The Nostalgia Trap

It's not meant for you, really it's not meant for anyone. I've been writing this kind of stuff for years, in places where no one knows me, at tables where no one sits with me, in cities I change before I can call them home.

I've felt this distance for as long as I can remember.

If you're not guided by your vision of the future, you stay clinging to the emotions of the past. And your personality, instead of pushing you forward, drags you back. To where you've already been. To where you don't want to return but where it feels safe, at home, in a familiar place.

Last week I told you about beginnings. About waves seen, caught, and let go before they ever reached shore. About the problem that's never outside.

And every time you choose that path, you'll wake up six months later in the same place as before. With the same hunger. With the same distance from what you want to become.

But it wasn't the growth that changed me. It was the awareness of something I had never seen before.

And every time I got there, happiness lasted three days. Then the emptiness returned. Then the hunger returned. Then that feeling in your chest returned, telling you "it's not enough, it's still not enough."

The day after the exit with NoLimits-Ad I worked all day. Because everything before that was just warm-up. But even after, the emptiness was there. Different, but there.

One night, in a hotel in a city whose name I don't remember, I wrote a sentence in my notebook, in a single line.

Every morning, before taking my phone, I sit and ask myself two questions.

I opened my phone before I even put my feet on the ground.

I call it, for as long as I can remember, restlessness.

One evening in a hotel, I don't even remember which city, and this already says something, I noticed something banal: I was living a life that from the outside seemed enormous and from the inside was generic.

Generic like a hotel room: clean, functional, identical to all the others. You sleep there and tomorrow you don't remember being there.

I was in a village up in the mountains, at the foot of the Himalayas, the greatest border that exists. (read the old letter if you don't remember what border means ;) )

If the answer is I don't remember, we're in the same column.

I was in a village up in the mountains, at the foot of the Himalayas, the greatest boundary that exists. (read the previous letter here if you don't remember what boundary means ;) )

I remembered, while watching them, an eight-year-old boy.

▎ Richard Williams had written a seventy-eight-page plan for his daughters' lives before they were born.

Not when they were seven years old. Not when they were two years old. Before they were born.

I arrived from São Paulo a few days ago — and before that from the mountains of India. I wrote to you last week about a music inside that doesn't play (reread it, if you don't remember), and one thing I know about myself is: my music plays in movement. Movement is the way. Stopping means quitting.

He arrives before all the others. Always. At seven he's already on the roof — the roof of a building that doesn't exist yet, exposed rebar sticking out of concrete, wooden planks, no protection, as if he were immortal.

I'm writing to you again from Buenos Aires, last week here, soon I'll return to Italy to the warmth (finally, because here it's winter).

Yesterday, while going to a little shop to buy mate, I crossed the street on red without thinking about it.

And usually there's only one way this ends. You open Instagram and scroll for an hour, until you fall asleep in worse shape than before.

That night, the concept that got under my skin was the answer to a question I'd left you with a few weeks ago — one I'd been keeping in my pocket. I'll ask it again, so you don't have to remember it: is it right to settle, or do you always have to raise the bar?

But when I got there, the morning after I woke up, like always, before everyone else, opened my laptop in a house where there was no one to wake, and worked. Like any other Tuesday.

And after a while something strange happened. The children who were rewarded started drawing less. The ones who received nothing kept going like before, for the pleasure of it. The others didn't — the reward had switched something off. They had stopped drawing out of love, and were only drawing in relation to the prize.

Two evenings ago I was in the car with my brother, and I wouldn't even remember it, if it weren't for one small thing that happened and everything it made me think about afterward.

On the clock, sure. But stop for a second. In those ten minutes we drove down streets we never would have taken. We saw things we wouldn't have seen. We avoided a car, an intersection, maybe trouble. Maybe we avoided something worse. Even just my mind: ten minutes before I was one person, ten minutes after I was another, with different thoughts, different choices.

I've stayed in this hotel before. Two years ago. Three, maybe — I'm not exactly sure.

But today, years later, I remembered the real feelings I was hiding from myself three years ago. I had just launched the company and already had twenty people on the team. And I was scared. A lot.

I, for the first time, have seen which shore is my safe shore. And I've understood why my body holds onto it. It's not a great victory, I know. But before, I couldn't even see the bridge. Now I can see it whole. Crossing it is another letter — and I'm afraid, quite a few more.

This week I was in Mykonos. Before that, Barcelona. Celebration days, the kind that destroy your routine, shift your schedule, drag you away from where you'd arrived with such effort. Pleasant, yes. But they threw me off track again.

And real growth goes like this: gradually, gradually, gradually. And then all at once. A flat line for a very long time, that at some point spikes upward. Except we can't sustain the flat line. We quit. And, statistically, we quit almost always at the flattest point on the curve — meaning the instant before it spikes.

A video crossed my path the other day. One of those you scroll past and then go back to.

And the other man stops him. Looks him in the eye and says: "Look at me. You are someone right now. Do you understand? I was someone long before people knew who I was. And I believed it. You are someone right now."

Then they finish. The singer picks up the mic one last time, says thank you, and before stepping off drops a line.

But it has never happened to anyone. It has never made someone cry at two in the morning, never changed anyone's mind, never been copied into a message by a guy who didn't know how else to say it. It just sits there, all possibilities at once, like those electrons before the measurement. Waiting for someone to touch it.