I have a confession to make: I feel alive when I choose the opposite of what the majority of people do.

Do I need to go somewhere? Bike or Walk. Too far? Bike/Walk + transit. Or carpool.

Do I need to eat? Cook meals myself, try new recipes, always bring snacks with me to share with people.

Do I want to build meaningful relationships? Get comfortable with social anxiety, join communities and show up consistently. Build the social skills I need to be a human being.

Need to fix my bike? I’ve been learning bike mechanics by volunteering at a local bike shop and I even started working a few hours per week at a cool Bike shop called BikeBike.

Time to file my taxes? I am really proud of having learned more about taxes using StudioTax, a Canadian company that I highly recommend. It looks like a program an accountant uses, and I love it. I get to learn about the forms, understand how adding things impact my income tax. And just like biking in the winter, it makes me feel powerful.

Why I am doing all of this?

I needed to feel alive.

I was feeling so shallow inside. I wanted to change that. I needed to change that. Life was better as I started getting out of the house, learning new things and meeting people in real life.

It was time for me to be in touch with my body, soul, discomfort and my surroundings. No more choosing the easy path.

This wasn’t a linear process. Questioning why I was unhappy had been a familiar friend for a few years. I’ve had my fair share of mental health issues in the past, so I was okay… so I thought. Having to face what my intuition was telling me was hard.

That brings me to changing careers, again. I had been working as a software developer for almost 10 years. I loved it. I gave public talks, launched an educational program to more than 50 students, worked with good people. But deep inside, I was always dreaming of retiring early and exploring doing something useful instead.

But exploring what I wanted to do with my life couldn’t wait anymore. I needed to find purpose and meaning sooner than later.

I made peace with letting go of a career that I had worked so hard to get into. I was in a Senior position, making good money. I found myself spiraling into “why do I not enjoy this anymore? I should just suck it up and find another job, it was just a bad experience last time”. And no, it wasn’t just my last job that was a bad experience. It’s a bad industry, period.

It turns out that the word spiral is a great word to define my career life.

Learning about the 4 Career Paths brought me clarity and perspective; an understanding that I thrive in changing every 5-7 years. I experienced the “symptoms” of not following a linear path but didn’t know what to think of it.

Duh, writing this makes me realize: come on, I should have known better than thinking that my career and life should follow a linear path as I am past my 30’s. But we all need our moments of starring into the abyss, and realizing that “the only way out is through”.

I was afraid of making a mistake. But I realized that staying attached to the past is a mistake.

And hell, being afraid to change is not how I want to live my life.

It’s 2026 and I mentioned software in this post and as much as I hate spotlighting this stupid waste of human intelligence, this “AI” bubble made the decision easier for me. If you enjoy it, good for you shame on you. I hate it and I do not want to be part of it.

I recognize there are benefits for some industries but forcing me to use a tool that was intentionally created with bad intentions? No, thanks.

Good luck for those who stay. For those who feel the same like I do, I wish you courage and financial independence so you can also find your way out.

I can do this because yes, I have a good financial reserve. Doing boring things consistently like living way below your means and investing most of your income pays off. I recommend it!

My cognitive fitness is very important to me and I do not fall into the trap of outsourcing thinking for me. I like working on hard problems, thinking about the problems from different perspectives, researching different analogies to connect facts, making mistakes, embracing friction, collaborating, creating and refining, etc.

When I worked with software, I enjoyed working with existing codebases, improving the code and team processes. I loved pairing and working with humans. But since none of that is relevant in the industry anymore, I am now directing my energy somewhere else.

I’ve been paying lots of attention on how modern life is constantly selling us the easy way out. The solution to my problems is a click away. Working remotely in tech made me even more aware of how “progress” makes us miserable. And how working with software made me feel bad for building “products” that just became part of the enshitification loop.

My body was getting sick from working at the computer and attending meaningless meetings all day to deliver value to stakeholders, and not moving my body. My mind was getting sick for lacking meaning and connection.

I decided to stop buying this nonsense that doing hard things myself was a waste of time; that I should buy my time back by hiring someone to cook, clean, buy stuff online, order deliveries, etc., to free up my time. In the end, the time that I ‘saved’ buying all of that was so devoid from life that everything combined just made me sicker and souless. Because it wasn’t time that I needed. It was being alive.

Recently, I enjoyed reading Michael Easter’s books: “The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self”, and “Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough”. If anything from this post resonated with you, I think you will like them too.

To wrap this up, I want to share this quote from one of the books that summarizes my worldview:

“In the end, I believe we don’t need more comfort or hacks. We need more acts like walking with weight. We need more effort. More presence. More friction. More long miles under load. Because what’s on the other side of that effort isn’t just fitness. It’s strength, clarity, and truth.” - Michael Easter

I am scared about my next steps. I will enter a whole new industry. I wont' work remotely anymore. It will be so different! And yet, that all makes me excited.

I am ready to see what I will find out on the other side.