The earliest enlightenment of value, in a sense, was the phrase "Equivalent Exchange" from Fullmetal Alchemist; of course, a patch is needed—you still have to accept that after putting in effort or sacrificing something, you might end up with nothing.

I’m still quite envious of my peers—their campus life, sunny youth. Of course, it might just be that I didn’t take this path, so I’ve overly romanticized it. But if I were to live a very ordinary, very normal life, I probably couldn’t stand this kind of decay either. It’s my own doing—I just can’t stay idle.

Today, I worry about this company’s financing; tomorrow, I worry about that company’s business issues; the day after, I worry about whether the project I’m working on with my buddy will have misalignments or oversights. Even though I live with a lot of anxiety every day, perhaps years later, whether I succeed or fail, I’ll have lived a very different life.