The Value of Authenticity: Reflections on Integrity and Sustainable Growth
After recently publicly admitting that I had worked myself into a minor burnout and needed time to rest and recover, I noticed a temporary dip in the value of my project’s tokens. It was then that a thought crossed my mind: "Damn it, I could be so much more (financially) successful if I were capable of lying and being inauthentic without feeling like I betrayed myself and my own integrity to my values. Personal responsibility sucks sometimes." It occurred to me that I could have easily told everyone that I needed time off to help a family member affected by the Pacific Palisades fire—a plausible excuse that might have preserved appearances. If I had done so, perhaps the value of my tokens wouldn’t have temporarily dipped.
But here's the thing—when I made the decision to share that announcement in all of its vulnerability, the idea of lying didn't even cross my mind. My natural instinct, driven by a well-disciplined commitment to my values of truth and authenticity, was to share precisely what was happening. It was only after the consequences unfolded that the idea of lying crossed my mind as a hypothetical alternative.
The idea that lying would have been more profitable is entirely incorrect. No amount of financial success or short-term gain is worth the cost of compromising your integrity. This isn't just true for me, but it's universally true for anyone with a human conscience.
This reflection highlighted two critical realizations: the unsustainability of my current working model and the reminder of the inherent psychological and cognitive costs of deception—an afterthought that resurfaced only as I reflected on the consequences of my decision to be transparent.
Burnout, Sustainability, and the Importance of Collaboration
The situation stemmed from a clear reality: the way I’ve been working—shouldering the entire project myself with the support of AI and agents—is unsustainable. At this stage, it’s both unrealistic and detrimental to myself and the project. Moving forward, I’m prioritizing funding to hire a quant or finding a team member to handle the development work that I’ve been managing. This will not only allow for distributed workloads but also ensure the project can grow sustainably in the short and long term.
Thankfully, I caught the early signs of burnout before it worsened, so the time I need to rest and recover isn’t significant. But this experience reinforced the importance of building a collaborative foundation. It’s clear that trying to do everything myself is neither sustainable nor aligned with my broader goals for the project.
The Emotional and Cognitive Costs of Deception
Reflecting on the thought of deception led me to revisit something I've long understood: while most people consider lying a bad idea for moral reasons, lying without a justifiable reason (like for the purpose of safety) is also a bad idea even for selfish reasons—it's destructive in ways most people don’t fully appreciate.
Emotional Costs: Guilt, Shame, and Self-Betrayal
For someone who values truth and authenticity, lying creates a deep internal conflict. This conflict arises as cognitive dissonance—a psychological tension born from the misalignment between your values and actions.
The result is guilt, which stems from knowing you've violated your principles. But guilt is only part of the equation. Lying can also induce shame, a far more insidious consequence that erodes your self-esteem. While guilt is tied to specific actions, shame affects your entire sense of self-worth. When you compromise your integrity, you betray yourself, and that betrayal undermines your self-respect.
As Dostoevsky aptly expressed in Crime and Punishment:
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
Deception for the sake of convenience or financial gain is rarely, if ever, worth the emotional damage it leaves in its wake.
Cognitive Costs: The Mental Tax of Sustaining Lies
Beyond the emotional toll, lying places an immense cognitive burden on the deceiver. A single lie doesn’t exist in isolation—it creates a network of contradictions that you must manage indefinitely.
If you aren’t already retarded, lying will literally retard your cognition. Here’s what lying costs your cognitive capacity:
Tracking Contradictions: Every lie generates discrepancies between the truthful and deceptive information you share with others. Keeping track of these discrepancies is a mental task that demands constant attention.
Mapping Social Network Graphs: To avoid exposure of your deceitfulness, you need to understand how the people you’ve lied to are connected in your entire broader social network graph. This involves tracking how information cascades, or flows between nodes, through the network, who is likely to communicate with whom, and what paths exist for contradictory information to meet.
Preventing Information Collisions: You must actively ensure that deceptive and truthful information that contradict each other never cascade to meet within the network. This requires not only vigilance but also continuous mental updates and recalibrations every time you say anything to anyone—meaning you must do this constantly.
The mental processes to conceal deception require constant updating, recalibrating, and monitoring. It’s a form of cognitive multitasking that consumes immense mental energy. The more intricate the initial deception becomes over time, the more it demands from your cognitive resources. The mental maintenance of lying and deception is exhausting and it consumes cognitive resources that could otherwise be applied to creative, productive, or strategic endeavors.
Years before I formally studied mathematics, information theory, and social network analysis, I intuitively understood these dynamics. Life experience taught me the exhausting mechanics of managing deception. Strategic thinking and deception came naturally to me as survival skills. I was one of those teenagers spawned straight from Hell. The wisdom I share with you here about the personal detriments of lying and deceit is what I derived from the practices of self-awareness, introspection, and metacognition that were required of me to evolve beyond being that teenager from Hell, long before I had the technical language to articulate these phenomena and insights that I had derived about these social and psychological dynamics.
Later, discovering all of these frameworks during my education and research blew my mind how much I already intuitively understood before ever being made aware there exists entire theoretical and research fields surrounding these ideas. It’s one of the reasons I consider behavioral economics, behavioral game theory, information theory, and social network econometric analysis so fascinating—not because they taught me something new, but because they validated what I’d already observed through my own experiences and because they gave me the mathematics and technical language to communicate and describe my insights, observations, and experiences.
This experience reaffirmed the enduring importance of values I had cultivated long before I could name them: truth, authenticity, and the refusal to compromise integrity. These aren't just personal principles—they’re the foundation of meaningful, sustainable growth.
The Big Picture: Sustaining Integrity for Long-Term Growth
My recent experience wasn’t just a lesson in sustainability—it was a reaffirmation of my commitment to integrity. While personal responsibility can feel burdensome, it’s also liberating. My refusal to deceive wasn’t a calculated choice—it was instinctual, rooted in values that I’ve worked hard to cultivate.
No amount of money is ever worth destroying yourself over. Sometimes you just need to eat your short-term losses in the name of your long-term gains. The temporary dip in token values is a short-term loss that I’m willing to accept in the context of long-term growth. What I won’t accept is the emotional and cognitive cost of compromising my integrity. No amount of financial gain is worth sacrificing the foundation of trust, authenticity, and self-respect that sustains not just this project, but my sense of self.
This applies to pretty much everything in life, not just money. This isn’t just about one moment or one decision—it’s about the broader principle that governs how I work and live. Deception may offer the illusion of convenience, but it’s ultimately unsustainable. Authenticity, on the other hand, clears the mental and emotional clutter that deception creates. It allows you to focus your energy on what truly matters: meaningful work, sustainable growth, and building something that endures.
Integrity isn’t just a moral choice—it’s a practical necessity. By staying true to my values, I ensure that the foundation of my work is unshakable. Sometimes, that means accepting short-term setbacks. But in the bigger picture, truth and authenticity are the only strategies that truly endure.
well said and well done.
creating something from nothing requires an effort that few can do successfully.
glad that you caught the early signs of burnout and are doing what is needed to keep going in this effort.
I wish that you find team members that share your passion and keep moving forward at even greater speed.