The paradox of freedom and restlessness
The story of a man’s rebirth in a world of inherent chaos. Twelve months without a calendar. Transitioning from emptiness to the foundation. My 2025 retrospective: a collision between reality and the romanticized myths of existence.
I know the story may look like sophisticated escapism and decision fatigue masquerading as Zen. It actually is, to some extent. So, at the end of each section I put a structured caution to dispel any illusions.
The trigger
It's unbelievable how much can happen in one year when you're retired from your office job.
It was late 2024. My birthday was coming. Typically, I give myself a gift of a new musical instrument. The last three birthdays brought me a guitar, a piano, and a violin. That one in 2024 was special — it gave me freedom. Freedom from duties and obligations to almost any human in my life. The work-and-sleep circuit shorted and the new reality sparkled like an igniting nascent star.
After fifteen years of being directed by the educational system, after seven years of climbing to the summit of the IT market, I woke up one cold morning and realized that life shouldn't always be like this. It's an obvious revelation, I know. That was a crossroads with two radical choices: keep going, burning the energy of youth and compromising identity for the sake of never-ending money, or make a voyage to the river of inner feelings with the help of a macro-vacation or micro-retirement.
Most people seek stability, especially during turbulent periods of their lives. What could be more illogical than leaving a well-paid job in the midst of wartime? I've got the answer: it's a dramatic discrepancy between one's identity and objective reality. No, it's not a typical story of a French poet of the XIX century who gives up on conformist rules and lives under a bridge. Just a vacation with a touch of rethinking meanings and values.
The unemployment paradox comes into play.
The bad: Leaving a job is a terrible decision if you don't have financial security or if it contradicts your current goals, such as caring for family or investing in Nvidia stock.
The void
I woke up on Monday and realized that I didn't need to check the calendar, Slack, or Jira. I slept for two more hours, bought myself an ice cream, and went on a date. I did it all in my typical working hours. They are not working hours anymore! Close your eyes and you see a rainbow, unicorns, and butterflies. Predictably, the familiar mechanism breaks here.
The paradox of freedom and restlessness. It's when the conscious part of you knows the body can relax in the flow of existence. You expect life to become easy now with interesting adventures coming from the outside. However, without action, the world is moving towards entropy.
Your brain is a machine that never stops. The state of "not thinking about anything" is unnatural to it. It's a state achieved via meditation, and real deep meditation requires practice. When you wake up for the Nth day straight, without any responsibilities, your brain will cry for help — it will invent problems, troubles; it will recall past traumas and open gestalts; it will fall in love and suffer. After working hard for years and spending lots of mental energy on the job, the organism is not prepared for such a radical change.
That's what happened to me. During the first month of "waking up and doing nothing", all I did can be called smooth degradation. I immediately broke my sleep schedule by going to bed at 4 AM and playing computer games all day.
The bad: The bad part is not wasted time. It's the chance of falling into permanent atrophy. Rationally, I don't believe the chance is significant for people who can afford micro-retirement because they can, not because they're completely burned out. The latter case is beyond my consideration today.
The system
Of course, there was a moment of revelation. The voice said: "You cannot live like this, man. Didn't you leave your job to build up other facets of your character? Didn't you do it to have more energy to do great things, pursue hobbies, go to the gym, start your own business?" That was mid-January when I decided to make some changes and cease the degradation streak.
The new period of my life started with a set of experiments and challenges. "What if?" What if I read books every day? What if I play the piano every day? What if I do yoga every day? What if I learn French every day? And even more — trying to break all bad habits (I didn't have many of them, but wanted to break free of them all). That's how the challenge started. And to make sure it succeeded, I signed a commitment contract with my friends. 50 days of everyday activities. Skip one day without a good reason = lose $1200.
I didn't skip a day. As a result, I read about five books, learned a piano piece from scratch to recording, completed 5,000 fill-in-the-blank flashcards in French, and did sports for 50 days straight. That contract was the simplest but the most effective external motivation, and I'll absolutely tell you more about it later.
Did I have a thought that if I didn't quit my job I could have X more dollars in my bank account today? Did I think of it as a direct expenditure of potential capital? Yes. However, I decided to buy an opportunity to spend a year doing whatever I wanted to do.
Did I have a thought that I was procrastinating on everything really important? Yes. During this year I created nothing material. I didn't plant a tree or run a business. Instead, I invested in my deep internals. The attempt to better understand how the world works. To develop my own philosophy.
Another amazing thing unlocked by an abundance of time is the ability to make new friends. Tea ceremony, yoga, climbing, speaking club, movie night, whatever. I met a hundred new faces and some of them are my amazing friends now.
The bad: It's easy to slide back into the pit of degradation once the contract finishes. That law of entropy again. Nature requires discipline to hold us tightly by the throat for the rest of our lives.
The pole star
Having 24 hours of free time leads to inevitable foundational questions about values, meanings, and missions.
Meaning and happiness are not the final goal. Every morning you wake up, remind yourself of who you are. Ask yourself whether the meaning of life you had yesterday is still relevant. If you feel dissonance between your thoughts yesterday and your actions today, it's time to change the direction of your vector.
I was often asked about the meaning of my life. I could never give a coherent and clear answer. I think my answers were everything but the "meaning" itself.
First, it all comes from values. Values are the predecessors of meanings, missions, and goals. Mine are short and simple: staying ethical, loving, caring, and genuine. It's an almost permanent foundation that just exists as part of my identity.
Then there are missions. They are vectors — the ultimate direction that affects the outcome of any daily decision. They're closely bound with meanings and cannot exist separately. A global meaning is something that justifies the mission. And I think it's the most difficult piece of the mind puzzle to define. From a biological perspective, the global meaning doesn't exist. Each meaning you create is subject to being smashed to smithereens. That's why I answer differently whenever you ask me. I tell you about the local, just-in-time meaning that I discovered in that specific situation.
The goals are at the lowest level. They are practical, specific, and countable. They're easily inferred from the three pillars above.
A quick personal example: regularly visiting the gym (the goal) is a partial consequence of my desire to guide people on the path to a healthy life by personal example (the mission) because I care about humanity (the value). The "why do I do it?" global meaning question is tough. Maybe because it's evolutionarily profitable. Maybe because it brings me deep satisfaction. Maybe it's the current intellectual limit of my attempts and abilities in being caring.
The bad: Staying ethical has a cost. As the brain always prefers to follow the path of least resistance, framing yourself within virtues like this is hard mental work. It's an act of persistently questioning yourself, and it consumes willpower. It just doesn't work with pure external systems.
The expansion
Then there was spring with love in the air. If you ask me what 2024, 2023, and 2022 were like, then... I don't really remember. I was doing well with my job, but the rest of my world was so static. If you ask me what that spring and summer were like, I could recall every day and every hour. The power of love, the intention of a clear mind, the breaking away from all bad habits.
That was the time when I introduced journaling into my life. I have been doing it every day since then, with no exceptions. Daily observations, the deepest feelings, the flow of brilliant or paranoid thoughts — ah, it's so sweet.
It was a summer full of experiments. "What if?", again. What if I lose weight, grow a mustache, walk 10,000 steps, and read all the books about software engineering on my shelf. I felt shivers down my spine every single day. I wish that state would never end. With every day thoroughly saved in a journal, I can reread it and feel goosebumps again, no joke.
The bad: It's too easy to escape into a world of dreams and illusions. The more you write, the more you become attached to fictional figures created by your imagination. Things can get quite depressing when reality fails to meet expectations, no matter how Buddhist or Stoic you are.
The transition
The joy of comfort ended rapidly and abruptly. I remember the 21st night of September. The beginning of a new life. Just me, a small suitcase, and 150 directions. The unbearable lightness of being ends here. I — with my new worldview and my set of semi-broken habits — have complete freedom. It's a chance to turn everlasting decision procrastination into real action.
Finding a new home. That's ridiculously difficult when your planning horizon is one day. Without exaggeration, I had a desire to visit all the "best-rated" countries on the planet before deciding where to stay for a long time. And without exaggeration, I changed my route every morning. I woke up, opened flight booking apps, and accepted the cheapest route. That's how I combined the fatigue of decision-making and the simplicity of the "one-day planning horizon" mindset.
The bad: It's not for everyone. The more I travel, the more I realize how vulnerable and timid some humans are in a new environment. Financial security clearly comes to the rescue and makes a major contribution. The critical spiritual traits for survival are calmness, confidence, and self-regulation that that most people never have to develop because their environment usually does it for them.
The synthesis
At seventeen, I started living consciously and forming my identity. Ten years later, thanks to the tricks of fate and a fair amount of hard work, it transitioned into a real spiritual journey.
The year 2026 will be so full of surprising revelations. I still doubt every global decision. I still live with a one-day planning horizon. And I mean the plans that actually come true, not that hypothetical fabrication from the long-term planning list that will remain unrealized.
Having a decision vector is more important than having a plan. Having steel discipline is more important than having internal energy. "Wake up honey, you achieved nothing" — yes, who cares? I act according to the ethical framework that I constructed. The rest is so fragile and transient.
1. Conventional "long-term planning" is not the only way to live a pleasurable and interesting life, but being able to live with a one-day planning horizon is a luxury that requires specific infrastructure. And this infrastructure requires years of hard work to build.
2. Bringing experiments to life is really fun. Failing them is also part of the experiment, so don't be shy.
3. Being calm (and confident) is a superpower. Most people lack it because they haven't allocated time and energy to spiritual growth.
What's next
I'm not making an unbreakable promise, but in my philosophical series, I'll try to unveil my worldview, my rationally irrational decisions, and my slightly unconventional lifestyle in future articles. Restructuring these views from randomly appearing flows of thought into something shareable and potentially useful is my main focus these days.
For the chiller guys who don't care about the neural chaos in my head, I'll also write about travel, a healthy lifestyle, discipline, software engineering, and other practical stuff.
To my dear friends who have made it to the end: drop me a message if we've lost touch. I may have missed you.