I still live here.
The funny thing is that nothing much has changed.
The same entrance. The same shops. The same people going somewhere in the morning and coming back in the evening. Someone parks like a dickhead. Someone drills a wall. Someone hauls a bag of groceries.
And the world, meanwhile, has somehow become enormous.
I used to think there was a “here” and there was a “there”.
Here is ordinary life.
There is the real one.
There are the big companies, the big products, the big money, people with the right surnames, the right universities and the right words in their LinkedIn.
You have to get in there somehow first.
Obtain permission.
Meet the right person.
Move.
Become somebody.
And then it turned out there is no “there” at all.
There is the internet.
There is a laptop.
There is a night when, for whatever reason, you cannot sleep.
There is an idea.
And there is a Submit button.
That is it.
No pipe to Hogwarts.
No committee deciding whether you are worthy of doing interesting things.
Nobody arrives to hand you a licence for a new life.
You just make some crap at home.
And then that crap unexpectedly turns out to be what somebody several thousand kilometres away needed.
And you sit there thinking:
fuck.
So now what?
Because the unpleasant part comes right after
The excuses disappear.
It is very convenient to think that geography is what is holding you back.
The country.
No connections.
No money.
Bad timing.
The wrong market.
Mercury in bloody retrograde.
Once I am somewhere else, I will start living.
Once I get a proper job, I will start doing things.
Once someone notices me, then I will tear it up.
And then nobody particularly notices you.
You just start doing things.
And suddenly it turns out the door had been open the whole time.
Which is honestly a bit annoying.
All those years you could have spent not standing next to it.
Never mind.
You are inside now.
And this is where it got far more interesting
Because I still want to leave.
I have not changed my mind.
The reason has just changed.
Before, I wanted to break out of somewhere.
Now I want to see the world.
That is not the same thing at all.
Escape always makes the place you are escaping from the main character of your life.
You hate it.
You argue with it.
You prove something to it with every success.
Look at me now, you bastard.
And it could not care less.
The building could not care less.
The tarmac could not care less.
The tree by the entrance could not care less about your ARR.
And that is wonderful.
It turns out you can simply love a place and still pack your things one day.
No tragedy.
No resignation letter.
No “at last”.
Thank you.
It was good.
Let’s move on.
I stopped waiting for the moment my life becomes real
It already is real.
This one.
With the mess.
With work.
With sleepless nights.
With family.
With idiotic chat threads.
With code.
With people who turn up and disappear.
With conversations about God at three in the morning and buying toilet paper in the morning.
For years I somehow thought all of it was a draft.
That somewhere ahead the fair copy would begin.
It will not.
The draft was the book.
And that is bloody good news.
You do not have to become a new version of yourself.
You do not have to solemnly close chapters.
You do not have to kill off your past self.
That idiot is coming along with you anyway.
Which is fine.
Let him come.
I want less and less to be a person who is easy to describe.
Engineer.
Founder.
Husband.
Father.
A bloke who writes some crap on the internet.
All true.
And all insufficient.
Probably that is how it should be.
I do not know where I will be in a year
And for the first time I do not particularly want to know.
Uncertainty used to feel like a malfunction.
Now it feels more like space.
You can go that way.
You can go this way.
You can do something completely unexpected and see what happens.
The important part has already happened.
I stopped seeing the world as a members’ club.
Nobody is standing at the entrance.
Nobody checks your surname.
Nobody asks whether you are entitled.
Most of the doors turned out to be painted on, inside our own heads.
The rest open with an ordinary push.
So my philosophy is fairly simple at the moment.
If it is interesting — do it.
If it is frightening — do it more carefully.
If it did not work — redo it.
If somebody reckons you are not allowed — that is entirely their own hobby.
And if one day it gets cramped — leave.
Not because it is bad here.
Because the world is large.
I still live here.
But “here” no longer means “only here”.
That, I suppose, is the whole trick.
The world did not arrive anywhere.
It simply turned out, one day, that it had been starting right outside the door all along.
Which is just fine by me.
Eminem — Still Don’t Give a Fuck.
An exhaustive editorial comment.