Four years of standing still taught me that life isn't about performing for others or collecting experiences — it's about doing both, on your own terms.
Burnout followed. Then something heavier. The kind of weight where even the smallest performance — showing up, engaging, being present — felt like a cost I couldn't afford.
Here's what people don't say enough about that kind of isolation: it's not always forced on you from outside. Sometimes you stop because the version of yourself that was running... was running on someone else's fuel. Other people's expectations, other people's definitions of what a good life looks like, other people's timelines. And the body, eventually, sends a very clear invoice.
I wrote more about that whole process in the Health & Longevity section — the burnout, the recovery, what actually helped.
The word I made up: Perfieriencing
Yeah. I made it up. Perfieriencing. Performance + experience, collapsed into one.
The idea is simple: we are all, in every moment, both performing and experiencing. You're an actor on a stage that is also, somehow, a life you're actually living. The two things aren't opposites. Think of a car with a specific aura — the kind that makes you stop and stare before it even moves. It's not just the engineering. It's the presence. And when it tears through a mountain road, it's performing and moving through something real at the same time. That aura is what draws people in. It's the same with humans — when you're genuinely perfieriencing, people feel it. That's what makes someone magnetic.
What makes it beautiful is autonomy. Perfieriencing on your own terms is one of the most alive feelings a person can have. Perfieriencing on someone else's terms is what we usually call suffering.
Life only feels heavy when you're performing someone else's script.
The inner child isn't a metaphor, it's a system
Children are brutally honest about what they feel. They don't negotiate with their emotions or schedule them for after the meeting. They feel first, process later — and everyone around them learns to deal with it.
That gets trained out of us. Slowly, systemically, with good intentions. And a lot of that training happened in school. The classroom was designed — brilliantly, for its time — to produce reliable, standardised output for an industrial economy. Sit still. Follow instructions. Perform the role assigned to you. It worked. It built the last economic supercycle.
But we're not in that supercycle anymore.
The next one isn't built on standardised labour. It's built on something the assembly line could never replicate: the fully individual, unrepeatable experience of a human being living and expressing on their own terms. Call it what you want — I think of it as the Human Performing Arts era. The age where what makes you irreplaceable isn't your ability to execute a fixed task, but your capacity to bring something genuinely yours to the world. The institutions that were built to produce workers for the old model are going to have to reckon with that — or quietly become irrelevant.
The result of the old model is a generation of adults who are extremely competent at performing roles they never auditioned for — and the tragedy isn't just inefficiency. It's that it feels fake. Because it is. A role written by someone else, for someone else's economy, for someone else's definition of a good life. Not lived, not chosen, not yours. Just scripted by others and handed to you at age six with a gold star for compliance.
The recovery — and I mean this personally, not as a self-help prescription — was about letting the inner child and the adult share the same space. The child who wants to sit at a canal on a Saturday afternoon with no agenda. The adult who can reflect on what that means and write about it. Both legitimate. Both necessary.
Not chaos. Not regression. Coexistence.
And here's why this matters beyond the personal: societies that crush that balance — that demand performance without experience, or tolerate experience without accountability — produce people who are either burned out or checked out. In an era where AI can perform most cognitive tasks better than we can, the one irreplaceable thing is the fully human experience of being alive on your own terms. The institutions, governments, and companies that still don't understand that are managing a very quiet kind of collapse — and probably don't know it yet.
The Donaukanal moment
I won't name the two people — partly privacy, mostly because they know who they are. I did, however, strongly encourage them to subscribe to this newsletter. Fine, I may have been slightly relentless about it. So if you're reading this — hi. You know who you are. You probably also know I'd have sent the link either way.
What they gave me wasn't advice. It wasn't a plan. It was just presence — the kind that makes you remember you're allowed to take up space in your own life again.
That's the whole thing, really. Four years of watching the world move without me. And then a Friday afternoon that reminded me I still know how to move.
What I'd actually do
- Notice whose rules you're living by. Not in a dramatic way. Just occasionally pause and ask: whose expectation is this? If you can't answer quickly, that's information.
- Let the inner child cast a vote. Before committing to how you spend your time, check in with what you actually want — not what you should want. One vote each. Then negotiate.
- Don't wait for the big reset. My four years of stillness weren't wasted, but they were longer than they needed to be. Small permissions granted early would have helped. A Sunday at a canal. A conversation with no agenda.
- Claim the right to design your own experience. Not just whether you engage with life — but how. The shape, the texture, the pace. That's yours to decide. Nobody else has the blueprint.
- Coin your own words if you have to. Language shapes thought. If the word for what you're going through doesn't exist yet, make it up. Perfieriencing is mine. Find yours.
The world will keep asking you to perform. The question is just whether you're also experiencing it while you do — and whether the experience looks anything like you.
And as for governments and institutions: it's not a matter of if they'll have to shift from producing standardised workers to supporting fully realised human performers. It's when. The ones who figure that out early will shape the next era. The ones who don't will just be managing the fallout of the old one.