As a child, I spent many days on my own and only ever peeked outside my window when my tummy made noise.

I was never a stranger to starvation, but I was also not a frequent visitor to the Salvation Army. Maybe that was life in a lower-middle-class household.

Reasoning through these problems never helped me understand why my school bag was always missing a lunch box, or why I always had the chore of explaining my home life to my teachers.

Chaos is an old friend of mine. It started out as my debt collector, eventually became a close companion over the years, and is probably one of the few I cannot live without.

What ties us together is the occasional selfish urge to gain particular things. The first occasion was finding a way to silence my teachers stomach while not yet knowing how to add decimals (binary, or everything rounded to 1 d.p.). All I knew was that everyone around me loved cartoons, and that I liked drawing. Inking their favourite characters earned me my first wage: $15 and a few non-gold coins over 8 hours of school (~$1.80/hr).

By the time I faced my first love the canteen lady, I was speechless, my energy lost to looping thoughts of how proud my mother would be to see my bag of gold coins.

Unfortunately, it was not much to her. Still, I was thankful that it matched her average bet on her favourite number, 36, a popular pick among roulette players. A classic example of gambler's ruin.

No matter how many remaining years I spend learning how machines operate, or how many times I derive the same maths formulas, I am certain this knowledge is only here to be applied, and is never meant to stay, much like my current wrinkle-free state.

In other words, on the day I can no longer remember my name, will I still know how to hold a pencil to sketch your favourite character?

But what about the war veterans who can only remember how to hold a gun? Fortunately, I don’t know.