Intense times

I don't believe in work-life balance.

The phrase implies that work is not part of life, and life is what happens outside work. That may be true for some people. If it is, I'm sorry, and that's probably its own post. For me, work is life and life is work and the two are the same thing. I don't clock in and clock out. I build things because I can't not build things.

Working on my own ventures has completely changed my world view. I work on things I control, on things I like working on, and I own both the upside and the downside. Full skin in the game. There is no version of this where someone else takes the hit and I collect the reward, or where I show up, do the hours, and go home. Every decision is mine. Every consequence is mine. That's not stress. That's the point.

What I do have is a swing between intense times and cruise times.

Intense times are when everything happens at once. Everything is urgent, everything is connected, and the days feel short.

Cruise times are when you exhale. Things work. You ship small improvements. You read. You take a longer lunch. You think about what's next without the pressure of what's now.

I normally thrive in intense times. I've been doing this my whole life. The pattern is familiar. You push hard, you get through it, you come out the other side, and then you cruise for a while. Cruising is what makes the intensity sustainable. It's where you recover.

Here's the thing I've been trying to understand. This time feels different. Harder. Not because the problems are harder, they're not. I've handled worse. But I've been running on intense for what feels like years now, and there hasn't been a cruise in between.

That's the problem. Not the intensity of any one period, but the absence of recovery between them. Intense times are fine when they end. They're brutal when they don't.

Right now the big piece is the MarkMesh backend. We out-scaled the initial data pipeline. What started as an append-only event log that handled a few offices is now ingesting 30+ offices with millions of records, and the architecture that got us here can't get us to where we're going. So we're rewriting fundamental pieces while keeping the system live for the beta users who depend on it. That's the kind of work that fills every spare cycle in your head. You wake up thinking about it. You fall asleep thinking about it.

At the same time, we're wrapping up Fonte do Palheiro. Five years of life packed into a house in the Algarve hills, and now it goes on the market. People walk through and judge your taste in furniture. You pack, you sort, you decide what fits in a van and what fits on a boat and what you can let go of. There's a grief in that, in closing a chapter you put five years into, even when you know the next one is right.

I normally thrive on this. Right now I'm fighting my way through it.

I think the reason is simple. I haven't been cruising in a long time. The last few years have been one intense period after another, back to back, no break. Rebuilding the Algarve tech scene ran straight into building local.foundation, which ran straight into launching MarkMesh and a gazillion other small projects in between, which ran straight into selling the house, and somewhere in there the recovery periods disappeared. You can run on adrenaline for a long time. You can't run on it forever.

September. October. That's when we're done with Portugal. The house is sold or it isn't, the bags are packed, we're on the road. The backend will have shipped or it'll be shipping. Either way, I'll be able to exhale. Not stop working. I rarely stop working. But cruising for a while. Ship small things. Read. Think about what's next without the pressure of what's now.

If you're in an intense time right now too, I hope you have some time to cruise soon. And if you don't, I hope you can find it. The intensity is fine. It's the absence of recovery that gets you.