An Old and Bitter Hungarian Man

It’s 6.30am in Vancouver, and towards the end of my run around the beautiful Stanley Park, I decided to pass by the calisthenics park and do a few pull ups. I meet there a 65 year Hungarian old man who was doing working out on his own. I engaged conversation after doing my set and asked him whether he was from here. He quietly nodded. I told him how amazing his city was - being ecstatic from the absolutely stunning sunrise run I had just experienced. He quietly nodded again, and added “but very expensive…”. And he said this with a notable and peculiar bitterness.

I was not expecting such bitterness from a 65 year old man who was strong and healthy enough to be doing such serious pull ups at 6 in the morning. It just was a bit odd, and unlike how one expect a conversation to be started - so I of course got curious, and started asking questions - and it went on for about 30 minutes. Here is what it taught me about B2B SaaS. Just kidding, but it did make me reflect quite a bit.

As we started the conversation, what struck me even more than his first comment was his eloquence and intelligence. Again - another thing that one would not associate with bitterness and complaining about “everything got too expensive”. He spoke like a man who understood life, who understood people, and who was clear minded about the reality of the world - and all of this without arrogance. He spoke like a man who, would he not have been so bitter, I would have thought had a life of culture, education and prosperity. But no - he had that singular bitterness in his tone which didn’t leave him for the entirety of the conversation, unmpromptedly complaining to a man he had just met about his city having become too expensive for him.

So he started, and he kept talking, not asking me a single question about who I was, where I was from, and what I was doing here. He touched on every single thing that had been corrupted by money. First, it was the housing market in Vancouver, and how speculative investment from companies and banks, and foreign money had completely and artificially inflated the prices in a way that made it impossible to live for the locals - for the “normal people”. Airbnb crisis, big universities and student influx made it ever worse - a “perfect storm for disaster” as he called it. He was bitterly recalling how he missed the opportunity to buy a condo in downtown Vancouver 15 years ago for 300k CAD - these condos are now worth more than a million. “I thought it was too expensive back then, but I had the means to make the move - little did I know…”. And all of this, he was saying with the most impressive eloquence and precision, rightfully correcting me if I had done any approximation in my answers, and giving precise examples of things that created or worsened the problem. This guy was just very smart and also had good morals, and it was just sad to hear how the city he had built an honorable life in, working decently, suddenly became too expensive for him to peacefully enjoy rightfully deserved retirement.

And then Sports started being discussed, and the impossibly expensive tickets of the overpaid hockey players of his favorite team, or of the upcoming football world cup in North America (including in Vancouver). “When money enters the picture, it just slowly corrupts everything - you’ll see, one day Dubai will want to organize the Winter Olympics, it just makes no sense whatsoever and costs a fortune that would make the life of so many people much better”. Interestingly, we also discussed how Chess was an exception in the world of sports, because even though it has radically metamorphosed in recent years with a lot more money involved, it remains ran by people who play the game and love the game. This is unlike basketball, football or other popular sports which have become cash cows for investors that never played the sports in their lives nor care about it in the slightest - and of course, to the great disservice to the sport. But that was just a short digression from the bitter rant.

He eventually argued that none of this was new, that it was all cyclical part of history, that the Romans, the Greek, the French all lived through this - “either you pursue the carrot forever, or you hold the stick - it’s always been like this. One day, the people pursuing the carrot can’t take it anymore, and you have a revolution, but sooner than later, it’s again exactly the same thing, just with different people holding the stick”. So I asked the bitter man, as he also has a young son about my age (studying chiropractic at UBC) what would he do if he were 25 years old again with the knowledge he has today of how the world has shaped up to be. I had to rephrase and precise - “if you were 25, would you come and fight war in crazy expensive big cities, or you’d just go hide in a small town and make your life there far from this chaos”. I rephrased again: “would you try to hold the stick, or pursue the carrot in the peace of your little town”. He laughed, and eventually admitted that the only way was to find a way to hold the stick - because following the carrot, sooner or later, one ends up being fucked in the worse of ways.. The both of us hate this reality, but the both of us know that holding the stick is the only way to survive. And so we looked at each other - a 65 year old bitter man, encouraging me, a 26 year old stranger, to somewhat be part of what he hates so much.

We exchanged warm smiles, wished each other the best of days, and I left back to my Airbnb in Downtown Vancouver.