Time doesn’t pass. It’s spent, and most of us never check the receipt.
My buddy told me he's going to be a dad. First kid. I said congratulations like he'd just found a good parking spot.
He didn't notice. I did.
I've been like this for a while. Flat. Not sad, not happy. Just room temperature about everything. Someone shares good news and I nod. Bad news, same nod. My revenue dips three grand in a month and I close the laptop and go make coffee. A clean swell rolls in at sunrise and I think "nice" and paddle out like I'm running an errand.
I used to think this was growth. My twenties and early thirties were a roller coaster. Running the logistics company had me swinging between panic and euphoria every week. Big client signs, I'm on top of the world. Truck breaks down, I'm spiraling. Every phone call could ruin my day or save it. I was reactive to everything.
I remember the night we landed our biggest contract. Seventeen trucks for a retail chain. I sat in the warehouse parking lot and called everyone I knew. Yelling into the phone. Hands shaking. I didn't know back then that feeling that hard was something I'd eventually miss.
So when I got out and rebuilt my life around calm, it felt like healing. No drama. No emergencies. No swings. I read the books. Regulate your nervous system. Don't let external events control your internal state. I practiced. Got good at it.
Too good.
That's the trap. You spend years learning not to react to the chaos and you don't notice when you stop reacting to everything else too. The volume doesn't go down on just the bad stuff. It goes down on all of it.
My niece turned five last month. My brother sent a video of her blowing out candles. I watched it, typed a heart emoji, and closed the video. I should've felt something. I know that. But somewhere between selling the company and building a life designed to never stress me out, I flattened. Not just my schedule. My whole emotional range.
You've felt this. Maybe you haven't named it yet. But if you've successfully built the quiet life, you might recognize it in the small moments. A friend is excited about something and you can't match their energy. Someone tells you about a problem and you give the measured response when what they actually needed was for you to say damn, that's terrible. You're not cold. You're controlled. And controlled looks a lot like cold from the outside.
The messed up part is people compliment you on it. "You're so steady." "Nothing rattles you." "I wish I had your composure." And you take it because the alternative is admitting that your composure isn't something you built on purpose. It's what grew over the place where your feelings used to be.
I went surfing last week in rough conditions. Big swell, messy lineup, the kind of day that used to scare the shit out of me. Paddled into a wave way overhead. Got worked. Held under long enough that my brain went quiet and my body took over.
When I came up gasping, my hands were shaking and I was grinning like an idiot. For about thirty seconds I felt completely, stupidly alive.
It faded by the time I got back to the lineup. But those thirty seconds had more feeling in them than the rest of my month combined.
I don't have a clean answer for this. I've started chasing that feeling in small ways. Cold water. Bigger waves. Saying yes to things that make me nervous. Anything my body can't stay neutral about. It's not a system. It's more like poking a bruise to make sure you can still feel it.
Some mornings I wake up and the first thing I feel is nothing. Not dread, not excitement. The ceiling looks the same as it did yesterday. I make coffee. Open the laptop. Everything works. That's supposed to be the win.
The life you build to protect yourself from feeling bad will eventually protect you from feeling anything at all. And the scariest part isn't that it happens. It's that you might not notice until someone calls with the best news of their life and you answer like they just read you the weather.
— Best, Jose
