Unscheduled Maintenance

#02 | January 2025

Last Month, In a Thought

Some months, clarity dances in the wings, waiting to be summoned. But January brought a different kind of performance — more like a system update gone wrong. My brain, usually a reliable companion in overthinking, decided to quietly uninstall itself. 🚫

No blue screen of death, no warning messages, just a fade into quiet protest. The kind that no amount of sleep could reboot, leaving me questioning what I could possibly have to share after a month of mental stasis.

But, that's exactly why I committed to this monthly ritual—to write through the mess, even when my mind begs for an easy way out. To dig until I find something worth sharing, buried in the dirt.

January felt suspended in time; not racing forward, not retreating, just hovering in this strange state of depletion.

It's not burnout exactly. More like finding your phone at 20% when you swear you just charged it.

Except this battery drain comes from months of carrying decisions too consequential to make lightly, from pushing forward projects that demand more than just time, and from maneuvering environments that require a master's degree in diplomacy.

And while there must be a charging cable for a tired mind, mine seems to reject every adapter I've tried. 🔌

Here's the thing about my mind: it treats rest like a system error. Even in moments meant for recharge, it hums like a device that's forgotten how to power down. It doesn't know how to idle, not really.

It's like having background apps constantly running, even in activities meant for recharge, some part of me is analyzing, processing, working. The system never fully closes its tabs. Writing becomes an exercise in wrestling with clarity. Reading turns into connecting dots I'm not even trying to connect. At the gym, my mind is doing more reps than my body.

My mind has developed this pattern of constant processing, like a deeply ingrained habit that has become a fixed default setting.

Every activity draws from the same battery, even those meant for “rest”. And every single decision, no matter how small, gets processed through the same hyper-rationalized framework of questions:

What's the optimal decision?

What's the highest ROI on this scenario?

How do I hedge the tail-end scenarios?

Even when I try to disconnect, I'm evaluating the best way to disconnect 😅. The irony isn't lost on me. The power button exists somewhere, but I've lost the manual.

I seem to only have one setting: full throttle 🏎️. Like a computer that refuses to close its tabs.

"Just do less," people say, as if they've discovered gravity. But it misses the point. Volume isn't the issue when your mind treats every quiet moment like an unsolved puzzle.

While everyone else was sprinting into their “new year, new me” energy, I was standing still, watching my usually reliable mental machinery flash "system update needed ⚠️", with no manual for what that update should look like.

Maybe the real challenge isn't about rest at all. Maybe it's about learning how to do things without a strategic angle, without some greater purpose.

But I don't know what that looks like.

Everything in my life has a purpose, an angle, a reason. I can't think of a single thing I do just for the sake of doing it.

Maybe what I need are activities with no ROI, no purpose, and no grand self-improvement arc.

But there's a double bind here: Even if I knew how to quiet my mind (which I don't), I wouldn't know what to do with that silence.

I've been thinking about how physical training mirrors life, especially when it comes to exhaustion. While a single intense workout (acute load) might leave you temporarily depleted, it's the accumulated strain over months (chronic load) without deload periods that leads to regression and risk of injury. 🤕

The mind isn't so different.

Since September, my mind's been running without a deload week: navigating work politics like 4D chess ♟️, handling situations (and people) that leave me mentally hungover, making decisions where every choice feels like picking the least wrong option.

It's not just the volume of challenges, but how they linger. Each situation demands a particular kind of focus — the kind that leaves residue, like mental velcro that keeps sticking to your thoughts long after you've walked away. Whatever processing power remains gets dumped into creative work.

By December, any reasonable person would have downshifted. Instead, I doubled down (because apparently I needed to prove something to... myself?). Working through the holidays with that classic "I'll recharge later" mindset.

Then January showed up, and my mind staged an unexpected intervention. After twelve relentless months, my mind pulled one of its rare disappearing acts. 🛑

It was as if my body, mind, and creativity all collectively said, Nope. We’re out.

The irony is, I know this pattern. But knowing when to pull back? That's my blind spot. I keep pushing until my mind stages an intervention.

And even if I did recognize the right moment to step back…what then?

When I look at my calendar and see open space, my first instinct is to fill it. Not because I'm chasing productivity, but because I don't know what else to do with that time. The thought of deliberately writing off time — scheduling actual days without purpose — feels almost criminal.

What do people do when they're not solving something, building something, pursuing something?

Maybe I need a different rhythm: sprint for three days, then one day... something else? But what's that "something else" when sitting still just means giving thoughts more room to echo?🔋

So the real question is: how do I actually disengage when my brain refuses to power down?

And I don't have an answer to that yet.

My mind does find peace sometimes, just not from the usual prescriptions. It comes alive again in those rare moments when the puzzle pieces align, when I finally crack a thorny problem, or when an idea crystallizes after weeks or months of fog.

It recharges from wins. 🌟

But you can't schedule breakthroughs like calendar appointments,.

There are other rare moments when my mind does find its off switch; I call it the cottage effect.

Something almost magical happens during those summer weekends at a lake house. The mind dissolves like ink in water, thoughts settling with the gentle lap of waves against the shore. Something in that environment bypasses all my usual mental circuitry, lets thoughts drift instead of race, convincing them that they don’t need to solve today’s problems. 🌊

(Though sadly, I haven't found a spare few million dollars for a lakefront property in my couch cushions yet. Please donate to this worthy cause. 💸)

Travel used to offer that same mental renewal ✈️.

Nine months since my last real trip — a choice I made to double down on work, telling myself the usual Fall escape could wait. Now I'm wondering if that was too long to go without that particular kind of reset. It's not just about being somewhere else; it's about becoming someone else temporarily. Someone whose mind isn't constantly running simulations of the future.

But you can't book a flight every time your brain needs a reset. 🤷🏽‍♂️

So I'm here in January, in this weird liminal space, still waiting for that system update to complete. Not broken or failing; just a machine learning that maybe the next upgrade isn't about adding features, but finding that elusive middle setting between full throttle and sleep mode.

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Experiments in Motion

1. Developing Vital Shift

The newsletter is evolving, but I'm learning some hard truths. Each piece takes hours to strike the right balance between accessibility, depth, and engagement — translating complex health concepts into something both digestible and nuanced.

I keep pushing each piece well past its natural endpoint. There's a point where an article is clear, useful, and good to go, and then there's the three extra hours I spend trying to turn it into a masterpiece. I need to learn when to ship it and move on, instead of burning mental energy chasing diminishing returns.

Then there's distribution; the part I've been avoiding. Not because I don't know it's important (writing for 100 people takes the same effort as writing for 10,000), but because it requires a different kind of mental effort.

The tools exist to make this systematic, less draining. I know I can string them together into something that works. But setting up that machinery? That needs a fully operational brain.

And right now, mine's still in maintenance mode.

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2. Working Rhythm

Testing a new pattern: three days of structured work, followed by one day off.

It's my attempt at forcing a pause in the machinery — a scheduled maintenance day, if you will.

The three days part is easy. It's that "off" day that has me stumped. When your mind treats every moment as a problem to solve, what exactly does a day off look like?

Still working on that part of the manual.

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3. Still Trying to Sit Still

Remember last month's ambitious meditation plans?

Yeah, about that...

Turns out meditation isn't the passive reset everyone claims it is, at least not for me.

It's active mental work, which makes it hard to commit to when your mental battery is already running low.

I know I need to push through the burden of the first few sessions. But that's exactly why it's so hard to start when my mind's already stretched thin.

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Sweat Equity

My mind might be on strike, but my body's still stubbornly collecting its daily workout receipts (26 out of 31, if we're counting, which of course I am). Though last week served up a reality check worth noting.

Hill sprints. Same workout as last week. Same gradient, same intervals, same everything. Last week was challenging but doable. This week? My body looked at those hills and said "404 Error: Energy Not Found."

My trainer offered the classic wisdom: dial back the speed, push through. But after five minutes, I knew this wasn't about mental toughness or pushing limits—something was just off.

These moments are rare. Maybe once a month I hit abort.

And I'm still debugging whether stopping was right.

Maybe there was character development waiting on the other side of those hills. Or maybe sometimes the real upgrade comes from recognizing when your system needs to force quit.

You never know which lesson was the right one until way later — if your memory cache holds onto it at all.

Workouts Logged: 26/31 days active

Mileage: 112.5 km

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The Next Stop (Maybe)

Singapore and Bali are still on the horizon—plans are set, but there’s a strange detachment until the wheels actually leave the ground. A trip always feels theoretical until you’re in the air.

Meanwhile, I've been mapping intersections between my experiences and unexplored opportunities.

Three areas keep surfacing:

First, advisory work with startups, particularly in healthcare and creative direction. I think I’d enjoy it and there are numerous intangible long-term benefits from doing so. The challenge is figuring out how to wedge a foot into that world without the usual validation ticket of grey hair or successful exits.

There’s a way in. I just haven’t found it yet.

And then there’s something that should be a throwaway thought but won’t leave me alone. Building niche software for forgotten industries.

Take funeral homes. Who the hell wakes up in the morning and thinks, I want to build funeral home software? Nobody. Who actually understands how funeral homes operate? Almost nobody—except, I might have a slight edge there from my coroner days.

The moat isn't in the technology. It's in understanding an overlooked industry well enough to build for it. And while top-tier developers dream of building the next productivity app, none of them are thinking about optimizing the logistics of end-of-life care.

It’s not a billion-dollar play, but that’s the point. Small, well-built software that quietly prints cash is a vastly underrated business model.

The third thread weaves together my decade-long obsession with classical menswear and executive presence: helping C-suite executives, consultants, and founders develop their visual authority.

Most people at this level know their appearance matters but haven't had the time or inclination to master it. They've mastered their craft, built their companies, but never learned how subtle details in tailoring and style can amplify their presence in a boardroom.

This isn't about attire. It's about strategic refinement that demands attention without a word being spoken. People already pay a premium for this expertise, some charging $8,000 for the first consultation alone.

The challenge isn't whether there's demand or whether I understand the craft—it's landing those first few clients in a space where everyone wants to see who else you've worked with first. But crafting someone's visual authority while diving into the details of cloth weights and lapel proportions? That's almost play.

These might seem like disparate paths, but they share a common thread: each leverages specific knowledge I've accumulated, often accidentally.

Some might go nowhere. But the interesting ones usually start that way.

We'll see which ones take root.

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Thoughts I’ve Sweated Over

This month was unusual. I picked up a lot of heavy ideas—five or six, at least—but none of them are finished yet. They’re sitting in draft form, waiting for me to wrestle them into something coherent. The spark was there, so I started writing when inspiration struck, but some ideas need more time to settle before they’re ready to be released.

So, unlike last month where I had multiple essays to share, this time there’s just one: The Voltage Tax: Why I Choose Traffic Over Time

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Behind The Lens

Photography is my pause button on life — an attempt to paint a picture of things I fail to put into words.

Around this time of year, I’ve found myself in Thailand the last two years, camera in hand, capturing the energy, chaos, and stillness all at once. Since I haven’t released a new album this month, I’m resurfacing my Thailand photo album, a collection of moments that still feel vivid to me.

Some shots are quiet, some are loud, but together, they tell a story of a place that continues to pull me back.

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