What would happen if I died tomorrow?

Someone asked me this question recently. Kinda morbid, but I think I was more surprised that I didn't have a good answer.

Have I done enough to justify my existence? Have I been a net positive to the world? If someone erased my existence from the timeline, would the world look any different? Would people miss me? Would I have left a legacy?

Temporal discounting

I think the reason this question hit me so hard is because it made me realize how much of a role temporal discounting has, so far, played in my life. Put simply, temporal discounting is the tendency to value immediate rewards more than future ones. It's why we procrastinate, why we eat junk food, and why we don't save for retirement. But it's also why, for most of my life, I didn't really think about what I was optimizing for in the long term.

Even as I'm now building a startup, I find myself thinking about the next few months, the next year, but it's really hard to think about the next 10 years, or 20 years. I also kind of landed in this space by accident — at the time, I was trying to avoid serving the military as an infantry soldier, so I decided to apply to serve as a cybersecurity specialist instead. I borrowed a 500-page textbook from my teacher, read it cover to cover right before the test, and somehow got in. I didn't think that a few years later, I would be competing in the DEF CON CTF finals, or that I would be making a salary within the top 1% of people my age doing freelance pentesting, or that I would be building a startup in cybersecurity.

Even when I ultimately went to Cambridge, I didn't really think about what that would have meant for my life once I graduated. I just had a vague idea that it would be prestigious and would unlock some doors for me. Ultimately, it did get me a prestigious internship which I ended up not taking, and I could have just as easily started Hacktron 2 years ago without ever going to Cambridge.

Perhaps I wouldn't have met my current investors, or perhaps I would have met them in a different way. I wouldn't know.

What to optimise for?

Now that I have this realization, I think the question becomes: what do I want to optimize for? What should I be doing so that 10 years from now, if I were to die, I would feel like I had lived a life worth living?

I think growing up, this had meant different things to me at different times. When I was younger, for the longest time, it was about being the best at something. I refused to be average, and I guess if I had died the moment I hit my dream rank in League of Legends, I would have felt happy with my life.

At some point in the past few years, it became about making money. This was kind of a means to an end, because I thought that I wanted to buy my parents the best bungalow in Singapore and give my grandparents the best life possible. I thought if I got the highest paying job I could, I would be happy.

But I think I realized that this was a bit of a dead end. Put bluntly, I see this as just rebalancing a single coordinate in the universe — the world would be different if I had never existed, sure, but if you were to erase a few more people (like my parents and grandparents) from the timeline, the world would still be the same. This was sort of the bare minimum I could do to justify my existence as a zero-sum to the universe.

I think I want to optimise for scalable impact. I think there are many ways to make an outsized impact on a small number of people — just consider how many strangers you've met in your life that have influenced you in profound ways. But I think if someone has the ability and resources to do this on a much larger scale, they have a moral obligation to do so. I think startups are still the best way to do this, but again, what does impact even mean? Is it small incremental improvements to the world, in which case we can achieve a good approximation of the optimal solution with a hill climbing algorithm that chooses at each step the best local improvement? Or is the optimal solution something that is fundamentally different, and requires careful consideration of the problem space at the very beginning (and once you get it wrong, you can't really fix it)?

2 months

Even this goal is full of contradictions. If I had 2 months left to live, my priorities would likely shift dramatically towards a local optimum — I would want to spend time with my family and aim to make an outsized impact on a few people that I am close to.

Some people are just worth more than others, and I think that's okay. I told the person who asked me this question that if they had 2 months left to live, they should spend it travelling the world, and I would drop everything to join them, because I knew they would have done the same for me.

Risk aversion

I think that's part of why sometimes I find this path so scary. Prospect theory tells us that we are risk-averse when it comes to gains, but risk-seeking when it comes to losses.

If I were to die tomorrow, choosing a "safer" path would mean that I would have lived a life that was less impactful, but it would have been impactful nonetheless since I would have been able to provide for people I care about and spend much more time with them. The risk-seeking path, on the other hand, would have had much more potential for impact, but the losses from failure (or dying tomorrow) would have been much more pronounced.

But if we think about this from a rational perspective, the expected value of the risk-seeking path is still higher. It would be really sad if I were to die tomorrow, but that's likely not going to happen. But if there's a chance that I could do something that changes the world profoundly, then pure statistics would tell us that it's worth taking that risk.

The point?

I keep circling back to one question:

How can a single life compound beyond itself?

The answer I keep landing on is work that continues to widen its radius even when I am no longer around to steer it. Start-ups are my chosen vehicle, but the deeper principle is leverage: building systems, tools, or ideas that unlock the efforts of thousands of others.

There have been some small examples of this in my life so far. One example: I started a CTF team in Singapore that became the top team in the country for some time and qualified for a bunch of international competitions, showing to many that Singaporeans can be competitive at the highest levels of competitive hacking globally. I've left the team and am no longer active in CTFs, but the team is still active and the secondary effects that we created are still being felt today.

Because leverage rewards patience, my best hedge against the chance of “dying tomorrow” is to live today as though I might, while still investing as though I won’t. Concretely, that means:

1. Designing for continuity — doing things with the expectation that I will not be around to see them through.
2. Choosing problems with second-order effects — solving security will create a safer world that outlives me. If I ever get the opportunity though, I want to work on climate change. That's the single biggest problem of my generation, but right now I don't have the skills or power to tackle it.
3. Measuring impact the way investors track compound interest — returns are tiny at first, but they grow exponentially over time. If we do the most locally optimal thing at every step, we will eventually get pretty far.

If the experiment fails, at least I will have spent my finite hours pushing on the biggest fulcrum I was capable of finding, and sharing that journey with the people who matter most. And if it works, the value created will dwarf anything I could have done by playing safe. Either way, the only unacceptable outcome is to leave the lever untouched.

So the next time someone asks what would happen if I died tomorrow, I hope the honest answer will be: “Less than you’d think, because the work is built to outlive me.”