Written for myself, casually recorded:

After leaving TSMC, my first job after graduating with a master's degree in 2020, I haven't worked again, and I didn't expect that 6 years have passed.

A bit stubborn, I insist on this, which can be considered a challenge of pursuing freedom in life's game. My family and friends don't understand why, but it seems they see that I'm doing okay, so they haven't said much. In short, it's quite a fantastic journey, relying on managing life, and I've unexpectedly earned enough to cover daily expenses/medical/travel, etc.

I also got married in 2024, and in 2025, a lovely little daughter was just born. Although taking care of the baby every day is exhausting, the sense of happiness is really high. It's like living my life again, and every day watching her grow and change little by little brings me pure joy.

I feel like everything is happily living a relatively free life as I imagined. But today is really hard to bear, like a wake-up call, I feel like I've been harshly awakened from a dream again.

I remember in 2021 when the market nearly collapsed with FTX, at that time my confidence was almost continuously destroyed, and after making a lot of money, I started to become arrogant, not being humble and getting taught a lesson by the market, losing nearly 300,000 USD...

Later, it took me more than a year to regain my confidence to trade again. From around 20,000 to 30,000 USD in 2023/2024, I turned it into 300,000 USD by the end of 2025. I never expected to be able to climb back up again, using a small amount of capital to recover, which was incredibly difficult, I thought it was unlikely again, just luck or fortune I guess.

Today on 26/02/05, I was once again taught a lesson by the market. Bitcoin almost halved from its peak, and there were no abnormal news in the market, yet it kept falling, even worse than during the Covid pandemic. I thought I was trading very conservatively and avoided the crash due to the Binance software issue on 10/11, then slowly increased my position, even only leveraging on key levels that seemed unlikely to break. As a result, there was a continuous abnormal decline for 5 months, proving once again that I was still too reckless, no longer respecting the market, and perhaps shouldn't have used low leverage, thinking I had made money and my confidence inflated. Indeed, I was once again washed out by the market, instantly blowing up 300,000+ USD (leverage ~2x)...

(Fragrant flowers) As Uncle Ye said: The Empire State Building in New York takes 1.5 hours to climb up, but only 8.8 seconds to jump down. This sentence is vividly in my mind again.

Sigh, typing these words in the middle of the night, my mind is quite chaotic, like waking up from a big dream. It might take a few months to calm down and think things over, to see how I can adjust. Maybe I should think of it as a startup failure. Thankfully, I have always kept a risk reserve, so at least I can hold on for 2-3 years.

Damn... it's a bit helpless, the money that blew up is frustrating, but even more frustrating is the pursuit of a relatively free life. The difficulty level of the life game has increased again, and my confidence needs to be repaired for a while 🥹

Anyway, life keeps going

Regardless of poverty or wealth, my attitude towards life hasn't changed much, just being that simple self, reducing material desires, sincerely feeling and exploring life and my inner self, and maintaining mental and physical health is the most important.

Recycled water 2026/02/06