There’s a particular pause that happens in every conversation with people I went to college with. Someone asks what I do, I say analyst at a capital management firm, and they look at me a second too long. Then: wait, weren’t you the philosophy person?
Yes. I was the philosophy person. I’m still the philosophy person, in the sense that the only really interesting question is still “what do you actually mean.” I just did some other things between then and now.
After college I had a plan, which was law school, which would have been a bad plan. Instead I spent a year in a master’s program in business analytics, which I picked over law school the way you pick a bet you think you can win. Then I got hired as an analyst at the firm I’m at now, where I do something I couldn’t have explained to twenty-year-old me using any of the vocabulary I had then. Philosophy major. Business analytics master’s. Finance analyst. The path between those three points is the entire reason this newsletter exists.
This is the kind of path the internet, in 2026, has approximately zero good advice for. I went looking, and I found three lanes, none of which sat in my seat. The tech-bro tactical lane sells you a FAANG resume template. Great if you majored in CS, useless if you majored in anything else. The anti-work lane sells you autonomy without ambition, which is fine if that’s what you want, and I’m sure it’s what some people want, but it’s not what I want and I don’t think it’s what most of my friends want either. The third lane is LinkedIn, where millennials are cosplaying as relatable and Gen Z is reading it as cringe.
There’s a fourth corner none of them sit in. Pro-ambition and anti-corporate-bullshit, which I don’t think are opposites. You can want autonomy and you can want to do hard, interesting work. You can want to build something weird on purpose and you can want it to be competent enough to back the weirdness up. I think there are a lot of us. We just have nobody talking to us.
So this is what I’m going to try to do here.
I’m going to write about the meta-skill of making a non-obvious path read as an asset instead of a flaw, which is something I had to figure out the hard way and which philosophy, ironically, prepared me for better than business school did. I’m going to write about the skills worth stacking in 2026 and which ones are noise, which I have opinions about because I picked some and not others and I can tell you what the picks did. I’m going to translate the business world into English. I sit inside a capital management firm and I can still hear the jargon as jargon, because I remember when it was opaque. And occasionally I’m going to take a viral career-advice TikTok and ask whether the math actually works, because 94% of Gen Z has admitted to following viral career advice that turned out to be wrong, and I think the audience is ready for someone to be honest about it.
What this won’t be: optimization content. I have nothing against productivity, but I’m suspicious of the idea that your early twenties are a problem to solve. I won’t tell you to wake up at five. I won’t tell you to manifest. I won’t promise you a six-figure remote job by the end of the quarter. I’m a year out of grad school. I’m not a guru. The whole appeal of writing this now, instead of ten years from now, is that the path between philosophy major and finance analyst is recent enough that I still remember every move that didn’t make sense at the time.
If you’re a humanities grad watching your CS friends get offers while you stare at a job board, this is for you. If you’re a year out of college and underemployed and tired of being told to manifest a better situation, this is for you. If you took a “safe” first job and now wonder if your degree is going to atrophy entirely, this is for you. If your path so far is what other people might call non-linear and what you might call, honestly, a little embarrassing to explain at a party, this is for you.
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