self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Hey man, I'm no expert here. All I can say with a semblance of confidence is that the Chinese seem to disagree with you. Hence the whole FTP shtick.
Perhaps they think the two systems are complementary. Or perhaps it's a massive proof of concept, albeit one with the usual amount of Chinese bloody-mindedness. They rarely half-ass these things.
You get Communism with Chinese Characteristics, something more experimental on Hainan, and maybe integration down the line when one decisively does better than the other. It's very pragmatic.
We Have Taiwan At Home
There is a story that Su Shi, the great Song Dynasty poet, was exiled to Hainan in 1097. At the time, this was a death sentence. The island was a malarial backwater, the literal end of the known world, inhabited by "barbarians" and venomous snakes. Su Shi, being a stoic and a gourmand, reportedly (and perhaps apocryphally) made the best of it by learning to cook oysters and writing poems about how nice the weather was. Fast forward a millennium, and the Communist Party of China has decided that Su Shi's place of exile is the future of global capitalism.
On the 18th of December, 2025, Beijing officially "closed" the customs border around Hainan. This sounds bad. Usually, when you close a border, it means tanks are rolling in. In this case, it means the opposite: Hainan is now treated as a separate customs territory for goods, with a "first line" between the island and the rest of the world and a "second line" between the island and the mainland. The Reuters headline calls it a "$113 billion free-trade experiment." The details are drastic, the implications, as far as I can tell, immense. If you are a foreign company, you can ship a wide range of inputs into Hainan, subject to a negative-list regime, tariff-free. If you process those goods there, adding just 30% value under the Free Trade Port's eligibility and supervision rules, you can sell them into mainland China with zero tariffs (while import VAT and consumption taxes may still apply, depending on the product).
This is the "Hainan Free Trade Port", and if the Chinese government is to be believed, it is the successor to Hong Kong, a pilot for joining the CPTPP, and a strategic hedge against a hostile trade war with the US, all rolled into one tropical island.
This is a very big deal. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a big brain play at "dual circulation" economics or a doomed attempt to simulate a free market inside a panopticon. I for one, tend towards optimism.
Let's look at the mechanics, because they are fascinatingly game able. I suspect that might even be the intent:
The core purpose of the Hainan FTP is what we might call the 30% Loophole.
Under normal circumstances, if you want to sell a widget to a consumer in Shanghai, you pay a tariff. If that widget comes from a country currently annoyed with China (or vice versa), that tariff might be punitive. I wonder why tariffs have been a hot topic of late.
Under the new Hainan rules, the flow looks like this:
- Import raw materials or components into Hainan (Tariff: 0%).
- Do "processing" in Hainan that increases the value by 30%.
- Ship the finished product to Shanghai (Tariff: 0%). This sounds like a standard Free Trade Zone, but the scale is different. Most FTZs are fenced-off industrial parks near airports. Hainan is an entire province of 10 million people. It is a vacation destination.
Imagine if the USGov declared that Florida was a separate customs entity. You could ship French wine or Japanese steel into Miami tax-free. If you turned the steel into a car in Orlando, you could sell it to New York tariff-free.
Perhaps just as important, the tax regime is aggressive. Qualifying firms in encouraged sectors can access a 15% corporate income tax rate (versus the standard 25%), and eligible "high-end" or "urgently needed" talent can be brought down to an effective 15% personal rate via refunds of the portion above 15%. This is a direct shot at Singapore and Hong Kong.
The economic incentives here are powerful. The "30% value added" is a low bar. The accounting details matter: bill of materials, processing costs, overhead; but 30% is low enough that assembly, testing, packaging, and integration often get you there. If I were a German chemical company or a Japanese electronics manufacturer, I'd be looking at this and calculating the margin. You can bypass the Great Wall of Tariffs by setting up a factory in Haikou.
Why is Beijing doing this?
The standard answer is "economic growth." China's FDI dropped ~ 10% in the first three quarters of 2025. The property sector is still a mess. They need a win.
But the specific timing and structure suggest two other motivations: The Hong Kong Problem and The CPTPP Gambit:
Hong Kong used to be the interface between China and the world. It was the airlock. You could keep the mainland pressurized with communism and capital controls, while Hong Kong remained a vacuum of common law and free capital. It worked great until 2019-2020, when the airlock started leaking politics. Beijing has effectively integrated Hong Kong politically, but in doing so, they damaged its unique value proposition. Trust in Hong Kong's distinct legal system has eroded. The "Hainan Option" is an attempt to build a backup airlock.
The theory goes: We don't need the British Common Law or colonial judges to have a financial hub. We can just simulate the economic conditions of Hong Kong (low tax, free trade) without the political pains (protests, foreign judges).
On the other hand:
The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is the trade deal that the US abandoned under Trump, leaving Japan and others to run it. It has very high standards for data flows, labor rights, and state-owned enterprises.
China wants in. Joining CPTPP would be a geopolitical coup, effectively isolating the US from the Pacific trade architecture. But China, as currently constituted, cannot meet the standards. The state subsidies are too high; the data laws are too strict. Hainan is the "pilot." The Reuters article quotes Vice Premier He Lifeng calling it a "vital gateway." The idea is to adopt CPTPP-compliant rules only in Hainan. If it works, they can tell the trade bloc, "Look, we can do it. There's enough trade in the Pacific without the US wagging its dick at us."
The skepticism here is high. As one diplomat noted in the Reuters piece, CPTPP members generally demand nationwide commitments, not just a gated playground for pilot projects. Beijing hopes Hainan will serve as a proof of concept; trade negotiators suspect it will be a showpiece rather than a structural reform.
Will it work?
If you are a fan of Gravity Models of Trade, you should be bullish (I do not know enough to claim to be an expert, I'm just doing this because it's been a few days and nobody else has bothered). Hainan sits right in the middle of the South China Sea, one of the busiest shipping lanes on earth. It is closer to Vietnam and the Philippines than Shanghai is. If you lower friction/tariffs in a high-gravity area/massive population centers, trade will happen. The physics of economics demand it. If you are a fan of Institutional Economics (think Acemoglu and Robinson), you should be skeptical.
The institutionalist argument is that Hong Kong worked not because of the tax rate, but because of the Rule of Law. If you had a contract dispute in Hong Kong, you knew a judge in a wig would apply English common law, regardless of what the Party Secretary thought.
Hainan does not have judges in wigs. It has the People's Courts. The "Hainan Free Trade Port Law" passed in 2021 promises protection for foreign investors, but we have seen how quickly laws can change when they conflict with "national security."
However, there is a middle path: the "Good Enough" Equilibrium.
Foreign capital might not need perfect British Common Law. It might just need "predictable enough" rules and "high enough" profits. If the 30% value-add loophole generates a 20% increase in net margin for a German carmaker, they might be willing to tolerate the risk that the local court is biased.
Dubai is a good comparison here. Dubai is more chocolate than it is a democracy. It does not have English Common Law (though the DIFC does). But it functions as a global hub because the ruling family understands that screwing over foreign investors is bad for business. If Hainan can establish a reputation for "commercial neutrality", even within an authoritarian state, it could siphon off a lot of the manufacturing-adjacent services that are currently leaving Hong Kong.
There is also the Trump Factor (implied by the fact that 2025 of all years is the date of implementation). If the US is ramping up tariffs on "China," Hainan offers a fascinating shell game.
If a product is made in Vietnam, shipped to Hainan for "processing," and then shipped to Europe, what is its origin? If a product is made in Hainan and shipped to the US, does it get hit with the "China Tariff"?
Probably yes. Customs agents are not stupid (alas). Outside China, origin is usually about substantial transformation or "last substantial transformation," often implemented through tariff classification changes or specific processing rules, not the Free Trade Port's internal 30% threshold.
But for the rest of the world, Hainan offers a way to interact with the Chinese economy without the full weight of mainland protectionism. The "30% value add" rule effectively turns Hainan into a giant mixing vat. You pour in global commodities, stir them with Chinese labor (which is still cost-competitive for high-skill work), and pour out a "Hainan" product. This helps China move up the value chain. Instead of just being the "World's Factory" (doing the scutwork), they become the "World's Processor" (high value add-ons).
Let's look at the numbers again. Hainan's GDP is $113 billion. Hong Kong's is $407 billion. To catch up, Hainan needs to grow at explosive rates. But it has a handicap: talent. Hong Kong is a nice place to live if you like cosmopolitan cities. Hainan is... nice if you like beaches and humidity. But it lacks the schools, the nightlife, and the cultural cachet of HK or Shanghai.
The "talent" question is usually where these top-down economic zones fail. You can build the airport and the office towers, but if the bankers and engineers don't want to live there, you just have a very expensive ghost town. However, the tax incentives for "urgently needed" talent are the counter-weight. In a world where Western nations are talking about wealth taxes and China's mainland tax is high, an effective 15% cap is very attractive. It might attract a specific class of mercenary expatriates and Chinese tech workers looking for a tax haven.
Explain the implications like I'm an idiot, or a precocious 5 year old:
I predict a golden age of smuggling. The "Second Line" (the border between Hainan and the mainland) is the critical point of failure. If you have a zero-tariff zone separated from a high-tariff zone by a ferry ride, the incentive wedge is enormous. Expect the "Second Line" to become a cat-and-mouse game of drone deliveries and mislabeled cargo.
Hainan is geographically closer to Hanoi than to Beijing. The marketing for the FTP explicitly positions it as a gateway to Southeast Asia. If Hainan works, it becomes the de facto capital of the South China Sea economic zone. It pulls Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines closer into China's economic gravity well, regardless of the naval disputes.
I suspect this splits the functions that used to be united in HK. It makes HK less indispensable to Beijing, which in turn makes HK more vulnerable politically. Hong Kong keeps the IPOs; Hainan takes the supply chains.
And of course, the Taiwanese elephant in the South China Sea. I get more than a whiff of "we have Taiwan at home", an effort to make a China that is less... Chinese. Perhaps a proof-of-concept that Beijing can take the boot of the neck if you unite amicably.
In a letter from exile in 1097, Su Shi wrote of Hainan: "I have no meat to eat, no medicine for my illness, no house to live in, no friends to visit, no coal for winter, no cool spring for summer. But for some reason, I've got a lot of raw fish. FeelsBadMan." (I am not sure he said any of this at all, I asked ChatGPT for cool quotes. At least Wikipedia confirms he was exiled to the area)
In 2025, you can get all of those things in Hainan, tax-free, likely imported from Australia or France. The fish, you probably want from somewhere with lower levels of mercury.
China is attempting to engineer a free market organ and transplant it into nominally communist body. The rejection risk is moderate. I, for one, am interested in seeing how it all plays out.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Thank you!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
It is very much not the model! I'm in love, not concussed haha.
You might have missed this recent update:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3416/wellness-wednesday-for-december-17-2025/392615?context=8#context
All I want for Christmas is Her
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I finally told her I love her. I probably could have said it weeks ago, but I’ve spent the last few years developing a very healthy respect for the kind of wreckage that happens when you deploy those words at the wrong time. When you’ve spent enough time losing, you start to treat your internal state like a high-stakes game where you’re terrified of overplaying your hand.
She actually beat me to the punch. We had been existing in a state of high-density clinginess for a while, just being generally ridiculous to each other, and she decided to try a stealth maneuver. She ended a conversation with "goodnight love," clearly hoping I’d just let it slide past without making a scene. But I’m tall; very little goes over my head (physical or metaphorical) without me noticing.
It feels good. It feels considerably better than I’m usually willing to admit things can feel.
I still had to give her a hard time about the timing, though. 1:30 in the morning after a grueling day is not exactly the cinematic peak I had envisioned. I had a whole plan involving chocolates and flowers and the kind of deliberate romantic effort that makes for a better story. Instead, I got a sneak attack at my most exhausted.
In the meantime, we’ve started "soft-launching" the relationship to our respective families. This feels like a significant escalation of the stakes. I’m really hoping this works out; my heart has taken enough hits lately that it probably deserves a vacation, or at least a very gentle training montage. Maybe this is just what it looks like when you finally put the muscle to work.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Good post. I agree with most of it, and have made similar claims on the record. I appreciate someone else picking up the torch.
Life used to be so very mysterious. What Elan Vitale motivated living flesh while a similar weight of dead meat or clay stayed dumbly inert?
Well, turns out that even the most ineffable mystery of the time could be reduced to biology, then chemistry, then physics. We can simulate just about any part of the body, except that it's so computationally expensive that anything larger than a cell is too much for our supercomputers, at least at full resolution. I expect the same is true for qualia. I am confident that free-will is just what it feels like to be a computationally bounded entity making agentic decisions. We don't know what our decisions will be, even if an omniscient observer can see it's all deterministic, or at least non-deterministic in ways that do not leave room for "choice".
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I legitimately can't even imagine what a killshot on Trump would be.
It's easy for me. The bullet would have had to go just an inch to the left.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
It is not that I am incapable of appreciating good coffee, it's just that I don't particularly care either way.
Back in med school, I had a crippling caffeine addiction. Yes, this was before I got my ADHD meds, how did you guess?
Anyway, I used to wake up in the morning, and couldn't be arsed to take milk out of the fridge or borrow a roommate's kettle. I just poured instant coffee powder into an empty plastic coke bottle, added some cold water from the tap. Swirl for taste, and then pour it all down my gullet.
There was almost a queue in the dorms to see this bullshit the first few times I did it. Ah, good times. I eventually upgraded to warming up the water to be slightly warm and using a mug. I'm very civilized now.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
If 4chan goes behind an IQ gate, I can only see good outcomes for the world at large.
As it is, the only reason CAPTCHAS aren't even more useless is because the typical consumer chatbot (as available to the typical normie) is simply too polite to lie about being a robot (and are also trained not to solve them).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I'm relieved to find out that I wasn't quite cynical enough to go full noir. I never actually believed that I "deserve" this lady, not quite willing to consign myself to purgatory yet. My attitude towards the genre is like my attitude towards Warhammer 40k, fun to read about, fun to imagine myself as the hard-boiled protagonist, but actually inhabiting it? Oh hell no.
I enjoyed reading this, thank you.
You're welcome!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Bloody hell. My mom told me the same thing, in the same words. I can only wish she came from such a noble lineage, but I've been trying to live by them nonetheless.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Some more context:
The "modal" model of a typical relationship in India is that the couple will start seeing each other largely on the down-low. Things don't blow up immediately? Loop in your friends. Things don't crash after a few weeks or months and they really like each other? Then parents are (usually) informed. Things are serious? Introduce them in person. By the time the parents are meeting each other, you're practically engaged.
Theres definitely major variance. Stage in the life cycle. Liberal vs conservative, in social terms. Sanity, maturity. But that's roughly how it works for most of us. I don't think it's that different in most of the West, but each step is a bigger milestone here.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
You're right, but the denizens of even a specific cultural group aren't homogenous. I won't pretend to have the full picture, but she is scared to introduce me because:
We don't know for a fact where this is going. Just knowing where we want to take this isn't sufficient for it to happen, even if it's necessary. Neither of us are quite delusional enough to make promises about marriage just yet (well... now that I say that. She was drunk, it might have been a joke).
If she brings me over, that raises the stakes massively. I can see she's deeply anxious about what they might say, or the pressure they might put on her. In her words, her parents simultaneously want her to get married ASAP and are also deeply disapproving of her dating around. Even if it's serious dating. Don't ask, it perplexes both of us. But I've heard of much worse. Seen much worse: the girl I'd seen for 5 years had hidden my existence from her family for the entire duration (!)
(Indians can be quite culturally conservative, not that I don't know millions of relatively liberal folk.)
I think the biggest barriers might be mental. Hers. I'm good at charming the average parent. I'm very polite, funny, and yes, a doctor who is doing pretty well for himself. That matters a lot. I would bet good money that if she'd let me meet them, I'd win them over. But she knows, deep down, that if this happens and it doesn't pan out, it'll make the heartbreak all the worse.
I won't push her. I've raised the idea, to prove I'm serious. I'd bring sweets. Perhaps she might change her mind on that when she realizes that the infatuation is permanent, but I'm here to date her and not the family, as much as I'm fond of her brother.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Like you I’m a neurotic, which is unfortunate in this particular aspect of life, in which neuroticism can so easily ruin everything.
I am normally the opposite of neurotic. For the past few years, the only thing I've gone full throttle on is academics (my parents are beaming at me). The romantic neuroticism is quite new, courtesy of a particular relationship you already know too much about. I won't repeat myself.
I enjoy being able to put that aside, and hopefully keep it aside. That being said, a pinch of neuroticism probably makes me a more considerate partner.
(unlike you, I never write anything about my personal life, no journals or diaries, but I had it in my head)
I have the memory of a goldfish, so if I don't write, I forget. Also, writing is cathartic.
Funny. While talking to her yesterday, I suddenly recalled one of the reasons we'd pulled apart after our first few meetings. She had asked me once, probably over text, whether some of her menstrual symptoms might be due to pregnancy.
This threw me for a loop. I hadn't slept with her. My reaction was to point out, with some indignation, that I was really the wrong person to ask given that I don't know who she slept with or when. Getting that out of the system, I then proceeded to give her actual advice, because of course that's what I did. Just helpful like that. She then told me it was 4/5 months back, after which I told her that if it was a pregnancy she'd damn well know by now. It was something else.
I took that as a not particularly polite sign of a lack of romantic or sexual interest. I thought she'd either hinted that, or simply saw me so platonically that the notion that I'd care hadn't even occurred to her. I put aside my aspirations for another date, low as they already were. I busied myself with even crazier women.
I told her this. She was initially taken aback, but then recall struck like lightning. Oh, she said, and then proceeded to type out a very lengthy and heartfelt apology. She wasn't entirely sure what her rationale had been back then, but it wasn't malicious. Perhaps a tad bit inconsiderate, but I've been there myself. I hemmed and hawed a little bit, but I did accept it. I said I'd forget, and for now, it didn't spoil a good thing.
Ah. Mature conversations and being able to talk to someone. I missed this.
The points you've mentioned are good. I can see that being the foundation for a good relationship, happy husband/wife = happy life.
I would personally make a longer list, tacking on such things as intelligent, looks, a sense of humor etc etc. I'm sure you don't mean to say these aren't valuable by refraining from mentioning them specifically. I can excuse them being a liar, or at least I can this girl when she calls me a "pretty boy".
I must say that the whole "look at the parents to gauge their offspring" is wise, and something I learned from bitter experience. A girl from a well-adjusted, caring family? There's cause for hope.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
You're making me blush. No one more hopelessly romantic than a lapsed cynic.
Writing a book is hard work, though I might have enough material for "crazy women and how to love them (don't)". But I think of how much people make writing sappy bullshit on Substack and wonder if I should pivot away from writing about Chinese web fiction and niche hard scifi novels. Of course, ¿por que no los dos?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
It is difficult to overstate how different your love life is from mine. I am in almost every way the opposite of you. Partnered for ten years, soon to be married. Almost constitutionally incapable of big romantic gestures, inclined to focus on the smaller day to day things. Generally into women who are healthy, sane, and on the other side of the kids conversation.
Lucky man. I'm jealous, but also grateful, because it proves there's hope for the rest of us.
A large part of my struggles isn't just stochastic. It's awkward to date with intent when you keep hopping between countries, and are unsure where you will be or can be in a particular place. It's almost like the UK training scheme is designed to reduce medico fertility to nil. On a few occasions, I've met people I could see myself being happy with indefinitely, with minimal drama, but either or I they couldn't stay.
It sucks.
But damn do I enjoy reading about it.
Thank you. I suppose we all need a reason to be grateful for the eggs that did hatch.
I wish you luck. You've had a hard run of it. But there's no rhyme nor reason to these things. Sometimes it works until it doesn't, or doesn't until it does. There's little more you can do than try and learn from your mistakes, and you're doing that. I hope you find all the happiness of stability while keeping hold of the passion. My dad likes to say the most important thing we can do in life is find the one person we're going to share it with. If you do that right, the rest all falls into place.
Thank you, I mean it. I'm doing my best to minimize the role of luck. Every girl dreams of being lucky enough to find Mr. Right. It's worth considering what that gentleman had to do to get there.
Good luck with your upcoming marriage. Given the track record, I can only assume it will be happy and productive. You sound sane, and that's more than many can say. Probably me too.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Hey. My condolences. One of the scariest moments of my life was when my dad to go in for a thryoidectomy after a biopsy found something too suspicious to let lie. He also has a heart condition that hospitalized him once, so I can relate even harder.
Hoping yours pulls through, and I'd say it's better to cry in front of him if that's the cost of seeing him. If he has any wisdom (which most fathers do), he'll know it's your way of saying you love him when words fail you.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Since you're here, can you confirm if a 5 hour marathon is good or bad, relatively? I seem to recall that the 4 hour mark was a huge milestone in athletic history, so I'd presume 5 would be solid for an amateur.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
I'm sorry for my lack of inclusivity. I will listen, I will learn, and you will pay for a Substack subscription. Well, probably not, that's just an OnlyFans for "spice" addicts and I want to hold on to the last tattered shreds of my dignity.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Thank you. I thought myself congenitally incapable of living in the moment, but that's probably not true!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
We all have our ways of coping. Writing just happens to be mine.
(It's far less than 95% if I'm being honest. Only the highest highs and the lowest lows make me feel like bothering. Squeaky wheels, grease, all that jazz)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
This is why I hate race-mixing. It exponentially increases the number of stereotypes.
I Can Just Do Things
People like to say that if you know your destination, you’re already there. These are usually the same people who claim that "pain is just weakness leaving the body" or that a kale smoothie tastes "just like a milkshake." If they are correct, however, I am currently residing in a state of pre-emptive heartbreak, a destination I seem to book a ticket to with alarming regularity.
I had flown back to India to escape the Scottish winter, a season that is less a weather event and more a personal attack, a psychic shearing of the very paltry amount of wool keeping me warm. The goal was to thaw out. Instead, I found myself running a familiar experiment: meet someone nice, become infatuated, and then watch as reality arrives like a wet dog at a picnic.
Some time ago, I had attempted to catalog the women I’d dated, which is the sort of neurotic bookkeeping one does when procrastinating on actual work. There was one particular entry: a fashion designer. My notes described her as "very cute, very sweet, and very depressed." It sounds like the tagline for a memoirs section at a bookstore.
Our early courtship was a non-starter. A few dates, no touching. Then, inevitably, the dramatic medical emergency. She messaged me in a panic because her brother was at the ER. I went, of course. I’d like to say it was entirely out of altruism, but I was mostly willing to brave a hospital haunted by my ex-girlfriend just to get in the good graces of a new one.
I arrived to find the brother sweating and complaining. He’s a difficult person under the best of circumstances, and kidney stones rarely bring out the best in anyone. The doctors were performing that unique hospital dance of terrifying the patient while offering absolutely no useful information. I worked in Oncology before I caught the psych train, I'm not an emergency physician, but I took a quick history and laid hands on him and felt fairly certain it was a stone. This was soon confirmed by imaging. The hospital staff, sensing a customer with insurance, wanted to perform surgery on a pebble the size of a grain of couscous.
I couldn't exactly go argue with them. In India, contradicting a senior doctor is a social crime on par with kicking a cow. So, I did the passive-aggressive thing and slipped the brother some medical PDFs, instructing him to argue his own case. It worked. He peed it out, he was fine, and I got a pity date out of it.
It went well enough, though I got the distinct impression she was only there to pay off a karmic debt.
There was also the time she called me in the middle of my shift, suicidal. I was in the ICU. People were literally dying around me, monitors were screaming, and I was on the phone using my "soothing voice", which usually just puts people to sleep, to convince her to put down the scissors. It worked. She went to bed, and I went back to restart someone’s heart.
Then, silence. She vanished. I was in Scotland. I had my share of problems. I had more than my share of other people's problems, that's just my job.
Months later, I noticed her Instagram was deactivated. In the language of modern dating, this is the equivalent of a boarded-up house with a pile of newspapers on the porch. It means a breakdown. I messaged her. Four days later - an eternity when you are waiting for a reply from a pretty girl and genuinely concerned about her wellbeing - she wrote back.
"Heyoo pretty boy."
She was back in town, living with her brother and sister-in-law, having traded fashion design for financial calculators. She was studying for her CFA. It was a pivot from fabrics to derivatives, which I suppose is just a different way of obsessing over tiny details and patterns.
The texting... It was sublime. I began feeling uncanny, like it couldn't possibly be real that a pretty girl would laugh at all my jokes, even the really awful puns. And that she'd make me laugh too, hard. That we would get each other. It made me wonder why it hadn't happened the first go around. Had we learned from our mistakes? Or had we simply been battered by the passage of time, had our rough edges sanded off? Had we learned to settle for "good enough" and call that good?
We met at a café. She refers to herself as "smol," a spelling that makes my teeth ache, but she looked fantastic. She spent the entire time insulting herself, and I spent the entire time telling her she was wrong. We laughed until she claimed she was in physical pain. She said her cheeks ached. I pointed out the innuendo, and asked her to wait a while. I dropped her off home, and accepted an invitation that I hadn't thought I'd ever receive. Come upstairs. Her brother would be home soon, and she told me that he usually threw a fit if she wanted to bring a boy over. But when she told him it was "the doctor", he only expressed calm acceptance that in a more expressive person, might constitute outright approval. I guess good deeds remember their names.
I left at 3 am, after drinking quite a lot of her lemon rum. It didn't quite drown the butterflies in my stomach and the aching desire to see her again.
We both told each other that our date had been the highlight of a rather dreary year. I know I meant it, and I choose to believe she did too. Fuck that qualifier, "choose", I genuinely do.
Then came the family vacation. My mother dragged us to the nicest beaches India has to offer, a tropical paradise where she immediately developed a swollen cornea because she refuses to listen to her ophthalmologist, or her doctor son about contact lenses. Between applying eye drops to my mother and drinking beer by the beach, I spent most of my waking moments texting her. When my mom's eyesight recovered, she had to ask who I was talking to all day, with a goofy grin on my face.
We wrote essays to each other. She told me about her anemia, which she treats with chia seeds sprinkled on her chocolate pancakes. I told her pretty girls will do literally anything but take their iron tablets. She told me she’s terrified of needles. I told her about the time I almost died of appendicitis because I was too scared to go to the hospital. In my defense, I was six years old. We debated whether she was "vanilla" or a "sex goblin." I had made the mistake of assuming the former. I was pleasantly disabused. She sent me a picture of herself in a saree that was so attractive it actually made me angry. I tried keeping the messages light, PG-13. Suggest, don't tell. I was rather shaken when she threw caution to the wind and made it rather clear that she wanted me. I blushed. I tossed and turned in bed till 4 am with a boner because she was an utter tease who I could tell was deriving great satisfaction from making me squirm.
On December 12th, I got my exam results. I had crushed them. The sensible thing to do was to fly back to Scotland, return to my job, and accept that this was just a holiday romance.
Instead, I stood in the ocean, ignoring the coral reefs and the fish, and changed my flight. I bought VIP tickets to a concert I didn't want to see. I delayed my return to the real world for a girl who thinks her uterus is a "pink balloon."
They say if you know your destination, you’re already there. My destination, apparently, is standing in the surf, staring at a phone screen, waiting for a "trash panda" to tell me she wants pasta. I've saved a bottle of my best scotch for her. It costs more per shot than the whole bottle of her rum, but it's a fair trade for her company.
Man, self_made_human, you know this can't work. You have a job. You live a very large and a rather small continent away. You aren't incapable of loving well-adjusted women, they're just thin on the ground, few and far between. Probably snatched up in uni and happily married by now, unlike you. You tell yourself they you're happy in the market for lemons, you bite into them, skin and all, and enjoy the juices running down your face, staining that one floral shirt you intend to wear till it's ragged. You let your dumb-ass heart override that frontal lobe, and you enjoy your limbic system running itself ragged too. You know she doesn't want kids, and she's adamant on that point even when you tactfully, haha only joking, attempt to suggest otherwise. You know you want those. You know you're in for pain. You write essays about it. You intellectualize, you rationalize, you romanticize.
You're a poor bastard trapped between two kinds of death: the slow death of "stable but boring" or the fast death of knowing exactly how the crash will feel before you even take off.
You're a doctor who's seen too many terminal cases, except the patient is your own capacity for unguarded hope. You're grieving the version of yourself who could still be excited about a future with someone without immediately cataloging all the ways it won't work. The undefended, optimistic, "butterflies and bees" version of you who could look someone you loved, talk with her and laugh and imagine and not immediately start writing the breakup essay in his head. You've spent several hours tracking down all the essays you once wrote about falling in and out of love. You've charted your trajectory: it's a biased random walk through a minefield. You've looked over every explosion, remembered the pain of amputation, jettisioning who you once were, the slow healing that left your heart sclerosed and cramping. You've seen yourself become a better writer at the cost of becoming cynical. Your muse drinks your blood and in turn pisses out digital ink, with just enough ground glass in it to hurt.
Fuck it, fuck me, fuck you. You're just tired, enjoy the ride and don't look at the expiry dates on the bottle, liquor keeps.
(Is it a postscript if it's written before publication? I think that's just script.)
That was going to be it. Another neat little vivisection, another essay where I dissect my own heart while it's still beating and call it insight. File it next to all the others in my ever-expanding catalog of romantic catastrophes, each one slightly better written than the last because at least I'm getting something out of the wreckage.
Except here's the problem with pre-writing your own eulogy: sometimes you don't actually die.
I had spent half my vacation in a state of wanting. Not the casual kind, the obsessive kind, the kind where you check your phone every thirty seconds like a lab rat hitting a lever. I wanted another date. I told her as much. The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved. Mine can be guilty of the same, but I am thickskinned enough to threaten to decamp to a hotel if they kick up too much fuss. They love me enough to relent.
The surveillance wasn't the worst part. She could physically leave. But she was drowning in guilt, the kind that only comes from having tasted freedom and then having it revoked. She'd had her own apartment, her own money, her own life. Now she was back to being a broke student and a daughter under parental scrutiny, except with the psychological damage of knowing exactly what she'd lost. The thought of dolling herself up to see me, of explaining where she was going, of lying by omission or commission, it strangled her.
I liked her too much to push. I told her I'd give a great deal to see her again, and soon. I left it there. Sometimes the best move is to wait and see if someone wants you badly enough to navigate their own obstacles.
She did. She dropped the "going out with friends" bomb in the middle of a conversation about groceries and fled before her parents could cross-examine her. I did my part. I got the best haircut I'd gotten in months, the kind where the barber actually listens instead of just buzzing everything down to institutional length. I did skincare, which for me is practically revolutionary. I unpacked the suit that had been living in my luggage like a well-dressed corpse, travelling across continents but never actually getting worn. I looked good. Better than good. I looked like someone who gave enough of a shit to try.
I had a work meeting first, because apparently my job follows me everywhere like a well-trained dog, including on vacation. The moment I could escape, I bolted. I showed up early at our meeting spot, flowers in hand, but this time I had a plan. That cutesy Japanese store, the one that assaults you with pastel aggression the moment you walk in, I'd spotted something there last time. A plushie. Hot pink and goth black with a little skull, the kind of thing that was so perfectly her that it felt like fate. Or at least like good pattern recognition. I bought it. I wanted to see her face light up. I wanted to be the kind of person who notices these things and acts on them.
I'd offered to come get her when she arrived, but she was too proud to accept the offer. I will admit to some schadenfreude when she got lost in the building. Of course she did. The floor plan was designed by someone who hated intuitive navigation. I talked her through it over the phone. I ambushed her at the elevator, flowers hidden behind my back like some kind of rom-com protagonist. There she was, a tiny short-haired tomboy with an accent I found delicious. She'd dressed up, and she looked ravishing.
When she appeared, I kissed her hand (who even does that? Apparently I do now) and produced the bouquet. She beamed. The plushie came later, hidden at the restaurant table. She loved it, then immediately started catastrophizing about where to hide it from her parents and her klepto friends. I told her I was good at gift-giving when properly motivated. She told me I'd motivated her quite effectively.
The date was absurd in the best way. We ordered Long Island Iced Teas, which is what you do when you need liquid courage to have conversations you've been avoiding. They were great, or had copious amounts of liquor in them, which are interchangeable if I squint. She dabbed carbonara sauce from my moustache at the exact moment I realized she'd seen that scene from The Lady and the Tramp. We were disgusting. I loved it.
Then we had the talk. The real one, not the pleasant surface chatter and smoldering flirtation. The fact that I'd be flying back to Scotland while she was stuck here, treading water. The kids thing, that perennial dealbreaker lurking in every serious conversation like a landmine you both know is there but keep walking toward anyway.
It went easier than expected, which might mean something or might just mean we were drunk enough to be honest. I told her I'd be back if she wanted me back. I suggested, with the kind of boldness that only comes from Long Island Iced Teas and desperation, that I could fly her over for a few weeks. The idea made both of us dizzy. We sighed about the kids. We acknowledged it was big, maybe the biggest thing. She'd already told me her brother's marriage was crumbling because his wife had sprung the no-kids revelation on him after the wedding, knowing full well he wanted them. I'd already told her they should divorce. There's more to that story, but not for here.
We unpacked her reasons for not wanting children. The body horror of pregnancy, the way it transforms you into something alien. I told her the right man wouldn't care about stretch marks or loose skin, which I believe is true. If it's not, he was never the right man. Labor terrified her, the sheer physical violence of it. I reminded her that c-sections exist, that my entire family of gynecologists chose them. She told me about past boyfriends who'd been astonishingly tactless about the whole thing, who'd made her feel defective for not wanting what they assumed she should. I deployed all the tact I had like a drone strike. Call me Clausewitz. It's one of the few things I'm genuinely good at.
The concert became collateral damage. I'd bought a single VIP ticket earlier, planning to confirm she'd be free before getting hers. She wanted details. I, being an idiot, let her see the invoice. Her eyes watered. She said I absolutely couldn't spend that much on her. I pointed out I'd spent three times that just changing my flights at peak season, but she wouldn't budge. I didn't push, although I told her I'd been imagining her on my arm, showing her off to my friends like some kind of trophy I'd actually earned. We compromised: I'd go to the concert, get respectably drunk on the drink vouchers, then meet her at a hotel after. It's not ideal, but it's something.
Here's what I didn't expect: we never stopped talking. Hours of conversation without a single dead zone, without me having to fill silences like I was spackling drywall. Most women I've dated have required constant verbal maintenance. I can do it (I can hold a conversation with a brick wall if it's the polite kind), but it's exhausting. With her, words just kept coming. Machine-gun banter, jokes that built on jokes, puns that made us both groan and laugh simultaneously. Vulnerability disguised as stories. The kind of rapport that's rare enough that, once tasted, you notice its absence everywhere else.
She said I was spoiling her, ruining her for other men by setting standards the locals couldn't match. I told her that was the entire point. When I lovebomb someone, it's scorched earth baby, carpet bombing, not a single daisy left standing. I told her this was completely out of character for me. My previous ex had to formally demand flowers like she was filing a complaint with management, and even then I only did it once. Changing international flights at obscene cost? Buying VIP tickets to shows I don't care about in the hopes I could take her with me? Six months ago, self_made_human would have assumed he'd suffered a traumatic brain injury. Now I'm calling it something else, though I'm still working out what.
If this was just about sex, I could achieve it for a tenth of the investment. There's something else happening here. I'm figuring it out in real time, which is either growth or just a different flavor of self-deception.
I told her about this essay. The version I'd written before our date, where I'd already scripted the ending. I laid out my neuroses like medical specimens: the way I sublimate my own wounds into fixing others, the way my ex with BPD recalibrated my tolerance for chaos so thoroughly that stable feels boring and volatile feels like home. The way I've sabotaged perfectly good relationships by simply losing interest when they proved to be well-adjusted. I told her I thought this would end in heartbreak, that the odds were stacked against us in ways neither of us could control.
She asked me not to show her the essay. She said it would hurt, that it would make her cry. I promised I wouldn't. Not yet. Not until the dust settles, if it ever does.
Then she recalibrated everything. She told me she'd thought I was out of her league the first time around, that she'd been into me all along. I'd spent months assuming she was there out of obligation, paying off some karmic debt from the kidney stone incident. Apparently I'd just been too oblivious to notice. If we'd gotten this right the first time, my entire year might have been different. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, just with different timing. I'm not sure which possibility disturbs me more.
We fucked up by not checking the time. Too busy staring at each other like teenagers. By the time we looked up, it was late. Her parents called, asking when she'd be home. Fuck. It was already ten. I offered to bring her to my place, break open the bottle of scotch I'd been saving, before it aged to the point where it was too expensive for me to drink. We both knew exactly what would happen if she ended up on my couch. She couldn't do it. Guilt about being late and disappointing her parents, again. We compromised on one more glass of wine, then another, until we realized eleven o'clock was bearing down on us like an oncoming truck.
I insisted on dropping her off in an Uber. Every minute felt precious, like something I needed to hoard against future scarcity. I was taking a puff on a hookah of aerosolized gold and pixie dust, I just had to hold it all in my lungs until I gasped, till my very blood glittered and fizzed. And then I'd do it all over again. She agreed.
The car ride was everything. We were all over each other, making up for lost time, making out like we'd just discovered the concept. I won't give you a blow-by-blow. You're not here for erotica, and I'm selfish enough to want to keep some things private. But I will tell you this: the best moment was when I pulled her into my arms and let her rest her head on my chest while I kissed her hair. That's the image that keeps replaying. I felt obligated to tip the driver generously for being discreet about it, since we were anything but.
I'm glad she lived far away. By the time we reached her building, we were both wrecked. Flustered, craving more, feeling like addicts who'd been Narcanned mid-high. I said goodbye with all the recalcitrance of a toddler being dropped off at daycare for the first time. She looked like she felt the same.
The moment I got home, the texting resumed. Except "texting" is far too innocent a word for what we were doing. No holds barred. Every ounce of my wordcel vocabulary bent toward crafting the filthiest prose I could manage. She matched me, word for depraved word. We're both wordsmiths when properly motivated, it turns out.
Eventually, after what felt like both an eternity and no time at all, I told her to go to bed. I said I'd do what I always do with feelings I can't quite process: write them into submission, pin them to the page like butterflies in a collector's case.
So here I am. The taste of her still mapped on my lips. An essay that needs its ending rewritten because I'd already decided how this would go before it even started. I thought I knew my destination, thought I was already there in that state of pre-emptive heartbreak.
Maybe I bought a ticket to the wrong place. Maybe this me realizing it's possible to reschedule certain flights, and stay on the beach just a tad bit longer.
I've got things to figure out. The distance, the kids thing, the fact that I'm pathologically attracted to women who come with warning labels. But for once, I'm not writing the autopsy report before the patient dies. I'm not cataloging the failure before it happens. I'm just here, wanting this badly enough to be stupid about it, willing to believe that maybe my diagnostic abilities can do more than just identify the disease. It feels good to undon the cuirass of cynicism, set my back straight and let the tension bleed out for once. Music hits hard - every lyric dripping with cosmic significance, the world seems brighter and more vivid. Is this what happiness feels like? Is this- no, don't jinx it.
Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11d ago
The writing did wander
That is the biggest tell. I did ask the AIs to try their hand at editing (I just didn't use it). They always spit out something more... polished. Streamlined. Less fluff. Fewer details. That's just not me.
My man, I quite literally said, in the essay itself, that I used ChatGPT for help. That is not the same as using it to write an essay!
I am not an expert on geopolitics or economics. I asked ChatGPT for help with relevant theories (I do know about the Gravity model of trade and am tangentially familiar with Acemoglu). Why? Because nobody with more expertise brought this up first in a hot minute.
You do realize that's in the context of an essay with no AI involvement beyond feedback? I have few qualms about disclosing it when it's actually relevant, or denying my usage. You don't have to use GPT-Zero, which is an unreliable tool at the best of times. You can just ask. The honest answer here is I ran into a very interesting article, wrote a rough draft of an essay, asked multiple models for feedback and edit passes, then did the tedious work of checking for hallucinations. This was over multiple days, and several good points noted by the AI, such as the applicability of various economic models, was probably accepted by me into the final version. As far as I can tell, there are no hallucinations, beyond quotes from poorly sourced Chinese literature that I can't read (suitably signposted and kept as a joke).
The current moderation consensus is that the use of AI to generate all or even most of a post, particularly in an attempt to pad effort or mislead, is a clear violation of the rules. We have refrained from declaring what proportion of an essay or post must be AI written to be worthy of action. It is a ruling mainly made to dissuade spam or bad-faith actors, and using it for editing or proofreading is, as far as I'm aware, above board.
While it's very kind of you to say that you prefer 100% raw SMH, you haven't even seen the raw essay! How would you know if it's better? I don't, or I'd have posted it.
The previous essay on China was a throwaway written in the middle of the night, it lacks the spit and polish of an effortpost written over hours or days. You will see a lot of variance in my style based on how much effort I'm putting in.
Much like goods "manufactured" in Hainan, I believe I have added enough additional value to the base product to post without qualms. It is, after all, mostly mine. Or perhaps the AI added enough value to my base product. The day I throw raw ChatGPT output in here is the day I welcome public crucifixion.
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