Somewhere in your 20s or 30s you’ll get the opportunity to rebuild your life after a negative loop, heal from what broke you, live in your own space, reconnect with your discipline, and learn to love yourself again. It’s very important that you see that journey through.
People respect you more when they don't see you often. Even parents. Trust me. It's strange how distance rearranges love, how absence restores what closeness erodes. When people are deprived of your presence, they start seeing you clearly again, not through habit but through awareness. Proximity dulls perception. Space sharpens it. That's just how the human mind works.
i believe in re-reading and re-watching your favourite books & movies at different stages of your life. the plot never changes, but your perspective does.
Somewhere today, someone you barely remember is describing you to a person you'll never meet. They built a whole version of you out of one afternoon, and they still carry it around. You live inside hundreds of these little stories. You'll never hear one.
A researcher named Charles Cooley worked this out back in 1902. You build your entire sense of who you are by imagining how other people see you. Other people are the mirror. So the truest version of you has never really sat inside your own head. It has been living in theirs.
Your brain runs a quiet system for this. Get to know someone, and you build a small copy of them that you carry everywhere. You can hear their voice and guess what they'd say before they even say it. Everyone who knows you is doing the same thing with a copy of you. That copy keeps running after you leave the room. It keeps going after you leave their life, and sometimes after you leave the world.
And those copies stay busy. Scientists once recorded what people talk about all day. About two-thirds of it was other people who weren't even in the room. So at this exact moment, in a kitchen or a group chat you'll never see, someone is telling a story with you in it.
A 2018 study found something gentler. Almost everyone underestimates how much other people like them. We get so busy picking apart how we came across that we miss the other person walking away glad they met us. In their memory, you are the warm one. The cold version mostly lives in your own head.
Even dying does not switch this off. For most of the last hundred years, experts thought the job of grief was to slowly let the person go. In 1996, researchers found the opposite was healthier. We keep the people we lose alive inside us. We go on talking to them and telling their stories for years. About 1,500 years ago, a Roman writer named Boethius wrote that being forgotten is its own kind of death. People later put it plainer. You die twice. Once when your body stops, and once more, much later, the last time someone says your name.
So that ache you felt reading the phrase was pointing at something true. It never fully goes away. You spend a whole life leaving small pieces of yourself inside other people, and you never get to read a single one. The stories with your name in them will always outnumber the ones you hear. And they keep going after you stop.
Voltaire passed away today in 1778.
There are two quotes of his I always come back to:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
and
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Calculate time in reverse.
That is, if I have an appointment at 4, I start scheduling my whole day in reverse: I have to be there at 4, so I have to leave my house at 3:15 and be ready by 3:10. Getting ready takes 40 minutes, so I have to start by 2:30 at the latest, so I have to shower at 2. For that, I have to finish my chores at home, which I estimate will take about 2 hours, so I have to start at 12, but first I have to eat lunch, so I'll start cooking it at 11... and so on...
This has a clinical name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. And the ADHD version runs on a completely different mechanism than the neurotypical one.
A neurotypical person stays up late because they want more leisure time. The ADHD brain stays up because it spent every drop of dopamine it had on executive function during the day. Sitting in meetings, managing transitions, filtering impulses, remembering the thing you were supposed to remember. That burns through dopamine the way sprinting burns through glycogen. By 10pm the tank is empty.
But here's where it gets counterintuitive. The exhaustion is physical. The dopamine deficit is neurological. Those are two separate systems. Your muscles want sleep. Your prefrontal cortex is starving for the stimulation it was denied all day because it spent 14 hours on task-switching and impulse control instead of anything that actually felt rewarding.
The phone at midnight is the brain trying to collect what it's owed. Low-effort, high-stimulation content. Scrolling, short videos, rabbit holes. The exact profile of activity that delivers dopamine without requiring the executive function you already depleted.
The sleep researchers call this a "self-regulation failure." It's closer to a debt collection. You borrowed against your own reward system to function all day. The bill comes due at midnight. And the brain will not let you sleep until it gets paid.
Pattern Recognition is also the form of intelligence that causes the most stress.
You will see things that others do not.
You'll feel crazy.
Things will be *so obvious* to you, and others will just deny it.
you’re 22. you scroll 3 hours a day. it feels harmless
at 28 you can’t read an article without checking your phone twice per paragraph
at 32 you don’t understand why nothing you start ever finishes, you’re still dreaming of this project you wanted to start. still no time
at 40 you’ve never finished a book in a decade.
it all passed