Nobody warns you about this because it sounds ridiculous.
I haven't solved a real problem in months. Not because I can't. Because nothing in my life requires it.
A buddy from my logistics days called last week with a supplier mess. Two vendors, overlapping contracts, a delivery gap costing him real money. I sat in a cafe in Lisbon drawing scenarios on a napkin for forty minutes. When I hung up I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. This buzzing in my chest. Like waking up a muscle I forgot was there.
Then I went home and sat on my bed and felt weird about it. Not because the phone call was strange. Because feeling that alive was strange. Because it meant I hadn't been.
That's the part that doesn't make the highlight reel. The freedom story sounds great. Two hours of work a day. Revenue that doesn't need my attention. No meetings. No fires. Nobody needing me to think hard about anything.
But my brain used to be the sharpest thing I owned. I could walk into a negotiation with a carrier at 11pm and feel the math clicking before I opened my mouth. Hold six variables in my head and find the gap in someone's argument while they were still talking. I was fast. I hated the hours. I hated what the work cost me. But I trusted what the work did to my mind.
Now the most complex decision I make in a week is which flight has the better layover.
That's the trap. You build a life that doesn't need your best thinking and your best thinking starts to leave. Not dramatically. Slowly. The way a language fades when you stop speaking it. You can still understand the words. You just can't find them as fast.
I caught it in Porto a few weeks ago. A woman at a coworking space asked me to look at her pricing model. Basic stuff. The kind of thing I'd have eaten alive five years ago. It took me twice as long to get there. I was reaching for instincts that used to be automatic and finding them buried under months of disuse.
You've felt this. Maybe you left a demanding job for something easier and noticed your edge going soft within a year. Maybe you automated the hard parts of your work and realized the hard parts were what kept you sharp. Maybe you sat down to think through something complex and caught yourself reaching for your phone instead because your brain had lost the habit of sitting with anything difficult.
Nobody warns you about this because it sounds ridiculous. "My life is too easy and it's making me dull." Try saying that to anyone without sounding like an ass.
But it's real. A knife you stop using doesn't break. It just stops cutting. One morning you press your thumb to the edge and it doesn't even leave a mark.
My mom never had a day where her brain wasn't running full speed. Nine kids, no margin, every hour accounted for. She's 67 and sharper than I am. Not because she's smarter. Because she never had the option of letting it go soft.
I don't want to go back to seventy-hour weeks. I know what those burn. But I've started picking up the phone when people call with problems. Not as a consultant. Not for money. Just as a guy who needs to think hard about something once in a while to remember he still can. My buddy's supply chain. Another friend trying to figure out whether to hire or outsource. My oldest brother working through a refinance.
Their problems are keeping me from going completely flat.
Turns out the thing that made me sharp was never talent. It was necessity. And I designed necessity out of my entire life.
— Best, Jose
