And I'm walking around like a guy who just got out and doesn't know what normal people do with an open Saturday.
Someone asked me what I do for fun and the first word out of my mouth was podcasts. Like that's an answer. Like listening to other people talk about their lives counts as having one.
It was dinner in Lisbon. A woman I'd been seeing for a few weeks. She asked what music I listen to and I blanked. She asked what I do besides surfing and work. I sat there.
I spent fifteen years building things. A logistics company from 22 to 32. The delivery driving stretch. Then the digital products. During all of that, every hour was either working or recovering from work. I didn't develop tastes. I didn't read fiction. I didn't go to concerts or learn to cook for the pleasure of it or walk through a neighbourhood without a destination. Everything I did was either productive or rest so I could be productive again.
Now I have the time. The money. The freedom. And I'm walking around like a guy who just got out and doesn't know what normal people do with an open Saturday.
That's the trap. You spend the best years of your life getting excellent at making money and you arrive on the other side with nothing inside you except the ability to make money. You're a machine that finally got switched off and doesn't know what it's for when it's not running.
One of my younger sisters called me a few weeks ago. She works at a hospital. Long shifts. Two roommates. Not a lot of extra anything. But she spent twenty minutes telling me about a ceramics class she's taking on Tuesday nights and the way her voice went when she talked about it, this goofy excitement over a lopsided bowl she'd glazed, I realized I couldn't remember the last time I sounded like that about anything.
She has less money, less time, and less flexibility than I do in every way you can measure. But she has this thing on Tuesday nights that makes her light up. And I'm a guy sitting in a restaurant in Portugal who can't name a song he likes.
You know this. Maybe someone asked what shows you're into and you realized you haven't watched anything that wasn't a documentary or a business biography in years. Maybe you got a free weekend and spent it reorganizing your files because you didn't know what else to do with the hours. Maybe you booked a vacation and caught yourself reading about conversion rates by the pool because your brain doesn't have another gear.
It's not burnout. Burnout is when you're too tired to enjoy the things you love. This is different. This is not knowing what you love because you never took the time to find out.
I skipped that part. Went from teenager to founder at 19 and never did the slow, useless, unprofitable work of becoming a person with interests. With taste. With things I care about that have nothing to do with money.
I'm starting from zero. Last month I bought a cheap turntable from a secondhand shop in Ericeira. Been picking up records at random. Jazz. Old soul. Some Filipino stuff my dad used to play when I was little. I don't know what I like yet. But I sit there and let the needle drop and don't do anything else. No phone. No screens. Just sound filling a room.
It feels ridiculous. A grown man learning how to have a hobby. But that's the tax on building the way I built. I got excellent at one thing and let everything else die. And nobody said a word about it while it was happening. They just called me focused. Driven. Disciplined.
Disciplined is a nice word for someone who forgot how to be a person.
She texted me the next morning. Sent me a song. I listened to it three times. I still don't know if I liked it.
But I liked that someone thought I was the kind of person worth sharing music with. That felt like enough of a place to start.
— Best, Jose
