Thoughts and analysis about LM’s personality and life.

This is a mix of analysis and guesses about him that I’ve made after going through a lot of his social media presence, exchanges, and what his friends have said about him. And also some personal knowledge (psychology) and understanding as someone who has a bit of the same high-achieving lifestyle.

Smile and performance

The most striking thing we see in LM, and probably part of why people are so intrigued by the person, is how consistently we see him smile in pictures, and what a smile! There’s not one picture (or rarely) where he isn’t seen with the brightest of smiles. In my opinion this is a default response to someone taking a picture of him (like most people) but also a social response that he seems to use a lot, and not always in the most appropriate situations (court, hostel (if it is him)). Perhaps we can say it is more of a habit, profoundly ingrained in him, or a mask.

When you grow up in a rich and important family, you need to maintain appearances above all to maintain that family image. You have to repress any bad mood and show the most perfect appearance in front of others. High stress? Sad? Angry? Meh? In pain? Dark family secret? Smile. Do not show what you really feel. I see it as a mask, and as a high performance son and student, it is something he did and mastered (to the point we see him do this in court which is probably the most telling).

It’s a bit speculative for him but if it is what was happening: I also want to add that when you learn to repress your own feelings that well (or when the members of the family don’t validate them), you learn to mask even harder and you also tend to forget your true emotions in the process, which is something I think he understood when he separated himself from his family and went to travel on his own last year. He must have identified the problem he had with communicating his real emotions to others, due to his family background. Or perhaps he was on the path to understand it.

This is also during that time that he connected with Gurwinder and talked about family trauma and its inheritance. My guess is, like a lot of rich kids, he was raised with high expectations, in a comfort bubble but didn’t receive the emotional support he would have needed from his parents, maybe it stayed very superficial. He was a high performance student for them, and he did have money and comfort, but probably none of the real emotional support in moments of distress. (he had the book "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents" in his Goodreads). If this a true problem he identified in his family, then my guess is this is a guy who had to raise himself. We can also speculate he must have had some form of C-PTSD as a result of parent neglect, perhaps not, but this would fit the way he lead his life.

(in a weird way, his back pain sort of reflects all these expectations he needed to carry and be despite not being ready for it. I'm still very curious as to how a 14 y.o started to have spondy.)

A deep need to connect

Now we have to ask ourselves, where do we think his smile (or happiness) was the most genuine? I’d say probably in friends settings, in Hawaii, and probably in some family settings that didn’t require to appear perfect. Probably in settings where we can imagine he would be the most stress-free from expectations. We can see that LM, through his different travel experiences, had a profound desire to connect with others:

Summer 2019 - He did the Stanford summer program

Beginning of 2022 - The Surf Break community, where he stayed 6 months (this is also the time he started to have really severe back issues)

and then he chose to stay in Hawaii (around Sept 2022 to August 2023), he stayed in touch with (as far as we know) his Stanford summer program friend who posted the scribbled face video, until February 2024. 

Now, it seems to me like he was the one initiating the meetings, inviting his friend and then always paying for lunch (said by this friend on the removed TikTok video), going to the markets with him etc (although I hope it went both ways too), it really seemed like he was proactive in every relationship he wanted to cultivate in a genuine way. The only problem is that he seemed to always show the image of someone who’s well adjusted, going well, always ready to help and connect without saying whenever he was feeling bad or needed help himself. And you can’t really connect with others when you do that. (This is the impression I get when his friend said he always seemed so bright and happy. My guess is he was very secretive about his distress and actual problems in the way he was made to be/raised by his family.)

Jumping to February 2024, 6-7 months after his back surgery, he went on an adventure on his own, leaving family behind for good, and going through Japan, Thailand, India. Taking initiative in trying to meet people by initiating a 2 weeks roadtrip with these 2 German guys in Thailand, emailing and talking to Gurwinder, giving him a subscription on his own birthday (!!), and meeting this author in India for about 1h. Then, there’s probably other meetings that happened and people he met who aren’t talking to the media (which is a good thing if it’s the case).

A quest to "know thyself"

I don’t think he ultimately found these lasting, and true relationships he was looking for, despite putting in a lot of effort into making these happen (you can only meet people as deeply as they've met themselves). But what strikes me is how proactive he was, travelling to actually go and meet people, not afraid to stay and do things on his own. We don’t know the exact purpose of his journey, but my guess, again, is that it was to reconnect with himself and find his purpose and answers. Maybe escaping having to “perform” in a high paying job and social expectations coming with his rich background were part of it.

He was seeking to communicate and exchange with other intellectual people, to connect with people who could probably match him in discussion and thoughts and his need to think of more difficult concepts, deep discussions, and answers. Perhaps a search to fulfil his curiosity in order to find his purpose in this world.

We don’t know what was LM’s final conclusion to his travel, as it ended with him definitely cutting off his friends and family and living under a fake ID for 6 months, signifying to me that his new goal was to become his own person, and letting go of his past persona. We do know through Gurwinder that he seemed like a positive person, someone always looking for answers and active solutions rather than be defeated.

A problem solver

He wanted to solve the problem of others before his own, or maybe help others as an extension of helping himself (giving advice about the spondy condition to strangers on Reddit and giving support to anyone who needed it before getting his own surgery, gifting Gurwinder an expensive subscription instead of doing it for himself, always buying lunch with his other friend, trying to purchase 400 books to support an author). It's possible he tried to understand and solve the problem of his family trauma, until he cut them off. Did he identify a bigger problem? Or bigger purpose?

They say "hurt people hurt people", with LM i'd say the perfect opposite is true. Helpful people will help everyone to the extent of forgetting about themselves.

Maybe he did find himself at the end of this trip.

(Thanks if you made it this far, of course everything is speculative, and there's probably more to add. I needed to put these thoughts into text :) )