Calibrated Exposure

Excavation is supposed to free you. Dig up the past, understand what shaped you, and suddenly you’ll know what to do next. Except that’s not how it works—the uncertainty principle applies for life too: there’s a trade-off between knowing where you are and knowing where you’re going. When I chose biology over math in high school, it wasn’t really about science—it was my body screaming for agency in a life scripted by others. I don’t remember the chain of reasoning that led to the decision; I suspect it was probably the combination of seeing the messiness of biology and the cleanliness of math. Maybe what I needed was to fail at something I chose myself... a life could be wrong in a way that was genuinely mine. That buried instinct surfaced years later, revealing how self-chosen failures rewrite authorship. But excavation has limits; stir too long, and nothing sets. The limit isn’t absolute burial nor endless excavation. It’s calibrated exposure.

My body wanted to reassert itself. My head kept spinning while my body was working. Going through the motions put me in situations I wished I could extract myself from but had already invested too much to leave. That thinking carried me until the pandemic hit and I was forced to make a choice: either implosion or explosion. At 23, on the verge of finishing a master’s in bioinformatics and starting a doctorate in a field that meant nothing to me, both arrived. The implosion preceded the explosion—a complete reset.

The goal of this essay is not to dig into my past; rather, it’s about choosing when and how to expose buried layers. Sometimes not excavating further helps, sometimes excavating pays off. For the past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my life (as one does). I followed competence first, then stakes. This involved carrying out ‘cheap tests’ to estimate my fit. They were not conclusive, so my excavation went further: my first love. That’s how I landed on football analytics. The work is fun, it is potentially my Ikigai. It won’t save the world but it might save my Mondays. There’s something embarrassing about trading existential stakes for football data. I’m making the trade anyway.

The market doesn’t grant permission. The market grants exposure. I used to think this only applied to finance. It turns out it’s the rule for trauma, identity, and every decision I’ve delayed waiting to feel certain. It took me twenty years to finally shed the armor I built in childhood. It took me thirty to start affirming my identity instead of trying to discover it. Ten years after my first interest in finance, I finally decided to bet on it—to start building models. The market isn’t a puzzle waiting to be solved by the cleverest boy in the room. The need to know must be abandoned. The willingness to bet must be favored. All this sounds like wishful thinking and aimless planning—empty aphorisms. It’s not. No one is reading this newsletter (yet), but I’m committing to posting write-ups of my projects. To risk failing publicly.

One should shift from passive tolerance of tension to active regulation of it. Identity is not discovered, it’s regulated. Agency is not about insight, it’s mostly about timing. Permission is the problem. We excavate the past hoping to find answers to our questions, but the past only reveals how thoroughly we’ve been shaped by forces outside our control. Real agency isn’t about understanding yourself better—it’s about acting in spite of that understanding, choosing failure that’s yours over success that isn’t. I spent years digging up my past hoping for permission to build my future. I realized that transparency is just a control mechanism, and true agency requires acting before you understand.

Act before understanding is complete.