I used to think that was sharp thinking. Seeing the angles other people missed. Now I think it's just damage.
I read a novel last week. First one in years. Halfway through I caught myself looking for the actionable takeaway.
It was a love story. There was no takeaway.
I put the book down and sat there feeling like something in me was broken. Not dramatically broken. Broken the way a door hinge gets broken where it still works but it squeaks every time and you stop noticing the squeak until someone else hears it.
That's the trap. You spend enough years building things, measuring things, running the math on everything, and your brain stops being able to experience anything without evaluating it for utility. Every conversation becomes a potential connection. Every trip becomes a story you can tell somewhere. Every hour has a dollar value and you know exactly what it is.
I used to think that was sharp thinking. Seeing the angles other people missed.
Now I think it's just damage.
When I ran my logistics company, everything was a calculation. Which client was worth keeping. Which employee cost more than they produced. Which route saved eleven minutes. I was good at it. That math kept the business alive for ten years.
But the math didn't stay at the warehouse. It came home with me. It crawled into my friendships. I started evaluating people the way I evaluated vendors. What does this person bring to the table. What's the cost of maintaining this relationship. Is this worth my time.
I lost a close friend in my late twenties and didn't even realize it was happening. He wanted to hang out and do nothing. Watch football. Eat bad food. Talk about nothing important. And I kept canceling because I had better things to do. Better meaning things that moved a number somewhere.
He stopped calling. Took me six months to notice.
You know this one. Maybe you've caught yourself mentally networking at your kid's birthday party. Maybe you sat across from someone at dinner and realized you were half-listening because nothing they said was useful to you. Maybe someone asked you to do something fun and your first thought was how long it would take and what you'd lose by saying yes.
The calculation runs in the background now. You don't choose it. It just fires. Pricing every hour. Weighing every interaction. Turning your whole life into a spreadsheet nobody asked you to build.
And the worst part is it works. In business, that brain is an asset. It's the thing that got you here. The thing that helped you say no to the wrong clients and yes to the right ones. The thing that built the income that bought the freedom.
But it doesn't shut off. And a life where everything is measured is a life where nothing is just felt.
I noticed it in the water a few months ago. I was out near Peniche with some guys and a kid, maybe nineteen, paddled out late and caught the worst wave of the day. Closeout. No shape to it. He rode it for maybe three seconds before it folded on him.
He came up laughing. Not because the wave was good. Because he was in the ocean and that was enough.
I sat on my board and tried to remember the last time I did something purely because it felt good without also running the math on whether it was worth doing. Couldn't come up with one.
I don't have a clean answer for this. I don't think there is one. Your brain got rewired by a decade of treating everything like a business decision and you can't just flip it back.
What I've been doing is stupid small. One thing a day that has no return. A walk with no podcast. A meal I cook slow without checking my phone. A conversation where I'm not angling toward anything. That novel I put down, I picked it back up. Finished it. Still couldn't tell you what the takeaway was.
I think that might be the whole point.
My mom used to sit on the porch after all nine of us were in bed and drink her coffee. No book. No plan for the next day. Just sitting there. I asked her once what she was doing. She said nothing. Like that was the complete answer.
I'm thirty-seven years old and I'm trying to relearn how to do nothing. The thing my mom never had to learn because nobody ever taught her to turn everything into a transaction first.
The most expensive thing I ever built wasn't the company. It was the brain that can't stop running the numbers on a life that was never meant to be a math problem.
— Best, Jose
