Month: January 2025

Yesterday, I met someone at a party who, as it turned out, was in my year during undergrad. Same college. Same classes. Same exams. “Oh, but you must have never studied at the library then,” she said. “Actually, I was in the library all the time, often from 7 AM to 10 PM,” I responded. “Ahh, that’s why—I always went at night!”

“How amazing,” I thought. “14 years later, and I can still run into new people from this experience whom I’ve never met before.” I believe it goes to show: Experiences don’t end. We just stop pulling on certain threads. I graduated from that college in 2014, but I’m in touch with some of the people from back then to this day. And if I wanted to, I could start hitting up every connection from back then that I can remember or find online. I could join an alumni group or start one. In other words, I could keep playing the “Karlsruhe Institute of Technology student” experience until the day I die in some way or other. Most of the time, I just choose not to.

You don’t have to think about the infinite nature of experiences all the time. But on occasion, it can be an encouraging reminder: You can pick up where you left off any day. You won’t get the same result as if you’d kept pulling on those threads way back when, but you’ll still get some continuation of a phase of life you’ve enjoyed—and, made with the right timing, that can be worth just as much, if not more, as a new experience altogether.

The Crain family is anything but a normal family, mostly because they lived in an anything-but-normal house. At one point in the spooky TV series telling their tale, however, the estranged father Hugh shares some advice with his son that works just as well for normal people as it does for those haunted by the ghosts of the past: If you’re a kite, find your line—and vice versa.

“Your mom and I were married 15 years,” Hugh tells his son Steve. “Together five before that. She used to say she was the kite and I was the line. She was a creature of the clouds, and I was a creature of the earth. And she’d say that without me she’d become untethered, and she would float away up into the [sky]. And then without her, I would just, you know, crash, just drop right down to the ground. But, together…”

I, too, am a kite in need of a line, and in that respect, my girlfriend is the perfect partner for me. If there’s a hole in one of my lofty plans, she’ll find it and help me plug it before I take off. And however high I might soar, she always reminds me there are basics on the ground not to be forgotten. At the same time, I pull her up. I point towards the sunset and say, “Look, there’s something glistening over there, let’s go and take a look!” And sometimes, we do and find a treasure.

Your kite doesn’t need to be your partner, and your line won’t have to be the person you marry. Just make sure you find your other half—in a friend, in a spouse, in a family member—and stay afloat at just the right height together.

In 2019, I posted every day on Substack for four months straight. My newsletter went from 0 to 4,000 subscribers. It was 100% organic growth with almost zero promotion.

Five years later, in 2024, I started a new, different newsletter on the platform. I again posted every day for four months straight. And again, I did almost no external promotion. This time, I went from 0 to 500 subscribers.

There are various factors at play here. Maybe my 2019 publication was more appealing. Maybe the barrage of new features on the platform, from chat to video to tweet-style notes, has diluted how many people subscribe to a newsletter.

But there is one element I’ve observed repeatedly on several platforms, and it’s undeniable: timing. If you can’t be early and catch a platform’s biggest growth spurt, often, it’s not worth being there at all—especially if engaging on a variety of platforms is only part of a larger, long-term game you’re playing.

I once did the math for this on Medium. As it turned out, a writer who had started in 2018 and posted ten times as many successful articles as a comparable writer in 2016 only grew to about two thirds of his followers. The verdict was clear:

A great writer starting in 2020 will take longer to reach 10,000 followers than a mediocre one did in 2016. This isn’t fair, but it’s still true. On top of hard work, perseverance, and continued adaptation, maybe more so than all of the former combined, you need impeccable timing to grow in a maturing market.

The problem with timing is not just predicting it, which is impossible, but also to execute on it even if you could. Attention has become an ever-shapeshifting beast attracted to new places every month. Feeding those places with your ideas and generosity isn’t a job you can do in a weekend. It’s a massive, often multi-year detour, and even in a best-case scenario, who can afford such detours from the work they actually mean to do?

Call me old-school, but given how hard it is to be early and how fragile its payoff even if you are, perhaps the best way to play social media is to not play at all. Pick your own hill on the internet, and defend it—because that’s something you can be as late to as you want, yet once you arrive there, it’ll pay its own kind of dividends every day.

My inbox keeps warning me that my storage is near its limit. Of course, Google would prefer I throw some money at the problem. “Just pay us $30/year, and we’ll give you more digital space!” I usually react by relentlessly deleting old files, but here, I’m tempted—because email is different.

My emails go back all the way to 2008. I just found the first digital product I ever bought. A typical get-rich-quick scheme for a few bucks, back in 2010. Now, I can write about the experience. If I delete the confirmation email, I can’t do that anymore, can I? I’ll never stumble into it again, let alone find it on purpose.

Sure, my inbox has lots and lots of irrelevant emails. Notifications. Updates from groups I’m no longer a part of. One-liners, saying, “Okay,” “Confirmed,” or “FYI.” But it also contains precious memories, personal conversations with friends, travel plans, and more. I find my inbox hosts a special kind of memorabilia: Stuff that’s personal but usually not too intimate, interesting but not critical. Take it all together, however, and you’d be throwing away a big chunk of your life.

What about my first business records as a self-employed person? What if I need to prove in court at some point that I sent this email or that one, that I had certain documents, or that I bought a product when I say I bought it? Maybe one day, my emails can offer me legal protection.

Your inbox sure is a mess. It’s full of irrelevant data. Sometimes, it’s even a crowdsourced to-do list made for you by other people, a to-do list you’ll still have to get through. But in a way, your inbox is also the ultimate insurance policy: It’s filled with creativity, memories, and proof.

Will I cough up the money to keep my emails around? I don’t know. But I do realize my inbox, for all its wear and tear, is still a treasure chest—and that might be worth preserving.

Yesterday, I checked my blog analytics so I could share last year’s 10 most popular posts based on views. I learned some lessons, but first, here they are:

1. ​The Teacher Who Made Mistakes on Purpose​​
2. ​The Lord Who Never Lost a Battle​​
3. ​Are You Taking the Bait?​​
4. ​It Is Not Strength That Overcomes Darkness​​
5. ​“I Think”​​
6. ​An Invitation to Dance​​
7. ​Tomorrow Is Tomorrow​​
8. ​2 Kinds of Fate​​
9. ​To Solve Your Problems, Start​​
10. ​Against the Odds

As I was going through the data, I noticed some patterns. Five observations stood out:

1. Don’t check your analytics unless you have to. It’s a much better way to write and, quite frankly, live. I’m not exactly checking it only once a year, but I do it a lot less than I used to. I’m happier for it.
2. The only true growth is the growth you didn’t manufacture. Before Google drastically changed its algorithm and everything fell off a cliff, my peak traffic for the blog was 65,000 views in one month. It dropped to 20,000 and stayed there for a good while. Once I started my daily blog, however, I stopped trying to optimize posts for anything, let alone search engines. This is my hill, and here I just write what I want. It was nice to see the blog growing again despite my disregard for results. This month, I’m up to 45,000 views or so.
3. Five of the top 10 posts featured scenes from TV shows. Turning moments from film and television into little stories has always been a favorite of mine. I’m having so much fun with it. Granted, those also end up featured on Google or quoted elsewhere more frequently, so there might be a bit of bias in them getting more views. Also: Three of them referenced the same show, Shogun. Apparently everyone else loved it as much as I did.
4. Enjoy when your work goes viral, but don’t count on it. The #1 post was the one my friend Herbert shared on Hacker News. I’m grateful for it, but I’m not gonna start trying to hack Hacker News.
5. Popular is relative. Views are merely the best proxy I have. Most of the above posts still only got a few hundred views. It’s not like each one was ten times more popular than the next. If I had picked posts based on which ones got the most email responses, the list would have looked very different. It’s just harder to assemble that data.

It is turning out to be a multi-year process for me to unhook my art from ulterior motives and external results. I hope I can get there. Hence, 2025: the year of the re-set. Let’s see where I’m at in December—and, hopefully, that’ll be the first time I check my analytics.

The customer in front of me kept asking the barista about their café’s expansion. One tiny corner shop had turned into a three-room venue already, replete with a bakery and a space to give classes. Now, they had opened another, even bigger location elsewhere in town. How did they do it? All the barista could do was shrug: “Beats me. It’s such a saturated market. But the demand was just too big.”

Usually, cafés in Munich don’t expand. If anything, they shut down. But this one, whether for its vibe, great cinnamon rolls, arguably excellent coffee, or all of those factors combined, is thriving. They didn’t have a master plan when they opened—clearly: It was in the middle of the pandemic. They just showed up, made the best coffee they could, and four years later, here we are.

Writing a bestseller, landing your dream job, raising a fully self-sufficient human—all of these are impractical, yet none impossible. In fact, we’re doing the impossible every day, so why not work our magic on the dreams we truly care about? It might go better than we expect, and perhaps, one day soon, the demand will be so big, we’ll have to open a second shop.

Today, our apartment has no water for eight hours. The irony? Outside, it’s raining all day long. But there’s a difference between water coming out of the sky or the ground and fresh H2O pouring out of your tap, and you only realize how big of a difference it is when you’re left without your usual conveniences.

Could I catch some of the rainwater? Sure. But then I’d have to filter it to drink it, heat it up in the boiler or the microwave if I want it warm, and pour some into a bowl whenever I want to wash my hands. Could I even collect enough for a bath? Who knows. But on days like today, you realize how un-basic the basics actually are. Pipes, heating, filtering, countless mechanisms work invisibly day and night so we can wash hands whenever, make coffee whenever, shower hot or cold whenever.

It’s a good tradition, this reset. I hope they’ll repair or maintain the water system at least once a year. That way, every time I scoop another cup from my prefilled bathtub, then filter it for next steps, I’ll remember: Appreciate the basics—because without them, whatever we hope to build on top of their foundation would collapse like a house of cards.

The movie Sully deals with the complications of becoming a hero. To the public, the situation was obvious: Chesley Sullenberger landed a jet plane with no functioning engines on the Hudson river and saved 155 people’s lives—give the man a medal, and let’s be grateful for some good news.

According to the movie, however, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. As is customary in plane incidents, the National Transportation Safety Board conducted an investigation. What were the actual facts of the situation? Why were the choices made that were made? And how could the outcome have been improved?

During the climax of the movie, the NTSB investigators show simulations of real pilots navigating the same conditions. The birds strike, the engines fail, they turn back to the nearest airport, and voilà, perfect landing! Why didn’t Sully just do that instead of risking crashing his plane into ice-cold water?

The answer is that life—real life—is not a simulation. “You have allowed no time for analysis and decision-making,” Sully tells the board. “With these sims, you have taken all the humanity out of the cockpit.” How many practice runs have those pilots gone through before recording these simulations, Sully wants to know. The number almost gets stuck in the investigator’s throat: “17.” They agree to another live run, and with as little as 35 seconds of delay, all simulation pilots crash their planes despite having the perfect plan in their pocket.

No matter how authentic it feels, in the end, no video game will be the same as life itself. Reality needs evidence, and real effort with real sacrifice is a kind of proof you just can’t fake.

That’s a point made not only in the movie but also by the movie itself: After its release, the NTSB criticized the depiction of its investigators. No one was “out to embarrass anybody at all,” they said. And in the actual hearing featuring Sully and his copilot, all simulations pointed to the same truth to begin with: “A successful return to LaGuardia or a diversion to Teterboro Airport was not assured”—and therefore, Sully was exactly the hero everyone saw in the news all along.

Don’t worry if you don’t stack up in imaginary competitions. Live, and play, and do your best right here in the realm of physics, and you’ll always score your points in the only game that really counts.

This morning, my girlfriend and I needed a quick snack before a big event. There were no bakeries near our hotel, and we didn’t have time for a full breakfast. When she went down and asked if we could purchase two croissants or so, the lady said: “Oh, just grab a plate and take whatever! No charge.”

It was the right bit of luck at the right time—but it was also a decision. In the end, helping others always is, and even when it seems like no big deal to you, for them, it might go a long way. The situation reminded me of a Bruce Lee quote: “I’m not one of those guys that can brush people off. Besides, I feel that if I can just take a second to make someone happy, why not do it?”

Ultimately, when you help someone, you help everyone—but even if it’s just karma points you’re after, why not collect them every time you get a chance?

A “Steppenwolf” is a kind of wolfhound, half wild animal, half domesticated pet. In Hermann Hesse’s novel of the same name, protagonist Harry claims to be a specimen of this very variety, forever torn between a life outside society’s expectations and the comfort of hiding his lofty ideals in plain sight: among pubs, discussions about politics, and everything else mundane.

During a visit to an old friend’s house, Harry notices an embellished painting of Goethe, whom he adores, but whose stylized icon he despises. Later, Goethe visits him in a dream only to tease him about his snobby attitude, eventually fading into darkness with “a still and soundless laughter that shook him to the depths with abysmal old-man’s humor.”

Much later in the book, Harry realizes what his dream was really about. It wasn’t an old man laughing at a deeply broken and depressed individual. It was an immortal being pointing the way to inner peace. Here’s my translation attempt from the original German:

“It was without object, this laughter. It was only light, only brightness, was that which remains when a real human has passed through the suffering, the vices, the errors, desires, and misunderstandings of humans and made it to eternity, to space. And eternity was nothing more than the salvation of time, was in a way its return to innocence, its reconversion into space.”

I didn’t really understand Hesse’s words. I don’t think Harry did either. Or that, really, anyone ever will. But I also kind of did, because after witnessing Harry’s story for 200 pages, as for him, Hesse’s imagery gave me a deep sense of peace. “Ahhh, eternity. What a great comfort to know we are but a speck of time in an infinite space. Why get worked up about the petty issues of existence? Why not just laugh about them?” That’s what the passage seems to say.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are, you, too, are a Steppenwolf. There’s the you that goes to work and cleans the sink and pays the bills and does all the things. But there’s also something deep inside, and it keeps scratching, scratching at all the surface-level stuff we call “living,” desperate, hoping, yearning for something more.

I don’t know where that “more” is for you. I don’t know if any of us will ever find it. But I know people like Hermann Hesse, the kind of people who write the kind of books like Der Steppenwolf, they all felt it too, and so when I read those books, I don’t feel alone. I feel connected. Quiet. Seeking yet satisfied. My inner wolf isn’t howling—and perhaps that’s all the eternity a Steppenwolf will ever need.