I hope
I just put my 3-year-old son to bed. I love putting him to sleep, because sometimes—when he’s in the mood—he just starts telling me what happened at kindergarten, like he did today. But usually, when we ask him: “What happened today?” he just says: “Nothing…”
His “nothing” usually turns out—based on what we find out days later in the kindergarten’s Facebook group—to mean that he was, for example, a hawk tamer and they were flying in the kindergarten yard.
My beautiful flight attendant wife is already asleep in the bedroom, because she has an early morning flight tomorrow.
I’m sitting in the kitchen with a glass of wine, writing this.
I’m writing this because I thought—since I’ve never done anything like this before—that as a kind of therapy, I’d start a blog about my thoughts. Because if everything is true, I do have thoughts—they’re just burned out right now. My mind feels dull. All I can think about is work and what the next step is.
My mind is always focused on the next step, not on what’s happening now, not on what I should be doing right now—even though there’s plenty to do, and it would all make sense to do it. But for some reason, I’m blocked when it comes to the present. I hope that writing these future posts will help me get closer to answering the “why.”
It’s also a blog so others can read it, because there are probably others in a similar situation—people who, just like me, have watched every YouTube video on the topic, read every Medium article, followed every guru on X—hoping they’ll come across that one thing that will make their brain “click” and solve everything.
But I’ve realized that it doesn’t work like that. Something else is needed to clear my mind.
And I hope this won’t just become the next thing I use to distract myself from the present.
Over the past years, this feeling—of not living in the present—has been getting worse. Instagram, YouTube Shorts, X, Reddit doomscrolling have been a big part of that.
And the constant procrastination, which always leads to a vicious cycle: I don’t deal with what I should, so I get stressed—but because I’m stressed, I distract myself with something else to get a quick sense of success. Then when the deadline comes, I pull an all-nighter, get it done, and immediately feel relief. And yet, despite all this, procrastination happens almost every single time.
That’s the worst part: I know what the problem is. I know what I need to change. Every 2–3 months I get a burst of motivation for 2–3 weeks—new diet, I start running again, I start working out, I delete all social media—but I always “relapse.”
Living in the present. Catching up with myself—though not forward, but backward—so I can be here, in the now.
For now, I’m not even giving myself the satisfaction of writing out everything that’s inside me. I’ll leave something for the next time—which I hope will come—so this won’t just be a momentary impulse, but a regular activity I look forward to, and hopefully something that clears my mind.