Chapter 12

2022/23

Looking at my life through the lens of the seven categories at the beginning of 2022, the landscape looked like this:

Health: My leg began to heal, and I started feeling better. Physiotherapy helped without fully fixing the issue, but I returned to the gym and began playing a bit of cricket and tennis—a massive milestone for me.

Finance: I started reading up on investments. Until then, I believed my financial progress came entirely from career moves, but I wanted my money to start working for me.

Career: I couldn't complain; I had found my place and maintained a good work-life balance. However, public sentiment toward dating apps began to sour, and the stock price dropped.

Home: The search dragged on endlessly. Every option felt overwhelming: buying as an investment versus for living, a house versus a flat, leasehold versus freehold, outright purchase versus mortgaged, full versus shared ownership, inside versus outside London.

Travel: I was traveling a sufficient amount and even toyed with the idea of moving to Dubai, drawn briefly by its polished, Instagram-style allure.

Entertainment: My life was already busy and eventful enough that I craved no further stimulation.

Relationship: I wanted a proper, permanent partnership. Lin was wonderful, but she was a double-edged sword. I loved the chemistry, but I was deeply uncomfortable with the secrecy. She felt the same way, yet took her sweet time extracting herself from her marriage—living as if she had all the time in the world, while I felt like I had none. My feelings were a tangled mix of love, frustration, and guilt, which I used as a subconscious excuse to edge closer to Liz.

All it takes for a relationship to crumble is a hairline blemish that quickly metastasizes. Dishonesty and a lack of commitment were the blemishes in ours.

Yet, even with all the underlying turbulence and mutual awareness of our issues, we genuinely wished each other well and supported one another. My profound respect for Lin prevents me from airing everything; if she were ever to read this book, I would never want to disappoint her. Amidst the chaos, she was a true positive force who stepped into my life simply to guide me onto a slightly better path.

Between 2021 and 2023, I lived in Mile End in a house share we affectionately called Casa. It was a home defined by strong personalities and a rotating cast of incredible housemates. We shared the space with Tor from Britain, an LSE graduate working for Cancer Research UK; Ski from Peru, working at Adobe; and Mon from Poland, a teacher who eventually left for China and was replaced by Ine from Portugal, a chemical engineer. When Tor moved out, he was succeeded by Jor from Ecuador, who was deep into his PhD. Later, Sas departed, making room for Dan, a British civil servant. Lin stayed with me for the majority of 2022 and 2023.

It was a proper multicultural household governed by rigorous house rules. We vetted prospective tenants thoroughly, and my housemates were kind enough to let Lin stay with me. Their partners floated in and out, adding to the community vibe.

Our landlord was an absolute character named Ned—a retired East London boxer with a thick Cockney accent that only Tor and Dan could decipher. He would show up promptly to fix any household issue, adding a layer of joviality to daily life. Though it was technically a house share, it genuinely felt like home. Out of all my years sharing houses, this was my favorite. If only I had found an environment like that earlier; that kind of organic camaraderie is notoriously difficult to manufacture.

I finally understood why choosing the right people for a shared space is critical—a single person failing to pull their weight shatters the peace. Having previously experienced the sting of getting rejected by houses, I now found myself on the other side of the table, using a democratic voting process to vet and select new housemates.

Life kept drawing me closer to people from every corner of the globe—such an underrated luxury. From that point on, I made a conscious effort to forge a connection with everyone who crossed my path, and I genuinely pitied those who failed to seize that opportunity in a city like London.

Contrary to popular belief, making friends in London as an adult is brutally hard. I call it the city of a million lonely souls, where people respect privacy so fiercely that they rarely make a real effort to connect during their fleeting time here. Yet, Ine, Jor, and I forged a rare, lasting bond.

Trips to Bristol and Bath with Lin made that summer entirely ours. Those were truly good times.

Meta reached out again. I went through the entire six-to-seven-round interview gauntlet, but still didn't clear it. It was the wake-up call I needed to overhaul my core habits, pushing me to solidify my framework for true Algorithmic Living.

The first step was organizing my digital life—a practice I initiated in 2019 before moving to Germany—by sorting absolutely everything into my seven core categories.

Most people don't grasp the psychological power of the number 7. There was a time when my life's priorities were boundless, leaving me with a persistent, nagging anxiety that I was forgetting something vital while distracted by something else. By boxing my priorities into seven strict categories, I streamlined my focus down to what genuinely mattered. From the moment I woke up, every single action had to ladder up to one of those pillars. Corporations call this OKRs; I called it survival.

Around this time, I began compiling a repository of life lessons to share with my brother so he could bypass my mistakes. He was deep into preparing for his UPSC exams, and I supported him fiercely through all six of his unsuccessful attempts. Ironically, some of my most vital life rules were forged from his own pursuit of excellence. Success tends to make a man arrogant, but failure makes him wise; I will always trust someone who has tasted failure over someone who has only known success. What started with me acting as his mentor slowly inverted, the tables turning as I learned from his resilience.

I realized that people are the ultimate currency in life—everything else is just a means to that end. While some prioritize career to find a grand "purpose," for me, people are the purpose. The only tangible evidence of human existence is our capacity to think and to replicate ourselves, a biological drive shared even with non-thinking living organisms. Nature essentially encodes a message into us: travel from time zero to n by recreating yourself. Everything else is merely a consequence of that journey. The best we can do is help each other along the way in the brief time we are allotted.

Home sits as the fifth pillar of my framework. After more than a year of relentless searching, an offer I made on an apartment finally got accepted. Suddenly, reality crashed down: I was about to make the largest financial commitment of my life against a complex backdrop of facts on the ground:

Lin and I were going through a rocky patch.

As a visa holder, I had to stump up a massive 25% deposit.

There was always a lingering chance I might have to leave the country eventually.

I desperately needed to break my psychological aversion to spending money—a "poor man's mentality" that had long hindered my progress.

Buying the cheapest properties always yields the worst deals; investing in above-average properties vastly improves location, amenities, and community.

It’s all about equity. Unless you plan to live there forever, a home is an investment, provided the carrying costs beat renting.

Interest rates had hovered around 1% just a year prior, but locking in a 3% deal was still respectable.

Unless the housing market undergoes a total structural revolution, people will always need homes, making future liquidity viable.

I had to shed my scarcity mindset, take calculated risks, and make bold moves.

He who doesn’t spend, doesn’t make.

Even if the market crashes spectacularly, the absolute worst-case scenario is losing money, not life.

Being the sole owner meant absorbing 100% of the risk.

In November, anticipating my keys would arrive imminently, I chose not to renew my rental contract at Casa. Naturally, the purchase hit a two-month delay. I ended up camped out in the living room much to the frustration of the incoming tenant. To avoid becoming a complete nuisance, I escaped on trips to Stockholm to see Lin and to Berlin to visit friends. Right after returning from Berlin, I caught a severe bout of Covid that knocked me out for three weeks. With the housemates growing weary of my living-room residency, I bounced around budget hotels for two agonizing weeks.

The ordeal finally culminated on a euphoric note on January 27, 2023, when I was officially handed the keys to my own flat.