A tanned, shirtless guy with sandy feet rode by on his bicycle, narrowly missing a coconut on the sidewalk. An enthusiastic labrador ran after him. Palm trees, coconuts, bicycles, sand — it was April 2021, just another day in Mexico. I was taking a short stroll around my favorite neighborhood.
The guy circled back and stopped his bike. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me, but I do remember it being one of the cheesiest pickup lines I’d ever heard. So cheesy, in fact, that I burst out laughing.
“Does that actually work on women?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“I don’t know. Does it?” he grinned.
Smooth. Cliché, but well executed.
The labrador caught up to the bike. He had a cute red bandana tied around his neck. Now that worked on women.
I stroked the dog’s soft ears as the stranger and I began chatting. I was a bit standoffish at first. He’d caught me deep in thought on my afternoon walk, and I don’t like being disturbed when I think. I considered putting an end to the small talk with a classic white lie — the one that had never failed me in a beach town where hot-blooded American men were always looking for a holiday fling: “Sorry, I have a boyfriend. I respect the hustle, though.”
But before I could open my mouth, the stranger asked something, completely out of the blue: “Have you ever read The Celestine Prophecy?”
The Celestine Prophecy...
I flashed back to eighteen months earlier, perusing a second-hand bookshop a few hours north of Brisbane, Australia. My fingers wrapped around a slim, well-worn book. I pulled it from the shelf: The Celestine Prophecy.
The cover didn’t offer much information. I googled the title and found a summary:
The story opens with the male narrator becoming reacquainted with an old female friend, who tells him about the insights contained in a manuscript dating to 600 BC, which has been only recently translated. After this encounter leaves him curious, he decides to go to Peru.
On the airplane, he meets a historian who also happens to be interested in the manuscript. The historian explains how the world is currently undergoing an enormous shift in consciousness, elaborating on how things had been generally understood (until now) to be:
1) In the beginning, people believed the world to be governed by the forces of divinity; everything could be explained as an act of a god or gods.
2) With increasing knowledge of the world, brought about by scientific inquiry, people turned to the men and women of science for an explanation of life and their world, and...
3) Since the problem of how to find meaning in the world could not be solved by science, people chose to instead focus on efforts to improve their lives materially, subduing and plundering the earth for its natural resources, with a hyper-emphasis on controlling economic conditions and market fluctuations.
What was now occurring, explained the historian, was that the baseness of our current conditions had begun to infect our souls as well. We had become restless and desperate, primed for another fundamental shift in consciousness so as to bring about the creation of a new, better world.
Cool, I shrugged.
I tucked the book under my arm and kept browsing the shelves until the rest of my friends approached the checkout to purchase their literary hauls.
We drove home from our road trip the next day. I remember zooming down the highway, surfboards in the back, Nate at the wheel, the dreamy vibes of Rüfüs Du Sol playing on the speaker as I read poetry to the group from Rumi’s Little Book of Life.
I crashed on Nate and Soph’s couch while I was in town. Our good friends, Ed and Louise, were in Brisbane from God-knows-where. Jimmy and Bailey were there too. As was Cat, who I hadn’t seen in a while. The crew was back together, if only for a few days before life dispersed us around the globe again. It was September 2019.
After returning from our road trip, we sat in a hot tub and talked about the future. The brother-sister team, Nate and Soph, had a medical device company that was growing beautifully. Bailey’s new business was soaring to new heights. Her fiancé, Jimmy, had embarked on a new venture that was gaining traction. Our favorite married couple, Ed and Louise, had a diverse portfolio of successful projects and moved around the world as they pleased. They’d recently bought a place in Georgia, right on the ski slopes. “You should come stay with us in the European winter!” Ed offered. By the end of the night, we’d all converged on the idea of moving to Lisbon, Portugal, for a summer together. Maybe next year, in 2020, we said.
It was nice seeing everyone again. But at the same time, it was difficult for me. I’d just gone through the most challenging year of my life, and I was picking up the pieces of the aftermath: another failed startup and the debris of debt that came with it. I was heartbroken; lonely; grieving the loss of my children’s coding school. It wasn’t even a bad business. Parents would call me up in tears, telling me how our classes had changed their child’s life; that their 9-year-old had gone from a shy misfit to leading the code club at his primary school; that their 8-year-old had found his intellectually-stimulating niche and stopped misbehaving. I tried so hard to make the price point accessible to all kids — not just the rich ones. I really did try. And I could’ve sold the business if I just... I just couldn’t... my mind wouldn’t let... whatever. It doesn’t matter, anyway. What’s done is done.
It’s hard not to compare yourself to other people when you’ve hit rock bottom. I’d been working on my dreams just as hard and just as long as my friends, and I couldn’t help but wonder: “when is it my turn?” The only glimmer of hope in my life were the hundred-thousand words I’d written in one of my creative fevers, and a PowerPoint I’d made myself: a logical proof that there was order in the chaos; that the system would rearrange if I just kept going — if I just kept generating free energy and expressing a belief in the mantra I repeated to myself daily: Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Everything is always rigged in my favor. Always in all ways.
I wasn’t a stranger to comparison. Or failure, for that matter. Five years had gone by since my last startup tanked. I wrote a blog post about it at the time: My Startup Failed And This Is What It Feels Like... After sharing it on my personal Facebook, the story instantly went viral, with over a quarter-million views in forty-eight hours. It was translated into multiple languages and syndicated in online publications around the world, including the front page of Australia’s top news site.
A few months after that ship went down — back when I was 23 years old — my close friend asked if I could give a talk at her coworking space with two other well-known founders in the Australian startup community. I said yes, because she was my friend.
I got up on stage, flanked by two women who were everything I was not; two entrepreneurs who hadn’t led their team off a cliff and watched four years of hard work crumble before their eyes.
When it came my turn to speak, I looked out at the crowd, their smiling faces staring back expectantly. They’d come to hear me talk about failure. They’d come to hear me tell the truth.
And there I was, staring back at them, tears silently rolling down my cheeks, drowning in my own inferiority. I thought I was up for it, but I wasn’t. I was a mess. It was too soon. I completely choked.
I went home to my parent’s place that night, embarrassed. I remember sitting up in bed in the wee hours of the morning, thinking about how I ended up in this situation. Deep questions were starting to bubble up in the back of my mind, hardening and compressing into a sharp splinter that lodged itself somewhere in my consciousness.
You see, I hadn’t always had a rough journey. When I was just starting out as a naive 18-year-old, it was honestly like the Red Sea would part to deliver me every resource, every person, every opportunity, everything I needed to assemble the next part of my vision.
I was skipping through life, from one beautiful conversation to another lucky ‘coincidence’ like a happy little leprechaun. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just followed a trail of curiosity and took action on ideas that excited me with a sense of childlike wonder. I’d take a step into the unknown and a golden path would magically materialize beneath my feet as fast as I could run.
And boy, was it an adventure!
I’d somehow find myself in a photoshoot for Vogue magazine, draped in expensive diamonds. Or on a phone call to the CEO of the biggest talent agency in the world, who met me for five minutes and wanted to make a reality show about my life. Or at the top of the Empire State Building at 1 a.m. with a handsome European stranger I’d met at the airport as we ran around Manhattan for one spontaneous night like a goddamn rom-com movie, and then he kissed me in the hidden nook of a little bar on West 4th street — a temporary portal into a magical universe.
And I’d think to myself, how on earth did I end up here, having this experience? I was just a girl from a small country town with an overactive imagination, who spent her childhood mucking around with horses and having sword fights with her blue-haired best friend. How did all the stars line up to deliver me this? Things just seemed to happen for me.
So then why did I fail? I asked myself.
My brain rattled off the usual culprits: I didn’t do X well; I executed Y poorly; I thought that idea was good but it turned out to be terrible.
Okay, but why did I feel so compelled to execute that terrible idea?
Hmm… my brain ran through some compute cycles. Data? Intuition?
Okay, but where do my ideas come from?
Oh fuck, we’d entered philosophical territory. God, maybe? But I didn’t believe in a man in the sky. The religion taught to me in school always seemed completely nonsensical and reeked of man-made moral posturing and power plays — a type of collective delusion.
Hmm… let’s try another question:
How come I had a year-long stretch of green grass to sprint along when I started that business, but somehow found myself lost in the muddy, murky woods over and over and over again like a recurring nightmare?
The entropy in the adventure was suspiciously low. It felt like tossing a coin one hundred times and getting thirty heads in a row, then seventy tails. Wouldn’t that make you curious? Wouldn’t that make you suspicious of the coin? Something felt off.
I’d been taught that life was disordered; random. But when I walked through the world and observed a seed growing into a sunflower, a child laughing with that sparkle in their eye, or the vast beauty of the cosmos — well, there was nothing disordered about any of that.
And when I considered the way reality would contort itself to deliver me another resource, another opportunity, another idea, another person that would be instrumental in my success — no, I just couldn’t pass it off as ‘random’ or ‘luck.’
Years of societal programming screamed in my ear: “Cognitive bias! You’re finding patterns where there are none! Stay in your lane like a good girl and move on with your life.”
But I’ve never really been a good girl.
That splinter in my mind was digging in, sharpening, twisting until I couldn’t take it any longer and my pent-up curiosity erupted in a flurry of action.
I needed to understand why I experienced what I experienced. It wasn’t enough to just tell myself, “better luck next time.” Fuck that! I used to be insanely lucky and then pretty darn unlucky, so what variable changed?
It almost felt like the past four years had been set up as some kind of game, some kind of mystery for me to unravel; an intellectual chew toy for me to gnaw on.
What variable changed, Nikki? Look beneath the surface. Find the common thread. Experiment with it. Play with it. Solve it. Be creatively logical. Be logically creative. That’s what you’re good at.
I pulled my laptop from the bedside table, opened it under the covers, and typed three words into the search bar: What is reality?
I pressed Enter.
A portal appeared before my eyes, softly beckoning me to come explore its secrets and magic and mysteries.
I leaned forward, and tumbled down the rabbit hole.
***
“The Celestine Prophecy,” the stranger repeated. “Have you read it?”
“No,” I replied. “But I have a copy. I bought it at a second-hand bookshop eighteen months ago. It’s probably still in my suitcase somewhere. Why?”
I continued on my walk. He wheeled his bike next to me.
“It talks about synchronicity. Do you believe in coincidence?” he asked.
“Coincidence can’t be defended from first principles.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes,” I smiled.
The stranger kicked another coconut off the path before asking his next question: “So, what sequence of events brought you here, to this conversation in Mexico?”
***
I walked through the door of my sister's empty one-bedroom apartment and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her fluffy cat, Bella, jumped off the couch and came to investigate. “Hello, princess,” I cooed. “Your aunty’s had a hard day. Can I have a hug?” I opened my arms.
Bella looked at me for a moment, then turned on her heel and walked towards the bedroom, her tail swaying elegantly in the air. “Nooooo!” I whined. I got up on my knees and shuffled towards her, hands outstretched like a zombie. “Love me! Love me!”
Bella ran under the queen-sized bed — the one my sister and I had been sharing while I stayed with her.
My phone buzzed with a notification. It was a photo from a school in Kenya where we ran a pro-bono coding program.
“Congrats on being so incompetent,” I whispered to myself. I’d fired my full-time teachers the previous day. As I ripped away their livelihoods, all they could say were kind things like, “get better soon,” and “this was the best job of my life,” and “we love and appreciate you, Nikki.”
Meanwhile, all I felt was shame. Heavy, suffocating shame.
I felt even worse when I thought about settling my business debts without any new revenue coming in. Or supporting myself, for that matter. My baby-boomer father, whom I love dearly, is not the most emotionally sensitive man. Several months earlier, he’d said to me: “That’s great if someone will hire you. You’re 27 years old with nothing to show on your resume.” I burst into tears. He didn’t know what to do, except to run to the kitchen for some chocolate and awkwardly offer it to me while saying, “I didn’t mean it” — which was obviously a lie. I knew what he thought of me. I dreamed of the day when all my risk would pay off and he’d finally see that it was worth it; that I was right; that I wasn’t stupid for walking my own path.
I wandered over to the fridge, which was neatly stacked with grilled vegetables and quinoa that my sister had prepared. She’d given me three objectives for the day: get out of bed, eat a healthy meal, go for a walk.
I shut the fridge door. I wasn’t hungry.
A few days later, my friend called me in an emergency.
His name is Rick, and we have a funny backstory. We went to primary school together. I never spoke to him — he was the most popular boy in school and I was a quiet wallflower — but I liked his drawings. I was sent to an all-girls boarding school when I was 12 years old. So to me, Rick was just some kid I shared a classroom with as a child.
Yet, fourteen years later, when I was 26 years old, Rick randomly appeared in my dream. I woke up with a funny feeling the next morning.
You see, my dreams sometimes have a habit of leaking out into physical reality. The prophetic ones have a certain energetic texture to them, and they usually involve emotionally jarring events: being 11 years old, eating lunch, having a sudden, overwhelming vision of my father breaking his leg — only to find out that evening that my father did, in fact, break his leg that afternoon. Or having a strange dream involving my grandmother's cat standing on a table, staring at me and miaowing for help while her face burned and crumbled into black embers. The next day I went out to lunch with my mother and mentioned the vision. She said, "I didn't tell you why I'm in town for the day. I have to take your grandmother's cat to the vet to be put down. She has cancer on her nose and it's spreading up her face. It's time to say goodbye." My grandmother was devastated.
I was in Thailand when Rick first appeared in my dream. A few weeks later, right on cue, our fates collided in Brisbane, Australia. As we caught up, I learned that he'd started a finance career on Wall Street, hated it, then gave it all up to start something creative: a virtual reality company. We quickly became friends. We'd often hang out on Friday nights, drinking beer and playing VR games with his co-founder, Brennan.
Anyway...
Fast forward to September 2019, a few days after I'd hit rock bottom and fired my teachers as a 28-year-old.
Rick and Brennan called me in an emergency. Their virtual reality company was overloaded with demand and everything was breaking. They needed help from someone with a general skillset — a temporary “co-founder as a service” — and I needed to work my tail off to pay down my business debt. It was a perfect match. “Can you start this afternoon?” they asked.
Another month went by, and I found myself zooming down the highway, surfboards in the back, Nate at the wheel, the dreamy vibes of Rüfüs Du Sol playing on the speaker as I read poetry to my Brisbane crew from Rumi’s Little Book of Life. I had two laptops with me: my MacBook and a bulky 17-inch gaming PC for working on VR projects.
Three more weeks passed, and I found myself in Washington DC, visiting a client with Rick and Brennan. We’d hack all day and go rock climbing in the evening. I didn’t like the chilly October weather. We agreed to fly down south for Christmas.
Several weeks later, I was sleeping on a sofa bed in a beautiful loft in West Village, NYC. Two of my closest Sydney friends, Bryce and Pandora, had recently packed up their life and moved to Manhattan. I’d promised to visit by the end of the year, but I had no idea how or when that would happen. Gallivanting around the world was the last thing on my mind in 2019. And yet, there I was, exactly where I promised I’d be.
The calendar flipped to November, and I found myself in Medellin, Colombia. My best mate and brother-from-another-mother, Zac, owns a huge place there, so we stayed with him for a few months. Rick and Brennan brought their girlfriends, and Zac’s girlfriend visited from Brazil. I was the seventh wheel, but I was used to it. It was a fun summer: working, laughing, funneling all of my income into paying off debt. Colombia is great for that: cheap rent and good coffee. That’s all I needed.
Along came 2020, and with it, a mysterious virus emerging from China. I was sorting out my visa at a Colombian immigration office when news of the pandemic hit. Brennan had been following the virus since January; he’d already flown back to Australia. Rick decided to stay in Medellin. Colombia shut its borders. Australia did the same. I figured I wasn’t getting home for a few years. So what was supposed to be a month-long trip to the US quickly turned into an extended stay in Colombia. I don't own anything other than a MacBook, a deck of tarot cards, and some sundresses, so it wasn’t a big deal. As with all things in life, it just is what it is.
As chaos descended on the world, a strange sense of calm washed over me. Something was coming into focus. I felt clear — like I could shine sunlight through my mind and split it into different colors. I hadn’t felt that way for a while. My mind had been a volatile storm for the past eighteen months — two weeks of blue sky followed by months of heavy fog. The Muses don't speak to me in the fog. I can’t get a clear signal.
A few weeks after the global lockdown began, I understood what was happening: Stephen Wolfram announced his Wolfram Physics Project — just like I’d predicted six months earlier in a period of blue sky. The system was re-arranging. I could feel it. It was only a matter of time until Karl Friston began publicly talking about the FEP as a potential theory of everything. And when that time came, I wanted to be ready.
Rick and Brennan’s VR startup was hit hard by the pandemic, so my consulting gig stopped. As fate would have it, I’d just finished paying off my short-term business debt after six months of intense focus. With nothing else to do, and no more problems to solve for my friends, I felt my soul whisper, “If you were waiting for the opportune moment, this is it. Finish what you started. Complete the mission.” I sat at my desk and worked seven days a week, structuring my knowledge into a philosophy that I could clearly communicate to other people.
This was actually quite difficult to do indoors because I walk while I think. I'd clock up a half-marathon each day on my Fitbit, wandering in circles, barefoot, around the living room, trying to deconstruct and articulate highly abstract concepts in my mind. It drove Zac nuts. His five-bedroom penthouse was so large that I barely saw him. But occasionally he’d wander downstairs to tinker with his 3D printers or retrieve a book from the library, and he’d inevitably end up trailing me, throwing little objects at my head, saying, “Goddamnit, Nikki! You’re a nutter! You know that, right?” To be honest, it was a bit rich coming from him. I’d lived with Zac, on and off, for a decade. To describe him as “eccentric” would be an understatement.
After six months of strict lockdown, Medellin began to reopen. I emerged from the apartment, light shining in my eyes, surveying the damage. The tourist area in my local neighborhood was devastated. Friends warned me about higher crime rates as desperate, starving Colombians did what they had to do to get by. Zac was mugged at gunpoint a few blocks from his place, which had never happened before. I’d always felt safe in that area, but I was empathetic to the situation. I’d spent six months trapped in an ivory tower, relatively immune from the economic devastation. Many locals had spent six months without jobs, without opportunities to work online, without pedestrians on the street to beg to or busk for. I could’ve been a criminal if I'd been born into different circumstances. I could’ve held a gun to Zac’s head if The System held a gun to mine.
My work progressed immensely during the quiet quarantine. I channeled hundreds of short essays, all connecting together into a story of our universe. My self-confidence slowly began to return.
That confidence reflected back in subtle ways. One day, I was at my local coffee shop when a stranger tapped me on the shoulder.
“Are you Nikki?” he asked. He was definitely Colombian, but with a slight American accent.
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how he knew my name.
“Okay, so...” the stranger continued, “my friend, Forrest, said you had this thing. A proof, or something. Can I see it?”
I gestured him over to my table, pointed to my laptop, and walked him through a rudimentary, draft version of the 3-step proof that eventually formed the backbone of Gameism.
The next day, a twenty-something-year-old Colombian woman tapped me on the shoulder.
“Are you Nikki?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how she knew my name.
“Okay, so...” she continued, “my friend, Andres, said you blew his mind yesterday. You made a proof, right? I’m a physics nerd. Can I see it?”
I was dealing red pills under the table at my local coffee shop.
I gave one stranger, Juan, a tarot reading that left him speechless. “What the hell?!” he said. “That was scarily specific and accurate. How does that work? I’m a rational guy, but this feels mystical.”
“It’s not mystical,” I shrugged. “It’s just free energy manipulation. It’s math.”
The next time I saw Juan, he’d gone down the rabbit hole, reading scientific papers on the FEP, a short draft of my work, anything he could get his hands on. After years of rejection, being misunderstood, and struggling to find my voice, I was starting to see small glimmers of hope. I believed that maybe — just maybe — I could figure out how to communicate something as complex as the universe in a simple way. Maybe I wouldn’t carry this knowledge to my grave.
A new year — 2021 — rolled by. My Colombian visa expired, so I found myself living in Airbnbs in Mexico. Australia’s borders were still shut, and Mexico offered a generous period of visa-free travel. It was exactly what I needed at the time.
I kept to myself in Mexico. I had one goal: finish what I started seven years earlier in my bedroom when I typed what is reality? into a search bar. I optimized my life around that objective, erasing everything superfluous: people, activities, events. Every day was the same: sit under an umbrella at my favorite cafe in my favorite neighborhood and focus. Go for an afternoon walk. Do another creative session. Workout. Sleep. Repeat. It was a multi-month, uninterrupted, rolling flow state: my idea of pure bliss.
I did take a short break when Eman passed through town. The last time I saw him was in Medellin in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Zac had warned me about the impending arrival of a “smart and ridiculously good-looking Argentinian gentleman” — a friend he’d met through mutual connections at a business thing in Lithuania. I’d heard the guy’s name thrown around throughout the years — “that time Eman and I were at Simon’s villa in Italy,” “That time Eman dove into the lake and rescued the drowning girl,” etc. Zac asked if I wanted to be set up so he could save me from my sad state of perpetual singledom. I wasn’t interested. The last thing I wanted was a distraction while I put the pieces of my life back together.
Nevertheless, a few weeks later, I found myself seated next to a tall man in his mid-thirties with caramel skin, dark eyes, massive biceps, interesting opinions, and an open mind. Zac had mentioned his friend had “a certain effect on the ladies,” and I wasn’t immune to it. The Argentinian and I sunk deep into conversation during dinner, which kicked on to drinks at various local bars when the rest of the group went home. As the night wore on, we found our bodies pressed against each other at a reggaeton club, the scent of cologne and perfume and sweat saturating our senses, his arms wrapped around my waist, my arms wrapped around his neck, dancing into the wee hours of the morning while happy Colombians smashed shots of aguardiente on a little wooden table. The adventure ended with us walking home, plotting the hypothetical heist of a colorful piñata from the neighbouring bar, then making out under the stars on Zac's terrace next to a little waterfall and a potted tree that sprouted berries in the spring.
Mery, Zac's full-time cook, wasn't a fan of our little fling. The moment she figured it out, she chased me around the kitchen, smacking me with her spatula and yelling, “No, Nikki! Hombres son perros! Hombres son perros!” It was a standard warning among Colombian women — men are dogs. “You don't go near Latin men who look like that,” she berated me in Spanish. “They're all womanizers. He'll break your heart.”
Zac was waltzing past the kitchen at the time, roaring with laughter. “You think Nikki's in trouble? That's cute. You don't need to worry about Nikki.”
He was right. I was used to this transient lifestyle with people, places, objects, things floating in and out of my game like a rhythmic tide lapping at the shore. If happiness is reality minus expectations, then I'd mastered the art of a happy nomadic romance. At 28 years old, I was perfectly content to live in the moment, connecting deeply with a human, then saying goodbye as they caught a plane to their next destination. Not everything is meant to last forever, and I'd made peace with that.
That’s not to say I didn’t want to find my person. A bonded pair of scarlet macaws flew past my window every morning, and I never saw one magnificent parrot without the other by its side. Macaws live up to seventy years. That monogamous pair was probably flying over Medellin, side by side, during the Pablo Escobar days — quietly watching the city descend into chaos and rise from the ashes again.
I wanted that. I really did. I dreamed of finding my permanent partner in crime, and laughter, and adventure, and life. I wanted to stand beside a king and build a kingdom together — a home, a family, a legacy. But Eman wasn't that man for me. We connected physically, intellectually, even emotionally — yet we also had fundamentally different goals and values. I didn’t feel the spiritual connection I was searching for; the resonance that comes from a shared vision, a mutual model of reality. If wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your choices, then I’d gained enough wisdom to set a boundary with him. Eman and I enjoyed each other's company, both knowing it was fleeting — and all the sweeter for it.
Yet, the universe always delivers exactly what I need, exactly when I need it. And at 28 years old, a brief romance with a man like him was exactly what I needed.
I remember standing in Zac’s kitchen before the pandemic hit. Eman was cooking dinner while I explained the free energy principle.
“Does that make sense?” I finished.
“Not really,” Eman laughed.
“Yeah, sorry," I sighed. “It's super weird. We don't have to talk abou-”
“Actually, it's super interesting. Why are you apologizing?”
“I dunno,” I muttered as I fiddled with my dress.
He looked at me. “I know you're intelligent. It's one of the things I like about you. But you're a lot smarter than you let on, aren't you?”
“How am I supposed to answer that?” I asked. “If I say yes, then I'm vain. If I say no, then I'm lying.”
“Can I give you some unsolicited advice?”
“It's not unsolicited if you ask me first.”
“Nikki," he said. “Stop apologizing. Don't apologize for who you are. Don't apologize for what you're passionate about. And certainly don't apologize for your intelligence. If other people can't handle it, then they can fuck off.”
I looked at him, head tilted to one side in fascination. “Where does it come from?”
“What?”
“Your confidence,” I said.
He shrugged. “Why wouldn't I be confident?”
There. Right there. That was my problem. Why wouldn't I be confident? I could think of a million reasons why I wouldn't be confident. I could start with the cellulite on my thighs, or how I struggled to verbally articulate my thoughts because my mind moves in multiple directions while my mouth only moves in one. I could then move on to my overwhelming enthusiasm for topics and ideas that most people don't understand, or the shame I feel over the trail of failed projects in my life, or how uncomfortable I become when my bold opinions are perceived as immodest arrogance.
I could easily extend grace towards the perceived imperfections and failures of other people. But to myself? It was a constant struggle for me. As a young girl, the world taught me that confidence was something to be earned by staying skinny, and being well-liked, and neat, and conscientious, and productive, and ‘good.’ Who was I to be happy with myself, exactly as I was? It just seemed so… presumptuous. Immodest. Unladylike.
But there he was — a six-foot-two hunk of muscle with a cheeky troublemaker personality who wasn’t perfect by any means. But what was ‘perfect,’ anyway? He’d get fired up about little things in day-to-day life, and his Latin passion was triggered way too easily in my opinion. He called it having ‘high standards.’ I personally didn’t care about trivial minutia, so I thought he needed to chill. Aussies have a motto: “She’ll be right, mate.” In other words: “Don’t worry about it.”
But then, the previous night, Zac was being an asshole to me and Eman was all over him like a rottweiler, teeth snarling, ready to rip his throat out. Zac looked in my direction and told me to heel my dog, but I didn't want to. I appreciated Eman’s overt disagreeability because I sorely lacked it in my own life; it was an idea I needed to integrate. Plus, I'm a product of evolution, and there was no escaping my biological programming: watching Eman verbally maul Zac on my behalf was kinda hot. I guess ‘perfect’ is a subjective concept, after all.
“I want what you've got,” I said, prodding him in the chest.
“And what's that?”
I could sense it in the air. I inhaled, intoxicated by its aroma. “Power. I want my power back. I wrote over 100,000 words on this thesis last year, and I’m onto something. I know I am. I want to finish what I started.”
“What’s stopping you?” Eman asked while he continued layering the lasagna.
I flashed back to 2019. All the pain from that year washed through my body, deflating my spirit as my ego threw another whiney tantrum. “It’s just... nobody cares about what I have to say,” I mumbled. “No one gives a shit. Nobody wants to hear it.”
This wasn’t strictly true, but fear has a habit of distorting one’s perception. I was parroting words from my well-meaning mother who wanted to keep me safe in a judgmental world (“Nikki, tone it down. When people ask what you’re working on, they’re being polite. They don’t want to hear your thoughts on the universe. No, I’m not telling you to lie. Talk about something else, like... No, you don’t embarrass me. You just can’t go around saying the smartest scientists in the world are wrong. You dropped science in high school. You have no credibility. People will think you’re... No, Nikki, I never said you were crazy. I never said that. Just practice some humility, okay? I worry about you.”)
“What?” Eman said.
“Nobody cares,” I repeated, louder this time. “So why bother? All my creativity does is fuck up my life, drain my bank account, and leave me with a mess to clean up while the world judges me. And for what purpose? Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear it.”
Eman stopped what he was doing, looked me in the eyes, and said, “I don’t give a fuck about what anybody else wants. I want to hear what you have to say. So go ahead and say it. Write what you want to write. Then send it to me when you’re done.”
I never sent it to him.
He called me on it a year later in Mexico. “Why didn’t you send me your book?” he asked.
“Because it’s shit,” I replied. “It’s simultaneously the best creative work I’ve ever produced, and total shit. It’s not good enough yet. I need more time.”
“Are you sure you're not being a perfectionist? Why don't you just release someth-”
“No. I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think you understand how high the bar is for me. Being good is not good enough. If anyone other than my friends is going to take me seriously, then I have to be an order of magnitude better than the academic elites — ten times better than them. I want to be respected, not ridiculed. Respect comes from competence. Competence requires training. Training requires patience.
And then, once I've mastered my metaphorical sword, I also have to get eyeballs on my work. Being right is irrelevant if no one listens to why you're right. So I have to wrap my thesis up in something pretty and palatable, like—”
“—like a practical philosophy,” Eman finished.
“Exactly. I'm not allowed to make bold scientific claims without a Ph.D. I'll get slapped with the crackpot label and dismissed before I even open my mouth. But anyone can be a philosopher on the internet and wax lyrical about life.”
“Wait...” Eman paused. “So your philosophy is a Trojan horse for delivering a serious scientific idea?”
“Pretty much,” I shrugged. “I mean, obviously the philosophy is immensely useful to individuals. But it's derived from the FEP, and the FEP is immensely useful to humanity.
We're currently running our modern society on materialism, which is an operating system built by apes. The gap between our technology, and the wisdom required to safely wield it, is growing at an exponential rate — which is why The System seems so shaky these days. We're gearing up to run powerful applications — like AI and autonomous weapons — on the equivalent of Windows 95. That's a great way to crash our civilization.
And the academic institutions that are supposed to be addressing this issue are obviously incompetent. If scientists are going to do science, then they should do science. But the old men in power are sitting on their thrones as the High Priest of Reason, telling uneducated simpletons like me that I'm 'woo woo' and 'irrational' for not bending the knee to their reductionist deity. I mean, it takes approximately two minutes of critical thought to figure out that materialism is bullshit. And yet I'm the irrational one?
So, basically, the FEP is really important for our young, open-minded scientists to research right now. Like, really important. Like, save-the-goddamn-world important. But they don't realize it yet. So I'm going to make them realize it. I only need one credible, influential person to read my work and start spreading the idea within academia's castle walls. The philosophy is the pretty wooden horse, but my thesis is the payload.”
Eman softly stroked my hair. “You make it sound like intellectual warfare.”
“It is,” I replied, indignantly. “Despots cannot be allowed to flourish, but must be stopped in their despotism. Love of Self, and love of the despot, demands it.
This is the harsh reality of the situation: a religious dictator — King Materialism — has control of our academic institutions — and, by extension, our entire society. He has control of our minds. The king punishes dissenters, and a huge army of biased, brainwashed soldiers defend the border from outside rebels who might challenge the king's regime.
So how does a lone rebel assassinate a guarded king? Step one: get inside the castle walls via a Trojan horse. Step two: rapidly construct a kill zone.”
“What does that mean?”
“The scientific community worships logic and rationality, right?”
“Yeah...” Eman replied.
“So you use The System's rules against itself. I can construct a kill zone from boolean functions, herd all the shit ideas into them, and slaughter them all at once. And there's nothing the materialist soldiers can do about it because I'm right by default. It puts them on the defensive, not me.
Think about it: I can logically dismantle our current scientific paradigm with a single function. With two functions, I can introduce the concept of God, thereby fusing science with spirituality. And, unlike most boring scientific papers, I only need a few minutes of focused attention to do it. I've been testing this on willing guinea pigs at the cafe. What used to take me twenty minutes to explain via writing now takes two. I'm getting faster on that front. Speed is critical.”
Eman grinned. “Is it wrong that I'm turned on by this?”
“Shush,” I giggled. “Step three is delivering the payload: my third and final function — the FEP. It's not enough to assassinate the old king. I need to offer them a new king; a new paradigm to explore. This is the only vulnerability in my logical assault-”
“How come?” he interjected.
“Well, I make a claim in the third function, which means the burden of proof is on me. It's the first time I have to play defence. That's why I'm waiting for Friston to begin aggressively pushing the FEP as a potential theory of everything. Friston is one of the most credible academics in the world. If anyone's going to call me a looney crackpot, then they'll have to call him one too. At the risk of sounding callous, I want to use him as a human shield. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
So that's my audacious plan. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but the fate of the world depends on the quality of our collective knowledge. Improvements in physics, biology, medicine, philosophy... imagine what humans could do if they had the source code of the game. Imagine how many people could be pulled out of poverty with incredible technology wielded by a spiritually-evolved civilization. Now that's a future worth fighting for.
That's all to say... I'm just... I'm trying... really trying... to resist a metric fuckton of entropy here, all by myself, and it's both thrilling and insanely difficult. Every time I reach a new summit, I look up and there's another one ahead of me. Over and over and over again. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and trust that the universe will self-organize in response. I know that one day I'll experience myself as a competent warrior, but today is not that day. My book isn't ready yet because I'm not ready yet. I need more time.”
“You should come stay with me in Spain and work on it there,” Eman teased. After years of planning, overcoming obstacles, and methodical execution, Eman and his son were en-route to Spain, about to start a new life in Europe. Mexico was a short business trip before the final voyage.
“Maybe,” I said as I kissed him goodbye. I have a meticulously-calibrated internal compass, and it wasn’t pointing to Spain. “Or maybe not,” I continued. “Maybe you’ll fall in love with a beautiful Spanish woman in a red dress. I hope Europe is the gateway to everything you ever wanted.”
And with that, he was gone. And I was alone in Mexico again.
As I mentioned earlier, I spent every day at the same cafe in the same neighborhood. It was a gated community full of green grass, trees, happy dogs, joyful kids, beach, and jungle. I’d sip my cappuccino and watch the mothers have coffee together, entertaining their young children with coloring books and banana smoothies. They all looked around my age, give or take a few years. After several wistful glances in their direction, I’d put my head down and continue writing. I wanted what they had, but it wasn’t my time yet. I had work to do. I had to complete the mission.
One Saturday, I settled into my morning session at the cafe and listed my priorities for the day. I intended to book a new Airbnb apartment that afternoon, after my daily walk. I had a week left at my current place.
There were hardly any small apartments to rent in the gated community that I liked so much. The neighborhood was mostly full of large houses and expensive short-term holiday rentals. I'd tried renting nicer apartments before. But while I liked the idea of the amenities, I never actually used them.
You see, I measured my income as a ratio: “if I consult for one week, how many weeks of uninterrupted creative time does that buy me?” Time was the most precious resource I had — especially as a woman — and I hated trading my youth for money. I couldn’t do deep work if I had to context-switch to solve trivial problems. But I also couldn’t do deep work if I didn’t solve trivial problems for food. Hence, to simultaneously do deep work while avoiding starvation, I had to keep my expenses low. Despite the value I created for other people, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought myself something nice.
And that wasn't a new experience for me. Some people struggle with relationships or health or family. I've always struggled with material security. The game was constantly dangling symbols of comfort and luxury in front of me: equity in a rocketship startup, secure cashflow in exchange for my time and commitment. Then it would ask, "Who are you in relationship to this? What do you believe?"
A comfortable life was at my fingertips. If I wanted it, all I had to do was betray myself; was contort myself into someone I'm not. Let me explain why:
Our economy is a symbolic reflection of what we collectively value, and it's no coincidence that society rewards archetypically masculine skills while insisting feminine skills — those involving care, love, nurturing, and fluid creativity — must come cheaply. Women observe hyper-competitive male Wall Street brokers and consumeristic businesses making a fortune. They also observe gentle social workers and primary school teachers making a pittance.
Every day, we watch our kind sisters get pinned against an economic wall and raped by the loud, competitive, dominant alphas. And once the masculine system has had its way with them, these women quietly get back up and care for the children, the sick, the poor, and the elderly — because grace and nurturing is Who They Are.
From a lifetime of this programming, women subconsciously learn that society doesn't value the feminine polarity. Imagine if the brain consistently told the heart that its unique skillset was worthless, but the heart kept beating anyway for minimum wage because it was a heart, not a brain.
Heck, I'm 30 years old and I'm still figuring out how to alchemize my fluid creativity and altruistic tendencies into solid financial security. Getting paid to make other people richer is way less surprising than getting paid to serve the long-term collective interests of humanity when The System still thinks you're a crackpot.
Case in point: this is my life's work — the result of nearly eight years of blood, sweat, tears, being misunderstood, ridiculed, rejected, underestimated, and investing every penny I have — and I'm giving it to you for free; not because it's what humanity wants, but because it's what humanity needs. If I starve in the process of producing it, then so be it. At least I'll end up with thighs like a baby giraffe. And, according to society's values, a female can always derive some distorted sense of dignity and self-worth from that.
As my male best friend likes to say: "Nikki, you already have a monetizable asset: boobs. Worst case scenario, just sign up for OnlyFans and become an intellectual whore. Society might not value your altruism just yet, but they'll pay you by the minute to wear lace lingerie and fake glasses, and talk about recursive algorithms in a sultry voice while they all jerk off. So you do what you need to do for the greater good. You go ahead and mother the world while the world fucks you. We're all counting on your selfless service."
Anyway, back to my story...
On that particular Saturday afternoon, I packed up my laptop and went for my usual afternoon stroll around the neighborhood. As I traipsed along the sidewalk in my floral sundress, a tanned, shirtless guy with sandy feet rode by on his bicycle, narrowly missing a coconut. An enthusiastic labrador ran after him.
***
“So, what sequence of events brought you here, to this conversation in Mexico?” the shirtless stranger asked.
“I got caught in Colombia during the pandemic, then ended up in Mexico, and here I am.” I said.
“Where are you off to next?”
“No idea,” I laughed. “What’s your story?”
We walked and chatted for a while. The labrador ran ahead, bored with our slow pace.
Eventually, we reached a side road that curved into a beautiful jungle area. “I’m cooking lunch with my house mates by the pool. Do you want to join us?” the stranger asked.
I checked the time. I was supposed to be sorting out my new accomodation, but lunch wouldn’t hurt.
I spent the whole afternoon talking to his house mates — a Russian woman and an older man I nicknamed “the Israeli pirate.” They prepared a huge feast: a whole baked salmon, a variety of salads, dessert. I thought I'd have to roll home.
As it turned out, the shirtless guy was moving back to New York in a week — neatly coinciding with the end of my Airbnb booking. The place was exactly what I wanted: quiet, surrounded by trees and nature, five minutes walk to the beach. My room had a huge desk, and the Israeli pirate gave me his spare desktop monitor so I could work from home — something that most touristy Airbnbs lacked. Not to mention the cost — it was half the price of a mediocre short-term rental, and I could move out with two weeks notice.
I loved waking up in the morning to the sound of chirping birds, and sitting outside while massive lizards sunned themselves in the backyard. Every few days, the labrador would scramble downstairs, barking like mad as he chased away the huge monkey-like creatures that snuck into the house to steal his food. I’d occasionally get home from the gym at night to find wild deer wandering around our driveway, or birds perched on the dining room table (we never shut the back door). Animals and nature nourished my soul.
Like I said: the universe always delivers exactly what I need, exactly when I need it. It’s not mystical. It’s math.