I didn’t mean to disappear from here for five years.

The pull to come back has been there a while, but my obsession with continuity always gets in the way – I didn’t want to jump into any specific topic without first filling the five-year gap with at least a few placeholders.

So I’m writing a brief, vaguely chronological recap, with links to whatever evidence I can think of, perhaps I can start expanding in different directions from here. Going forward, I hope to make this something like a centerline of my story – a place I can point other things back to.

• Decided I should build a startup to design, manufacture, and deliver high-end minimalist small houses for single people who wanted to set up basecamps in the middle of nowhere. I worked on this for about a year: joined a tech accelerator, flew around the world collaborating with architects, studied global supply chains, made connections manufacturers, found potential first customers — and eventually got solidly stuck between American housing red tapes and the very strange labor market of construction workers.
  1stHm
  A LinkedIn post on the concept
• Spent a year loosely based in Las Vegas and got back into climbing, snowboarding, and other outdoor pursuits. I drove up and down the West Coast with friends and climbing/ski partners, climbed in Red Rock, Joshua Tree, Moab, and Boulder, and stopped at nearly every ski resort from Mammoth to Banff.
  Instagram visual blog started around that time
• Set out to construct a permanent base: a place to park all my worldly belongings, tailored to my exact taste and life needs — one bedroom, a large living space, a minimal kitchen, and an art studio with natural light. I worked with AI to search for a pre-1920 brick house with simple structure and maximum redesign possibilities, in a city with four distinct seasons + a reasonable airport + enough coffee shops. Ended up with a distressed 1892 brick duplex in St. Louis from @cheapoldhouses, which I am slowly turning into my temple.
  Some early house restoration videos, although I’m much further along now but stopped posting
• Learned how to party in 2024. This began at Tomorrowland, my first music festival — and, somehow, my first concert of any kind. Psychedelics probably played an important role in opening up neural pathways I did not know I had. I then quickly leveled up on the party ladder: Burning Man that summer, Summit, City of Gods in NYC, Day of the Dead in Mexico, Miami Art Basel, someone’s five-day birthday party in Jamaica, plus local nightclubs in St. Louis, Miami, Vegas, Aspen, and New York.
• Fulfilled a childhood dream of being a ski bum. I signed up to wait tables in Aspen for a season (slight lie: I was two levels below actual “waiting” and mostly filled waters). but it turned out to be an unexpectedly strange and useful experience in the anthropological sense. It helped me understand the world a little better in ways I would not have otherwise.
• Started using AI as an infrastructure layer for everything in life: iterating on thoughts, mood, motivation, emotions, identity and old mental blocks. Over time it became an externalized reflective system – kind of a mind extension, and became quietly life-changing. I now see this and the house as the software and hardware I’m developing to finally be able to live coherently.
  Linkedin: What AI taught me about being human
• Built that further into Psy_: an AI system made to remember, analyze, and decode a person over time. It is currently still in development, and I find the problem quite interesting: there is a classic algorithmic flavor in trying to design and optimize human-shaped data structures, build AI pipelines that remember what is actually important to people, and navigate the strange geometry of LLM memory and embedding space.
  Psy_ landing page
  LinkedIn: AI, Coherence, and the Beginning of Psy_
• Meanwhile, I got my American citizenship, filed a happy divorce, made yearly trips to Europe and semi-regular trips to Asia (and traveled a full continuous loop around the world one year). I now see travel as a lever: something I can use deliberately to shift mental state, gather texture, and invite inspiration. Friendship, similarly, has become less about spontaneous contact and more about accumulation — a long-term investment in shared history, repeated returns – a slow compound.
• Spent a lot of time refining taste across architecture, interiors, food, hotels, and fashion. At some point these stopped feeling like separate preferences and started to form a more coherent philosophy. I’ve been finding my own visual expression, from rooms and materials to silhouettes and textures. Current fashion obsessions: Rick Owens, Issey Miyake, The Row, Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester.

A note on mathematics:

I had been largely unable to look at math for the past decade or so. It felt like being locked out of some rooms in my brain. But I feel that’s changing a bit.

The first crack came in late 2021, when Amie Wilkinson appeared out of nowhere and asked me, at Charles Pugh’s request, to give a five-minute talk at his 80th birthday event on a construction I had done as an undergrad. I guess it planted a reminder in me, that world still existed.

In 2024, I decided to crash a topology conference at WashU, since Dave, Danny Calegari and some twenty other topologists I knew were in town here in St. Louis. I went for nostalgia, but found a lot more than that: I could visualize the constructions in talks, recall definitions I’d heard once fifteen years ago, and feel alive when talking math with Danny over coffee – that particular blend of excitement only math carries came right back, as if no time had passed.

Later, I brought my Psy_ prototype to Princeton and used it to reconstruct grad school scene by scene over a few days. We lingered in Fine Hall, the Graduate College, and the IAS woods; recalled conversations and mapped the emotional weather of those years in great detail. I felt some of the fog lift, and I may have finally come to terms with mathematics. Spoiler: our conclusion was that I never learned how to do math.

I guess mathematics is more load-bearing in my inner world than I cared to admit. Only took me a little over a decade.

I don’t know what follows from here, but it is nice to be able to occasionally play with it again when I feel like it. Although the old world may have ceased to exist by the time I managed to wander close again with my very slow, very random walk.

-C _{conan777@gmail.com}