I have been told that this is unhealthy. I have been told that limerance is a bad thing, that maniacally obsessing about someone implies that you don’t have ambition or not enough of it. If you want to be loved, find something you love. People can sense it when you have something you’re dedicated to. No one wants the burden of being the answer to your dissatisfaction. To feel too much for someone is unsettling and love is supposed to “feel safe”.

Reasonable people don’t do this, reasonable people meet someone express their feelings, their desires, communicate their boundaries share their ambitions and then through some happenstance of life you wake up one day and find out you are “in love” with the person you woke up next to.

You are reasonable because you know them, you have learnt their quirks and pettiness. You are reasonable because you know that they love a smoothie with coconut milk. You know that they love to sleep late sometimes but only sometimes. You have had an educated guess about their patterns and personality and you can see a long term “potential” and “compatibility”. The only reasonable next step is to be exclusive and make them “your partner”, its a fucking business agreement after all. Something something common law.

Don’t be unreasonable. You open yourself up to a horror show of misery that comes from loving someone too much for no justifiable reason. You give them power over you, you give them ownership to your depths that they don’t quite know how to swim in. Don’t you know, those feelings are just them hormones ticking, its just carnal desire “clouding your vision”. You want the touch so so bad you can’t fathom their’s anything wrong with this person’s heart and maybe they are not “good for you”. Going down this path will inevitably blow up in your face and that this is the prelude to a humiliation ritual.

I get that maybe this word of caution is perfectly reasonable but why is that I “know” all of this and it feels so fucking wrong. I feel like a teenager being told by the adults to get home by eleven, its so crushing, Don’t you know that all the fun happens past eleven?

The adults may be reasonable, they may have money and I may very well be living in their house but do they know how to feel things as deeply as I do. Do they really know how to yearn in a way that turns you physically sick from the agony? Do they know the sheer joy when your heart explodes with a small brush of hands? They are all so well adjusted I wonder if they feel things as deeply or if it all. They are so busy protecting their hearts, they forgot how to use them.

What if they are all wrong? What if all the reasonable people are wrong? Do you really think a great story or a great tragedy was started by reasonable people doing reasonable things like communicating well, expressing boundaries and taking it slow? Do you really think that a great soul moving love comes from this “safety”? I don’t know, I just don’t buy it.

I know you mean well and maybe this will all blow up in my face and I will be left alone with the agony of my own unrequitted love but at-least I fucking lived. At least I fucking felt something.

This is your life, if you don’t live and emote the fuck are you doing? The fuck are you doing playing it safe and playing it right? Why learn a lesson from your misery? Why not make the same mistake again but differently this time?

It’s such a mundane thing. And yet in these tiny moments of mundanity, my entire universe is contained.

I spent so many days and so many nights fantasizing about all the fun games we’ll play when you come here, my future son.

I love you so much. You have no idea.

When I was in my twenties, the things I tried to protect most fiercely were my freedom and autonomy, my weekends and the time I spent with people. I was trying to optimize everything down to the last hour.

Now I think of you. And how horribly inefficient my life is going to be: ruled not by my autonomy, but by your whims, your desires, your peculiar interests.

I am already thinking how I will teach you snowboarding. I imagine your first day of school, and how you kind of don’t want to go. I keep looking at you teary eyed as you try to walk away.

I imagine looking at your mother and just melting, it’s almost as if God put her on earth just for us and absolutely nothing else.

I don’t know who she is yet. But I know she’s out there.

Life used to be so selfish. Still is. But when I started thinking of you, I am never the same again.

I now see love for what it is. It is the greatest responsibility in the world.

It doesn’t happen often. It is incredibly rare. In tiny slivers, love is everywhere if you look for it. But you have to open your heart.

When you apply objective reason to the question of love, you’re insulting its depth and intensity. True love should turn you upside down, inside out. Rip your guts out.

I spend many days and nights thinking of you, my son. I know you are going to come.

You have changed me in so many ways, and you’re not even here yet. I can only imagine all the things you’ll do when you do come.

You are the reason I was here for all these years of anger. And now I finally realize how much my father sacrificed. He gave up his dreams, his life, and his joy to raise me.

My love for you has made me from a petty man, to someone who is kneeling on the edge of self-transcendence.

There is no rhyme or reason to this. I cannot justify this.

Some people say I am suffering from baby fever.

But I’ve had fevers before. I know what it’s like to like something for a few months. Fevers come and go.

This one hasn’t gone for a year and a half.

I don’t think this is a fever.

I always thought babies were cute. But I just never knew how much they could overwhelm you and for how long. Something inside of me changed so permanently.

I feel like I’m not in a fever. I feel like I’m in a coma. I feel like I got hit by a truck and then fell into a coma. A coma of love. And this coma, I can never get out of.

I spend many parts of my lonely days fantasizing about you running around me, being giggly and giddy without a care in the world, just wanting to be with me.

You’re looking at me. I’m your whole universe because that’s all you know.

And I look at you, you’re two years old.

I have seen so many things. I have seen the world. I’ve traveled everywhere.

And yet when I look at you and mommy in this tiny little room that I’m in, I know for sure in my heart:

You are my whole universe.

1. Passport privilege is real

As a Canadian, it’s easier to travel to most countries. I flash my passport and walk through. But I’ve watched people with certain passports get pulled into inspection every single time. Having to justify their entire existence just to cross a border is stupid, but you can’t do much rather than acknowledge it and plan ahead.

2. Financial privilege is real, but it’s not the blocker you think it is

Most Westerners spend way more money living in North American cities than they would traveling. If you saved 50-60% of your salary for a few months and quit your lease, you could travel for a while(I mean months). Your rent plus food for two months in SF or NYC is far far more expensive than three months in a cheaper country. Paying $600-700/month for a hostel+food is possible in many many different countries. Money is never really the blocker given the stupid shit people waste their money on, it’s mostly just a matter of priorities.

Now that I’ve acknowledged my privileges, can I please shut the fuck up and say what I actually wanted to say?

3. Discomfort is often proportional to the fun

The more physically inconvenient and taxing the travel, the more fun it’s likely going to be.

You can stay in fancy resorts. But I don’t think that’s actually fun. You’ll have way more fun in a €15-20/night hostel, meeting people who are different from you, people without a lot of money, people with a whacky personality are waaaaaay more fun. Their limitations/mental illnesses make them creative.

I’ve gotten scabies from shitty hostels. I’ve had someone sleepwalk and pee on my friend. I’ve witnessed all kinds of loud, chaotic, barbaric incidents. Despite all of that, I still think the whackiness and craziness of hostel life makes for better stories than any resort ever could.

4. Travel reflects your energy back at you

If you’re a happy person at the hostel, you’ll somehow find happy people, if you smile at people, then people will usually be receptive (even in Eastern Europe). Every now and then you’ll meet a total fucking dickhead, and that’s just life.

5. The “Fuck Yes” rule

The true joy is in your whims. If you talk to someone and they seem interesting, ask them: “What’s your favorite thing about this place?” And just go there. Don’t look it up or check reviews. Just go, even if it truly sucks it will make up for a great story.

You’re probably better off not going to the places considered “must-sees.” Most places you find from internet search results are riddled with TikTok tourists.

6. Cluster your countries

If you tie your self-esteem to the number of countries you’ve traveled to, you might as well be efficient about it. If you go to one country, you can easily hit 5 nearby:

• Vietnam → Cambodia, Thailand, Laos
• Singapore → Malaysia, Indonesia
• New Zealand → Australia, Fiji
• Guatemala → Honduras, El Salvador, Belize

Western Europe is the best place to abuse if you want to raise your country count. You can do Germany, Austria, and Hungary in a 4-day trip if you’re broke and ambitious enough.

7. Don’t dismiss travel romances

My controversial opinion is travel romances shouldn’t be taken lightly. Most people think they’re stupid and silly as those flings that don’t mean anything. And that might be true. But it’s also possible you meet someone who changes your life.

I’m not saying travel to find your romantic partner. I’m saying keep an open mind. Who knows what might happen? I have met people who met while traveling together in their 20s and they have been together for decades. I’d bet marriages between people who met traveling and chose to stay together against all odds have a much higher success rate.

8. You’re carrying way more stuff than you need

You really don’t need much. Truly, you don’t. You can live out of a small backpack and a suitcase.

Here’s my rule: if I’m traveling and I don’t use something at least once in three days, it doesn’t belong in my backpack. I don’t care how “necessary” it seems. If I’m not using it once every three days, I don’t need it.

9. Travel has karmic debt

When you travel, inevitably things will get fucked. You’ll be out in the middle of nowhere with no one looking out for you.

If you can be that person for someone else, help them when their phone gets stolen, when they twist their ankle, when they’re stranded, they’ll remember you for the rest of their life. I’ve spent a lot of time helping friends through injuries, disasters, theft and heartbreaks. I don’t regret any of it.

A lot of you are young. A lot of you don’t have money. But a little generosity and compassion will always pay back. I’ve been lost in the middle of nowhere and had strangers who barely spoke English drive me to where I needed to go. These moments are isolated, but they add up. Your kindness will come back to you. Don’t ever worry about it.

Lastly, I think there really is no justification or point of traveling. The point of traveling is to do stupid things with fun people. Some of which you end up regretting. And that’s okay, you can do whatever you like.

After living here for a couple of weeks, I’m starting to believe it. I don’t know what happens up there. I don’t know what it is about being in the snow, moving down a fucking hill, that makes you feel like humanity loves you. Like anything is possible. But I know it happens. And at this point, I don’t even know if I want to find out why if I try too hard, who knows, I might jinx the mystery, and then it stops working.

Is it actually a mountain of spirits? Am I talking to them? Is this some heroic dose of ayahuasca disguised as a ski lift? I’ll never know. But I had the time of my life here.

All year, my life felt like a race. And even at the ski hill the race didn’t stop. I was still working hard, I remember texting my colleagues in between runs and I had to force myself to not check slack too often but something was really different . The common phrase I hear is “I pulled out of my mind into my body,” a phrase used by a lot of health freaks. That was probably true, but I think I remember something else. I’m not quite sure how to describe it other than this odd sense of feeling that everything is complete and I want nothing more.

This is it, it’s a good life, this is the best time, I want to be here, I’m happy. But if it all ends, that’s great, and if it all goes on forever, that’s great too. Everything happening is fine, and the other things that could happen like for example, this chairlift falling down and me coming to my end are also perfectly fine.

Maybe I didn’t learn anything here. Maybe that’s the point.

All this rumination, trying to figure out what it means, what I should take away it’s counterproductive. When you’re really in love with something, it pulls you so fucking hard you forget who you are. You stop asking what you’re learning. You stop asking anything.

Maybe that’s the transcendence.

That reversed the causality.

I was trying to become a certain kind of person in order to be happy. But the real move is to be happy and let the person I become emerge from that.

When you’re happy, you don’t even think about it. Joy shifts your worldview. The rumination stops because there’s no space for it. You’re too busy living.

So I’m done trying to earn joy. I’m just going to live it.

Me, so happy I’m literally in tears

If you asked me what made me love each person in my life, I wouldn’t have a good answer. I can never chalk it up to a fixed set of traits because its not that easy. Sometimes it was the love of art, sometimes it was the love of skiing and sometimes it was just being stuck together in a horrible situation. I never saw it coming, one day I just woke up thinking this person’s so fucking cool, and I have no idea how it happened but I’m glad it did.

I want to find “My person”, I really want to. I was looking so hard that it actually made it harder to find. I was trying too hard. I figured that if I could take myself out of it the fear, the anxiety, the rush, the yearning might make it easier. As I write this, I see how unfair it is to put so much burden on another person, the burden of all your hidden desires and yearning. But somehow the twisted machinery of your psyche and your angst can do wonders on you. I accidentally stumbled upon a post from one of my favorite authors, Ava from BookBear Express:

BookBear Express has been one of my favorite blogs for many years. The ideas from it have helped me tremendously in my relationships and how I lived and how I met people with grace and love. I also think that it taught me a lot of self-compassion and made me slightly more self-adjusted both romantically and career-wise in other ways. The purpose of this event was to find a ton of readers of BookBear Express and then try to pair them with each other. Hopefully some of them get married, and I get invited to a wedding.

So I just DM’d her to become a self-appointed tech support for this. To make this event more fun, our idea was to gather a lot of data from people. We asked everyone 26 questions to figure out who they were, what their preferences were, and then do a very comprehensive analysis of figuring out the kind of person they are. We gathered roughly 105 people and 80 of them showed up to the event which was incredible. We had cards built out for all of them

The cards looked like this(name changed). The idea was that everyone was going to be matched with: Two people they really liked and were highly compatible with One person they were least compatible with We were now going to tell you which is which.

The truth is, what people say they want and what they actually want are very different things. Matchmaking, like everything else here, is a little bit of math and a lot of magic. By keeping this element of surprise, we added that magic. I think people come to these events and see someone they like and immediately feel this anxiety: Will this person like me? Do I want to take the leap of approaching them? What if they say no? And if they do, am I an incessant botherer doomed to a lifetime of loneliness? duhhhhh… maybe I should check my phone for the 5th time.

The whole point of making these cards was to make that anxiety go away. To give people a valid excuse to approach someone they liked, so the magic of introduction could finally happen. The math behind all these cards is in another blog post for nerds. This one is just about philosophy. Right before the event, a friend of mine(Mrs X) said, ‘What you’re doing is nothing serious; it’s only my life that’s in your hands.’ I know she said it as a joke, but at that moment, it hit me that a few lines of code I’ve written could potentially decide the course of someone’s lifetime.

There’s a deep part of me that believes that at least a few people in the matchmaking event could end up dating, and I really hope that it does happen. It will make me very happy, and more importantly, two people with a similar background who are enamored by similar ideas get to be together. What could be more beautiful than this?

At the same time, it hit me that so many people in this discourse of matchmaking have perverse incentives. Every single day, yet another dating app just wants you to pay more to keep coming back. They have very little interest in you actually getting married. I made a vow to get nothing out of it, that’s the only way this could ever really work. I want to do it right.

A few magical things that happened:

• Mrs X met Mr H(another guy we know) matched with each other. I knew both of them and they know each other. The sheer surprise of this boggles my brain. We live in a small world.
• A guy got there late, so he couldn’t pick his card in time. Later, when I showed him matches with the card of his name, one match was actually his friend and she was hanging out with him the whole time.
• The whole system ran on algorithms and weighted matching—a blend of hard filters, compatibility scores, and a bit of LLM magic to parse personalities. If you’re curious about how we actually built the matching system (or want to geek out on the math), I wrote a technical deep-dive here.

I really hope that everyone had a good time. Overall the intent of this event was to get the room “popping” just get people to talk to each feel their “vibes” and then people get each other’s numbers and hopefully they talk and feel some spark. You can’t really have a heart to heart conversation in a long event like this, there’s too many people around you, there’s so much pressure, there’s so much yearning and pent up trauma when the intent is so clear. How much of you should you expose to this stranger? How much is too much and how much is too little? Am I too proud by holding back or too desperate by showing all my cards?

We encourage people to spend 10-15 minutes “feeling it out”. Just have a conversation, say a hello to your “match” person: say what you like, what excites you. You both read this blog on love and relationships, its not the most eccentric niche in the world but it is like a twisted 4d space where the more you try to go in the further you go out. Where you are in this 4d space doesn’t matter as much as your intention of where you want to go. Perhaps the person you matched with also wants to go “there” and hopefully with you.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s be nimble, why don’t you just exchange numbers/insta/snap(uggh genZ)? You are both nice to each other(you kinda have to be) some of your friends are here(And Ava who you love very much). You go home, and get something to eat, your mind comes out of this strange social “rush” feeling, you want it to quiet down. Maybe then you “look each other up”, maybe you like what you see, maybe you want to know more and maybe just maybe, you like them enough that you want more of this person. I hope it happens for you, I really do.

1. You are a good dude and I see so much potential in you, please prove me right by doing something really cool and awesome with your life.

2. You changed my life upside down for the better but my own shame got in between us, I am so sorry for disappointing you in all the ways that I did and hopefully someday you will be able to forgive me.

3. I don’t think you believe a word of what you are saying even when you claim to be a believer. You are more interested in making people feel that you believe in something rather than actually believing in something yourself which is sad because if you were just honest people would like you a lot.
4. I have never loved someone more and been disappointed by them more than I was by you. I still wish you well and I hope you find your bliss after all these years.

5. Your love has shown me that just about anything is possible, I wish you loved yourself just as much as you loved me.

6. Depending on the day and the time I think of you, I oscillate between calling you a monster or perhaps a troubled soul. No matter how many years pass, I suppose I will never know.

7. You made it so so hard to love you but I still kept choosing you until one day it became clear that you wanted me to stop and I did.

8. You have a long way to go my man, keep moving and exploring.
9. You’re the smartest unfinished person I know, don’t let potential be written on your tombstone.
10. If you knew how many nights I have laid in bed thinking of you, you would see me very differently. Let’s be friends again(not that we aren’t friends, but I mean like really be friends like we used to be).

11. The amount of love in your heart is so big that flows out of you into the people you meet, there’s a calmness in your presence that kept me grounded.

12. I knew you had to do what you had to do, I get it, but it was still really cruel. Fuck you!

13. I know we were just colleagues but you are so much more than that to me, I am really really gonna miss you, nerd, you are my favourite nerd in the world. Your strange voice is something I won’t forget.

14. I don’t know how different life would have been if I hadn’t met you. Unbeknownst to you, I try to be extra nice to strangers in distress in hopes that somehow the grace you showed me can be paid back in an odd sort of universal karmic calculus.

15. You are a funny dude but also a kind of a psychopath from time to time. But then again, youth can justify a lot of things.

16. Was it you? really just tell me the truth, if it was you or was it somebody else?

17. I see so much light in you but I don’t know why that is, I hope you make the best of your 20s.

18. Your life can literally be a movie and it would still be underwhelming. You made me want to be a better person, I wish we were friends in real life and not just online talking every few weeks.

19. I can’t believe how your real life and professional life are so different. And as much as I like to troll whenever I am around you, I really respect and look up to you.

20. I really like you a lot you know, I know I am not allowed to say it because we have a mutual pact of playful rivalry but you are so pretty and funny and I wish to see you more.

21. You are the reason I like sophisticated English people.

22. What the fuck bro, you were so so cool? What happened? Can’t believe you became like the rest of them.

23. You have such a deep moral compass, I really admire that about you. I wish I had matured as fast as you did but knowing you, I know it’s not too late, I can still do it.

24. You taught me how to be a good man, I will never be able to repay you for that but I will try to be a good person and hope that works out.

People always find it strange that I’m at the intersection of many different circles. A question I often get, “How do you enter this circle of people who do something completely antithetical to how you’ve lived so far?” Or more bluntly “How do you end up with people who do this shit?”

My answer to finding the people to do weird shit with is always: Find the people who do weird shit with or without you. I personally think this is the greatest recruiting and selection technique for just about anything.

There are two mental models for searching friends, partners, lovers this way:

• Try to get the people you know to do the things that you actually like doing. This might be climbing, reading, art, philosophy, coding that kind of stuff.
• Or find the people who already do those things with or without you and drop expectations about how they should be.

Sketch a Venn diagram of your circles X, Y, and Z and notice where they overlap.

So for my case: One circle is the dirtbag travelers who spend every spare dollar getting to the middle of nowhere. The second circle is a circle of skiers and snowboarders. The third circle is the people who spend 14 hours a day grinding to optimize AI models. Maybe there’s a fourth circle for gym bros, and a fifth for philosophy/art nerds who obsess about why brutalist architecture is a crime against humanity.

I don’t necessarily think that any of those circles, taken alone, are unique. Being in two or maybe three of those groups simultaneously is very plausible. But being present in all of them together is very unlikely.

Quite often, people in one of these circles are gonna think the people in the other circles are fucking insane. And they’re probably totally okay with thinking that way. Most of my friends think everyone else’s circle is pretty weird. Any individual slice of your friend group probably wouldn’t vibe with another. Therefore, you have to be a person who is:

A) Individually willing to do all those things, and

B) Ready to do it with people who will do it with or without you.

Does this mean you can’t entice people to do new stuff? No, that’s definitely not what I’m saying.

I’m sure you can get people interested in things you love(I’ve gotten many people to try AI in different ways and skiing).

But to me? You want to find people who just do weird shit with or without you and ideally before you even asked them. Respect people’s autonomy, respect their desire, because trying to “rah-rah” people past a certain age(say 29) is much harder and I like to think that if you haven’t figured out a genuine love for something are you only doing it to make someone happy or do you actually love it?

One of my best life habits has just been being able to hang out with people who are nothing like me. For me, if I am really into something I’ll even step away from my usual friend group without neglecting them if that’s what it takes. If that means moving to a new city, I’m open. Even if I have to do it alone, as long as I’m with people who would do it anyway, I’m good.

With or without you is also a hiring metric, a relationship filter, a friendship test, a way to find collaborators. It takes away the friction of needing to be nice, to charm, to entice as it self-selects! You really can find community anywhere, It may not be how you would have imagined it to be but you can find it.

Of course, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes the people you want to join just aren’t interested in doing it with you. And that’s totally fine, you either learn to look harder or learn to love your own company as life goes on.

I have two types of friends. The first type makes $300k a year and say things like “I’m comfortable” this is a rich people code for “I’m rich, fuck you.” The second type sleeps in hostels that sometimes have bed bugs and believe that showering is optional. Somehow I’m both of them. Somehow I’m neither.

I was working at a decent remote gig this past year. Got to travel to something like eight(or maybe 10) different countries, got to build some of the coolest AI stuff, until the coolness factor kind of ran away. Knowing that people who work there will read this, it’s kind of disappointing because in many ways I really loved the gig and I’m very thankful for it. In other ways, something didn’t feel right (that’s a nice way to put it).

The thing about life is your heart always knows the truth before your mind. Your consciousness can’t necessarily verbalize the depth of your emotion, but your heart and your body embody the direction of your spirit. I started waking up at 3am, anxious about nothing while everything else was supposedly going perfectly. My body was trying to quit while my mind was still trying to update my LinkedIn.

I knew something was off. Couldn’t quite put a finger on it. I probably didn’t enjoy things as much anymore. That itch, the genuine desire it kind of faded away. For many reasons, right? It’s always easy to blame one thing(or a person). So maybe it was being around people who weren’t right for me, or maybe my heart just wasn’t in it anymore.

So I quit. Figured I had enough savings to travel for a couple years without working. The plan was to do something wild like bike from the UK to Turkey, or maybe Argentina to Alaska. My old landlord had done the South America route and it sounded perfect. Young enough, restless enough, why not? I have done multi day hikes in western Canada and never regretted them.

Then some recruiter messaged me on LinkedIn.

Now, knowing recruiters, I thought they were all sleazy idiots who had to portray every startup as the next billion dollar thing, regardless of how stupid or fraudulent it was. But this guy seemed nice enough, and the product was in the AI space where my expertise was. I figured, what’s the worst that could happen? I don’t need a job. I’ll just try the product.

I tried it for five minutes and felt something I hadn’t felt since I was 18 writing my first for-loop was pure fucking delight. Like watching magic happen. Within minutes I was like, “I don’t even care about the job, I’ll do this for free”.

And that’s when I realized I was caught. My twenties are ending. There are certain things you can only do once that cross-continental bike trip being one of them. I’ve traveled to 30 countries but my stomach and soul still have this endless desire to explore more. Like something’s missing and I need to see more of the world to fill it.

But then there’s this other thing. AGI is coming. And I mean really coming.(For my non-tech friends: AGI is basically a super intelligent computer like Samantha from “Her” that can do anything a human can do, but faster and smarter).

Within the next one or two years, the world as we know it will fundamentally change. You’ll say things and magic will come to life. Every time I tell my hippie friends this, they roll their eyes like I’m fucking insane. And every single day, this vision gets closer to reality(While I am not waiting for an “I told you so moment”, I do know that it will come).

So here I am, 29 years old, choosing between two things that will only happen once: being young and free on a bike crossing continents, or watching AGI transform everything from the front row.

The AGI pulled me harder. It pulled me so fucking hard I couldn’t think of doing anything else.

Which brings me to the absurd part: I’m actively working to make my own career obsolete. I am working at cline.bot and this AI coding agent I’m building? If it works and it will the world of software as we know it will cease to exist. Or become so different it’ll never feel the same again.

I am ending my biking trip to end my career. And it seems like every line of code I write is a eulogy. Every feature I ship brings us closer to not needing me anymore. It’s a personal crusade to basically make myself irrelevant.

My hippie friends think I’m insane for caring about AGI. My tech friends think I’m insane for wanting to bike across continents instead of building the future. And I think they’re both right.

Underneath that phrase is the idea that it’s not really about the external situation you’re in, but the internal experience of your consciousness that really counts. Back in university, I struggled to keep up and couldn’t seem to perform the mental gymnastics required to become a good student. I even blamed myself until a professor straight up told me, “Your grades reflect your belief in the system.”

At first I thought this was supposed to motivate me, but after a few days I realized he was right, I simply didn’t believe in the system, and that pattern kept repeating itself in my life: like, later at my dream job, I’d work weekends, grind late into Friday nights, and it felt joyful and fine for a while until one day I woke up and something inside me died, and no matter how much I tried to blame external factors like sleep or health, deep down I knew I’d lost faith.

My natural instinct is to blame myself and “try to make it work” but I don’t think that’s always right, if there’s something deep knawing at you constantly why fight yourself every step of the way, why not just accept the wisdom of my emotions to accept that I used to love this but this is not for me any more(a graceful breakup maybe?).

When I moved on to my next gig, though, that faith was back, and I worked harder than ever. (It was easier to work harder but harder to work less). It still felt effortless. It seems like the Stoics (or perhaps Milton) had it right: the mind really does shape your reality, or perhaps it’s not the mind but your faith (and more precisely, the degree of faith you have in your work).

Next time I find a job, faith is literally the only thing I’m optimizing for. I’ve made enough money, I don’t care anymore. If I force myself to work on something I don’t believe in, then that’s a total waste of my time. Faith single handedly transforms your internal experience. That’s why people willingly go barefoot on epic religious pilgrimages but take the car to a grocery store two blocks away. You can’t trick yourself into believing, so the real move is finding something worth believing in something that genuinely pulls you instead of something you have to keep dragging yourself toward. Because that subtle shift in motivation is literally everything.

And I wasn’t happy with the amount of phone uses that I was doing, or having conversations that were not necessarily the most fulfilling or joyful. And I started to introspect and ask myself this question that, should I keep doing this, or should I turn around? I figured one way to test myself and to test my faith to introspection was to give up any external stimulation, except journaling and coding. I did that being heading out to a rural bulgarian village in the middle of nowhere with serene mountains to look at and not much else.

I think this experiment entailed a few things: I wasn’t allowed to use my phone till 8 PM except maybe 1-3 times to respond to messages from friends/family who wanted to be certain that I wasn’t kidnapped. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to besides my landlady Tsvetina who is an awesome person and really fun but ideally I aimed at just looking inwards to find out some deeper truths about my being.

I also didn’t really want to be memetically influenced by the life that I came from, so over time I curbed the usage of reddit,instagram to less than 20 minutes. I did that by using an app on my browser and it worked surprizingly well.

I replaced all th extra time I had with work and with starting at the mountians and laying down watching the sky while the warm sun light hits my face. Somehow this was cathartic and far more satsifying that doomscrolling instagram.

One of the main things I learned is that now I could sleep well and was very relaxed physically and emotionally. I could sleep for 8 hours straight for multiple days without using any sleep supplement and I think that was just such a surprising revelation. To be able to sleep so peacefully for so many nights back to back was just unreal. I had many years of insomnia and that was cured. I felt very relaxed from that one. I realized I didn’t need my phone and I didn’t need external information from other sources to entertain myself. I felt like I wasn’t exactly gaining any knowledge from external sources that I used to frequent most of it was just an escape from my inner voice waiting to be heard.

And Just like that, I think I ended my many years of Insomnia.