April In Review
April in Review
There’s a particular kind of clarity you get when you’re bedridden.
I spent part of this month recovering from Achilles tendon surgery — which means a lot of ceiling staring, a lot of thinking, and very little ability to escape your own thoughts. Somewhere in that forced stillness, I made a decision: quit Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. Cold turkey. The next morning.
It wasn’t a principled stance against attention capitalism. It was simpler than that. I’d caught myself doom-scrolling an entire day into nothing — no satisfaction, no residue worth keeping — and the hospital bed was the blunt object I needed to finally act on what I already knew.
What replaced it has been interesting to observe. Chess puzzles first thing in the morning. A daily Wordle on Discord. The Dwarkesh Patel podcast. Deeper technical reading. The irony is that none of these feel like virtuous substitutes — they’re just things I actually enjoy, which apparently needed the space cleared to breathe.
On Bangkok
I came back to Thailand in May 2025 after twelve years in the US. April was the first month where it started to feel less like an experiment and more like a life.
The city makes more sense to me now than it did when I left. Every social circle I have has somehow converged here — drawn by jobs, opportunities, whatever pulls people to a capital city. Even when I don’t need the professional network, I need the people. That distinction matters more than I expected.
There’s a version of this repatriation story that’s triumphant: cashed out, came home, semi-retired at 39. But the honest version is messier and more interesting. The consulting market here isn’t what I’d hoped. A client I’d been counting on walked away this month — not because the work was wrong, but because he needed a coder, not a consultant. That’s not a failure of execution. It’s a positioning mismatch, and recognizing it clearly is the first useful thing you can do with it.
May is going to be about finding paying clients. April was infrastructure — the marketing site, the blog, the online presence. That work is done. The next step is the one that requires talking to actual people, which is harder and more important than any of the technical work that preceded it.
Okinawa
Went with Mint. It was good. Sometimes the right measure of a month isn’t what you built — it’s whether you managed to be somewhere beautiful with someone you care about.
That counts.
