The Flesh Is Weak, The Grind Is Stupid (But I’ll Do It Again Anyway)
So I'm sitting on my couch. Burnt out. Cooked. Done. A walking cautionary tale in human form.
And yet here I am again, asking myself the same dumb question: why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep pushing myself to the point of mental combustion like some overworked MacBook fan screaming in the middle of summer?
It's constant. It's inevitable. It's basically on my bimonthly calendar at this point: "Oh look, time to collapse again."
And the worst part? I love it. I love the grind, the push, the ridiculous self-imposed suffering. Which, yes, makes me an absolute idiot. Is this good? Is this bad? No idea. (Spoiler: it's bad. That's the joke. Don't clap yet.)
Better yet, why on Earth am I writing an article about this? I should be sleeping, or resting, or literally anything else. I am the literal cause of my own suffering at this point because I just don’t want to stop. The flesh is weak, my mind is constantly willing, my spirit is always on fire, and I still need grace.
So this is basically a storytime of how did I even get here? because, honestly, I don't know either. Let's rewind.
Five-ish years ago, I started Tomedia. Just steady, organic growth. No marketing, no personal brand, no plastering my face all over LinkedIn like an MLM coach. People I knew referred me, clients shared my name, work kept rolling in. Simple. Stable. Boring, even.
Then CutCompass happened about four months ago. At the time, I was still with my fiancée (note the was). That backfired hard about a month in - cue the breakup, me moving back in with my parents, and throwing myself headfirst into this app as the ultimate distraction. Classic "use the startup to patch the emotional wounds" arc. Ten out of ten, do not recommend, but also…it worked?
Next thing you know, I'm flying to Cairns on a whim, grinding like my life depended on it. I refused to be defeated. One bad personal event turned into the fuel to dive completely out of my comfort zone.
Now, here's the fun contradiction: I'm an introvert. Like, extreme introvert. Yes, I can talk the hair off a bald man, and yes, I'm cocky enough to lecture a room full of people on API endpoints, but crowds absolutely drain me. Networking events light me up…then burn me out faster than a $2 candle. Catch-22 central.
Still, I leaned into it. Clients kept saying, "You should write. You explain things in a way we actually get." Apparently, my rambling pauses and layman breakdowns were entertaining? Too many compliments later, I caved.
So I started writing. Articles, rants, the whole "me screaming into text form" vibe. Social bans, dumb tech hot takes, startup frustrations. Stuff that's fun for me, unfiltered, sarcastic - rage-but-make-it-readable. And, somehow, people loved it.
The result? My LinkedIn went from ~400 to ~750 in like two months. My Tomedia site traffic spiked. People at networking events started recognising me - not from my articles, but from a random video I posted explaining MVC paradigms and how they connect into the CutCompass app via APIs.
Yes, that of all things. A technical rant about architecture. That's apparently what made people go, "Hey, you're that guy."
The funniest part? My sister edited the video and, in peak Gen Z fashion, focused on me saying "Special Sauce." And that's literally how someone at an event mentioned it to me: "I loved the special sauce." (No context, just that. Welcome to my life.)
And then the numbers started stacking up. My Instagram now gets 25,000 impressions a month. My LinkedIn? 2,973 impressions per month. All these fun, impossible stats that should not be happening.
Five years ago, I was nobody. Now, people are asking me questions, treating me like the mentor in rooms full of actual mentors.
And here's the real problem: you have no idea the amount of imposter syndrome this drags up. People asking me for advice?? Who am I to tell anyone how to do anything? It eats at me, especially this week. I am not perfect. I am far from perfect. I make stupid mistakes. I can't even keep some of my relationships functioning. I get frustrated over trivial things. I can be difficult.
One day I feel like a genius - some SEO theory I cooked up in the shower actually works. The next, I'm sitting at an event thinking: am I the idiot here? Am I lying? Am I faking it?
I even told my best friend today, "I don't want to fail. I don't want to be a failure." Because in my head, if I stop, I fail. And she just shot back:
"You're not gunna fail. You won't. Like look at you, Tom. Failure isn't an option for you. It's not in your vocab."
I needed that. Because I don't always believe it.
Doesn't matter that I built a functioning app in four months when others take years. Doesn't matter that I can spit out articles like I'm possessed. Doesn't matter that I mentor people who are objectively smarter than me. Inside my head, the alarms keep going off: you're the imposter.
And maybe that's why it's eating me alive. I spend so much time telling people not to blindly trust tech, media, or the systems around us - and then I spiral into asking if I can even be trusted. I'm literally the one saying "everyone's lying to you," so where does that leave me?
That's the existential loop: why am I like this? I am not a god. I am human. And half the time I feel like an imposter in my own damn life.
And then there's the bigger picture. Even outside of my head, this whole world is…a lot. We weren't meant to live like this. Constantly online. Constantly tracked. Constantly sold a version of reality by media you know damn well you can't trust. We were meant to be farmers and hunters and gatherers - not tech zombies pushing API calls at 2am.
That's why I joke about buying a farm. Because the longer you're in tech, the more you realise: tech enthusiasts adopt it, tech experts fear it. I fear it. I see the curse, not the magic.
Thank God for friends. Thank God for God, honestly - I pray every single day for comfort. Because without that? I'd fold.
So yeah, I'm burnt out. I'm existential. I'm questioning my own place in this circus while also building things people tell me are impossible.
There isn't really an end to this article. This is just my state right now: burnt out, overthinking, praying for some peace. I'll get over it. I'll come back in two months and probably have doubled my growth again.
But right now? I'm just tired. And that's okay.