# The Ergodic Reader In 2026, I quit my job of six years at Google. I liked my work. It was technical, client-facing, and deeply rooted in math. It stoked all those academic desires that most jobs can't satisfy. And I know everyone always says this, but my colleagues really were some of the smartest and nicest people I had ever met: the team was packed with PhDs in math, physics, computer science, and statistics. The position's impact was enormous as well. My last product launch, where I was the sole engineer, generated over $1.3B per year—more than the GDP of São Tomé and Príncipe. But eventually I saw my learning rate plateau. After so many iterations, so many launches, so many problems, each day was no longer novel. Soon the pay, the culture, the food—all of it made me feel cosseted, like I wasn't truly challenging myself. The part I was slower to admit: I wanted more than novelty. I wanted to be truly exceptional and compensated like it, but I had stopped becoming either. I abruptly left. When I left, colleagues became concerned to discover I wasn't transitioning to another job, and hesitantly asked where I was going. > "If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path." > > — After Joseph Campbell I told them I didn't know what was next, and that this was the exciting part. I believed it too. After I left, the initial freedom of choice was liberating. I shifted from solving external problems to existential ones—surprisingly, far harder to solve than my past work. I settled on reading voraciously, and told myself that with enough volume the path was ergodic: sample long enough and a single trajectory averages out to the whole space. It was a pretty theory. It was also wrong. An ergodic strategy succeeds in low-dimension spaces, where a recurrent walk eventually covers all possibilities. However, in higher dimensions the walk turns transient and wanders aimlessly. It took me a while to notice I'd turned Campbell into an alibi—proof that not choosing was a kind of wisdom. But I stretched it too far and my indecision carried a pernicious cost. > "A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may be lost forever." > > — After Shizuo Kakutani This is what I was late to learn. A choice's correctness is discovered by the right mix of inspection and commitment. The information I kept reading for comes after making the choice and sticking with it. For now, I picked the one with markets and numbers behind it and set aside the others. I'll probably revisit the decision, but not until I've walked long enough to know whether it was truly right or wrong. — _The Ergodic Reader_