I went to a friend’s party the other day.

It was one of those house parties where you know some of the guests, but most were unfamiliar.

I saw people standing in small circles, holding drinks they occasionally sipped from. I heard laughter in the adjacent room over the background music, and felt a cold draft from the open door to the backyard. Around me were paintings and trophies that brought back memories of time spent together. Racing down that hallway. The soccer tournament we won when we were 9.

I walked a little forward and said hello to the first group I came across. They had a heated discussion about how fast AI is changing things.

“I don’t think people realize how many jobs this is going to replace,” one of them said. “It’s not just repetitive stuff anymore.”

Someone else shook their head slightly. “People said that about every major shift. Last time was when the mobile phone was invented. It’ll just change the kind of work we do.”

“Yeah, but this feels different,” the first one replied. “It’s not just helping. It’s starting to do the thinking for us.”

A third person chimed in. “Or it’s amplifying it. If you know how to use it, you can do more than before.”

“Until it starts amplifying itself,” I added, half-jokingly. “But I think it depends on whether you see it as a tool or a replacement.”

There was a small pause. Then the conversation continued.

After a while, it felt like the conversation was just going back and forth with everyone saying the same thing from different angles. I nodded along, but I was already somewhere else.

I left the group and went to find my friend, the host.

I found him in the kitchen.

He handed me a drink before I even asked.

“Hey buddy, glad you could make it,” he said.

“Yeah, I made it,” I replied.

We stood there for a moment, just looking at other people, both of us sipping our drinks.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“Good, I guess. Work’s a bit all over the place, though.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “Nothing dramatic, just a bunch of things piling up, and I’ve had to put in extra hours to figure out this new AI thing.”

I smiled. “That sounds familiar. We’ve been dealing with that, too.”

There was a short pause. And we heard someone laugh loudly behind us.

“I went by your old place the other day,” I said.

“What brought you there?”

“Just jogging. Went that way. Did you know the new owners have five dogs?”

“Wow, that’s a lot,” he exclaimed.

“Yeah, they came running out to bark at me.”

There was a quiet moment. Some people clinked their glasses near us.

“How’s everything else?” he asked after a moment.

“Good, the kids are doing well, and they’re keeping me busy…”

He smiled. “Yeah, they tend to do that.”

We both laughed lightly.

For a moment, everything else felt a bit further away.

It felt easy to stay there. Just talking with an old friend.

We parted ways, and I went for another drink.

Soon another guest came over to talk.

We introduced ourselves.

“So what do you think about everything that’s going on in the world?” he asked.

I tensed up slightly. I knew what he meant.

“I try to follow it,” I said, “but I’m not sure I understand it well enough to have a clear opinion.”

He nodded, and continued.

“It’s actually very clear if you look into it properly. One side has been doing it for years. People just don’t want to admit it.”

I nodded a little, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“I think it’s probably a little more complicated than that,” I said.

He leaned in slightly. “That’s what people say when they don’t want to take a stance.”

I took a sip, giving myself a second.

“Maybe, or maybe I just don’t know enough to be certain.”

He looked at me for a moment, like I had missed something obvious.

“You just have to look at the right sources,” he said with clear exasperation.

I nodded again. “Yeah.”

There was a short pause. I noticed I wasn’t really in the conversation anymore.

After a moment, something else caught his attention, and he moved on.

I exhaled deeply, only then noticing how much tension I had been holding in my shoulders.

Then I saw an old high school friend that I hadn’t met in years.

I went over almost immediately.

“Hey… It’s been a while,” I said.

She smiled. “Hey Dan, it really has.”

We shared a friendly hug. And then started talking about our kids.

“My son just started daycare,” she said.

“Oh yeah? How did that go?”

“The first few days were rough,” she said. “His crying was really breaking my heart. At first, I cried in the car after leaving him there.”

I smiled. “Yeah, that sounds familiar. Had a similar experience when I brought my daughter to daycare.”

“But then, about 2 weeks later,” she continued, “he just ran in and forgot about me right away. I almost felt abandoned.”

“That happened to us, too,” I laughed. “It’s strange how quickly that changes.”

She nodded. “I think it’s harder for us than for them.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Then we just stood there for a while.

Someone walked past us, laughing at something we hadn’t heard.

“But it’s nice too,” she added. “Seeing them figure things out on their own.”

I nodded. It felt easy to stay there.

And for a moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything else.

And I stayed there a bit longer than I normally would have.

If this felt familiar, you might like the rest of what I write.
I keep a library of these essays here: Library

“I want to say something, but I don’t know how to say it without making things worse.”

I’ve used that sentence more times than I’d like to admit.

It feels uncomfortable, and I can feel myself pulling back.

I remember stopping mid-sentence and pretending I forgot what I was saying, because I was already sure it wouldn’t go well.

One sentence turning into an argument I didn’t want to have.
Something I say getting turned back on me.
That I might be saying too much.
Or that I’m saying it wrong.

So I stay quiet. Or I tell myself I should.
Even when I feel the urge to say something.

And staying quiet doesn’t just avoid something.
It also creates a distance I didn’t really want.

I can still feel some of those moments.
The way they ache in my chest after I left something unsaid.

But when I sit with it now, something feels slightly off about how I remember it.

It doesn’t feel like I didn’t know what to say.
It feels more like I had already decided how it would go.
Or at least I convinced myself I had.

As if the conversation had already happened somewhere in my head.
And I didn’t trust myself to handle it.

Sometimes I expect something to land well, and it doesn’t.
Other times, I think it will pass quietly, and it lingers.

And yet I still catch myself acting like I already know.

As if saying something honestly meant I could also control what happens after.

And when I can’t control what happens next,
staying quiet starts to feel like the safer option.

Even when something in me still wants to say it.
I wonder if I’ve been wrong about those moments.

If this felt familiar, you might like the rest of what I write.
I keep a library of these essays here: Library

“It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”

A subscriber of mine recently sent me this sentence and suggested I write something about it.

At first, it sounded like a complete thought.
The kind of sentence that sounds good immediately. Balanced and reasonable. The sort of wisdom people repeat without ever questioning it.

And at first, I agreed.

Being important does feel nice.
I’ve felt it before. With newspapers interviewing me. A room full of people paying attention. Hearing other people repeat what I say.

Recognition feels good. Being noticed, being needed, having people care about what you say. Those things pull on something very human inside us.

But being important has a strange quality. It’s a bit like publicity.

From the outside, it looks attractive, but from the inside, it can be complicated. The same attention that lifts you up can also box you in. The same influence that gives you a voice can make every word heavier than you intended.

Being important is rarely simple. It’s almost always a double-edged sword.

Then there’s the second part of the sentence: Being nice.

Initially, that sounds even easier to agree with.

Nice people are often pleasant to be around. They make for smooth conversations. They keep small disagreements from becoming larger ones. And for a long time, I also assumed that was simply the better path.

Until life eventually presents moments where being nice stops working.

Moments where staying polite means pretending nothing is wrong.
Moments where saying the polite thing means saying something untrue.
Moments where staying agreeable means letting something wrong continue.

Moments where being nice slowly starts to cost something.

And when those moments arrive, niceness starts to look like avoidance.

Being nice can be dangerous in unexpected ways. It can hide problems instead of addressing them. It can keep the peace in the moment while allowing something worse to grow underneath.

And sometimes the most honest thing you can do isn’t nice at all.

But that doesn’t mean being nice has no value.

There is something deeply valuable about choosing warmth over sharpness, about softening situations that could easily turn cold, as the world has enough cruelty already.

So being nice still matters.

But for a long time, I didn’t have words for it. I just knew something felt off. There were plenty of moments where I was “being nice”, but it didn’t feel like I was doing the right thing.

At some point, I came across a way of describing kindness that stayed with me. It sounded almost the same as being nice.

Until it didn’t.

Being nice and being kind are not the same.

Niceness keeps things pleasant.
Kindness sometimes requires discomfort.

Kindness might say the difficult thing and set the boundary.
Kindness might interrupt the silence everyone else is politely maintaining.

So niceness protects the moment.
While kindness protects the people inside it.

Which brings me back to that sentence.

The longer I sat with it, the more something started to bother me.

Not because it’s wrong. But because it sounds too complete.

Sometimes, importance doesn’t feel nice at all.
And sometimes being nice isn’t the most important thing in the room.

So the sentence my subscriber sent me starts to sound different.

“It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”

It’s not wrong. It’s just not quite finished.

If you’ve come across a sentence that sounds right but feels slightly off, I’d be curious what it is.

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Listening to a song made me pay attention to something inside myself that I don’t fully understand.

This time it was an intense song about love. The specific song doesn’t matter because it isn’t the only one that does this for me. There are quite a few songs that have this effect on me.

It brought out tears and emotions, not because I could clearly feel love, but because it pointed at something I can’t access. Or at least something I don’t know how to access.

I feel like I’m reaching for emotions from deep within me, but I only feel absence where I believe love should be.

When I reach inward for love, I often find absence.
It’s not that something is missing. It’s more like something is out of reach.

I have a metaphor in mind for this:
My emotions are locked up in a cage somewhere inside of me.
And it’s sturdy enough that I cannot break it.
And I don’t know where the key is.

Now and then, the cage leaks.

Some music has made me cry, as if my emotions slip through small cracks in the cage.

And it’s not only music. Some emotional moments can have the same effect.

Because I feel emotional while writing this, the whole thing becomes confusing.
Clearly something is there. I just don’t understand it.

For the most part, this isn’t that big of an issue in my life. I have a good life, a family I care about, and things that genuinely matter to me.

I’ve learned to mimic emotions and respond appropriately so that in most interactions, no one will notice the difference.

Outwardly, it looks normal.

But in my marriage, it’s not quite as simple.

My wife feels deeply. She expresses her emotions and brings the emotional intensity into the relationship. We have talked about it, and she knows it. Most of the time, this is manageable, but sometimes it does create friction between us.

I notice something else about myself in those moments. I struggle to set clear boundaries. When a conversation becomes emotionally intense, I often retreat inward. I go quiet. I drift into my own thoughts and avoid the conversation rather than meeting it directly.

I also notice that sometimes she hesitates to bring up certain things, because she worries I might withdraw if the conversation becomes too emotional. And at times, I hesitate to bring things up myself, because I worry the emotions might become too intense for me to stay present.

When I sit next to her and hold her hand, I do it because it feels like the right thing to do.
I expect some surge of emotion from inside of me.
But instead, I just feel quiet.

I often feel sad about that.

Not because I don’t care, but because I don’t know how to access the feeling in the way she can.

I believe my children know I care about them because I show up and engage with them. I play with them, I spend time with them, and I make space for them in my life.

None of that is a question to me.

My wife expresses love much more openly than I do, and I’m grateful our children get to experience that from her.

What confuses me is something else: when I pause and try to observe what that love actually feels like inside me, I often find absence where I expect something powerful.

Not coldness, nor indifference. More like a muted emotional space.

And yet something in me clearly cares enough to build a life around these people.

I have been thinking about where this might have started.

I was a serious child, and I didn’t understand sarcasm. Social nuance often escaped me when I was younger, and I struggled to interpret other people’s feelings, and even more to understand my own. When the feelings felt overwhelming, I escaped. I found video games quite early, and they became a safe space. There was no emotional ambiguity. They were structured, logical, and predictable.

Then my parents divorced.

The arguments that followed were heavy and confusing. I didn’t have the tools to process them. I felt overwhelmed by emotions that weren’t mine to carry.

So I did what worked: I buried my feelings, and I retreated into things that didn’t require emotional exposure. Gaming was my go-to choice. It gave me progress without vulnerability and emotional risk.

And there were moments in my life where I tried to open up again, with different women. Sure, many of them were just harmless fun. But with some, I wanted to feel fully, and I wanted to open up properly. But looking back, I think I just mimicked what I thought openness should look like.

It was convincing enough to also fool myself.

Except in long-term intimacy, mimicry will eventually fail.

But throughout all of this, the hardest part to admit is this.

I think I’m now afraid to open the cage. Not because I think it’s empty, but because I suspect there’s too much.

My feelings were hurt deeply at different points while growing up and in my youth. I learnt that narrowing myself made things survivable. If I don’t feel too much, I can’t be overwhelmed. If I stay composed, I am safe.

And now I don’t know how to reverse that without risking the flood.

And if I’m honest, I’m not even sure I want to find the key.

So I live somewhere in between.

I’m not numb, but I’m not fully alive emotionally either.

And at the same time, I feel sadness about that absence, which is proof that something still exists.

I’ve spoken about this in therapy before, among other things.
Writing it down this openly is new for me.

I don’t know yet whether this is something I can change down the line. I don’t know whether it requires patience, courage, help, or something else entirely.

But writing this did make me ask one uncomfortable question:
If I stop and look honestly, what do my own feelings actually feel like?

Writing this has felt like standing in front of the cage and admitting it exists.

Just acknowledging that it exists.

If something like this feels familiar, you’re not alone in this.

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I recently observed a moment where someone gave another person an ultimatum.

A clear line drawn in the sand.
If something doesn’t change, they’re out.

Watching it stirred something old in me.

There was a period in my life where ultimatums felt normal. They were common in my environment growing up. Anger would rise, and with it came a threat. If you don’t do this, then I will do that. If this continues, then something will happen.

It felt almost natural that strong emotion should be followed by a strong declaration.

I remember saying things like that to my mother when our relationship was at its worst.
I don’t even remember what they were about.
I don’t remember whether anything changed because of them.

What I do remember is how it felt to say them.

It was liberating.
And I felt powerful.
Like I had taken control of the situation.

But later I realized that feeling was mostly an illusion.

An ultimatum only carries weight if you either hold real power or are truly willing to carry it out. Without that, it’s hollow. A performance of control rather than control itself. And neither was true at the time.

Once I realized this in my early twenties, I started to consciously avoid using them. If I were going to draw a line, I needed to be willing to live with the consequences of it.
Later, when I tried again, I realized how easily they could be misunderstood. I became so careful that I mostly stopped drawing lines outside of work.

Over time, it made me afraid of conflict in my personal life.
I tried to suppress my anger and resolve everything calmly.
I believed boundaries could be maintained through tone alone.

For a while, it felt like it worked.
But that too was an illusion.

I think I was perceived as someone you could walk over fairly easily.
I’m not sure that perception was wrong.

At some point, I started to notice how similar an ultimatum and setting a boundary can sound.

One sounds like control.
The other sounds like self-respect.
But from the outside, they can look identical.

In work environments, ultimatums made sense. If someone behaves poorly, a supervisor has a responsibility to intervene. There are roles and structures, and there is authority behind the line being drawn.

In personal relationships, however, it becomes murkier.

I’ve blurted out sentences that sounded like ultimatums, including in my current relationship. At the time, I might not even have labeled them as such, but looking back, I’m not sure what I meant. Was I asking for change? Was I trying to regain control? Or was I just reacting? I honestly don’t know.

What I’ve noticed is that ultimatums in close relationships rarely appear at the first disagreement. Nor the second.

They tend to surface after something has already been eroding for a while.

After repeated silence.
After honesty was postponed.
After small misalignments quietly accumulate.

By the time someone says, “this needs to change, or I’m leaving,” the real shift has already been happening quietly.

And then there are the ultimatums we give ourselves.

If I keep living like this, something will break.
If I don’t change, I will lose respect for myself.

These are quieter. No audience. No raised voices. Just a growing awareness that the current version of you cannot continue like this.

Sometimes they provide clarity. A moment when someone stops negotiating against their own well-being.

Other times, they are what happens when honesty has been postponed for too long.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether ultimatums are strength or weakness.

Maybe the question is:

What went unspoken long enough
that this became the only language left?

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Not something dramatic.
Not something I consciously decide.

More like a quiet misplacement of blame.

It can be unresolved feelings.
Unprocessed grief.
Bottled frustration.
Misalignment I’ve learned to ignore.
Emotions that never found a place to land.

I know not every reaction comes from something deeper.
Sometimes I’m just tired.
I didn’t sleep well.
Something didn’t work out.
Someone was rude.

But sometimes that’s not what’s happening.

Sometimes I’m more irritable than usual without a clear cause.
A bit tighter.
Less patient.
Slightly on edge.

Nothing I can easily point to.
Just a constant friction under the surface.

It doesn’t announce itself clearly.
It shows up elsewhere.

A colleague looks at me funny.
My spouse seems to ignore me.
The house feels messier than usual.

Things that would normally pass
suddenly gets under my skin.

I react more sharply.
Or more coldly.
Sometimes I speak.
Sometimes I withdraw.

I remember snapping at someone over a small delay.
Later, I realized how little that delay actually mattered.

I wasn’t wrong to want relief.
I was wrong to assume the nearest trigger was the cause.

Unrecognized feelings don’t disappear.
They linger.
They shape my reactions.
They have to go somewhere.
And often it ends up on whatever is nearest.

A comment.
A delay.
A person who happened to be there.

They hadn’t caused anything.
They were available.
Most of the time, the people on the receiving end are just there.

For a long time, I kept moving forward.
I didn’t stop to notice what I was carrying.
I functioned.
I progressed.
I did what needed to be done.

And along the way, plenty of things got bottled up.
Not deliberately.
It just felt easier to keep going.

At the time, I didn’t think my life could be any better than it was.
I didn’t see how much more was possible.

What I hadn’t dealt with didn’t disappear.
It showed up indirectly.
As irritability.
As impatience.
As a quiet sense that the world was against me.

I reacted as if the problem had just appeared.
I didn’t notice how long it had already been building.

In that moment, reacting felt like relief.
At least for a moment.
Something shifted.
My body relaxed a little.
The edge softened.

And for that moment, it felt like I had figured it out.
But it never lasted.
Nothing underneath had changed.
The same tension returned.
It attached itself to something new.
A different situation.
A different person.
A different explanation.

Each reaction made sense on its own.
Together, however, they kept circling the same place I wasn’t touching.

I don’t know if anyone could have helped me see it sooner.
I’d been told to “deal with my emotions” before.
It never landed.

For me, it took reaching a point where my usual ways stopped working.
Where pushing forward made things worse.
Where avoiding what I was carrying was impossible.

I began to look at where I was directing my energy,
And where it didn’t belong.

I couldn’t fix everything.
But I could fix enough.
Enough that the pressure eased.
Enough that my worst reactions quieted.
Enough to see how much of what I’d been fighting
had never really been on the outside.

Once I started giving them somewhere more honest to land
they stopped needing to spill outward.

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The things that help you most in the long run rarely feel important at the start. But the payoff can be big.

Before I started my company, I created a summer programming project for youth aged 15–18. It became a real success. It was popular in the city, it kept growing, and for five years we ran it every summer. Eventually the university discontinued it for reasons I might write about another time.

Financially, the project made no sense at first. The first year was negative. The second year broke even. Only after that did we make any profit. But the impact it had on our company is almost impossible to measure. Again and again, when meeting new clients, we heard the same story: their children had attended the summer project and had loved it. That goodwill opened doors we never could have opened alone. I’m convinced that without it, many of our early clients would never have chosen us.

Still, this kind of value is easy to underestimate. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It can’t be neatly measured. And when new people joined our company, even we fell into the trap of thinking the project wasn’t “valuable enough” because the numbers didn’t prove it.

But just because something doesn’t translate directly to money doesn’t mean it lacks value. Some of the most powerful assets you build are intangible.

With hindsight, the goodwill we earned during those first few years was incredibly useful while we were still establishing trust and building a name. Later, once we were known and respected in our field, its importance faded. Ending the project still felt unfortunate, but it no longer felt harmful.

Goodwill is a strange asset. It’s quiet, hard to measure, and easy to dismiss. In the early stages, when trust matters more than anything else, it can carry you further than any marketing budget. Once your reputation is established, its impact naturally shrinks. But at the moment when people don’t yet know you, goodwill can open doors that nothing else can.

When you invest in people, the return has a way of becoming bigger than the effort.

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