So What Am I Doing Here?

Me: Yea I'm definitely interested in going to Japan

Future Boss: Well if you're still interested when you're sober I'm going to send you an email Monday

9 months, 6,710 miles, a massive earthquake and tsunami later...

To be honest I didn't really have any ambition to move to Japan before this opportunity came along. So what am I doing here?

Well the most literal answer to that question would be working- for those really interested I'll be giving it the old college try to explain what I do in the least dull way I can think of in a bit. The opportunity came along rather unexpectedly, to come and work in Japan and I took it.

Why Japan? I mean I was gainfully employed with a career doing something I didn't hate, in cool fun city where I had lots of friends and family, and a really, really sweet apartment. Again, the easy answer is that it was a good career move. I would get experience, and make connections that would open a whole new set of doors for me, while at the same time preserving all the inroads I had made back in Boston.

But the more honest answer was that things were becoming a little too comfortable. It was easy to see my future kind of unfolding on autopilot. In my routine time seemed to fly by quicker and quicker things I had planned on doing kept getting pushed back. My trip to Brazil last fall helped crystalize this a bit in my mind, time slowed down, each day brought a new and unique experience. Moving to a new place would be a way to break up the routine, slow things down force myself to figure out new ways of doing things. The observation that time seems to speed up when your in a routine is hardly original, here is author Steven Johnson, via Ben Casanocha

And then there's the passage of time. Another old friend -- my oldest, in fact -- wrote an email to me after I told him the news of our move. We've both been in New York for two decades, and we are both watching our kids growing up at lightning speed. "Change like this slows down time," he wrote. When you're in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate -- was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving -- figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment -- means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, suddenly are thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you aware of the passing days and months more acutely. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.

Tokyo is about as different as I could get in the developed world. The language, culture, food, and daily life in general are constantly stimulating and filled with challenges, frustrations, and rewarding experiences. Do the sum of these positive and negative experiences add up to make Tokyo an objectively better place then Boston? Of course not, it's a silly question. Without a doubt my life is more difficult and challenging here, but that's not because of Tokyo itself, but because of the experiences I bring (or don't bring) to it.

Tokyo certainly has the potential to be just as comfortable as Boston, likely even more so. But to me right now, it's still a jungle, and that makes it quite an exciting place to be. I hadn't really considered moving to Tokyo before, but now that I'm here it's difficult for me to imagine another place that I would rather be. I like that Tokyo is in many ways inaccessible to foreigners, it will take time, knowledge and experience to find the really good stuff. There's a sense of pride about living in a place that doesn't offer up all it's treasures to just anyone just passing through.

So anyway I promised I would try and explain what it is I technically do here, this bit is strictly IYI. Really I only continue because people in Tokyo seem to be genuinely surprised that I'm here as a young person doing something not related to teaching English.

So anyway, I'm an Actuary working for a large multinational insurance company (well technically I'm one test away from being an official one). Now what is an actuary? It's a question, we tend to get a lot, and despite this frequency of the question no one seems to have a good answer and it is a constant source of dread for those of us in the profession. According to the Society of Actuaries website

An actuary is a business professional who analyzes the financial consequences of risk

Sounds sexy right? Sometimes we actuaries have been known to "quantify risk" as well. The main problem I have with this class of definitions is that their primary goal seems to be to impress upon the reader/listener the importance of the profession rather then relating it to them in a way that seems intuitive. Of course virtually no one is impressed when you say this and usually you just convey the sense that you think the reader/listener should be impressed by you, which invariably leads them to think that you are a douche.

To be fair, I don't tend to do much better. My standard bar tailored response is something along the lines of "Oh, I do math, and statistics stuff for an insurance company." You see I've cleverly avoided the "come off like a douche " trap by being dismissive, I recognize that you probably aren't interested in the particulars of what I do, and implicitly support this belief. I've told you just enough to mentally sort me into the bland "professionals" bucket and we can move on to a more interesting topic of conversation.

I believe the root of the problem is that Actuaries belong to a class of professionals which operate in kind of the nuts and bolts of the modern economy. It's the kind of behind the scenes work that rarely, directly interacts with your average person's daily life and for which people have very little intuition.

My theory is that you can sort professions into two broad categories. Those whose professional knowledge would be valuable if you were suddenly stranded on a desert island, and those who would be jostling not to be the first one cannibalized.*

In the first group you have your doctors, engineers, farmers, etc. In the second you have your investment bankers, accountants, actuaries etc. (personally I think the ibanker gets eaten first, he's clearly the most likely to steal your coconut when you're not looking). People have very good intuition about what professions in the first group do because they understand the tangible impact on their lives that they have. The second group is really only valuable in a modern developed economy, defined by laws and professional standards of practice. Their value comes in facilitating the interactions that are necessarily to keep the whole engine running smoothly.

So what do Actuaries facilitate? Actuaries are concerned with a very particular kind of transaction. Specifically when one person wishes to exchange the financial consequences of some future event to some other person. The type of transaction people are most familiar with is insurance. If a fire destroys my factory that will be very expensive for my business, I would like to transfer the financial consequences of that event to someone else so I purchase a fire insurance policy.

Some parties demand compensation for this transfer of risk, like private insurance companies. Some do not, as in the case of government social insurance programs, or companies which view the provision of a pension as a benefit to their employees. But, everyone is concerned with how expensive assuming these risks will eventually be, what regulatory restrictions apply, and what strategies can be employed to make sure the entity in question can be relied upon to pay out future debts.

Actuaries advise these parties either as independent consultants or as employees in their service, as I am. By advise I mean explain explain the financial consequences of entering into a given risk transfer arrangement. In my case I work for an insurance company. In the grand scheme of things the two classes of people I exist as an intermediary between are policy holders or my company's customers and my company's shareholders or owners. Now in reality there are many other intermediaries who separate me from both of those people, insurance agents on one end, and my company's senior management on the other.

On a day to day to day basis what do I do? Well actuaries serve in many capacities at large insurance companies, but I currently work in a pricing area. We develop new products or reprice existing products which may be obsolete or unprofitable. Basically we figure out what the terms and conditions of the contract will be and get regulators and our internal risk management to buy off on what we want to do. In practice these means building models to produce financial projections of proposed transactions, putting together exhibits, writing memos etc. Lot's of the work can be tedious and boring at times, but the work needs to be done with care and the consequences of botching it can be huge (see AIG).

Despite my generally dismissive attitude in my bar tailored actuary description there is actually quite a bit about actuary work I do find interesting. Behind all the spreadsheet work, memos, and tables are some questions that are really impossible to answer. Investigating these things can be interesting, and can often lead to some surprising results. But I think I've gone on long enough already.

Now that I've gotten this out of the way I can go back to finding funny pictures.

*Relax, smart ass, I know this analogy breaks down in all kinds of ways, entertainers, programmers etc. But those people are generally responsible for things people interact with on a daily basis media, computer programs etc.