The Answer Was on Me All Along

By Georg Malahov

Today I spoke a seventeen-minute note into the voice journal. My usual notes run a minute or two. But today the dam broke: so many thoughts, jumping around so much, that I didn't even know where to start.

I'm torn. I keep thinking about my bot — whether to promote it, and how, and whether it's worth it at all, or whether to build something new. Thinking about the mini-projects. In parallel — where to get money: the laptop payment is due in August, and money is tight. Every individual action feels pointless, and there's this overwhelming sense of time slipping away. And yet I'm supposedly doing a ton of things all the time — and not keeping up. It drives me crazy.

Instagram is a story of its own. I took on a problem using AI, and it sometimes thinks for ten minutes at a stretch. While it thinks, there's nothing to do — so I pop into Instagram "for ten minutes" and scroll away forty. And it's wall-to-wall ads: everyone's angling to cut my taxes, boost my income, and sell me a course after which everything will magically fall into place. I'm sick to death of it. I want to delete it entirely, or at least reset the settings so it forgets who I am.

At the same time, I can't stop either. I don't watch a movie — two hours feel like a waste, I have so much to do. I don't go fishing — better to read the new documentation, watch the latest videos. It feels like everything around me is moving so fast that if I sit down with a book, it will all run off without me.

The net feeling is this: as if I'd lost my glasses and were rummaging through the whole apartment. Out of sheer desperation I'm already checking the fridge — how they could possibly be in there, no idea, but I'm looking everywhere. And then I walk up to the mirror — the glasses are on my head. That's exactly how I'm hunting for a magic solution right now, some single project to pour myself into: twitching, burning energy for nothing, unable to choose where to spend my time and strength.

The solution, it seems, is simple, and it starts with deleting Instagram. Unplug from the outside feeds: follow nothing for a month — nothing will happen. Close out the small hanging tasks; they're slowly closing anyway: the car, the visas, the bills. That damn light fixture is still hanging there unmounted. And pick one thing — and do it well, all the way to the end.

In the evening, while I was waiting for the kids after rehearsal, an unknown number called. Turned out to be a career coach: I'd submitted a coaching request that morning. We talked for nearly half an hour. An unfamiliar kind of conversation: he asks concrete questions about me, and I have no concrete answers. He expected to hear which one I am — an Angestellter, a Selbstständiger, or a Gründer: an employee, a freelancer, or a founder — and I turned out to be all of those at once. We agreed to talk again on Tuesday.

And the day ended entirely off script. We drove out to get a tripod for my wife — almost thirty kilometers each way — and on the way back a truck flipped over right in front of us and blocked our entire side of the autobahn. Nobody was hurt, but we were in for hours of standing still, and my wife had a wedding shoot the next day. The nearest village turned out to be a twenty-minute walk: we climbed over a fence, I walked my wife to the village, and a friend picked her up from there. I went back to the car and am sitting here waiting for the truck to be cleared — with food, water, and a charged phone. Quite an evening; something to remember.

Hours of standstill ahead — a story to remember