“What if I died tomorrow?”
That’s the question I’ve asked myself for the greater part of the last year. And I had good reasons to ask myself that. And I know, I’m writing this for my birthday. I should be happy I’m now 28, I should go party, drink some beers with my friends, and think about what’s next in my life. But right now, I can’t help but strip away all the unnecessary, leaving only what really matters.
It’s easy to think that life follows a predictable route, and if you do a derivative at a certain point in time, it could look like that. But life isn’t always like that. Life is partially a bitch. Everything can happen, and everything will happen. That’s the only thing that keeps us alive.
Three years ago I wrote a post for my 25th birthday. I was lost in a crisis of purpose. Exhausted by the very thought of writing code. I felt I was the worst in the room. It feels like a lifetime away, but also so near.
In the last three years the world has changed in ways no one could’ve predicted, we saw the rise of maybe one of the most transformative technologies of the last 40 years. As a software developer, I felt every bit of that. When agents started getting really good, I felt like I didn’t have anything more to give to the world professionally. I really felt I was getting useless, a meat proxy between thoughts and implementation. I felt like I wasted a great chunk of my life.
It’s fucking hard to put these feelings into words. It’s even scary. And this is why I’m heavily critical of the world we’re building.
But this tremendous shift lit a little bonfire in me. I suddenly needed to express myself in other ways, other than programming. I started documenting my life more through photography and through writing, it’s something that I needed to remind myself I’m human. Something that reminded me that it is OK to be imperfect. But I’m still a perfectionist.
The opening question of this post was something that I asked myself a lot after a family member became bedridden. I’m afraid of death. Or, to be more honest, I’m afraid of being forgotten, or even worse, being replaced. This is another feeling that I have always wanted to avoid, but I experienced it firsthand during these years. And it hurts every single time. I spent my emotional bandwidth in a lot of interpersonal relationships, but the abrupt change of availability is a form of quiet violence that my brain (and heart) can’t get used to.
But maybe that’s exactly what I need, stripped of anything but the essential.
My essential?
- Opening a beer in front of Neovim to look at code I wrote with one of my dearest friends.
- Loading a camera with film, and listening to the intricate mechanics of it, while shooting pictures around the city with my friends & my brother.
- Opening an LP and listening to it front to back.
- Meeting random cats in the street.
- Late-night conversations with friends.
- Watching a darkroom print slowly emerge on the paper.
- Realizing I don’t have to figure it all out today.
- Calling my parents after a long day.
- pspsps at my cat.
Today is my birthday.
“What if I lived today?”