40

My birthday was January 11th 2026. I am now 40 years old. Alone in Ras Al Khaimah. Which if you don’t know is what happens when you can’t afford Dubai anymore.

I moved in yesterday. Studio apartment. AED 32,000 a year which sounds like a lot until you do the math and realize it’s like $8,700 USD for twelve months of rent, which is what people in Manhattan pay for six weeks in a shoebox next to a rat. So actually I’m winning. Or am i? The apartment is beachfront. Hayat Island. “Prime location” according to the listing. I’m staring at the Arabian Gulf right now and it’s beautiful and I feel nothing.

hayat island

40 years old with nothing to look forward to, no car, no house. No children. No equity. No passive income streams. No accomplishments that I could point to at a dinner party not that I get invited to dinner parties. What I have is a mass of savings that’s getting lighter by the month, a laptop, a Binance account, and the same LinkedIn profile I’ve been polishing for fifteen fucking years. “Open to opportunities.” Yeah. Me and every other guy who got spat out by the machine.

I lost my job at DIFC a few months ago. The Dubai International Financial Centre. Which sounds prestigious when you say it fast. Glass buildings. Men in good suits. The illusion that you’re participating in something that matters. Then one day you’re not, and you’re googling “cheapest emirates to live in” at 2am, and the algorithm serves you Ras Al Khaimah like it’s doing you a favor.

So here I am. Back to hustling. Again.

Let me tell you about Dubai since we’re here.

Dubai is a city built on the principle that if something looks expensive it basically is expensive and therefore you are successful for being near it. The tallest building. The biggest mall. The indoor ski slope in the desert. It’s Disneyland for people who think wealth is a personality trait. I lived there for years. I worked with crypto influencers: seven of them, if you’re counting and I can tell you for free and with full confidence that every single one of them is a worse person in real life than they are online. Which is saying something because online they’re already insufferable.

They scam. Their online personalities, friends, on business partners, and most think the world revolves around them (feedback from followers/subscribers). They talk about “building communities” while extracting every dollar from the communities they build. They post gym selfies and gratitude journals and “gm” tweets and behind the scenes they’re all scrambling, desperate, hollow. Dubai is perfect for them. The whole city is a green screen. Nothing is real. Everyone is performing. The Lamborghinis are rented. The Rolex watches are financed. The smiles are exhausted.

And I’m not saying I’m better than them. That’s the thing. I’m not. I played the same game. I wrote the research reports. I helped build the narratives. I told myself I was “providing value” because the analysis was good, the thesis was sound but at the end of the day I was just another guy making content for the casino. Giving people reasons to put money into things that would probably go to zero. Was I lying? Not technically. Was I helping? I honestly don’t know anymore.

Crypto is a rigged game but so is everything else. At least crypto is honest about being fake. Traditional finance pretends there are rules.

I’m 40.

At 20 I thought I’d have it figured out by 30. At 30 I thought okay, 35 for sure. At 35 I thought maybe 40 is when it all clicks, when the compound interest of effort finally pays off, when I wake up one day and feel like I’ve arrived somewhere.

I’m 40 and I’m applying for jobs. Again. Updating the resume. Again. Tweaking the cover letters. “I’m excited about this opportunity”, no I’m not, I’m desperate, but you can’t say that. “I believe my experience in digital assets research” yeah, my experience watching grown men lose their life savings on coins named after dogs, my experience being the smartest guy in rooms full of scammers, my experience knowing exactly what’s happening and being powerless to do anything except participate.

I have plans. I always have plans. Start a Discord community. Share the research there. Maybe YouTube. Build an audience. Monetize. Become one of those guys with a following who can say “I don’t need a job, I have a platform.” The dream of every laid-off millennial. Become your own media company because the actual companies don’t want you anymore.

But I’ve had these plans before. Multiple times. And I’m 40 now, and the plans are still plans, and I’m still here, staring at a beach I can’t enjoy because enjoyment requires money and money requires either a job or a hustle and the job market is cooked and the hustle is exhausting and what the fuck am I even doing?

The question I keep coming back to, alone in this studio on my 40th birthday: Is the game rigged or am I just bad at it?

Because if it’s rigged then I can stop blaming myself. I can say “the system failed me” and feel righteous about it and join the ranks of folks who know the truth about how the world really works. But if it’s me, if I’m the problem then I have to sit with that. I have to accept that other people made it and I didn’t, that the opportunities were there and I fumbled them, that 40 years of choices led me to a studio apartment in the cheapest emirate, starting over again, alone.

I don’t know which is worse.

Probably both are true. The game is rigged AND I’m bad at it. The system is broken AND I made mistakes. The world is unfair AND I am responsible. These things can coexist. They do coexist. In me. Right now. On my birthday.

I thought about ending this essay with something hopeful. “But I’m not giving up. I’m going to keep going. The best is yet to come.” That’s what you’re supposed to say. That’s the redemption arc the algorithm rewards. Vulnerability followed by determination. Darkness followed by light.

But I don’t feel hopeful right now. I feel tired. I feel like I’ve been running on a treadmill for two decades and the scenery hasn’t changed. I feel like ambition is a disease I caught when I was young and never recovered from, and it keeps telling me “more, more, more” while delivering less, less, less.

Maybe that’s okay to say. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the only honest thing I can write at 40 is: I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know if it’s going to work out, and I’m still here anyway, for reasons I can’t fully articulate.

The sun is setting over Hayat Island. It’s actually gorgeous. I should probably go outside.

I probably won’t.

view from my balcony