You can rebel your way into another prison.
A four-year-old's birthday party. That's what I almost skipped because I couldn't figure out what was in it for me.
A guy I surf with here in Lisbon invited me. His daughter was turning four. Balloons, cake, kids running around a courtyard. He asked me on a Tuesday morning after we paddled in. I said I'd check my schedule. I don't have a schedule. I have a sticky note with three things on it. I just needed time to decide if showing up was worth it.
Worth it. A birthday party. For a child.
I went. Stayed about two hours. It was the best afternoon I'd had in weeks. His wife made arroz doce and his daughter handed me a balloon animal that was supposed to be a dog but looked like a tumor. I laughed harder than I had in a month.
And on the way home I realized how close I came to missing that because my brain still processes people like line items on a spreadsheet.
That's what a decade in business does to you. It trains you to evaluate every interaction by what it produces. Not in a cold, sociopathic way. In a quiet, automatic way that feels like intelligence but is actually damage.
In my logistics company, every person had a function. The vendor was a cost to negotiate down. The employee was a role to fill. The client was revenue to protect. Every conversation had an objective. Every meeting had an outcome I was steering toward. I got damn good at it. And I thought that was something to be proud of.
It is a skill. It's also a disease that doesn't stop when you close the laptop.
That's the trap. You spend enough years running human interactions through a filter of usefulness and it becomes your default setting. What does this person do for me. What does this conversation produce. Is this hour well spent. You get so fluent in that math you start doing it everywhere. At dinner with friends. On the phone with family. At a kid's birthday party where the only ask was to show up and eat some cake.
You've felt this. Maybe you went to a friend's wedding and caught yourself scanning the room for people worth knowing. Maybe someone called you just to talk and you felt your chest tighten because there was no agenda. Maybe your partner wanted a Sunday doing nothing and your first thought was that it was wasted time.
You're not a bad person. You just spent years inside a system that paid you to treat people like inputs. The system is gone but the wiring is still live.
I do it with my own family. My mom calls and within two minutes I'm trying to steer us toward something with a point. She doesn't want a point. She wants to tell me about my nephew's report card and the neighbor's new dog and what she's cooking this weekend. She wants twenty minutes of her son. And I'm sitting on a balcony in Portugal running a cost-benefit analysis on a phone call with my own damn mother.
That's an ugly thing to catch yourself doing.
What helped wasn't a book or a breakthrough. I just started noticing the math. Every time my brain asked "what's this worth" about a person or a moment, I'd catch it. Not fight it. Not lecture myself about it. Just see it. Oh. There it is again. The machine still running.
Some days I'm better. Some days I'm still the guy at the party with one eye on his phone. But noticing matters. Not because it fixes the wiring, but because once you can see the program running, you can choose not to follow the instructions every single time.
My buddy's daughter doesn't know my name. She calls me the tall one, which is generous because I'm five-eight on a good day. She walked up to me at that party with a juice box in her fist and said "here, you need this."
No agenda. No angle. No calculation. Just a juice box because she thought I looked thirsty.
That's the most honest interaction I've had in months. She's four.
— Best, Jose
