For a long time now, it feels like my life has been a constant failure to stop internal dialogue, with nothing meaningful replacing it.
Some years ago, I lost contact with my friends when I left my home country. I began practicing tensegrity and darkroom more seriously, but I still carried very human hopes: to do something worth living for, and somehow make money from it.
Later, I enrolled in music production classes. I started focusing more on those instead of spending 2–3 hours a day in the darkroom when I still had energy to do something practical. I did my homework, tried to improve, and for a while it felt like I was “fixing my life.” I could pay for the classes, but the way I earned that money felt empty and unsatisfying.
Eventually, reality caught up with me: I realized I wouldn’t be able to make a living from music. My income dropped, and I couldn’t afford the classes anymore. I dropped out.
Around that time, my girlfriend was studying UX/UI design. While helping her fix a JavaScript carousel, I noticed I could understand some of the logic even without real coding experience. That’s when I decided to seriously try web development. I already knew basic HTML and CSS, and with ChatGPT, learning JavaScript felt easier than ever.
I studied for months—then realized I still couldn’t find a job. Money stayed low. Nothing “miraculous” happened. My attention shifted more and more toward survival and studying, and less toward Castaneda’s practices. Months and years passed.
Eventually, I returned to my home country and went into debt to take an ML course. My girlfriend kept insisting that the “official system” and diplomas mattered, while my own experience kept reinforcing the opposite. I’ve always learned more effectively on my own. Watching how she studied only confirmed my doubts about formal education.
I passed the ML course without attending most online classes and quickly realized that even a diploma wouldn’t make me employable as an ML specialist. So I skipped the exams and decided to just start building things. But there was barely any time or energy left for real practice—either technical or energetic. Tensegrity became occasional and unfocused.
After some time, I found a job, but quit after a week. Twelve-hour workdays plus Saturdays felt like a life sentence, not a solution. I went back to job searching. Nothing worked.
Later, after a serious argument with my girlfriend, things escalated badly. I’ve long suspected I might have borderline traits, and in moments of desperation I tend to lose control and turn that inward. That incident marked another breaking point.
After that, I started building a porn-based social network app, hoping that traffic and ads might eventually generate income. I’ve been working on it for about nine months now. Traffic is small, income is very low—still higher than the ~$20 I earned from three years of music streaming—but nowhere near enough to live on.
At this point, I’m facing the possibility of barely surviving, doing AI chat work just to eat. Part of me tries to romanticize it: maybe becoming poor like the kid Don Juan talked about gives better chances than being a businessman. Best-case scenario.
But realistically, it doesn’t feel that way.
For almost 90 days, I played bullet chess obsessively, and in the end, it didn’t matter either.
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