I make fifty decisions before noon. my buddy makes five all day.
I miss being told what to do. I will never say that out loud to anyone who has a boss.
But it's true. I'm standing in a market in Mexico City and I can't decide whether to buy mangoes or walk to the park or open my laptop or fly to Oaxaca tomorrow or stay another week. Nobody is expecting me. Nothing is due. No one will notice what I choose.
So I just stand there.
This is the part they don't put on the podcast. The part where you design a life with zero constraints and then discover that constraints were the thing making decisions easy. When you had a job, Tuesday was Tuesday. You showed up. You ate at the place near the office. You went home. Done. When I ran my logistics company, I never once stood in a parking lot wondering what to do with my afternoon. There was always a driver who didn't show. A client who needed a call back. A shipment running late. The chaos chose for me.
Now I choose everything. Where to live. When to work. What to eat. Who to see. What country to be in next month. What to do with this afternoon. What to do with this hour.
Every single one of those choices falls on me alone.
That's the trap. You remove all the structure from your life because structure felt like a cage. Then you find out the cage was also a skeleton. Take it away and the whole thing just collapses into a puddle.
You've felt some version of this. Maybe you quit the nine-to-five and spent your first free Monday staring at the wall by 10am because nobody told you what to do next. Maybe you moved somewhere beautiful and spent the first week inside your apartment because going outside meant choosing a direction with no reason to pick one over another. Maybe you finally got the flexible schedule and burned half the morning just deciding what to work on.
A buddy back home complains about his calendar being packed. Meetings from eight to four. Kids' stuff after that. He's got maybe ninety free minutes a day. He thinks I've got it figured out because every minute of mine is open.
What he doesn't know is that his day has shape. It has edges. He makes maybe five real decisions a day because everything else is already decided by the structure he's inside of. I make fifty. What to eat. When to eat it. Where to go. Whether to work now or later. How long. Whether to see people or be alone. Whether to stay in this city or leave. Every hour is a blank page and most days I'm too tired from deciding to write anything on it.
I used to think discipline was the fix. Just make a schedule. Set a routine. Wake up at the same time. But I tried that and my brain saw through it immediately. A routine you invent for yourself on a Tuesday night carries no weight. There's no consequence for breaking it. No one notices if you skip it. You can't trick yourself into urgency. I know because I bought three different planners trying.
What actually helped was so small it's almost embarrassing. There's a taco spot near my apartment that opens at seven. Same group of people show up every morning. A couple of freelancers, a retired teacher, a few locals who've been eating there longer than I've been alive. I started going. Not because I chose to. Because one of the regulars started expecting me. If I didn't show by seven thirty he'd text me one word. "Tacos."
That one thing, someone else putting a pin in my morning, loosened everything else. I stopped standing in markets paralyzed. I stopped scrolling flights at 2am trying to decide whether to leave. The morning was handled. And having one thing I didn't choose somehow made every other choice lighter.
My mom never had a free hour in her life. Nine kids. Houses to clean. Dinner to cook. She didn't pick her schedule. Her schedule picked her. I spent fifteen years trying to build the opposite of that.
I got it. Turns out a day with no edges is just a day with no shape. You can't hold it. It runs through your hands and by nighttime you can't tell anyone where it went.
Freedom is lighter when someone else is holding one end of it.
— Best, Jose
