Starting Over, Quietly

I used to spend most of my time solving problems that lived inside screens. For years, that was enough. It was interesting, it paid well, and I was good at it. I didn’t question it the way you don’t question breathing.

Then at some point — I can’t tell you exactly when — I started noticing that I hadn’t really looked at anything in a long time. Not at the city I live in, not at the food I was eating, not at the sky doing its thing every evening while I stared at a monitor.

The shift

It wasn’t dramatic. Nobody quits anything dramatically in real life. You just start caring less about one thing and more about another, and one day you realize the balance has tipped.

I started walking more. Not exercise-walking, just walking. Through the sois near my apartment, past the vendors setting up before dawn, through the parts of Bangkok that don’t make it into travel blogs. I started cooking without recipes. Reading books that had no practical application whatsoever. Sitting in coffee shops without opening a laptop.

Small things. But they added up to a different kind of day.

What I’m not doing anymore

I’m not keeping up. With the discourse, the new releases, the opinions about opinions. I spent a decade swimming in that current and I’m tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

I don’t miss it the way I expected to. That surprised me.

What this is

Just a place to write. About mornings in Bangkok, about getting older, about the strange peace of having nothing to ship. No deadlines here. No sprints. Just whatever I feel like putting into words on a given day.

I’m happier alone with my thoughts than I’ve been in a long time. That feels like something worth paying attention to.