1. The point of the game is to keep playing
Let me share an inspiring anecdote. A dedicated student, after years of rigorous training, is offered a black belt. But there’s a final challenge awaiting him. He must correctly answer his master’s question. “What does this black belt mean?” The student, initially puzzled, responds with a hint of uncertainty. “It is a testament to years of discipline and dedication, the embodiment of mastery.” The master recognized his student's immaturity. Thus, they continued their training. Despite the master's disappointment, the student's perseverance and determination shone through. Exactly one year later, the master gave his student another chance: “What does this black belt mean?” – “The beginning of my training.”
I have a distinct dislike of goals. I see people who compare goals to the light at the end of the tunnel. They say you must go through darkness to reach light. Even if you fail, you will be closer to light than those who did not try. Once you reach the light, your life will be great, they say. Once you arrive, you will feel at peace, everything will fall into place, and all your problems will disappear.
Once this, then that!
Once this, then that, have you not heard?
Once this, then that, do you not understand?
Don’t try to change; twice two will still make four!
I’ve heard it all.
You are still in school; you should enjoy yourself! Don’t you want to be happy? Don’t work so hard, otherwise you will burn out! Have fun, or do you want a life of regret? If you feel surrounded by idiots, maybe you’re the stupid one. Wake up to reality; you are no special, and you are no phenomenon! ⎯⎯⎯ Oh, wait, now you’re in university. Well, graduate, then start your business or do whatever the hell you want. You have so much time; stop pressuring yourself so much! You will look back on your university years as your prime. Don’t think of death; you’re not supposed to. Stop being so serious all the time; smile and be happy! Life is a comedy if you zoom out far enough. You don’t need to do anything or be anyone; everyone has their place and worth. ⎯⎯⎯ Well, now that you’ve graduated, you’ve lost your prime energy, but don’t worry, so has almost everyone. That’s part of the process. Now it’s time to start a family, and who cares that your wife isn’t a virgin? Don’t be so insecure; didn’t we discuss this already? Why do you even want to be remarkable when you can have a well-paying job, a nice car, and a cruise once you retire? Even if you don’t like your job, why bother; hardly anyone does. So here, have a hobby or two! ⎯⎯⎯ Crying is healthy and lucky for you; there’s enough to cry about. Life is disappointment after disappointment – quiet despair, but with flowers, which are, of course, from the supermarket. Calm down; you don’t need a midlife crisis – listen to your ugly girlboss wife; she knows better. Oh, no, now you’ve got the exact relationship you sought to avoid but proved too weak. Get up, work, and spend the rest of the day numbing your mind. Now, wait to get old. ⎯⎯⎯ Haha! What about ‘I cannot give up, I cannot fatigue’? Your only remaining hobby is sitting around bitterly. Now you’re exhausted, and you’ve given up – without touching a fraction of your potential. An idiot, you were born; an idiot, you will die. You might want to cry, but you don’t feel anything anymore. And what’s the point now? It’s too late; you’ve waited too long.
Pursuing a goal implies the existence of another side.
But there isn’t.
When we pursue a goal, life feels great. Everything transforms into a tool or obstacle, and things seem to fall into place. But the second you reach a goal, it feels like an illusion; it becomes irrelevant. - “That’s it?” - You start to question everything. A crisis awaits, and sometimes people never recover; when their purpose vanishes, so do they. Something deep within you wants you to keep going.
You are not supposed to stop.
If life is a constant battle, a never-ending, perpetual struggle, when do you ‘get to live’ and enjoy yourself?
Never.
The idea of working to have fun later is a fallacy. Seeking hard work for the sake of relaxing never works – stop hoping for a life of relaxation amongst the waves. We have been sold the idea that fulfillment can be bought or summoned and that having fun is the way to be, but this fallacy leaves us unfulfilled. You’re not supposed to have fun. Life starts in the moments you deem difficult; the struggle is the reward. A tree grows because it can grow, and a river flows because it cannot stay still.
2. Living in the shadow of my best days
Reality can be seen as a duality. There is life and death, light and shadow, growth and decay, and yes, good and evil. United they are, verily. Hence, weakness is the force of death.
I’ve tried having fun. I’ve tried resting. I’ve tried living a ‘normal’ life. It has left me free of passion and void of an inner monologue. I lost the desire to do anything; I abandoned learning, striving, and growing. Trying the average life left me unable to love with all my heart. In a life void of purpose, the only thing remotely interesting is killing time and suppressing one’s mind. I call that depression – a state of mind where pathetic obstacles become insurmountable.
*****
When I was 13, I had my first vision: a software business. I got to work immediately, learning how to program and develop my apps. I even skipped 9th grade so that I would finish school a year earlier and reach my dream faster. My first project was a mental math app with games, which I made my first business around. Along the way, my life massively improved across all realms. I stopped wasting time, I cleaned up my diet, I started to exercise, I started to meditate, I started to socialize, I moved on from past trauma, and I returned to God.
After nine hundred days of uninterrupted work and self-improvement, things started to take a turn. It was June 2023, and I had just turned sixteen years old. It was clear I could not make my mental math apps successful, as I lacked experience and thus had made almost every conceivable mistake. For example, one app turned into three because I pursued distractions. By June 1st 2023, I had set myself the goal to ask out the girl I had fallen in love with so badly two months prior. I failed because of my cowardice. Then, on June 2nd, I read a story. It discussed a person who lived their entire life delaying gratification and regretted doing so. A few days later, I started this blog, asked that girl out, got rejected, and burned out for an entire month.
The inexperienced person will say it's because I worked nonstop for two and a half years, even going so far as working in school and at the beach. Someone else may point to me as overwhelmed and heartbroken, a typical confused sixteen-year-old. But now, I think I know better. The idea that work is a punishment, that burnout exists (which it doesn’t), and that having fun is the peak human experience attacked my spirit, and I lost, as the following months would demonstrate.
Most developments in life are exponential, that means, they start very slowly. As such, the summer that followed the burnout was the best summer of my life, for I had never compromised on excellence. When the summer reached its conclusion, things turned bleak rather quickly. After winning a business competition, I used that momentum to give my apps one last try: a series of ad campaigns designed to test whether my perceived market gap actually existed. You might have guessed it: I failed; I had worked three years and had nothing to show for it. Returning to school weakened my spirit because sloth, cowardice, and hedonists surrounded me. I did not have enough light to shield me from such doses of negativity. The nail in the coffin to my spirit was that girl being friends with a vape addict – what was my three-year self-improvement for?
I tried to get up multiple times but failed miserably. With a broken heart, decimated ego, and unsuccessful business, it was time to have fun. It was time to be average and to relax! Self-improvement was the idea of a child; now it was time to finally mature. After all, working hard only made me miserable!
Skipping a few months ahead, we have early 2024. My life started to look much better, and I had more or less recovered from my massive failures. It was the pain and perhaps the winter that contributed to my interest in philosophy and spirituality. I was confronted with perhaps the biggest temptation of my life. I could give up trying to be extraordinary and return to the average life. I could argue that my three-year-long odyssey was just part of my self-discovery and, thus, not to be taken too seriously. Girlbosses are so sexy after you’ve suffered defeat, and reading all day long, that’s delightful if you want to feel superior while doing nothing. They say writing is the closest thing that feels like work, but isn’t. The other option was to return to the purposeful way of life and see a few dark months as a valley most fail to cross. Poor them, right? It may sound obvious that I took the latter; however, do not be fooled: both were very legitimate choices. Going to the cinema with your mediocre girlfriend isn’t that much worse than meditation in the snow; I would go as far as to say it reigns superior.
It was April 2024. I was still sixteen, 12th grade had ended, and I had chosen the difficult path. To prove my worthiness, I began to run. After thirty days of training, I defeated ninety-five percent of runners in a race.
The rest of 2024 proved relatively unremarkable nonetheless.
Ever since the death of my first business, I have occupied myself with content creation. I recorded self-improvement videos, and that’s how I spent six months, from April to October 2024. Nonetheless, this year proved unremarkable because I had not performed much: School was over, and I could get away with being productive for two hours a day—a shame compared to the previous year. That girl I needed a year to overcome was gone, so who did I need to impress? I stopped programming after my first business failed, and retrospectively, programming and perspicacity are nearly identical. Retrospectively, I also know that I was forcing myself to create videos, thus swimming against my inner current and draining my force of life. With a lack of purpose, many other areas declined as well. For example, I started to eat less, so much so that it's dangerous. I read ten times less because I lacked the discipline to do so. I also neglected my meditation, which made every area decline. If we view the bigger picture, perhaps the most significant impact was my shifting desire away from business towards hot blondes.
Until a few weeks ago, that’s where I was. After a massive failure, I sort of recovered but still fell far short of my best days.
Do you see what the pressure to relax did to me? Cashing out on past victories proved to be a horrible decision. To hell with goals! The point of the game is to keep playing; the struggle is the reward.
One may want to point out that I still did some incredible things in 2024. For example, the time I got rejected fifty times in four days to build courage, the time I got a perfect high school diploma, or the time I kind of won that race. The problem with these examples is that they were essentially 2023’s achievements; most of the work happened that year. You see, 2024’s victories were 2023’s efforts. But because I wasted so much time in the past few months, 2025’s losses will result from 2024’s complacency. If I don’t lock myself in, I will keep declining – and I don’t want to get on a losing streak.
I base my self-worth on the amount of attention I get from women. I think it’s one of those few things that truly matter in life. This perspective on self-worth has served me exceptionally well: It is as if every woman feels when I have something to be proud of. For example, during my hardcore days in 2023, when I was walking a decent distance behind a random girl, she would sometimes turn around to greet me, thus giving me space to breathe, by validating my efforts. Here’s a more recent example. After my fifty rejections adventure, I started to get so many stares from girls – not glances – that I decided to pursue dating; after all, I had overcome the girl I used to want so badly, and I simply had to pick from one of the girls staring at me. As you might have guessed, the day I decided to pursue dating actively, all attention was gone, and my neediness must have been felt. The most recent example is the university itself, from the day I decided to take it seriously, which I will discuss later. It seems that attention from women perfectly mirrors your capacity as a man.
If I don’t do something now, I will be less sexy next year. That’s a price I don’t want to pay; I genuinely can’t afford the next year to get worse.
3. Ready for the next level?
One could argue that not every day can be monumental and that living in the shadow of past victories only leads to misery. That’s correct, but there’s a difference between an unsuccessful day and one where you mismanage time and energy so brutally that you get negative productivity. I also shouldn’t forget that I’m 17 and not 71, which means I lack the perspective to see that my best days still lie ahead.
A faculty Christmas party will be at my university in a few days. I have debated going because, in 2023, everyone kept telling me that ‘I’m so smart and thus need to focus on my social side.’ Furthermore, the party would also have a concrete purpose. There’s a blonde girl; we’ve held eye contact a few times. But even though we had never spoken, seeing her play video games made me lose respect for her... But wait! Did I not learn my lesson? It was pain that shaped my character; it was the work I did that had made me sexy. Going to a party is not winning. Working is winning. That stupid pressure to relax almost got me! I must work. I must work not because I have goals but because working is the goal. The current year wasn’t the best; I must move on nonetheless!
If I can’t have a purpose, I will take it myself!
It was early November when I decided to lean into my studies. I saw plenty of upward momentum. Although completing university in four instead of five years may not be possible, this goal served me nonetheless. Finally, I had something to do – and everything else started to fall into place. I began to eat more and had more energy as a result. I returned to getting up early more or less consistently. I started to read in public transit, which stimulated my mind and made me intelligent again. I signed up for the gym after having a two-month break. I massively increased my attention span by running long distances. The cherry on top was that the number of girls regularly glancing at me had risen from one to five. I had reverted to what made my life worth living by abandoning the idea of having fun.
4. A vision
On November 15th, I was on my first run in six months and had time to think about things. I ran ten kilometers in fifty minutes, which was a mediocre time, yet it didn't matter. Ten kilometers is a laughable distance, so I thought of a challenge I would fear: I envisioned completing a marathon in under six hours by the end of the year. I reasoned that one and a half months of training is not a lot of time. Yet, I had done many exceptional things before. I want to be the living embodiment of people’s shattered dreams one more time!
So, I began to train.
Nearly two weeks had passed, and my training went poorly because I got sick after almost every workout. Thus, I only trained five times, and those runs were mediocre because I hadn’t been ever short on breath. This was supposed to be a motivational text, and I couldn’t dedicate myself to training properly. I had one job and failed.
Then, things took a twist. In university, my classmates were debating where to go for lunch. They wanted to eat Chinese food, but I said I wasn’t going because I needed peak performance. They asked what I needed peak performance for, and I told them about this cute little project. Yet, at this moment, the ‘end of the year’ turned into ‘sixteen days’ – I would complete the run on December 1st.
I can’t overstate how uncertain I was about succeeding. But because I’ve said it, what choice did I have?
Now, my focus shifted away from training to the battle itself. On my thirteenth day, I decided to run my first-ever half marathon, double my usual capacity. Yet, I had a joker. I learned that real runners drink and snack on longer-distance runs – something I deemed emasculating before. I started calmly, and the first hour went by effortlessly, if we ignore how often I had to take a piss break. The next few kilometers were increasingly more difficult. I made the mistake of eating nuts during the run because I started to feel ill for the last kilometers – Yet I pushed through. And I had done it: my first half-marathon in two hours and fifteen minutes.
After that run, I had a problem. The half marathon sickened me even more, which was terrible news because I had only three days to rest and recover. I meditated on how this project was a complete mess: Why couldn’t I dedicate myself to anything for longer than a few years and sometimes only months? I know someone who has been into athletics pretty much since he was born, and others have been playing instruments for decades. Most people work one job their whole lives and have one wife. I don’t understand how that’s possible. The only thing I’m vaguely committed to is the idea that if I try, I will win. Am I doing something wrong?
5. The execution
It was Sunday, December 1st, 2024, and I woke up. I felt decently worse than the days before and had a nasty cough. I had one of those ugly nights of cold sweat. I slept too little, only seven hours. My energy felt incredibly low; I struggled to get out of bed, and even after eating, I wanted to go back to sleep. Yet, I never wanted an easy life. Who cares if I’m sick, sleep-deprived, and practically untrained? It just makes the story cooler. If you want to live a life no one has, you must do things no one does.
I decided that it wasn’t good sense to inhale dry and freezing air for hours, so I got ready for the gym. Just like the days and weeks before, I was swimming in doubt. What if I didn’t finish? What if I failed? What if I collapsed from exhaustion and ended up in the hospital?
I was not happy, not in the slightest. I knew exactly what was awaiting me. I understood I would see the devil himself, talk to him, and fight his alluring offers. Only one could win: me or the devil, and there was only one way to find out. I am no fool; I knew that no hot blondes were waiting for me at the finishing line; it was just about me and the devil. It was my indomitable spirit against the devil’s unwavering malice. I forced a smile.
The battle had begun.
The first hour was effortless, and I listened to an interview. Indeed, typical one-hour runs were significantly more arduous. But after the first hour, I couldn’t focus on the audio, which left me alone with my thoughts.
I thought of many things. I remembered how all 17-year-olds were still in school, probably thinking of video games and other nonsense and how I was superior to all of them. I thought of how I was going to write this text. I also thought about what loser I had been in the past year and how maybe I should just return to my 2020 vision of building a software business...
Meanwhile, I had coughed so much that I had no cough left. I saw the yellow trams come and go and observed how masses of tourists walked on the Zwinger, a gallery in Dresden. I though of how no one knew what I was doing.
The time started to pass slowly; even shopping with my mother felt faster. I was taking three-minute breaks every ten kilometers to drink and eat a few bananas. Before the run, I had never noticed one of my legs to be a tiny bit longer; now, I felt it, and it hurt. I had to balance this problem by focusing on the other leg.
Why does it have to be quick; why does it have to be easy? Hard means hard. Hard means good. Hard means desirable! Holy Spirit, please give me the tenacity to overcome this struggle!
I was slowly passing the twenty-kilometer mark and ran out of things to think of, so my thoughts kept looping. Slowly, I approached the thirty-kilometer mark and felt like a knife that was no longer sharp.
I wanted nothing but to quit running – even if it was more painful.
The devil increased its pressure. After running for so long, I was fatigued and hit an emotional low. I felt exceptionally irritable. I wanted to cry and release my energy; I looked for a reason but couldn’t; I realized I had nothing to cry about, and my life was magnificent.
Thinking the same thoughts repeatedly for hours started to numb my mind, yet, resisting exhaustion, I kept going. I prayed for strength and received it.
After kilometer thirty-eight, I significantly reduced the speed yet kept going nonetheless.
It would take five hours and twenty-five minutes to complete the run.
In the last few seconds, I touched enlightenment, a moment so beautiful you yearn to seize it, yet it remains elusive. I know of two lives. I know the fight, and I know lying depressed in bed when there’s no fight. Either I’m the best, or I’m falling off. For a few seconds, I saw nothing but beauty all around – and I let go, looking forward to the next time.
A few seconds later, I had completed the run.
“That’s it?”
Kiryl P.
Post-scriptum
My cough was completely gone after the marathon, which surprised me because I expected to get even sicker from such an effort. Even though I touched enlightenment for a moment, I felt no joy after completing the marathon. Instead, the emotional low continued. It would take a few more days to recover physically. Even though I had only trained for two weeks, I had lost a significant amount of muscle. It remains true that no one applauded me at the end.
I must thank M****, without her, I would have never started to run. Our first run was in January 2024; she convinced me to give it a try, since I had never run any mentionable distance before. In boots, we ran from her house to mine, which was cool. Now, it’s December 2024, and I ran a marathon – do you see the circle reaching completion?
Now, I have emptied my mind, and it is time to retreat; I will return when adventure calls.