique) to building independent projects carried emotional complexity — belonging vs autonomy, continuity vs change.

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Philosophical Themes (Recurring)

Fear of Not Being Ready

"You tend to delay action until you feel 'ready enough.'"

This is both high standards and a bottleneck. The antidote is not lowering standards but learning to act despite uncertainty.

Connection: [[philosophy#Puer Aeternus]] — the eternal boy delays commitment until conditions are perfect, which they never are.

Tension: Optimization vs Living

Tendency to optimize every system (career, health, knowledge, relationships) creates a meta-level anxiety: optimizing for optimization, never arriving.

Moving toward: Acceptance of imperfection. Action despite uncertainty. Doing things because they are good, not because they are optimal.

The Systems Thinker's Edge

"A systems thinker who combines data, finance, and AI into real-world applications."

This is the vision for the career arc — not just analytical skill, but integration across domains that most people keep separate.

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Book List

Source: raw-sources/Hobbies & Interests/Book List.md

Philosophy & Ethics

• David Hume — A Treatise of Human Nature
• Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics
• Alasdair MacIntyre — After Virtue
• René Guénon — The Crisis of the Modern World
• G.K. Chesterton — Orthodoxy
• Lao Tzu — Tao Te Ching
• Bernard Lonergan — Insight
• Epictetus — The Discourses

Literature & Fiction

• Neal Stephenson — Anathem
• Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian, The Passenger
• Ursula K. Le Guin — The Dispossessed
• Fyodor Dostoevsky — White Nights, Brothers Karamazov
• Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha
• Aldous Huxley — Brave New World
• Jon Fosse — Septology
• Ocean Vuong — (poetry/prose)
• Jorge Luis Borges — (stories)
• Nikos Kazantzakis — Zorba the Greek
• C.S. Lewis — Till We Have Faces

Spiritual & Contemplative

• Augustine — Confessions
• Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
• Rainer Maria Rilke — (letters/poetry)
• Wendell Berry — (essays)

Non-Fiction & Essays

• Nassim Taleb — Antifragile
• Iain McGilchrist — The Master and His Emissary
• Rick Rubin — The Creative Act
• Matthew Crawford — Shop Class as Soulcraft

Themes in Reading

The reading list spans: ancient philosophy → continental tradition → American pragmatism → literary fiction → spiritual texts → systems thinking.

Notable absence of mainstream business books — preference for works with longer half-lives. Prefers depth over relevance.

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Traits to Cultivate

Source: raw-sources/Hobbies & Interests/Traits I Look Out For.md

Four traits Hakyun specifically looks for in people worth learning from:

1. Ability to min-max properly — someone who can identify the highest-leverage actions and execute on them; someone worth looking up to
2. Driven — internal motivation, not externally validated
3. Takes care of health — physical discipline as a signal of broader self-discipline
4. Ability to articulate points clearly during arguments — not rhetorical tricks; actual clarity of thought under pressure

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Emerging Philosophy

Shift in Progress

Moving away from:

• Over-optimization
• Waiting until "ready"
• Treating every decision as high-stakes

Moving toward:

• Acceptance of imperfection
• Taking action despite uncertainty
• Spontaneity as a complement to structure
• Depth over productivity theater

Writing Style Preference

When writing (blog, reflections):

• Natural, human tone
• Avoid robotic or generic phrasing
• Continuous paragraph flow — not bullet-heavy (ironic given this wiki's format, but appropriate for prose)

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Related Pages

[[philosophy]] | [[hakyun-ryu]] | [[economics-and-scarcity]] | [[behavioral-finance]] | [[soul]]