#122: Design your life now
Learn why fulfillment lives in the now, how stillness fuels creativity, why risking your heart gives life meaning, and how growing old with purpose keeps us truly alive.
Last week, I spent two days with one of my oldest friends who lives in LA.
I stayed in his small place and slept on his couch, waking up every morning at 5:30 to work remotely on Berlin time. It wasn’t comfortable, but it didn’t matter.
When you’ve already shared years of laughter and stories, everything becomes easy. You don’t need a perfect setup. A couch will do. You can watch random sitcoms, eat whatever’s in the fridge, and still have the best time.
With these friends, I feel completely myself. There’s no filter. I don’t second-guess my words or worry if a joke lands the wrong way. There’s no performance. It feels like being a kid again, free, unguarded, fully present.
These kinds of friendships mean more than I often admit. I have a few like this, but they’re scattered across different cities and countries. I wish I saw them more.
I want to design my life to have the freedom of time, of space, of energy to be with friends like this more often. To spend real time together, not just in passing.
If you have friends like that, the kind who bring you home to yourself, maybe it’s time to reach out. Give them a call. Plan a visit. Or better, take a trip together.
Some of my most meaningful memories have come from moments like that. Unpolished and unforgettable.
This week at a glance:
🪂 Design your life now
🧘🏼♂️ Make space for stillness
🫀 You’re here to risk your heart
⏳ Devotion beyond decay
🪂 Design your life now
Real happiness isn’t found in the achievement. It lives in the anticipation. In the process. In the chase.
The best moment is often just before the goal is reached. You’re close enough to taste it. The outcome feels inevitable. You’re fully in motion, fully alive.
The fulfillment isn’t in the having. It’s in the becoming.
We tell ourselves we’ll slow down and enjoy life later.
I’ll spend more time with my kids later.
I’ll prioritize my health later.
I’ll give myself more freedom later.
I’ll enjoy myself more later.
But later is a fragile promise. Most of what you postpone won’t be possible when the time finally feels right.
Your kids won’t be young later.
Your health may not be there later.
Your life won’t suddenly become more spacious or forgiving.
Design it now. Build it into your days. Or risk living life with regret later.
✨ From 13 Harsh Truths About Success Nobody Told You
🧘🏼♂️ Make space for stillness
We live in a culture that measures worth by output. How efficient you are. How much you earn. How well you perform.
Productivity has its place, but when it becomes the lens through which we view everything, something essential gets lost. The very capacity for joy and wonder begins to fade.
As Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
If our days are packed with tasks and noise, our lives will be too.
Build quiet into your life. Go for walks. Meditate. Ride your bike without a destination.
There is value in daydreaming, even in boredom. Many of our best ideas arrive not when we force them, but when we stop trying. The mind needs time to wander. It needs space for unconscious connections to form.
Without stillness, creativity stalls.
And none of it works without sleep. Sleep restores. It sharpens our thinking, balances our moods, and renews our sense of rhythm.
Treat it with the same discipline you bring to your work.
Your health. Your sanity. Your presence. These are not luxuries. They are the foundation everything else rests on.
What did you do recently to create space for stillness in your life?
✨ From 18 Life-Learnings From 18 Years of the Marginalian
🫀 You’re here to risk your heart
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
✨ From Love Anyway
👵🏼 The art of growing old
Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable. There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
✨ From How to Keep Life From Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone De Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
🎵 Music I’m listening to
You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, World, Disco, and Organic Electronic here:
🎧 If you appreciate the music I carefully select and haven't followed my Spotify playlists yet, now is the perfect time to hit that follow button and join me on this musical journey! 🎶
🌒 Pano: Danceable and electronic obscure songs
🌓 Sisy: Ethnotronica and organic house
🌑 Berghain: Dark, minimal techno and tech house
🌕 Heide: Groovy soul and disco house
🌞 Sonntag: Afterhours shit
🦥 Slow rave: Sleepy techno for tired danced
🌎 World: From Latin jazz to Turkish psych
🌚 Super Slow: For your intimate moments
Previously on Pursuit:
