While They're Still Here

A Tuesday that changed nothing, and everything

A few days ago I met someone. She was one of those people who make you feel like the future is genuinely exciting, not just as a concept but as a place you're both going to. Uplifting. Full of energy. The kind of person you leave feeling slightly more alive than before.

A few days later, her father passed away. Sixty-six years old.

I had just met her. We barely knew each other. But something about the timing cracked something open in me that I haven't been able to close since. Because she was so full of life, and then life reminded her, without asking permission, that it operates on its own schedule.

The reflection I didn't want to have

My parents are in their sixties too.

That's the thought I couldn't stop sitting with. Not some abstract meditation on mortality. Just: my parents are in their sixties. Healthy, still here, still calling me, still asking if I've eaten. And I don't spend enough time with them. I know this. I've always known this.

I'm building. I'm chasing. I'm heads-down. There's always a reason why this week is the wrong week to slow down.

I felt guilty. Not the performative kind. The quiet kind that sits in your chest at 1am when you're honest with yourself about what you're actually doing.

And my first instinct, the moment I felt that guilt, was to point at the dream. To say: this is why. The empire, the impact, the legacy I'm trying to build. If I can just make it work, then the absence will have been worth it.

I sat with that instinct for a while. Then I said it out loud to myself and it sounded exactly like what it is: a story I tell to make the guilt easier to carry.

The actual bet

Here's what I'm really doing, if I'm being honest.

I am betting time with the people I love most on a future that is not guaranteed. I am borrowing from the present, from dinners and phone calls and ordinary evenings at home, and investing it into something that might pay off later. Might. On a timeline I can't control. In a world that, as I was just reminded, doesn't owe anyone a later.

This is not a confession that the dream is wrong. I still want to build something real. I still believe that money matters, that impact matters, that what you leave behind matters. I haven't arrived at some clean epiphany where I decide to quit and go home.

But I think I owe it to myself to stop pretending the bet doesn't exist. To stop telling myself I'll make up the time later, as if later is a place I can bank on reaching.

What I actually want to leave

I've said before that I want to build an empire. I mean that. But when I ask myself why, when I strip away the ambition and the narrative and the identity I've built around being a founder, the honest answer is simpler than I usually admit.

I want the people I love to have a better life. I want to be someone my parents can point to and feel that their sacrifices weren't wasted. I want to build something my future children can be proud of, the way I've always been proud of how my father handled the hardest years of the family business.

That's not empire. That's just love, expressed through the only language I know right now, which is building.

The day we die, we leave with nothing. But what we leave to others, that stays. And I'm starting to think the most important things we leave aren't in balance sheets or company legacies. They're in people who remember how you made them feel.

I don't know yet how to fully reconcile the chase with the presence. I don't have a clean answer. I'm twenty-two and I'm figuring it out in real time, and I think pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What I'm taking from this

Not a resolution. Not a pivot. Just a shift in awareness.

I'm going to keep building. But I'm going to try to stop treating the people around me as a constant I can return to whenever I'm ready. They're not constants. Nothing is.

Call your parents. Not because something bad might happen. Just because they're there, right now, and that is already more than some people have today.

I didn't know her father. But I'm grateful he existed, because losing him reminded me, a stranger his daughter met a few days before, to not wait.

---

Related: I Was Thinking About the Launch When I Crashed the Car and Why I Came Home — two earlier posts on the same tension. The cost of building, and the math that brought me back to Malaysia in the first place.