I don't know if what I'm doing is going to work.
That's not me being negative. I genuinely don't know.
I've spent a long time building something I believe in. I've written, created, learned, changed things that weren't working and fixed problems I didn't even know existed until they became my problems.
Some days I feel really good about it.
Other days I look at everything I've spent months building and wonder if I'm actually building something here, or if I'm just very committed to talking to the internet.
Especially when something unexpected happens and suddenly the plan doesn't look quite as simple as it did a week ago.
That's usually when the questions start.
Does this just need more time? Am I being patient or stubborn? Is changing direction the smart thing to do, or am I just frustrated because things aren't moving fast enough?
I can think about those questions for hours and still end up exactly where I started.
I don't know.
This could be the boring middle of something that eventually works.
Or it could just be the middle of something that doesn't.
Unfortunately nobody sends you that information in advance.
And lately I've been wondering why we think we're supposed to know.
It's easy to understand your life afterwards
The internet is full of stories that make perfect sense.
Someone quit their job and built the business they'd always dreamed about. Someone took a huge risk everyone told them not to take and it changed their life. Someone went through an awful year and later realized it was exactly what needed to happen.
I actually like these stories.
What interests me is when they're being told.
Usually, the person already knows what happened next.
Even the “real, unfiltered” versions tend to come afterwards.
We hear about the doubt, the bad decisions, the money they lost and the moment they almost gave up. I'm glad people talk about those parts because they're a lot more interesting than another highlight reel.
But the person saying “I almost gave up” already knows they're glad they didn't.
That's a very different experience from sitting in your own life today and wondering whether you should.
When we look backwards, we can give things meaning. We know which random conversation mattered, which failure pushed us somewhere better and which terrifying decision turned out to be the right one.
In the moment, it was probably just terrifying.
Nobody is interviewing the version of you who doesn't know yet.
That's the version I'm interested in.
Because that's where I am.
There is always someone willing to explain your life to you
Not knowing is uncomfortable.
Luckily, the internet has approximately four million explanations available.
I've wandered into the manifestation side of it enough times to know that apparently we now have a lot more to do than simply make decisions.
There's your highest self. Your future self. Identity shifts. Abundance. Alignment. Being energetically available to receive things.
I've heard the stories about having $7 left in the bank and becoming a millionaire after changing your mindset.
Maybe that's exactly what happened.
I wasn't there.
What I find funny is that underneath all the language, some of the ideas aren't particularly strange.
If fear makes all your decisions, it will probably limit your life. If you've spent years believing something isn't possible for you, changing that belief might change the way you behave. Sometimes you do need to stop doing what you've always done if you want something different.
I get it.
Apparently I just can't make a brave decision anymore. I have to make it as my highest self while being energetically available to receive abundance.
That's a lot of responsibility for a Wednesday.
And I say this as someone who is actually interested in spirituality. I've written about being spiritual, but normal before, because apparently that's the best description I've found for whatever I'm doing here.
There are things I believe, things I've felt and things about being human that I don't think we fully understand.
I'm perfectly comfortable leaving some of them unexplained.
I can believe there are things we don't understand without believing everyone selling an explanation understands them either.
I think I was looking for permission
And this goes way beyond spirituality.
I've done the same thing with business, work, productivity and life in general.
You don't know what to do, so you look for someone who does.
I've consumed a ridiculous amount of advice over the years — enough that I once ended up writing an entire post about what happened when I consumed more advice instead of trusting myself. Some of it genuinely helped me. Some of it probably sent me in circles. Most of it came from people who sounded very certain about what they were saying.
Then eventually you find another smart person saying the exact opposite.
That was probably when it started clicking for me.
A huge amount of what we treat as rules are just other people's opinions.
There isn't a committee somewhere deciding what your career should look like, how ambitious you should be, how much money is enough, whether changing direction means you failed or what you're supposed to do with your thirties.
Thank God, because that committee sounds exhausting.
People can give me information. They can show me possibilities I haven't considered. Someone else's experience can save me from making a completely unnecessary mistake.
I still want all of that.
What I don't want anymore is to automatically assume that someone else's certainty makes their answer more correct for my life.
Those are two very different things.
I wonder what the internet has changed about what we want
I've thought about deleting social media approximately a thousand times.
I haven't, obviously.
My business exists on the internet, so throwing my phone into the sea would create a few practical problems.
But I've become fascinated by what all this exposure to other people's lives actually does to us. I've written before about how you don't have to live at the internet's pace, but lately I've been thinking less about the speed of it and more about what all that input does to what we actually want.
We usually talk about time.
How many hours we scroll. What we could have done instead. The books we could have read or skills we could have learned.
And sure, that's part of it.
But I don't think the time is the most interesting part.
I'm more interested in what happens when you spend years watching thousands of people show you what a good life is supposed to look like.
You see what people admire. What they buy. What they're embarrassed about. What they call success. What they think you should fix about yourself.
Eventually some of that gets into your head.
It has to.
And then it becomes surprisingly difficult to work out which ideas were yours in the first place.
I sometimes wonder what I'd want if I'd never seen anybody else wanting it.
That's an uncomfortable question.
Because I don't think I'm immune to any of this just because I'm aware of it. None of us live in a vacuum.
But something has definitely changed in the way I use the internet.
I don't really go there looking for permission anymore.
I don't need someone to confirm that the way I want to live is acceptable.
And I don't automatically assume I'm doing something wrong just because someone with a very confident Instagram account would do it differently.
Maybe that's why so much marketing doesn't work on me anymore either.
Once you notice how often insecurity is being created before a solution is sold to you, it's quite difficult to unsee it.
Sometimes I want to help. Sometimes I want to disappear.
This is where my own logic gets slightly inconvenient.
Part of me wants a very quiet life.
Give me somewhere warm near the sea, some plants, books, good food and enough money that I don't have to think about it constantly.
Sounds excellent.
There are days when the world feels so loud and absurd that I genuinely don't understand why I would voluntarily try to contribute more noise to it.
And yet I keep wanting to make things.
I keep writing.
Something annoys me and I immediately want to understand why.
I see people struggling with something and start thinking about what might actually help instead of whatever we're currently being sold.
Sometimes I have this really deep feeling that I'm supposed to do something useful while I'm here. Help somehow. Make this strange place a little better than I found it.
I don't know what to call that.
Purpose sounds very serious.
Calling sounds even worse.
Maybe it's just part of who I am.
What I do know is that the urge to hide hasn't managed to beat it yet.
Even when I'm tired of the internet, I still care about what we're doing to ourselves with it.
Even when I question what I'm building, I eventually find myself back at it.
I don't take that as proof from the universe that I've found my one true life path.
But I do take it as information.
Apparently I still care.
I'm writing this before I know how it ends
That's really the reason I'm writing this now.
It would be easy to wait.
Maybe five years from now I'll know exactly how to tell this story. I'll know which decisions mattered and which things I worried about for absolutely no reason.
If everything works out, I'll probably be able to make the whole thing sound suspiciously meaningful.
But I don't want to write that version.
I want to write the one where I don't know yet.
Right now I'm still doing the work and waiting to see where it leads.
There are things I'm building that haven't given me much evidence yet that they'll become what I hope they will. There are things outside my control that could change my plans completely.
And yes, sometimes that scares me.
But I've also noticed that uncertainty doesn't send me searching for answers the way it used to.
I used to think self-trust would eventually come with some kind of certainty. Like I'd reach a point where I'd just know when to keep going and when to walk away.
I'm starting to think I had the whole thing backwards.
Because what does being on the “right path” even mean?
There isn't someone handing out maps.
I'm making decisions with what I know now. If something stops making sense, I'll deal with it then. I've changed direction before. I've figured things out before. There's no reason to assume I suddenly won't be able to.
And maybe that's the part of self-trust I've been missing.
I don't need to know how this story ends before I'm allowed to keep writing it.
Which is convenient, because I clearly have no f*cking idea.
P.S. No spiritual meaning behind the photo. The 🫡 energy just felt appropriate.
Want to keep in touch?
I have a lot of thoughts. Clearly.
I send some of them by email — usually about slow living, the internet, self-trust, spirituality, and figuring out what actually feels like your life underneath all the noise.
