The version of you who wanted this is still in there. He's just buried under what he got.
My twenty-five-year-old self would have killed for my Tuesday. I spent my Tuesday irritated about the Wi-Fi.
I was in Lisbon. View of the river from the kitchen. Espresso machine I knew how to use. Nowhere I had to be. The Wi-Fi was slow loading a YouTube video, and I muttered "Jesus Christ" under my breath like the universe owed me a refund.
This is the trap. Every milestone you hit becomes invisible within about ninety days. The thing you prayed for becomes the baseline you complain about. The floor of your life keeps rising, and you keep standing on it like it was always there.
You don't notice it happening. That's the whole problem.
The first $10k month I had, I screamed in my car. Literally screamed. I called my mom. I bought myself a nice dinner and felt guilty about the price, and ate it anyway, and remembered every bite. Three years later, $10k months are the months I'm worried about. Not celebrating. Worried.
The first time I flew business class, I took a picture of the seat. I sent it to three people. I stayed awake for the whole flight because I didn't want to miss it. Now I get annoyed when the entertainment system reboots during boarding.
The first apartment I rented with a real view, I used to sit on the balcony for an hour every morning. Just sit there. Coffee. Nothing else. By month four, I was eating breakfast over the sink, looking at my phone.
You'd think you'd notice. You don't. Hedonic adaptation is the cleanest, quietest thief in your whole life. It doesn't steal the thing. It steals your ability to feel the thing.
Here's what it looks like from inside. You're at dinner at a restaurant that took two months to get into, and you're scrolling Zillow under the table because you saw a friend bought a house. You're on a beach you saved up to see for a decade, and you're annoyed that the umbrella guy is taking too long. You hit a revenue goal you set five years ago, and your first thought is what the next one should be. Not joy. Just a new line item on a mental spreadsheet you never agreed to keep.
The cruelest part is that you remember being the version of you who wanted this. You can picture him. Twenty-five, broke, sleeping on a futon, eating eggs three meals a day, telling people his "real life" would start any minute now. He's in there somewhere. And if he could watch you complain about hotel Wi-Fi, he would lose his mind. He would shake you. He would beg you to stop.
I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty. Guilt doesn't fix it. I've tried.
What changed for me wasn't gratitude. I tried the journals. I tried the lists. Three things I'm thankful for. Five wins from this week. They all turned into one more thing to check off, one more box on a list, one more way to outsource feeling to a system.
What worked, and I'm not even sure "worked" is the right word, was a phone call.
A buddy of mine from the old days called me last summer. He'd been laid off. He was asking how I did what I did. He was nervous on the phone. I could hear his voice doing that thing where you're trying to sound casual about something that's keeping you up at night. He asked me what an average day looked like. I started describing it. The slow morning. The coffee on the balcony. The hour or two of actual work. The afternoon is free.
I heard myself say the words, and I heard him go quiet on the other end. Not jealous. Just quiet. The way you go quiet when somebody describes the exact thing you've been praying for, and you didn't know other people actually had it.
I hung up and sat on the balcony for the first time in months.
It didn't last. The hedonic thing kicks back in. Three days later, I was annoyed about something stupid again. But for those forty minutes after the call, I could see my life the way he saw it, and the view was unbelievable.
You will not feel your success the way you thought you would. That's not a flaw in you. It's a feature of being a person.
The version of you who wanted all this is still in there. He's just buried under everything he has.
Dig him up sometimes. Let him look around.
— Best, Jose
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