A year ago I was a full-time software engineer, and then a few months later I was making minimum wage as a barista at a specialty coffee shop. In this video, me and Tren talk through why that choice looks like an “objective downgrade” to people who knew me in tech—and why it didn’t feel like that at all from the inside. I’m a huge coffee nerd, and I genuinely loved the manual, physical craft of it: dialing in ratios, timing pours, steaming milk, and being “on” with real human interaction (especially during the pandemic). We also get into the deeper stuff: retirement and financial security, ego, strict parents, comparing yourself to other people, and this absurdist idea (Camus / Myth of Sisyphus) that life can feel inherently pointless if you keep trying to intellectualize a perfect meaning. For me, the takeaway is: if you make money the whole point, you get fragile—because it can disappear, and even if you get it, it might not fix the emptiness. I’m still success-driven, I just measure it by how much time I spend doing something that feels like I “might as well be doing that,” even if it looks weird on paper.