Aug 18, 2025 Life

Life Update: August 2025

It's been a good 8 months since I last published any piece of work online to be honest. Actually there might have been a video, tweet or some other form of media somewhere out there. I'm not too sure.

I'm mostly writing this to myself and to the few internet people that will stumble upon this letter. A lot of stuff have changed in my life, not so much externally but more of an internal change.

I had another article like this almost complete around last december that would talk about somewhat of a similar topic but I scrapped that. The gods of writing haven't spoken to me to publish that. Better to scrap it then let an 11 month old article cook.

Speaking about articles, no more!

From now on, we will call them letters. No more scrappy tutorials one could replace them with LLMs. I want to write more personal, reflective, artistic pieces of work.

This doesn't mean that they can't be technical. You can still write high quality work without using LLMs and I firmly believe people will read that. Everyone craves for authenticity. I'm sick and tired of all the LLM generated content on the internet.

If your curious, check out dead internet theory.

This letter will deal with all the things that are on my mind. It's pretty random, I hope you don't get too bored.

Dealing with major writing block

I've lost the drive to write last year.

I think the main contributer to that was the sheer amount of huge articles I was writing. I had articles that were 5000+ words cooking for months and I never seeing the light of day made me very unmotivated to write.

This is sad because I do like to write. It's a way for me to reflect on things. It makes me think deeper about stuff which ultimately make me grow as a human being. I actually feel a bit sad for not writing, it's a weird feeling, I don't have to do it, it doesn't bring me any fame or money.

I don't think anyone will read this but by just me sitting on my desk and writing brings me a little bit of joy in life.

As some buddhist probably said, "it's all about the small stuff"

Anyways, moral of the story is to not cook articles for too long, let it out in the world or risk losing motivation to write. Also another lesson is to enjoy the writing process, results don't matter.

Brandon Sanderson, my favourite author, famously said:

life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination

I've been learning languages

So your boy has finally decided to explicitly learn Swedish. It's been a long time coming and I was initially ignoring it because I thought I wouldn't stay here long.

But after some time, I realised I really like the country and want to settle down. For that, I must learn the language. As I've never studied a language from scratch before it was interesting to learn how to learn languages.

I've followed Steve Kaufmans advice and focused heavily on comprehensible input. I use an app called LingQ to find and read content. I also do speaking exercises that I stole from this guy.

Surprisingly, I found that I actually like learning languages. Even though, I thought I hated it my whole life (with Arabic – my family been nagging me for 15+ years and school was hell...).

I also started the cliche SFI (svenska for invandrare), it's just a way to supplement my learning and give me some certifications at the least. It also gives me good opportunities to practice my writing, as there seems to be a lot of it. But anyways, it's been fun and I hope to get C1 in Swedish in 2 years.

After that, I can learn/improve on some other language while I live in Sweden and naturally improve through conversation, content, etc...

Who knows, maybe by then the plan would change.

I've been playing some games

I bought myself a Steam Deck and boy was it a good investment. I always had trouble finishing up my gaming backlog. I've been trying to finish the Witcher 3 for like the past 2 years.

After that, I wanted to finish up Cyberpunk, KCD 1/2, and the Persona series. But anyways, I'm still trying to finish the last 2 DLCs of Witcher 3 then I'm finally free.

I didn't realise the Witcher 3 had multiple endings and ended up with the worst one after 2 years. I can't go back and play it again at this point 🤷

Anyways, if your a new parent or a person that want to finish up or play some games, I highly recommend getting the Steam Deck. You can pair it up with some cloud gaming such as Geforce Now if it's available to you to play some AAA games.

Blogging is dead? or is it? Is writing dead?

Coming back to more boring topics. When LLMs first came out, it bothered me a bit the amount of technical content that came out of people.

Every second developer had their own articles that weren't badly written. So I started using it myself and after I while I realised that the joy of writing was gone. I just cared about the outcome, to get my article published.

This caused me to eventually quit and stop caring because external validation will only get you so far. But coming to the question, is blogging dead?

I think traditional early 2000s blogging has died quite some time ago but it has been replaced by other forms such as newsletters, which is growing pretty well. Writing by itself isn't dead and I don't think it will ever die, it's one of the foundational skills that humanity is built upon.

The medium just changes, it used to be clay tablets -> letters -> email -> blog -> tweets -> captions/scripts/slack/etc...

So now you might ask, why do you blog? Especially in your own site that you don't promote.

Because I write for myself and don't expect other people to read so this allows me to write about whatever the hell I want, it doesn't matter, doesn't bring me any money and fame.

I do it just because I enjoy it.

I tried starting a newsletter about philosophy, spirituality, meditation and so on. But I then I felt that I'm not doing it out of intrinsic reasons, I'm doing it so that people could read it, I would get subscribers, and finally make money out of it.

I decided against it because I genuinely can't be motivated by money anymore. I find it hard to wake up and do something just for the sake of being paid. I don't know if that's right or wrong but that's just me.

Am I scared of AI?

Nah, if I lose my job to AI this means I'm not doing enough as a human and pivot to something else. Another thing is that this past two years have taught me to trust myself and to trust that I will figure things out.

🙇

I understand that this is a very privileged position to be in, some people have more responsibility than me and the loss of income would affect their loved one.

Do I still use neovim?

Yes.

What are your configs?

here.

What about AI?

tmux + and have an ai cli tool running in another pane. I use aider.

What about indie hacking? Any potential business ideas?

One of my most popular articles was about indie hacking, so naturally some people reached out and wanted to know what was I working on.

In reality, I've stopped being interested in making stuff for the sake of external validation (money, fame, etc...) whatsoever. So I threw out lots of ideas and in-progress projects. I'm trying to get back into writing and have a few ideas of things I'm genuinely excited and curios about.

I don't care if I make money from these at all, in fact I'm leaning toward making stuff completely open source. But hey, if you got any interesting ideas that you need help or consulting with, feel free to reach out.

Streaming

I do enjoy streaming but man my setup is a pain to sit in. I like to work from my couch lying down. Sitting for so long sounds like hell. I've also tried standing desks but that isn't the best solution either.

But nevertheless, I'm determined to make some video content. Maybe not quite soon as I have other priorities.

I finally figured out fitness

I started working out at the age of 16 with calisthenics. Then I moved on to the gym but through out that period of time, it was very difficult for me to stay consistent and I didn't like the way I looked.

It was only 2 years ago when I was introduced to science based lifting from the likes of Jeff Nippard and Dr.Mike Israetel that I started to make proper progress.

At the moment, I have a two day full body split and I manage my diet using the app Macrofactor (made by the folks, stronger by science, I absolutely love their work). For supplements, I only use creatine.

In any case, I'm in the best shape of my body and the progressing really well. I'm so happy that I figured this thing out.

Advice about life?

Do whatever you want. Be present. Be nice. Read some fiction. Think for yourself an don't listen to advice given by strangers.

What to expect for the future?

I would definitely want to publish and write more. In regards to the topics, I'm currently playing around with language learning, books, and non mainstream tech topics.

Hopefully, I can get my hands on some second hand mini pc that I could use to bootstrap a homelab to play around with. In general, I'm really interested in developer tooling and will continue on moving in that space.

How's my life? How's my mental health?

Not gonna lie, life's going great. I had a rough 2.5 years when I first moved to Sweden. It wasn't because of the country or migration, on the contrary it was great. The process was smooth and there weren't any hiccups.

I think at that age of 22 (if I remember correctly), it was the first time in my life that I was "comfortable". I didn't have monetary problems, I could finally relax. When I did, I realised that I was hiding lots of stuff in the back of my mind that needed to be processed.

Then all hell broke loose, I had psychotic episodes and would've ended up in some psyche ward. But thanks to, I don't even know, god or whatever's grace I got through it and learned a lot about myself and found for the first time in my life true peace.

I'm turning 26 in December this year and I'm really happy with how my life turned out. It's funny how I genuinely thought my life would be a over when I dropped out at 19 or something. Or all those embarrassing moments, when I wanted to hide from the world.

I took life way too seriously.

Relax, it's gonna be fine.

Just gotta trust the process.

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