Every time I let go of something, I felt lighter. So I kept going.
A woman I was seeing asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I couldn't think of a single thing. Not because I have everything. Because I'd trained myself to stop wanting.
She thought it was charming at first. Low maintenance. Easy. Then she asked again a week later and I still didn't have an answer and something shifted in her face. Like she was looking at a room with no furniture in it.
She wasn't wrong.
For years I practiced needing less. That was the whole project after I sold my company. I gave away most of what I owned, fit my life into a carry-on, stopped caring about the house, the car, the watch. I cut the relationships that required compromise. The friendships that required showing up on someone else's terms. The habits that tied me to one city or one schedule or one version of myself.
Every time I let go of something, I felt lighter. So I kept going.
I got so good at not needing things that I forgot how to want them.
That's the trap. You strip your life down to nothing that can hurt you and then you realize that wanting things is what made you feel alive. Not having them. Wanting them. The ache of reaching for something you might not get.
When I was running my logistics company I wanted everything. The big contract. The warehouse expansion. I wanted to prove my dad wrong about me dropping out of college. I wanted to take my mom somewhere nice for the first time in her life. I was exhausted and stressed and sometimes miserable but I was never empty. There was always something pulling me forward. Something I cared about enough to lose sleep over.
Now nothing pulls. I drift. Not in a crisis way. In a Tuesday afternoon way. The money comes in. The dashboards are green. The waves are good. And I sit there feeling like I'm watching my own life through a window.
You know this one even if you haven't named it yet. Maybe you simplified your business until it ran itself and then couldn't figure out why you kept opening your laptop with nothing to do. Maybe you got rid of every obligation and then sat in the silence wondering what the hell you were supposed to feel. Maybe someone asked what you're excited about and you gave an answer that sounded right but felt like air coming out of your mouth.
Minimalism tells you that less is more. And it is, for a while. Then less is just less. You cross a line somewhere between freedom and absence and you don't notice because the whole time you're crossing it, it feels like winning.
I spent my twenties needing too much from everything. My business. My relationships. My body. I squeezed every situation dry and then wondered why nothing lasted. So when I rebuilt, I went the other direction. Need nothing. Depend on nothing. Want nothing you can't walk away from in forty-eight hours.
Turns out there's a version of freedom that looks exactly like not giving a shit. And from the outside, those two things are impossible to tell apart.
What shifted wasn't some revelation. It was a Thursday in Ericeira. A guy I surf with asked if I wanted to help him fix up a boat he'd bought. Old thing. Barely floated. He needed someone to sand the hull on weekends.
I said yes before I thought about it. And for the first time in months I had somewhere I was supposed to be on Saturday that I didn't choose for myself. Someone was counting on me to show up with sandpaper and nothing else.
The boat was a terrible investment. We both knew it would take forever to get right. He didn't need my help specifically. Any person with two hands could've done what I did.
But I needed to want something again. Even something small. Even something that didn't make any sense on a spreadsheet.
My mom raised nine kids and never once tried to need less. She needed everything. The noise, the mess, the bills, the worry. She wanted things for every single one of us and she carried those wants around like they weighed nothing, even though they weighed everything.
I used to think she was trapped by all that wanting. Now I think she was the most alive person I've ever known.
Wanting is dangerous. That part they got right. But the other side of not wanting isn't peace.
It's just a quieter kind of gone.
— Best, Jose
