I grew up in a small village near the coast of the North Sea. Six thousand inhabitants, all of them very concerned with what the other 5,999 could think about them. This never felt right to me, and I thought there should be more to life than that. Even going to school in a city of 26,000 didn't change that feeling. The people around me didn’t share my interests, but I connected with others online who lived in big cities. I wasn't able to communicate exactly what I was feeling back then but I knew that I needed to get out.

Fortunately, 16 years later, I somehow found myself in the same situation again and am now able to express what it is that bothers me.

After living in Berlin Mitte for eight years, I was completely convinced that I needed a cozy small town without the depressing anonymity and all the noise. How great it would be to walk outside and not have to dodge others left and right.

I was wrong.

I miss what I was despising just a couple of months ago.

Yes, it was a lot and I wished for quieter surroundings at times. Of course, I wasn't happy with some aspects of my situation. Yes, I've seen a surprising amount of penises from randos pissing on the street. Not great!

It was interesting, though. Things changed from day to day. People were weird. Normal. Exciting. Profane. Loud. Quiet. Something. I stepped outside and life happened.

Schwerin, with it's less than 100,000 inhabitants, most of them teenagers or pensioners, is... boring.

Not in the way I thought it would be, where I expected the quietness and solitude to magically expand my mind. Walden Pond style. On the contrary: I kind of feel alone and mentally under-challenged.

I don't want to come across as contemptuous. A different version of me could love it here. I just don't want to be that version. Even though I respect everyone who finds what they're looking for in a place like this.

I've found that I want to be surrounded by people my age, with a high likelihood of shared interests. And as cringe as it might sound, I'm afraid mine are big-city-people interests. Internet-work people. I want to see, meet, and talk to people... like me. Or at least me-adjacent.

Here's the catch, though: People like me feel like they don't belong here.

I know because — and this might come as a surprise to you — I am a person like me.

And that's just one aspect. If you had asked me about this six months ago, I would have said something completely different, but here’s the reality: It’s too empty here. I can go for a 45-minute run and only meet five people—all of them pensioners, of course. I can walk from the main station to my flat on a Saturday night and not encounter a single person. That’s just depressing.

I haven't felt like this since moving away from where I grew up.

What I expected before the move was an expansion into a new way of being. Of feeling content with smallness, of finding joy in normalcy. Instead, it feels like a regression to something I left behind for a reason.

A reason that hasn't changed since I first felt it more than 16 years ago.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Many of you (nobody) asked how moving from a 3.8 million inhabitants city to a less than 100,000 inhabitants city is treating me. In the last couple of months, I went through quite a lot of thoughts and emotions and arrived at some new opinions that surprised me. I won't be able to fit them all in one coherent post so here you go, in no particular order and in good-old blogging style. Welcome to part one of who knows how many instalments of IMHMAO.

Today: Local Retail.

I wasn't expecting this, like at all, but I seem to have demands for the quality and diversity of stores around me. Every time I tried to buy something in a store in Schwerin, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. We're not talking about heavily exotic stuff here. Pants, for example, were nowhere to be found. None of them fit me, they were all far too big. I'm not weirdly shaped, on the contrary. It won't get more default than me. I ran out of stores to try before I found something I liked. That never happened before. Another time I tried to buy brushes: Nothing. Same for sketchbooks. Same for pretty baskets to store stuff in or colorful decoration. Nothing.

This might seem like a small matter but I like walking somewhere, browsing a limited but plentiful offering of wares and going back home with whatever I needed as the result. It makes me feel connected to where I am.

It doesn't help that online shopping became a pain in the ass at some point. There's just too much to choose from, everything, even Amazon, is full of scams and I hate the whole process. Choosing, ordering, waiting, tracking, receiving, returning. I don't need that noise.

So that's an insight: I would not have guessed that a heavily limited selection of stores would influence my mood this much but it does. The more you know!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

If you want to grow, you need to be able to learn, experiment, and stay consistent. That's only possible if you're able to keep yourself motivated, which is impossible if you're not being kind to yourself.

Many people think that being kind means not doing what needs to be done because it's hard. That giving themselves breaks from trying is what they need.

They think it comes easily to those succeeding at what they set out to do and if they themselves struggle, it's obviously not for them. They're special in how hard it is for them. Hence, they deserve time off from trying.

That's one of the biggest misconceptions, and I believe the inherent problem is with how people talk to themselves.

Growth is the result of enough repetitions, many of them ending in some sort of failure. Your drawing doesn't look like anything you expected, your run felt terrible, your code doesn't compile.

If your inner voice gets destructive every time you mess up, you're less likely to try again. Ironically, you are getting in yet another successful repetition of talking badly about yourself.

If you learn to not succumb to negative self-talk, it gets a lot easier to get back to what you set out to do and start another repetition. You'll still fail, you'll still find it hard, but you won't be in a constant fight with yourself anymore.

I strongly believe that everybody can achieve whatever they set out to do, as long as they keep at it. It might take forever, it might require a whole lot of deliberate practice and deep work, but as long as the repetitions don't stop, progress is inevitable.

The key difference between you and those who make it seem easy is probably that they're kinder to themselves.

First things first: Some of you will get triggered by what I'm about to write. I want you to know that this is a safe space. You're loved. I'm not attacking your character, your personality, or any life choices you've made. Please stay calm and collected. This will be tough, but we'll get through it.

Alright! Now that I've dealt with the little feelings of the worst junkies among you, let me tell you about the first and only addiction I've ever had: caffeine.

I don't have an addictive personality and have never had any problems with the usual suspects. What made caffeine different is that our society somehow neglects to talk about it as a drug. Everybody is juiced up 24/7 and at best, we'll get a "don't talk to me before I've had my first coffee" joke instead of an actual warning about what are clear symptoms of withdrawal.

It took me years until I figured out that caffeine could be the reason for the ever-present headaches that plagued me for most of my 20s. I suspected having a brain tumor before even considering caffeine as the culprit.

Society doesn't want you to suspect its favorite lubricant.

The following weeks of withdrawal, going completely cold turkey and not touching anything that contained caffeine, were harder than I expected them to be. A fun fact as an aside: Many painkillers contain caffeine. That's not the information you want to learn while feeling like your head is about to explode.

Long story short: After successfully getting clean, my headaches were gone. I felt like myself for the first time in years. I wasn't tired all the time; I woke up alert and it stayed that way until the evening hours. Exactly like all the people talking about how you should quit caffeine said it would be. They're right.

Caffeine traps you in a vicious cycle of needing it to feel like you don't need it.

Since then, I've been in a constant struggle to keep clean. As soon as I drink something with caffeine for two to three days, the headaches come back. Which is a bummer, because those headaches can be cured through caffeinated beverages and the cycle starts anew.

I had a couple of relapses but always managed to go through another round of withdrawal. It's surprisingly hard to stay "sober". If I'm having a bad day, I crave a caffeine high to make me feel better. On a good day, I want something with caffeine to celebrate and enjoy my day even more.

I found an okay-ish rhythm where I allow myself one caffeinated beverage per week. As a treat. The only problem is that I have to account for the willpower needed the next day because I'll crave another one more than if I hadn't had the first one.

Lately, despite my best efforts, I've noticed more gray hairs at my temples, recurring fashion trends, and a sharp memory of events from two decades ago, all of which frequently remind me that I'm getting older.

The other day, I was wondering what my official year of retirement would be if the German laws don't change and I don't die or get very sick before then. I'm writing this in 2024; I turn 35 in May, and the current retirement age is 67. My last year of officially having to be an active member of the working force will be 2056.

Two thousand fifty-six!

That's 32 years from now!

My entire mentally present life, once again.

At this point, there's a fork in the road of how to feel about this. "Oh shit, I still have to do this for more than 30 years?" or "Oh wow, that's so much time left!".

Fortunately, I landed on the second option.

Your mid-30s are a weird age. You meet people who seem convinced (or have to convince themselves?) that they've arrived. They worked, found success in some kind of career and are now ready to settle down. All of this makes it feel like there's nothing yet to come.

That's completely wrong, though. We're not talking about 32 years until I'm basically dead. They're productive years full of potential building, transformation and growth.

Let's say you studied and started your first real job in your early 20s: You worked for just one quarter of what is considered the norm. What's left is enough time to start three new, completely unrelated careers, if you're so inclined.

32 years!

How cool is that?!

I've been sharing my opinions online since I was 14. Something that has changed over the years is my relationship with the reactions I receive.

When you share something online, people will react. Most of the time, they try to one-up you, either by pointing out something you apparently missed or by flat-out telling you that you're wrong and they know better.

That's not surprising. It's how people operate.

In my early years of blogging, I viewed this behavior as a challenge. My whole personal brand was about "being combative." "Don't feed the trolls" was still a saying back then, and I completely ignored its inherent truth.

It's not just trolls, though. My recent post about filter icons resulted in quite a few reactions, most of them telling me things I already knew. I struggle with people implying I haven't thought about what they're now kindly offering me as new information. It's likely one of those ego things where I feel undervalued if people consider me uninformed.

My first reaction—and I've started and deleted quite a few responses like this over the last couple of days—is to react with some witty "You think you've accomplished something here, but let me show you that you're actually not that smart" remark. It's an asshole move and exactly the behavior I've trained myself to stop doing over the last few years. It's not easy, but it's worth it. Letting things go always feels better than trying to win something that isn't even a competition.

All of this influences my writing. I knew that these reactions would be the result of my short and not very in-depth argued post about filter icons. I could have written a 5,000-word piece on the ins and outs of why the status quo is the way it is, offered alternative icons, and talked about their pros and cons to anticipate those reactions as well. But that wouldn't have been fun. Everything requires a disclaimer.

I would lose my voice if I tried to optimize my writing around the expected reactions. I'd dumb everything down, argue in every direction, just to be safe. That's just not an option. Just like trying to outwit the people reacting to my writing isn't one.

Am I suggesting that you should ignore your readers? Perhaps!

"The Truth of a Thing Is in the Feel of It, Not in the Think of It"

Since I heard this quote from Stanley Kubrick for the first time a few weeks ago, I couldn’t let go of it. It encapsulates a moment in design that makes me feel like a hack every time it happens.

I’m a stern believer that software design is a craft, not an art. There are artsy aspects to it, but for most of the time, rules can and should be followed. They’re flexible and complex, but not inexistent.

Another belief of mine is that designers have to be able to argue for their solutions. A working designer’s inner monologue should be the Socratic method that is being applied to every design decision, no matter how small.

Sometimes, truly not often, there are moments where this isn’t enough. You know what the correct solution would be, the one with the most arguments, the one that fits the rules, but it just doesn’t feel right.

There’s no way to explain this to those who don’t feel it. They just have to trust your instincts. Sometimes, designing something the wrong way creates the right solution.