#09: I was grinding myself down

The grindset has a wonderfully simple user interface.

Whatever you have, select more. Whatever you achieve, mark it insufficient. If you are tired, that is a configuration error in your morning routine. Have you tried waking at 04:30, drinking something the colour of reactor coolant and listening to a podcast where a man with three assistants explains self-reliance?

Tech gives this machinery root access to your personality. There is always another language to learn, title to earn, company to join, project to ship or person on the internet whose career can be converted into evidence that you are falling behind. You must grow. You must become bigger, faster and more impressive. You must spend your one wild and precious life maintaining an internal Jira board called Reasons I May Eventually Deserve To Exist.

My last two fieldnotes were about refusing to optimize the joy out of writing and accepting that my tools do not need to be the future. Under both was an elephant I had politely configured Hugo not to render.

I did not only optimize the joy out of writing.

For a long time, I optimized the joy out of being alive.

I thought success would prove I was not useless#

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a mansion or expensive cars. A mansion is a building. A car is an unusually complicated chair that converts money into movement and dashboard warnings. Neither has a moral alignment.

The useful question is what job you have secretly hired those things to perform.

I did not merely want success because parts of a successful life seemed pleasant. I wanted it to issue a verdict.

If I had the right home, cars, career and invitations, they would prove I was not useless. They would show everyone that I had finally made it. More importantly, perhaps they would show me. The mansion was not a place to live. It was a unit test for my worth.

This is a marvellous arrangement for the grind because the test can never pass. Every achievement becomes ordinary shortly after it arrives. The new title turns into the title printed in your email signature. The difficult project becomes a line on your CV. The salary that once sounded impossible becomes the number from which bills leave. The room full of impressive people becomes, on closer inspection, a room full of people checking whether everyone else is impressed.

Nothing can permanently prove an internal belief wrong when the belief gets to grade its own exam.

So I kept submitting more evidence.

Stockholm was supposed to be the solution#

I believed moving to Stockholm would solve my problems. I spent time around Östermalm and in the “right” circles. I worked in places some people dream of reaching.

I do not regret going. Stockholm taught me a great deal about work, people and myself. It also taught me that you can successfully arrive in the life you planned and discover that somebody else wrote the requirements.

I thought I wanted the mansion, the cars and the social world orbiting them. What I wanted was the proof they seemed to contain. Once that became the purpose, friendship started degrading into networking. Being with the right people mattered more than being close to them. A night out was not simply a night out; it was an opportunity to be observed in the correct place with the correct company.

There was no single conversation that revealed it. It was the repeated experience of being at the right clubs and the cool events, almost always surrounded by people, while feeling more alone and isolated than I ever had in my life.

I kept smiling. I performed the version of me who genuinely wanted to be there because that was who the people around me expected to meet. I had gained access to the rooms I thought would prove that I belonged, then spent my time inside them cosplaying someone who felt at home.

Everything became a transaction:

1person        -> connection
2conversation  -> opportunity
3job           -> credential
4home          -> temporary base for the next move
5free time     -> capacity that should be monetized
6me            -> product requiring better market positioning

I stopped having friends in any meaningful sense. I knew people, sometimes useful people, and they knew me. That is not the same thing as having someone with whom you can sit around a kitchen table for too long, become progressively less articulate and solve none of capitalism’s problems.

The tragedy was not that everybody around me was shallow or malicious. The machinery worked because I had accepted its measurements. I was evaluating myself and everyone else by proximity to whatever I thought success looked like.

When every relationship had to advance the roadmap, I could no longer simply be close to someone.

Every apartment came with a countdown timer#

The same thing happened to where I lived.

I moved constantly, but not because I wanted every home to become a stepping stone toward a more impressive one. Stockholm’s brutal second-hand rental market made the moving unavoidable. The places available to me were temporary, so the moment I had the keys, the countdown to losing them had already started.

An apartment became storage, a shower and somewhere I might sleep. It was difficult to become attached to a place while knowing I would soon have to dismantle my life and carry it somewhere else again. Arrival did not feel like arrival. It was the beginning of another deadline.

The housing market caused the instability. The grind mindset shaped how I explained it to myself.

Instead of admitting that the constant moving was exhausting me, I treated it as another temporary cost of the life I was building. Endure this apartment. Endure the next move. Once the career, money and everything else finally aligned, stability would arrive as part of the reward package.

The apartment was a staging environment, but not because I had chosen to architect my life that way. I was trying to construct a life inside a system that would not let the ground stay still.

There was always a finish line, but it ran on Kubernetes and rescheduled itself whenever I approached.

I wanted stability, but I confused stability with the maximum visible quantity of success. Those are not the same thing. Living alone in a mansion with seventeen rooms sounds impressive until you realize fourteen of the rooms have not seen a human being since the estate agent took the photographs. That is not abundance. That is running a very expensive museum dedicated to your absence.

The life looked increasingly substantial from outside while becoming almost entirely transitional from within.

Suffering is not an investment account#

I had one foundational theory: if I suffered enough now, I would be rewarded later.

This is one of the more dangerous stories ambitious people tell themselves because it contains enough truth to survive code review. Some worthwhile things are difficult. Learning takes effort. Building something meaningful can be exhausting. Careers contain unpleasant seasons. Caring for people, changing your life and doing work properly will sometimes ask more of you than is comfortable.

But difficulty is a cost, not proof of value.

Suffering does not compound into guaranteed future happiness. There is no loyalty programme. Nobody stamps the little card after each terrible year and gives you the tenth one free, although burnout does make a determined attempt.

I kept treating pain as evidence that the plan must be working. When my life became harder, I did not question the direction. I assumed I needed more discipline. When I became tired, I treated rest as a reward I had not earned. When an achievement failed to make me feel whole, I concluded that the achievement had not been large enough.

The system had one input and one output:

1not enough -> work harder -> still not enough

This is not a growth loop. It is a wood chipper with OKRs.

Eventually, I burned out hard.

Before burnout, photography, games and reading were places I could go to recharge. Afterwards, even those became inaccessible.

For years I could not hold a controller for more than ten minutes. My camera collected dust because when I picked it up, I could not focus enough to use it. The same thing happened with books. Even watching a comfort show or listening to music could require more attention than I had left.

I was too exhausted to do the things that helped me recover from being exhausted. Then I became frustrated with myself for being unable to enjoy them, which only pulled me deeper into depression.

There was nowhere left to flee except into my own head.

It took about five years before I began to feel something resembling normal again and to find real joy in things. I am still not fully recovered. Burnout altered what I could do, how much it cost to do it and how long recovery took.

Was the suffering worth it?

No.

Some of the work was useful. Some jobs gave me experience and credentials that helped me reach where I am now. I can value what I learned without pretending the damage was tuition I had to pay. Good things growing in the wreckage do not retroactively make the collision a transport strategy.

I had outsourced more than my career#

Work was not the only place where I followed somebody else’s requirements.

That took me longer to understand.

Careers make their requirements obvious. There is a title, a salary, a person who decides whether you are doing well and an industry ready to explain which achievement should matter next. The rules may be ridiculous, but at least somebody has written them down.

The requirements I followed elsewhere were quieter.

I spent years trying to become what other people expected me to be. I became good at reading a room, locating the available role and squeezing myself into it. I could work out which parts of me would be useful, impressive or at least unobjectionable, then present those parts as if they were the whole person.

That can look like social competence. Sometimes it is. Being able to understand other people matters. But there is a difference between meeting people with care and rebuilding yourself around every room you enter.

I had spent so long asking what version of me would be accepted that I had almost stopped asking whether that version was true.

I let jobs tell me what success meant. I let social circles tell me which people mattered. I let the instability of every apartment become another cost I was supposed to endure. I let an imagined future audience choose the house, cars and life that would supposedly prove my value.

Then I had to face the possibility that I had applied the same process to my identity.

I honestly think I would have come out as queer and trans much earlier if I had understood sooner that other people do not get to define me.

I do not mean that I had one clear answer hidden inside me for years and simply refused to open the envelope. Lives are rarely that narratively convenient. I mean that I had trained myself not to trust any desire until it had survived everybody else’s imagined review.

Before I could ask what do I want?, my mind produced a queue of other questions.

Will this disappoint someone? Will it make my life more difficult? Will people still understand me? Will they think this is real? Can I justify it? Is there enough evidence? Have I suffered enough to be certain?

Those questions can sound responsible. Together, they meant everybody else received a vote before I was allowed to speak.

I was waiting for permission that nobody could meaningfully give me.

Coming out did not magically remove the habit. I did not cross a clean boundary between a false life and an authentic one while the old requirements disappeared into the credits. I still catch myself looking outside for confirmation that what I feel is sufficiently reasonable. I still sometimes try to build an airtight case for wanting something before admitting that I want it.

But I began to see the pattern.

The career, the friendships, the apartments and the identity were not separate mistakes. They were all consequences of the same decision: I had outsourced authorship of my life.

That realization hurt because it made the scale of the loss visible. I did many impressive things while moving farther away from myself. I could point to jobs, places and achievements, but I had spent years treating the person experiencing them as an implementation detail.

It also gave me somewhere to begin.

There is an important distinction here. I have not stopped caring what other people need or how my choices affect them. Other people have feelings, hopes and expectations. Loving them means taking those things seriously.

It does not mean giving them merge rights.

The question is no longer what version of me will make every room comfortable?

It is what kind of life can I recognize as mine?

That is a much less efficient question. It does not produce a universal roadmap. It has led to fewer status symbols and considerably more discussion of goat infrastructure.

It is also the first requirement I remember writing for myself.

Then I remembered what I actually wanted#

My real dream is not especially compatible with the luxury advertisement playing in my old head.

I want a farmstead. I want a workshop where I can build things and tinker with random electronics until a completely innocent device develops firmware and a personal grievance. I want a reasonable living space with enough room to have people over for board-game nights.

I want a huge kitchen, not because marble worktops will certify my socioeconomic tier, but because I want to cook. I want people leaning against the counters, food taking longer than planned, wine being opened and the evening running past the sensible stopping point. I want a home that participates in my life instead of documenting that I can afford rooms I never enter.

I still have dream cars. They are just very revealing dream cars.

I want an original Fiat 500 restored until it feels factory new, perhaps with a few quality-of-life upgrades because historical authenticity is lovely right up to the moment it begins fighting modern traffic. I also want a mid-1990s-ish Nissan King Cab to restore, perhaps convert to electric and use as a farm truck.

Neither is an obedient symbol of having won capitalism. One is a tiny Italian punctuation mark. The other is a future engineering incident with a cargo bed.

And I want goats.

One of the goats will naturally be named Ralf, because that is law. Ralf will have a suspiciously large goat tower and an enrichment programme with better funding than several public services. The other goats will have names once the naming committee has completed stakeholder consultation.

This dream may sound smaller than the old one. It is not.

The old dream was optimized for being seen. This one is full of things I would still want if nobody were watching.

Joy is not the reward at the end#

Only recently have I started allowing myself to enjoy things without forcing them to justify their place in a five-year plan.

I found my way back to writing. I tinker with random electronics. I can slow down without automatically interpreting it as evidence of personal failure. I spent a week of my vacation playing Factorio because Factorio is fun, not because conveyor-belt routing develops a leadership competency that can be added to LinkedIn.

Although, to be fair, Factorio is an excellent environment for discovering that your beautiful scalable architecture has been starving the copper bus for six hours.

The important part is that the week did not build toward anything. It did not become a side business, video series or carefully quantified recovery sprint. I played a game. I enjoyed it. Nothing was produced except several preventable railway deaths and a factory that had become difficult to explain.

For years I believed joy would be issued at the finish line. I could enjoy life after the career was secure, after the right move, after I became successful enough, after I proved whatever case I thought the universe was hearing.

But the grind does not contain a finish condition.

It knows only how to grind. In the end, the main thing I was grinding down was myself.

The new acceptance criteria#

I am not arguing that nobody should work hard, pursue a demanding career or want expensive things. I still love building difficult systems. I still have ambition. Apparently I am considering an electric conversion of a thirty-year-old farm truck, so nobody needs to schedule an intervention about my lack of projects.

I am arguing for inspecting the requirement before devoting a life to implementing it.

When I want something now, I try to ask:

1Would I want this if nobody could see it?
2Do I want the thing, or the verdict I expect it to deliver?
3What am I sacrificing, and is that cost temporary or simply my life now?
4Does this goal make room for people, rest and joy before it is complete?
5Who wrote this requirement?

Sometimes the answer still points toward hard work. Fine. A meaningful life is not frictionless, and rest is not a personality. But I no longer accept suffering as automatic evidence of progress. I no longer treat friendships as networking infrastructure. I no longer want every hobby to submit a business case.

Take the painting class even if the paintings will be terrible. Spend the vacation playing a factory game whose primary lesson is that manufacturing logistics can colonize a human nervous system. Cook dinner with people who cannot advance your career. Learn something because it delights you. Sit still long enough to notice whether the life you are building contains anywhere you would actually like to live.

You do not have to earn every good moment by converting it into future value.

What is the point of reaching the life you wanted if you trained yourself never to be there while it was happening?

I still want stability. I still want to build things. I still want to grow.

I just want the person doing the growing to survive the process.