July 10, 2026

35% loaded

Almost 10 years ago I wrote a few series of reflections during the summer of 2015, a few months before my 25th birthday. Now, a few months before my 36th birthday, I’m revisiting the theme for this month’s edition.

While I usually hate the Buzzfeed (rest in pieces) “listicle” format, I do see the positive side of writing a “listicle” for a long format blog post full of “reflections”. So without further ado, here are 35 beliefs I have now. Some are total reversals from 2015 Luis, others have grown deeper. Feel free to let me know what you love or hate in my inbox.

Adulthood “happens” to you faster than expected. When you are 25, your brain stops having any significant development, meaning it has reached full maturity, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making, reasoning, and impulse control. This area is crucial for processing consequences and planning. You feel like you have the direction of what you want to do with your life set into stone and that the only thing left is to check those boxes and reach those goals. Then you blink, and you’re 35, and half of your friends are 35+, and several of those friends are married and/or having kids. You all speak with each other realizing that from all the things you said you would accomplish by this age, you have completed almost half of them, and the rest isn’t important any more to you, meaning your priorities have shifted, and you think, “huh, I guess we became adults.”
The utility of money depreciates exponentially with age. As someone that tries to optimize whenever it is possible but also does not take spending money on experiences too seriously as long as I have fun and enjoy them, I’m increasingly noticing that €10 in 2015 could have gotten me the time of my life. Just going out with friends to an okeish bar (Gorilla, for the ones that remember, largely helped by €1 beers on any Friday night), just enjoying life and heading back home at around 2am, and just peeking at the craziness of everything around us, noticing it, commenting, and making random memories. Surely, 10 years later, life has gotten more expensive than ever, and what was €10 is probably around €30 today, but an equivalent fun night at 35 is more around €70-100. This is because I don’t want to spend my evenings at a dump surrounded by 21-year-old college students, etc. This, of course, applies to more than just “nights out”. I need a nicer apartment for the same level of “life satisfaction” as I had at 25. I’ll probably never stay in a hostel again, or fly on the lowest economy fare on a long-haul flight (my god, those seats have gotten really bad).
Divergent outcomes become increasingly common. This one is interesting. I have several friends that have made millions thanks to being in the right place at the right company, have had a child with someone they didn’t plan to have one with, developed gambling addictions (I see you, Polymarket), and for most of them, well, they have maintained what we all would consider a “normal” life. Most of them are feeling behind when they compare themselves with the right tail of the winners in their own social circles. Everyone was roughly on the same path when we were all 25, but now that we are 35+ you can really see how those slight divergences here and there throughout our journeys have affected and changed us.
The biggest crisis we are all facing in the next 10 years is information overload and attention decay. For years I have consistently managed to have my screen time below 3 hours a week on my phone. I tend to have my phone close to me all the time, and yes, I can use the social apps on my laptop, but generally I don’t, so I’m using the phone metric to state my case. Nowadays it’s reaching a consistent 4.5 hours per week. Have I gotten more social? Nope. If anything I cut down on social networks and pay more attention to my Slack and agent messages. So I’m not “doomscrolling”, so I’m not “wasting my time”, however I also feel that even though I’m spending more screen time on work related topics, I’m not getting anything from spending that extra time on it. And this is me, using it for work related tasks. I imagine the general person that’s in fact “doomscrolling” will feel even worse about it once that realization clicks. Ever increasingly powerful social media algorithms with profit motives, plus a proliferation of AI-slop content, have created a potent environment where our attention jumps from “thing to thing” without us dedicating enough time or focus to fully understand any particular thing.
Optionality is a depreciating asset. By 35 you see who has “stacked” wins. This is particularly evident in folks’ careers and relationships. A lot of folks have developed a “job-hopping” psyche of sorts, going from “thing to thing” every two years. Others are less dramatic than that (like me, heh), while others have spent what I could consider a lifetime within the same 4 walls (figuratively speaking) and have developed an increased focus and understanding of a niche. I’m still a believer that being a Swiss army knife is extremely helpful for most tasks and situations. Now, with frontier models becoming better at covering edge cases (read about Mythos and what the specialty of the model was), being an elite sniper is a valuable skillset that pays well. The future, though, is recognizing that you will need to be both in order to become the orchestrator archetype that will become an expert generalist. So being curious, collaborative, having a customer focus mindset, favoring fundamental knowledge, blending those general and specialist skills, having sympathy for related domains, and understanding first principle patterns are among the things on my list for that.
Never pursuing optionality is a recipe for a mid-life crisis. A caveat on the last point: the folks who I’ve seen spiral the hardest are those who committed to the “wrong thing” way too early. People that studied a career that didn’t satisfy them in order to switch careers mid flight to another one that wasn’t what they wanted either, but it was where they saw money. Most of them are panicking because AI took the part of the job that was brainless, which they saw as an easy and steady way to get an income. How do you pivot out of the only thing you’ve ever done? It’s hard! Inertia is a powerful drug. It’s probably better to try a few different things while we are still young (yeah, you are all still young), since the stakes are never going to be lower.
Geography is an important factor to well-being. Having lived in multiple countries, I can confidently say that I have never been happier than I am right now. I walk up and down the river every morning, watch the mountain peaks, watch the snow falling through my window in winter, and I’m just mesmerized by how simple life can be in nature. I take every walk as an opportunity to do something new and I dread going to any big city for a chore. Granted, this area is expensive AF, and I laugh when people say “you can’t put a price on happiness” because I think the price tag for a decline in “happiness” is very, very high. So you might as well pay now to have the things you need, be close with your friends, have the room with the window light during the morning time you need, or be close to the yoga spot you like.
Optimization culture has been taken too far, but it’s a self-own business. I love a good set of metrics. A friend of mine always pokes at me for having the knowledge of a consistent, very high sleep score. However, there’s a difference between you acknowledging metrics and committing to change a few things because of them, and drastically changing your way of life because of them. Imagine we have a night out with friends for a few cocktails. I know that I haven’t hit my 10k steps daily goal and that alcohol increases my heart rate variability during the night, making me sleep worse than usual, so I decide to skip a social event because my health scores would take a hit, even though these social events aren’t a thing that I do every single day. Sounds crazy, right? Optimization for the sake of optimization is a stupid pursuit. You’re going to die at some point, don’t be so pretentious about biomarkers.
Intuition is underrated. Common sense is the least common of all senses, right? Well now it looks like with the wave of AI psychosis we are experiencing, intuition is also becoming a rare trait. With the mountain of data and the ability to gather more of it, it’s easier than ever to just say “this is what the data dictates” when making a decision. One version of this is the “insert your meme”-maxxxing culture to the point where people become slaves of their like score, and another is failing to “trust your gut” when it comes to careers and relationships. If it feels like you are in a sinking ship most of the time, it’s your responsibility, and yours alone, to take care of yourself and redirect your path. If you wait until the “correct” move is obvious, you’ll be late. If you are going to hit the panic button, hit it early. I had this experience in one of my jobs where, after a year, I wasn’t feeling right, and without anything aligned in my future I knew I just had to exit the space. It worked out quite well for me.
Careers are and will always be a “people” game. We all know money is important, but the “ability to earn money” matters way more than money itself, especially early in your career. The best way to hone that ability is working with people whom you find aspirational. A good way to test this out is whether or not you would want to “be your boss” in 5-10 years. If that picture is something that gives you nightmares rather than being your aspiration, get out. Life is too short to stay around the uninspired.
If you think you have anxiety you might be drinking too much coffee. I was at a coffee shop overhearing a conversation that played out somewhat like this: “I need to book more appointments with my therapist because I’m not sleeping well and I just feel anxious all the time.” While that played out, I watched this person have 1 large cappuccino, a latte, and another one to take away. (I was at the coffee shop mostly working, taking in the white noise, and only drank one during that same period of time.) My first thought was, “Do you really need a therapist?” My second thought was, “Maybe look at how much caffeine you are consuming each day?” The third one was, “How much are you spending per month to have a professional ask you that question and then ignore it?” And yeah, I was totally gossiping. It piqued my curiosity and I was laughing internally about how it all played out. This is a lesson for not just coffee drinkers. If you are flooding your system with stimulants you need to understand the consequences of it. Cutting back on substance consumption is a low-hanging life hack. Respect your system.
Someone stupider than you is going to make a lot of money. People get rich in all sorts of ways, and most of the time it is impossible to separate how much “luck” from “skill” played out for them. I’m going to define “rich” here as someone that has made over €2m by the age of 30.
1. Successfully exited a startup where they pocketed ~€1m and invested it all during COVID.
2. Created a consulting company for consulting companies to teach how to teach AI implementation, and he’s pocketing a consistent ~€3m per month since late 2024.
3. Went all GameStop with Sandisk and sold out last month.
4. Has consistently been investing 60%+ of their income since their early 20s because they believed in the FIRE movement, and they still have not retired.
All of these people are really smart. All of them, knowingly or not, took on a heightened level of risk in some aspect of their lives. It’s quite easy to look at them and think “Why not me?” but that will drive yourself insane, and you only ask that question because you have the hindsight of their outcome. We are all making the best decisions with our abilities and the information we have at the time. The takeaway here is that outsized returns are the output of concentrated bets, and these are the stories you will hear the most about.
Envy is the ugliest human trait. To my last point, “envy” is increasingly common towards these “winners” in some facet of their life. As someone that lives in a country with a special concentration of them, I hear a lot of visitors outspokenly being annoyed about someone peacefully driving a Ferrari at 2 meters from them. Envy serves no purpose in closing the gap between you and the target of your envy, it just makes its host resentful. A good test is asking yourself to think about the last three people in your broader social circle who had an outsized win. Were you genuinely happy for them, or did part of you begin comparing yourself to their new standing? Comparison is the thief of joy, and it snowballs into envy rather quickly.
Don’t compare yourself to others. A continuation of the last point. I already spoke about the ugly side of it, but comparing yourself to great people, and to your past self, your prior self, asking have you evolved, grown out of bad beliefs, changed any behaviors, etc, that’s some healthy comparison. Compare yourself better.
Want it or not, the US is still the peak of software development. As someone that lives in Europe and aspires for better software around me, we are still in the era of catching up over here. Not only do the salaries reflect that, but most companies that aspire to do something new are just rehashing a concept that has been implemented overseas with a twist (and the twist is mostly X for the german market). Surely the conditions are changing and the market news is becoming increasingly more consolidated around the new AI model, but even most of the things we use, hear about, and are inspired to do something by are coming from the US market and not from here.
Everyone wants a risk-less bang. The more I have the conversation around hedging your investments and the increasing gap between right-tail winners and everyone else as you get older, the more I realize that everyone wants to be the outlier, but just a few are capable of tolerating the multi-year period of uncertainty that precedes said returns. The opportunity cost of “thing that could work”, particularly when it means a pay cut or status hit, is unbearable. Keep that in mind when you see your friends taking that risk. It takes courage, and I’m in the camp of being the first to root for you for being willing to put yourself on the wheel and kicking that inertia.
“Travel” as a source of enjoyment has declined with age and the explosion of “content.” As someone that has visited 44+ countries and repeated many of those on multiple occasions, this was the factor that drove me away from social media. There’s been a very real shift in the nature of travel tourism as TikTok and Instagram have become more ubiquitous. Now everyone can see how the “hot spots” trend over their phones on these platforms and prepare to visit them before they visit them, just wanting to visit them because everyone else is talking about them on social media and not for the sake of enjoying a place, losing the discovery and chasing the clout factor. Meanwhile content creators will do whatever it takes to grab your attention with more bombastic performances, making their viewers want to imitate them to the detriment of everyone in their immediate vicinity.
The bottom 10% dictates the rules where you live. There’s a lot of talk about billionaires, but I personally have few issues with the “wealth gap” between the super duper-wealthy and normal folks. This might be a hot take for some, but most rules and norms that inconvenience or hinder our day to day life are consequences of the actions of the bottom 10%, not the top 1%. There are studies that back up that around 1% of the population is responsible for 63% of all violent crime convictions. The fact that there are a few shoplifters affects how fast the cashier can be at the register for every day necessities, and the fact that we are increasingly and willingly removing the wall on privacy among our societies (see the UK’s case) is a consequence of a society trying to fix what these individuals do and not the root cause. Could we create an environment where wealth distribution is more equal? Maybe, although I’m not counting on it considering the past 2000+ years of recorded history. I do however think that we can work on lifting up the standards among all individuals in our society instead of consistently racing to the bottom, producing worse conditions. All career politicians belong in this bottom 10% group, because they are just making decisions that get them elected and retain their position.
Making new acquaintances is actually easier because everyone is craving to be social but doesn’t know where to start. It’s always scary to open up yourself a bit and say hello to strangers. The thought of “who am I to take your time” is a strong one in our minds, especially when we are bombarded with news about a new Karen giving their opinions at a local grocery store and the fear that you might be the next one. However, this is just the loud algorithms with unhinged content. Most people that walk past you every single day and would recognize you without knowing your name want to say good morning and do a quick chat while you wait for the bus or grab a cup of coffee. A few weeks ago I walked randomly into a coffee shop in the morning in the Barcelona area with comically small benches. I’m not a gigantic person at 1.83m, or 6” for my American friends, but I would not have seated myself on those and chose the tall ones. Then this dude, taller than me by a head, comes in and orders a coffee and sits on one of those small ones, and I watched it and could not help myself but ask why he chose to do it. Anyway, we ended up having a conversation around restaurants in the area, gentrification, and safari experiences in South Africa (we both had done one), and people that entered to take away their order even chimed in out of curiosity just because the environment was set for having an open conversation. I walked out with a smile because it was a fun and awkward situation, all because I just asked a comical question without expressing any judgment.
AI writing in general is disrespectful. I don’t know about you, but every time I open a Github comment to see a “response” from a person that’s clearly a copy and paste or a direct response from an agent, without any reasoning from the user other than just running a skill, it affects how I respond in that and future interactions with the same person. And from other people I have spoken with about it, it’s just a way to alienate yourself from others. So if you are one of those, slow yourself down, read, and put your thoughts in your own words, not your agent’s words.
Having constant introspections and thinking on what-ifs is a mind killer. A16z founder Marc Andreessen went viral a few months back for claiming that he has “as little as possible” introspection, claiming that it’s both a waste of time and a distraction from progress. Hot take: while this person has been far more successful in countless metrics than most of us, I would like to make an adjustment. Occasional introspection is both valuable and necessary, otherwise how do you even know what “you” are and what “you” want? The problem is that people who are good at doing introspection of themselves tend to start introspecting about everything that’s happening in their life and around them, psychoanalyzing every nth detail of a career decision, re-reading old text messages 100 times, or playing out hypothetical scenarios in their mind on repeat for days on end, all while telling themselves they’re “being thoughtful”. Introspection reaffirms who you are, deliberation disrupts the present with thoughts of an unchangeable past or an unknowable future. The line between the two is a fine one, and minimizing how often you find yourself walking the path is, I think, far healthier than fighting to not walk beyond it.
The experiences of the people around you, and yours, are the ones shaping you. It goes back a bit to one of my career development topics, but this also applies to your life. If the individuals around you inspire you, you will be more prone to try out new things or change how you see others.
Efficiency isn’t always the point. Sometimes the point is the ritual, sometimes the point is the feeling. This is why we are so drawn to old technology or the inconvenience of it. The modern world is full of mechanical marvels that have removed what makes us feel connected to the action we are doing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy having cruise control, but sometimes I also want to enjoy the action of driving. Why own a car you enjoy having and not feel it, right? Sometimes the flaws are part of the experience.
Sometimes the old ways are the best. Modern life has become overwhelmingly digital. We work on screens, we relax on screens, we communicate through screens, making life less physical. Our brains haven’t really adapted to this, and the sensory response of reading an actual book, flipping through pages, and concentrating on an action that forces you to focus on it is something that I’m increasingly enjoying more. Miss Moneypenny and Bond said it best. Sometimes the old ways just represent things that modern life lacks: character, history, and connection.
Don’t fail fast, fail often. Nothing gets more Silicon Valley than this phrase. When you are an 18 year old it is easy to get multiple do-overs, and the stakes are as low as they could be (unless you do something really bad like killing someone). After 30 the world starts to be less forgiving. You can still bounce back from any early fuck up and get your underdog story. Just keep in mind that it won’t seem as easy as it was before. While there’s no single way to “win” in life, there are multiple ways to “lose”. It’s not a spectator game. Make sure people around you are comfortable speaking up with you.
You are not afraid of failure, you are afraid of being seen failing. Those are 2 different things. If you could fail with total anonymity and 0 consequences, you would try and fail endlessly. We rehearse our humiliation in advance, and if we fail, we replay it in our minds for decades. Humans are odd this way. Your mind lies to you all the time. The mind works in mysterious ways to keep you alive, and all of these things feel so real because these ideas speak to you in your mind every second, every day. The skill is to learn to catch yourself mid story and check whether this is a survival instinct or real.
True friendship doesn’t mean that you are in contact every single day, week, or month. It just means that you can count on those friends when in need, and they can feel the same about you.
Slow down to go fast is a phrase that I have been hearing more since the beginning of 2026. Could be because the average developer is now shipping 2.5x the amount of code as they were doing in 2025, or because we no longer know what’s important and we are just pushing for the sake of pushing and filling in vanity metrics. Take a moment to reassess your goals and ensure that you are putting the time into the things that are important to you, and not what you think you should be putting the time into because everyone else is doing it.
Exercising does not have to be taken to the extreme, but it has to be done (unless that’s your goal, then props to you). There’s a line between hobbies that folks enjoy and do because it brings them joy, and doing something because it is the latest trend. The folks that do it because they take joy and pride from it are the ones that 5+ years after starting still find joy from it. I have a ton of acquaintances that started with Crossfit, did it hard for a few months, and didn’t continue at all, dropping all kinds of exercise because they were burned out from it. It’s more important to take a consistent set that can somewhat challenge you than to try and fail to become this hype beast machine because it is an aspirational goal for which you didn’t take time to consider the implications to begin with.
Modern medicine will keep you alive, it won’t keep you healthy. The earlier you understand that you have to take care of the things that make you healthier so you can live a good life, the better you will live. Modern medicine is pretty good at keeping you alive at all cost, but that doesn’t mean that you will have a good quality of life because of it. That’s on you.
People rarely walk away from the things they love because they lost interest. Reading books, playing games, or any other hobby out there that once brought them joy, it usually isn’t passion that disappears. It’s the feeling of the time we have for it. As we get older, work starts taking up more and more of the day. The hours seem longer, the evening seems shorter, and the list of responsibilities never stops growing. Before long the hobbies that used to be a regular part of life slowly fade into the background. And I think that makes all of it quite sad. Even if you carve out the time to do what you know will make you feel better, there’s this constant battle of guilt telling you that you should be using the time to work on improving yourself or do something that will make your life easier and better. The problem isn’t that we lost interest, it’s that we condition ourselves to believe that we can’t enjoy the simple things that make life ok as we try our best to adult.
Start being a “chef” vs being a “cook” now. The idea is simple: you want to reason from first principles vs reason by analogy. Put in plain words, we need to reason like a scientist. You take core facts and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of reasoning, by analogy, happens when you look at the way things are already done and you essentially copy it, with maybe a little personal tweak here and there, kind of like a cook following an already written recipe. I’m describing the extreme ends of a spectrum here. But for any particular part of your life that involves reasoning and decision making, wherever you happen to be on the spectrum, your reasoning process can usually be boiled down to fundamentally “chef like” or fundamentally “cook like”. Creating vs copying. Originality vs conformity. The framework I use to take the decision paralysis out of which end of the spectrum I believe I find myself on is to put a box of the things I want on the left side, and a box with the reality I find myself in on the other, and put all the options I have in the middle, drawing arrows to where they lean the most for me, and then take the time to deep dive on the one that hits the most centrist direction.
Not all of your problems are supposed to be fixed. We have been sold this idea that healing means arriving at a state where nothing hurts you anymore, but that’s not healing, that’s just denial with a fairytale. Improvement is going from one problem to a less shitty problem. The people that seem to have it figured out haven’t solved all their problems, they just stopped demanding that all problems have to be solvable. Most of the suffering comes from resisting the pain, not the actual pain.
Feelings are not facts, they are worth listening to. Your feelings are always transitory, often arbitrary, usually self serving, occasionally misguided. They are telling you something might be happening that you might want to pay attention to or might want to change. Your job is to consider them.
Your limitations are actually good for you. The person with 10k choices and the person with 0 choices end up at the same place: not doing anything. The best work is produced against constraints and boundaries. A life without limits is a life without depth. Your energy, time, lack of talent, upbringing, and mortality are limitations that you can harness to create great things.