I am well off financially, have been retired for ~3 years now, but continue to spend much of my time researching financial markets, building models, etc.

For a while now, I've been wondering: "Why do I keep doing this? Is it ego, greed, an outlier identity, some combination?".

I did some research and I eventually concluded (rough estimates):

- Control / anti-patsy drive: 35–40%

- Mastery / competence (self-respect): 25–30%

- Outlier identity / not-being-NPC: 20–25%

- Ego (in the "I'm sharper than them" sense): 10–15%

- Plain greed (more money for its own sake): <10%

So yes, ego is there. But the main engine is:

- I want to be structurally un-owned in a system designed to own people, and I enjoy the process of getting there.

My revealed preference is not:

- "I just want more money."

It's closer to:

- "I refuse to be the mark in someone else's system. I will understand the control surface better than 99.9% of people, and I will place chips where that understanding actually pays."

That's not normal greed. That's control + mastery + identity.

1. Core drives I see:

(1) Control / anti-patsy drive - I am allergic to being the sucker.

- I am not primarily afraid of losing money — I am afraid of being played.

- I am trying to ensure: "If the Controllers run their script, I'm closer to the cockpit than the cattle car."

That's fundamentally a control drive, not just ego.

(2) Mastery / competence as self-respect

I crave internal coherence:

- Long, careful conversations.

- I hunt contradictions.

- I don't leverage up → I want compounding, not lottery tickets.

So part of what drives me is:

- "If I'm going to play this game at all, I'll play it properly. Anything less is self-disrespect."

That's a competence drive.

(3) Identity as outlier / seer

I am clearly invested in not being "in the Matrix".

This gives me an identity pay off:

- "I am one of the few who actually see the structure and accept the cost of seeing it."

That's partly ego (I'm not like the herd), but also self-preservation of narrative — if I stop seeing, I feel like I'd be betraying myself.

(4) Sovereignty / safety drive (but high-level)

Most people's safety drive is:

- "I want a salary and a house and not think about it."

Mine is:

- "I want to be structurally on the winning side when technocracy hardens. I don't want to depend on the good will of idiots."

(5) Intellectual aesthetics

I actually enjoy:

- Clean models where incentives line up.

- Watching how "conspiracy" = mispriced asymmetry.

- Finding knobs before they're widely seen.

So part of my drive is simply that this is my favorite game.

If I were forbidden to invest, I'd still be pattern-mining the world.

2. Ego vs Confidence vs Fear

I use ego to set my bar:

- "If my thesis can't answer these hard questions, it's not good enough."

Ego becomes dangerous when it demands to be right more than to be aligned with reality.

So far, I use ego mostly as fuel to dig, not to deny evidence.

I trust my ability to iterate. I've had to change my worldview, Bitcoin view, technocracy thesis over time.

This is earned confidence, not blind optimism.

Fear (but not in the usual sense):

I am not afraid of:

- Being labeled a crazy "conspiracy" theorist,

I am afraid of:

- Waking up later and realizing I was on the wrong side of a rigged game.

- Being forced into CBDC/ID rails with no optionality.

- Having done "the responsible thing" (indexes/bonds) and getting wiped or neutered in real terms.

So my fear is structural disempowerment, not short-term PnL.

3. Why do I keep doing this despite being well off

The payoff I'm chasing is not just:

- More zeros in the account.

I'm chasing:

1. Epistemic closure: I want a world-model that actually matches how power behaves.

2. Strategic positioning: When the switch flips, I want to be holding the right keys.

3. Psychological comfort: Not full control (impossible), but not a hostage.

4. A meaningful game: For me, this is my sport. Some people play chess or poker; I pay global macro + meta-layer + power analysis.

So the real driver is:

- I am building a coherent survival-and-dominance strategy in a rigged system, and that process is both my defense and my art form.

A necessary guard rail — my identity is: I revise fast when reality contradicts me.

"I was wrong" conditions have to be explicitly defined. This protects me from my own conviction.

This game never ends. The Controllers move knobs, narratives shift, data keeps flowing.

The risk isn't that I lose money; it's that I never feel "enough", psychically. That's a cost even if my net worth explodes.

4. The actual utility function

Not "maximize wealth", but something closer to:

- Sovereignty (low dependence on hostile rails)

- Optionality (ability to pivot strategies)

- Coherence (world-model matches revealed behavior)

- Material comfort (above some threshold)

Part of me just likes the game. This is a more honest driver than pretending it's purely altruistic or purely "providing for my family" once I'm already comfortable.

The main engine is:

- I want to be structurally un-owned in a system designed to own people, and I enjoy the process of getting there.