The Years I Lost, the Time I Fear, and the Moment I Can Finally See
AI acceleration, personal collapse cycles, and the strange comfort of being present.
Alright. This one’s a bit weird.
I’m writing this half-asleep, slightly pickled from a rum / becherovka cocktail, after one of those weeks where everything happens at once and your brain turns to mashed potatoes (It’s only Wednesday…).
So, ideal conditions for some deep existential thinking, obviously.
I don’t even know if I’ll publish this. It feels messy, personal, and half-formed. But it’s been sitting in my head all week, and if I don’t write it down, it’ll just keep looping.
Running out of time in a world that won’t slow down
I wrote recently about time.
The gist of it was: you’re not late. You’ve got more time than you think. You run your own race. You don’t need to sprint just because everyone else looks like they’re sprinting.
That belief is basically the duct tape holding my sanity together. It’s what lets me keep pushing forward without collapsing into a heap of “I’m behind, I’m failing, everyone else is ahead of me.”
But we live in this weird culture that insists everything has to be a rush.
Startup land is the perfect example:
Move fast, break things, burn out, repeat.
Be first. Be fastest. Sleep is for people who don’t want to be on the cover of something.
I don’t agree with that. It’s probably why I’m not really built for “startup land”. I’m built more for “business land”. The one where you:
Think strategically
Don’t have to be first to market
Are allowed to learn from other people’s experiments instead of lighting your own hair on fire
You can be second, third, tenth to market and still build something great. You can watch what already exists, copy what works, avoid what doesn’t, and save yourself years of pain and money. That’s not laziness; that’s efficient.
But then AI crashed the party.
Suddenly, if anyone can build anything almost as fast as you can, the pressure ramps up again. The logic mutates into:
“If I can move faster, I should move faster.”
And that is where things start to get unhealthy. Especially for brains like mine that already like to sprint until they hallucinate.
Every two or three months, like clockwork, I crash. If you’ve read my stuff for a while, you know the pattern: I write an article about how I’m not coping, then a week later I’m fine again and back to sprinting. It’s basically a running gag at this point.
Funny. But also… not.
AI has supercharged that “do everything now” culture. And I think we desperately need the opposite: a culture of slowing down on purpose.
The “compressed 21st century” problem
I read something recently by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, about us living in a compressed 21st century.
The idea was:
What we thought would take 50 years is happening in 5. More so with AI progress and AGI just around the corner.
That’s exciting on one level. Cure for cancer? New medicines? Weird cool tools? Love it. Sign me up.
But humans are historically terrible at handling “good things” without also absolutely tanking something else in the process.
Even biblically, we couldn’t handle it. God: “Here’s literally everything, just don’t do this one thing.”
Us: does the one thing.
We repeat the same mistakes, history doesn’t repeat but it really does rhyme.
So yeah, all of that has had me thinking about time again, but this time from a more personal angle, because my relationship with time is… glitchy.
Losing 3–4 years of my life (and getting them back)
My sense of time is already wonky because of my own history.
I’ve only really had my memory back properly in the last year or so, after being on medication for psychosis for a couple of years. Before that, there’s this whole blurry 3–4 year chunk of my life that I barely remember.
It’s like looking back over your timeline and finding a giant pixelated gap.
People will say, “Remember when we did this?” and my brain just goes:
“Nope.”
I remember some things. But not enough to make it feel continuous. It’s unsettling in a way that’s hard to explain.
On top of that, my perception of time now is… slippery. I’ll think a conversation or meeting happened three weeks ago and find out it was three days ago. Things from yesterday can feel like a month away. Other things vanish instantly.
And when you can’t trust your own sense of time, it’s very easy to start telling yourself stories like:
“I’m not doing enough.”
“I’m too slow.”
“I’ve already fallen behind.”
When actually… it was last week. You’re fine, Tom. Chill.
Time is moving at a normal human pace. It just feels wrong from inside my skull.
The present moment vs the blur
Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m lying in bed.
I can feel the sheets under me. There’s a slight weight on my chest, that heavy, end-of-week tired feeling. The fan is spinning above me. The room sounds a certain way.
This moment is vivid.
But five seconds ago? I barely remember how I started this paragraph.
Most of life is like that. Our brains filter out almost everything. We forget the texture of the moment and keep only a loose summary.
That’s what messes with me:
Every second, I’m forgetting the second before. And yet this present moment is the only place I’m actually alive.
To anchor myself, I sometimes imagine Future Me.
In ten years, maybe I’ll be:
Writing another article like this
Doing a voice note again
Talking to an AI that transcribes my ramblings (hi)
Or juggling kids and a career and some strange new version of “normal”
And in that future, I’ll look back on this exact moment and think:
“Wow. Look how far I’ve come.”
I probably won’t remember the specifics. Not the fan, not the sheets, not the weight in my chest. Just the idea of this time.
Maybe in 5–10 years we’ll have brain implants or some Black Mirror-level tech where we never forget anything and can replay memories perfectly. I don’t know if I’d want that. Forgetting is painful, but remembering everything sounds worse.
For now, all I really have is this:
Be present.
Work about two weeks ahead. Don’t try to map every possible future branch. I’ve done that before. It wrecked my mental health.
The 30-under-30 clock in my head
Now for the bit I’m not sure I’ll leave in.
I like being open about mental health. If I lose a client because I talk openly about schizophrenia and fear and delusions, that says more about them than it does about me.
I’m literally on schizophrenia podcasts. I talk publicly about this stuff because I know it helps people. If my brain is going to be weird, I might as well use it for someone else’s good.
So here’s the thing that’s been gnawing at me:
I have this audacious goal of making a “30 under 30” list.
On paper, that’s fine. Goals are good. Stretch goals are great.
But my brain has turned it into a countdown.
I’ve set 30 as the finish line
I’ve tied my self-worth to making that list
And I’ve told myself, subconsciously, that everything I want to do needs to happen before then
I know that’s not how life works. Logically, I know I can hit 40 under 40, or 80 under 80, or whatever arbitrary list exists by then. I know that if I did somehow get 30 under 30, I’d probably spiral for a bit like:
“Cool. That was the big goal. Now what?”
And if I don’t get it, there’s that other spiral:
“Cool. You failed the one goal you cared about. Now what?”
The real problem is how my schizophrenic brain likes to fill in the gaps.
It feeds me thoughts like:
“People with schizophrenia don’t last to 30.”
“You got your diagnosis early, so you’ll deteriorate faster.”
“You’ve only got a finite amount of time, and it stops at 30.”
I know, intellectually, that this is nonsense. I know I’ll probably live a long, weird life and die doing something stupid at 80, like racing a go-kart in front of my grandkids.
Death doesn’t scare me.
What scares me is the idea of not achieving everything I want to achieve.
It’s selfish. It’s dramatic. It’s also very, very human.
And when I’m stressed or tired or low, my brain latches onto that 30-under-30 clock and whispers:
“You don’t have long. Do everything now.”
Cue: overwork, overthinking, and lying in bed wondering what on earth I’m doing.
Legacy vs achievement
Here’s what keeps me grounded when I spiral like that.
A while back, I told all of this to Justin from Litl Creative (the legend himself), when I was in a pretty rough headspace. And he said something that stuck with me:
“You’re not here for yourself.
You’re here for the legacy you leave behind for the people in the future.”
That reframed so much for me.
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been around weird groups. I’ve done things that weren’t good for my soul. But none of that is wasted if I can turn it into stories that help someone else avoid the same pain.
My life doesn’t have to be a neatly completed personal checklist. It can be a toolbox for the people who come after me.
That’s why I love writing these articles. It’s why I like when business owners say:
“It took me 10 years to get here.”
You rarely hear about those 10 years, but they’re everything. I’m only 5 years into my own journey and I’ve already packed way too much into it. The idea of another 5, 10, 20 years of growth actually makes me feel… better.
Like I’m early, not late.
Like time is bigger than my little 30-under-30 countdown.
Time is weird - and that’s okay
Time is such a strange construct.
We don’t understand it. We abuse it. We use it to justify burning ourselves out for some hypothetical payoff later.
We speedrun our lives, then wonder why we’re always exhausted and confused.
But here’s where I think I’m landing (for now):
The world is moving fast. AI is speeding it up even more.
My brain is terrible at perceiving time accurately.
My memory has gaps, and my sense of the past is fuzzy.
My future will almost certainly look nothing like what I expect.
And yet, in the middle of all that, I get this one thing:
The present moment.
This paragraph.
This breath.
This weird little article I might not publish.
If all I ever do is keep showing up to this moment with as much honesty as I can, and use what I’ve learned to make someone else’s path a bit easier… that might actually be enough.
Anyway. Those are the deep thoughts for today.
Next time I’ll probably go and write something “properly businessy” about how Cloudflare shut down or how AI just broke another industry in half.
But for now: it’s late, I’m tired, the fan is still spinning, and time is still doing whatever time does.
See you in the next Brainwave.