Stuff happens: I do not really set “goals” and so the topic of comparing “goals set” vs. “goals achieved” is somewhat non-sensical to me. One thing that does deserve attention, however, is how much 2024 was different from the years before that.

It is said that life slows down with age: as we get older, fewer new things should happen every year. The common folk theory is that we get asymptotically more acquainted with the set of all possible experiences that can fit our lifecycle: there might be just fewer and fewer things left to experience each year. Of course, I strongly disagree.

There are two things that can always keep life feel intense.

For one, I believe there is always more depth to anything. We can always become better friends, better lovers. We can gain more expertise, broaden our impact in our field, etc.

The other thing that happens, and truly fascinates me, is what I call a phase change, and what others more tamely call a perspective shift. It is when something happens in a way that is unpredictable ahead of time, so impactful to one’s life that it will be forever remembered as a frontier between “the life before” and “the life after”, and so deeply impactful that it would be hard for our before-consciousness to truly comprehend the new after-consciousness. The premature death of a loved relative tends to do that with people, as well as spiritual awakenings, the birth of one’s child, etc.

For context, I find these phase changes fascinating and also quite important. It feels to me that I would be doing myself a disfavor if I did not adequately seek or accept experiences that result in these phase changes for myself. I have discussed before how I desire optionality, and one of the many reasons is to leave the door open for these transformative experiences. I also love to accompany others through these transformations. I do not fully understand why I find these things important, but it is part of who I am.

Coming back to the topic at hand, last year was remarkable in that it brought about two unexpected transformations, after several years of a relatively continuous (albeit active) lifestyle. For perspective, the two life-changing transformations before that were in 2017, when I discovered noise-reducing/cancelling equipment and started, for the first time ever, to truly enjoy social activities in public spaces; and in 2021, when I cured both my lifelong depression and crippling social anxiety with psychedelics virtually overnight. Those before that were just as sparse.

For one, in 2024, I started to feel proud again. As in, proud of doing hard things and succeeding at them. I truly had forgotten how to feel that way, ever since I was a child. Of course, certain experiences in the past required a lot of effort, such as the completion of my PhD on a tight schedule, the expansion of my technical expertise to justify my rates on the labor market, or even the development and deepening of my friendships. They were also rewarding, all of them in different ways. But in none of these cases had I any doubt that I would be eventually successful, given enough effort. I had fully analyzed the range of possible outcomes beforehand. And so reaping their rewards, while fulfilling and sometimes joyful, wasn’t a source of pride. In contrast, in 2023/2024 I embarked on three large projects with no confidence ahead of time whatsoever about whether I would be successful. There was uncertainty, there was some anxiety, there was some anticipation, but foremost a lot of blind effort as well as faith in my ability to deal with unforeseen circumstances. I made several leaps of faith, I applied myself in ways that I hadn’t prepared for, I did truly hard things I would never had believed, a year earlier, that I could do, and… it worked!

It is extremely hard to convey how profound this feeling is affecting me, and how much stronger it made me feel. One effect of this, of course, is that I am generally less afraid now. I used to experience anxiety at the unknown, and my old way to deal with it was to over-analyze everything. This ceased almost entirely. Just a month or two ago, I woke up and peacefully realized that I am now OK with things happening after I start them, without thinking too much ahead of time. It is liberating! It feels like… freedom? I am still searching for words.

Another effect is that I now also need to learn the balance between embracing pride, and acting prideful towards others. Humility is easy to display from a position of weakness, and more of an active skill otherwise. I plan to work on that through the next year.

The other transformation was a bit more spread over time, but still happened within the confines of 2024: I made peace with my emotions. What I mean by that, is that before then I had a relatively adversarial relationship with my emotional reactions to things. On the one hand, certain emotions feel good, so I was definitely open to experiencing them, but on the other hand my repeated experience was that any type of emotion was reliably quick to overwhelm me completely and turn me into a malfunctioning, unhealthy human. This made me extremely conservative emotionally, with several unhappy consequences: trust issues, voluntary anhedonia, stunted romantic bonds, etc. Then through last year, somehow life shook me up and I liberated a new feature of my psyche, which now enables me to contemplate my emotions as they happen and regulate my reaction to them. It’s not easy, but it works, and as a result I have slowly let myself experiment emotionally with more things.

This has been rewarding so far. One anecdote includes me salivating with anticipation on my way to a lunch with a friend, as I had been seeking the experience of Sheshuan pepper for months, and experiencing fireworks of joy and pleasure when my anticipation was eventually rewarded. The dish was in no way exceptional; I simply let my experience of it be amplified on that day. Since then, my senses have been awakened and I discovered emotional curiosity towards all the things, from the mundane (e.g. the curious reliefs of my rug) to the elevated (e.g. my friends’ emotional experience of their life journey). It feels as if I should now re-experience many things from the last 20 years, and discover how many emotional layers I missed the first time around.

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In other news, my participation to the incubator program is chugging along. I am making good progress there.

For folk who haven’t heard yet, I am in the process of starting a consulting practice that helps Dutch service businesses expand to the US market. I wish to work with businesses of all sizes (from freelancers to bigger firms) in areas like IT, professional services, education, and creative services. My focus is making US expansion straightforward by using specific tax treaty advantages and sharing my operational experience in both markets.

I’ve noticed many Dutch business owners think the US market is too complex to enter, but that’s not really the case anymore. Between favorable tax treaties, online business registries and tools like Wise, Stripe and Shopify, it has become much more manageable than most people realize.

As part of my practice, I need to develop a network of licensed professionals to support my customers. If you know any good US-based or Dutch-based lawyers or accountants who might be interested in collaborating, I’d appreciate an introduction.

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Practically, if/when it starts I still plan to operate the above project as a side business. Helping high-caliber professionals as a personal development coach has been a strong source of joy recently and I wish to keep this in my life for the time being. I’m pretty sure I also still have a few delicious omelettes to bake from the technical leadership eggs I’ve laid and brooded over for so many years.

I do not have particular preferences as to how all of this will combine in the end, as long as it includes me spending quality time around good people.

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Until then, I will take work things a bit slow(er) than usual. For example, my focus for the next three months is to explore what “fun” really means to me.

This came about when I realized recently I have an unhealthy relationship to play. “Thanks” to my upbringing, I tend to both 1) only allow myself to engage in play (and, more generally, non-productive activities that could otherwise entertain and nurture me) as a reward for work well done; and 2) only consider work “well done” if I have done the best I could possibly do at it, including allocating most of my physical and emotional energy to it.

Obviously, the result of (1) and (2) is that no play is happening. That is not good.

So for a little while, I need to work (hah!) on myself to break this maladaptive system and learn to better balance my life around “fun” things. This will include spending more time exploring my social dynamics and relationships; listening more carefully to my feelings w.r.t non-productive activities; and perhaps also exploring the limits of my comfort zone w.r.t new experiences in the non-work realm.

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Meanwhile, there is another important topic I also want to make progress on: I’m struggling to understand how others perceive me, as even my friends say they sometimes find it hard to “place” me or properly introduce me to others.

Part of this might be because I tend to share different aspects of myself in different contexts, and rarely talk about myself holistically. While I initially considered creating content (like YouTube videos or writing) to help solve this, I realized there’s a fundamental tension: focusing on making useful content would require limiting self-disclosure to stay on topic, while focusing on identity development might make the content self-centered and less valuable to others. Moreover, even well-crafted content might still present fragmented views of who I am.

For the last few weeks, Anthropic’s Claude and I explored this challenge in depth together. An initial exploration revealed how content creation alone would be insufficient. Even with carefully crafted content that balances personal disclosure with value for the audience, each piece would still only show a fragment of who I am. Using connecting themes or “through-lines” might help but wouldn’t fully solve this fragmentation problem.

Claude then suggested several alternative approaches: building deep one-on-one relationships, getting involved in communities, creating discussion spaces, or taking on leadership roles—all of which allow for more natural and holistic identity expression. However, I realized these solutions only address how others perceive me, not how I understand myself.

This led us to explore methods for developing greater self-understanding through personal synthesis work (journaling, mind mapping), dialogue-based exploration (thinking partners, group discussions), structured self-documentation (personal wikis, life reviews), and active integration experiments that bring together different aspects of my identity. To be honest, all these feel like chores to me.

Instead, I’d love your help in this journey of better understanding and expressing who I am. If you’ve noticed patterns in how I think or approach things, I’d appreciate you pointing them out. I’m also looking for thinking partners who’d be interested in having deeper conversations about how different aspects of my interests and experiences connect. Your perspective on how you’ve come to understand me over time would be incredibly valuable—both about what makes sense to you now, and what still seems unclear or contradictory. Naturally, I would be glad to offer the same in return.