Standing on a bedside at life's crossroads
This article is about: Cancer, Longevity, Digital Nomad and Network States, and how I am on my way to connect the dots (Part 1).
1st, it started from a painful lockdown.
2022 marked a very special year to everyone who lived in Shanghai during lockdown.
To me, it is my ultimation to live with constraints. The constraints on personal finance, my loved ones’ & my health; on the environment & location I am at. The Shanghai lockdown made time for me to learn a new perspective, in fact, several perspectives that I rarely had time to explore while running my company Haalthy. With the fact that I was not able to run Haalthy by sitting at home & the country’s concern on healthcare was only on COVID-19 for unseeable long time, I decided to lay off everyone & gave it a pause.
For 2 months, with limited food & no outdoor activities to do, I explored new things every day. From reading Chip Wilson’s book on how he built Lululemon, to taking videos on TikTok; from preparing for my ACE personal training exam, to understanding Web 3.0 and DAO; from AI, to hardware.
Looking back, it was such a chaotic period where I had no idea where I was heading to. And somehow the universe had helped me re-connect a few dots that I purposely ignored in the past: health, longevity, crypto, AI and digital nomads.
How the 1st 2 dots were connected - Diseases x Digital Nomads
During my lockdown, my 92-year-old grandpa in my hometown Guangzhou when to the hospital. He asked my uncle to call me on video, and it was heartbreaking, because he was saying goodbye to me, ON THE VIDEO.
It was torturing to me that I could not satisfy my dying grandpa’s need to see all his beloved grandchildren one more time in person. Hence, I decided that I had to escape Shanghai at all cost, to see grandpa one more time.
Since then, well I have been escaping without bringing my money, clothes, etc. whenever there was a lockdown, since it happened so sporadically. You guess it right, my life was like a nomad, except that traditional nomad is “resource-based”, but I am baseless.
How the next 2 dots were connected - Longevity x DAO
When I was a kid seeing beggars in the street, I was wondering why the world was so unfair. I had once told myself, if I have 100 RMB, it would be nice to give 50 RMB to people in need, isn’t it?
That’s my naive but pure motivation to become rich, to help people.
But fast forward, as myself became an entrepreneur, I realized that’s not what business is about. Business is about maximizing profit.
Before 2023, I struggled. I have been struggling to find the balance between helping people & become rich, despite that I have accumulated so many resources & tried to learn & do as much as I can. The problem, finally I figured, is about Business itself.
A new form of structure ought to replace “business” in order to balance the two - helping people & become rich at the same time (not become rich first and then help people, which I was told by so many people who had been successful financially).
It was such a disruptive idea if anyone were able to do it! However, it has nothing to do with my passion & experience on health, longevity & on helping people. I still did not know how to connect the dots. But I knew back then, if the dots were not connected, it is impossible to create a world that I would love to live in.
One day, my friend Sky who had been in the crypto space, saw my post on WeChat about longevity & reached out to me. He said:
You have to check out vitaDAO! And you have to go to Zuzalu!
I quickly checked what Zuzalu was about, and found out that it is a pop-up city in Montenegro that gather a group of similar minded people, “to learn, create, live longer and healthier lives, and build self-sustaining communities”
I was immediately hooked! That’s exactly what I envisioned the future community should be. It kinda of remind me of Kibbutz in Israel, that people voluntarily live & work together. And when I visited one of Kibbutz there, there were the happiest people in the world.
And what intrigued me the most, was the longevity conference & its organization vitaDAO - a DAO that funds promising longevity projects in a new way. And crucially, vitaDAO had connecting the dots for me: helping people live better & longer (Longevity) under a new form of “business” (DAO). In fact, it connected more than two dots:
The foundation of longevity is to discovery how to increase not only lifespan but also healthspan; The foundation of DAO is to allow similar-minded people around the world to make decision & work together, and eventually form the Network State.
For someone like me, who worked on cancer data for the past 10 years, you would understand how cancer is associated with aging;
For someone like me, who witnessed my beloved grandpa deteriorated within one year after a fall, you would admire the importance of prevention than treatment for old people;
For someone like me, who succeeded in making my company break-even remotely but failed to control where I would end up living at night, you would appreciate the flexibility provided by your organizations;
For someone like me, who had hard time finding people dedicated to breakthrough research during COVID, you would probably want to join an organization that everyone is taking bold action to be healthy & live longer.