Over four years have passed since I first put some of my core values into words in My 10 Rules for a More Fulfilling Life. At the time, I was trying to articulate something about how I wanted to live, what principles I wanted to guide my choices, and what kind of person I was attempting to be.

I’ve always found writing to be the most comfortable way to work through my thoughts. That’s meant blog posts, long messages in chat apps, lined notebooks full of journalling, and a scattered trail of attempts at fiction. When I was younger, I even wrote poetry, mostly because there were emotions I didn’t know how to say out loud.

A journal or blog format suits me for a reason. It’s not built to be final. It’s built to show revisions. If I wanted to be “right”, I’d write something like a Wiki page and keep editing it until it looked clean. A blog is messier and more honest: it records the wrong turns, the overconfidence, the moments I was certain about something and then quietly stopped believing it. It emphasises the journey itself, where there’s no pressure to get things right all the time.

I didn’t expect those values to become a point I’d return to, but here I am, revisiting them anyway. Part of me is curious to see how they’ve weathered against the reality of actually living with them. Some have proven to be easier to live by than I expected. Others have bent under pressures I didn’t anticipate. A few have revealed contradictions I’m still working through.

There’s also something else going on. Over time, I’ve become less interested in writing about what happens in my life unless it’s there to give context to a concept. That’s a big change from when I’d write detailed recounts of my day-to-day, quoting friends and basically recording life as a sequence of events. Now I’m more interested in the structure of my thinking than the story of my week. Maybe that’s me becoming more abstract. Maybe it’s me trying not to turn my life into content. Maybe it’s just me writing the kind of thing I’d want to read, because I’ve never had much interest in other people’s day-by-day reports either.

I used to add categories to posts because that’s what blogs did. Over time, I realised I was using them differently. They became a crude mirror of what I actually spend time thinking about. Even simple “stats” can be revealing: what I’m more interested in than I thought, what I’m less interested in than I assumed. Part of me would love to track how that changes over years, but another part of me is wary of turning my life into dashboards and charts and calling it self-knowledge. I’m not convinced the measurement wouldn’t start steering the person.

So now I’m four years older and still uncertain whether that means four years wiser. But I do know this: writing is still how I notice what’s changed, even when I don’t enjoy what I notice.

1. Build self-discipline that makes me freer, not smaller.

More than ever, I believe that actively deciding who I am through deliberate, thoughtful action is important. This conviction has deepened since my diagnosis of ASD and ADHD, which gave me a framework for understanding patterns I’d struggled with my entire life without having language for them.

In recent months, it’s been reinforced (or perhaps I should say pressure-tested) by the flood of social media content where people discuss “managing” their ADHD by treating dopamine-chasing like some strange, gamified system. There’s an entire genre of content now where people talk about “hacking” their neurodivergent brains, and while I understand the appeal and don’t begrudge anyone their coping mechanisms, something about it unsettles me.

Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say this content has reminded me how easily one can rationalise whatever impulse the brain conjures in the moment. The mind is remarkably skilled at performing logical gymnastics to justify its own whims, isn’t it? Every shortcut, every “just this once,” every “I deserve this” can be made to sound perfectly reasonable in the moment. Discipline, for me, is less about willpower in any heroic sense and more about building structures that make it harder for my future self to talk my way out of what I know matters.

I suppose this concept is never easy to explain. It likely comes across as being a party pooper or a miserable person, someone who refuses to just relax and “enjoy” things. But I think it’s about the genuine fulfilment that arises from a continuous journey of self-challenge; the kind of satisfaction that doesn’t evaporate the moment the pleasure ends. After all, I’m not good at this happiness thing, anyway.

I’m fine with being misunderstood on this point. Maybe I’ll find I’m wrong and have to walk things back. Maybe I’ll realise I’m more right than I knew. Or maybe neither, and I’ll just keep muddling through with partial answers like everyone else. Time will tell.

2. Keep questioning, even when there’s no immediate payoff.

Surprisingly, this comes so naturally that I often don’t think about it. The “what if” questions are endlessly interesting, so there’s not much to say about the motivation itself. It simply exists, like breathing, and like breathing, I don’t even need to be in a good mood to do it.

The difficult part is probably when it comes to developing a systematic approach to subjectivity. I think my stance can come across as though I’m denying that subjectivity exists, as though I’m some naive positivist who thinks we can just observe reality neutrally and arrive at objective truth. What I actually mean is that there are reasons things are perceived and experienced differently, and those reasons are themselves interesting and worth investigating. The fact that someone else and myself might read the same book and feel entirely different things doesn’t mean our reactions are arbitrary or beyond analysis. There’s something happening there, some interaction between our histories and biologies and the object itself, and that interaction can be explored.

Like much of science, we humans hand-wave a lot and don’t examine our assumptions. We accept that the equipment works, that our senses are reliable enough, that the categories we use to carve up reality map onto something real. That seems like a dreadfully boring way to look at the world. There’s always more to find, more assumptions to question, more layers to peel back. And we can’t even observe it all without muddying the experiment, without our instruments and our attention changing the very thing we’re trying to measure.

I think we still have to get creative with how we interact with reality, designing experiments that let us see around corners, that reveal what direct observation obscures. That challenge, the ingenuity required just to see, is endlessly fascinating.

Sometimes I think the blog itself is part of this. Same person, different year, different mood, different conclusions. I can reread an older post and feel both familiarity and distance, like I’m studying a past version of my own subjectivity as if it belongs to someone else.

3. Interrogate the frame: sometimes the “problem” is how I’m thinking about it.

I’ve already begun talking about this with the last point, but what can I say? The themes bleed into each other because they’re all part of the same underlying orientation toward the world. The world is full of mysteries that humanity barely understands. We’ve made extraordinary progress in some domains, certainly, but every answered question seems to reveal ten more we didn’t know to ask.

Some people like to pretend they know everything, or at least that the important questions have been settled and the rest is just details. I find this attitude baffling. We don’t understand consciousness. We don’t understand why there’s something rather than nothing. We don’t remotely understand our own minds, and yet we prescribe solutions and claim to know what we’re doing at all times. The confident certainty I see in some quarters strikes me as either performance or a failure of imagination.

We’re all fumbling in the dark, searching for answers. Sometimes we latch onto the wrong ones, and that’s inevitable. The wrong answers often feel right; that’s what makes them seductive. But letting go of wrong ideas and continuing the search for better ones, refusing to get too attached to any particular framework, staying open to the possibility that everything we believe might need revision: that’s one of the few eternally motivating things I can imagine. The search itself has value, independent of whether we ever arrive.

And maybe writing is part of how I keep myself honest here. It’s easy to rewrite our own past beliefs in our heads, to pretend you were always nuanced, always careful. Old posts don’t let us do that. They sit there and quietly accuse us of certainty.

4. Prefer changing systems over moralising at individuals, and try to act accordingly.

I’ve noted before that my focus should be on transforming systems rather than attempting to change individual behaviour. This is a Marxist insight, really: that the conditions people live under shape their choices and consciousness far more than individual moral exhortation ever could. We can tell people to recycle all we want, but if the entire economy is structured around disposability and the recycling system doesn’t even function as promised, we’re fighting against a current that’s stronger than any individual’s willpower or capability. The point is to change the current.

But this is such a difficult thing to aim for. Systems are resilient. They have inertia. They’re defended by people who benefit from them and often by people who don’t but have internalised their logic. And I’m just one person, with limited energy and limited reach and limited time.

It’s useful to have a goal that’s hard to reach, I suppose. A thing that isn’t challenging isn’t interesting. But there’s a difference between “challenging” and “functionally impossible given my actual circumstances.” Frustrating still, this ambition is easily affected by mood, energy, and circumstance. But maybe the goal isn’t to maintain constant revolutionary fervour so much as to keep the orientation, to keep asking “what systems are producing this outcome?” even when I don’t have the capacity to do much about the answer.

This is also where my suspicion of self-quantification creeps in. Part of me wants a neat way to track whether I’m “doing enough,” whether my time is “aligned,” whether I’m moving in the right direction. But I don’t trust what happens when the measurement becomes the mission. It’s too easy to replace the hard question (am I changing anything?) with the easier one (does my spreadsheet look good?).

On that note...

5. Let ethics set constraints: ability and novelty aren’t justification.

It’s difficult to find projects I have the energy for that also fit within my morals. This has been a journey of searching for ideas that don’t feel like selling my soul, ones that align with a materialist, anti-consumerist worldview. I’ve been looking for small-scale projects that create real use-value for ordinary people without feeding the churn of pointless consumption.

This sounds simple enough in the abstract, but in practice it’s remarkably constraining. Once we strip away anything based on manufactured scarcity (artificial limitations designed to extract more money), manipulative marketing (creating desire for things people don’t actually need), or extracting attention (the entire attention economy that treats human consciousness as a resource to be mined), the options narrow considerably.

What’s left? Tools that help people do things they actually want to do. Information that’s genuinely useful and freely shared. Infrastructure that serves human needs rather than corporate profits. But then there’s the question of sustainable energy, the kind that keeps me going on something long-term. I find I don’t have it, or at least I haven’t found it yet. I can work in bursts, throwing myself into something with intense focus for a while, but that’s been the extent of what I’ve managed with anything. A month has been my limit before the energy dissipates and I’m left wondering why I thought this particular project mattered.

Maybe this is the ADHD, or maybe it’s something else, or maybe it’s just how I’m built. I haven’t figured out how to work with it rather than against it yet. I also haven’t figured out how to write about this without it sounding like an excuse. That might be part of why I keep returning to it.

6. Accept that progress is collective, then find a sustainable way to participate.

On the one hand, I know that collaborative endeavours have been pivotal to humanity’s progress. Every significant achievement, from scientific breakthroughs to social movements to works of art, has involved people working together, building on each other’s contributions, compensating for each other’s weaknesses. And I feel a genuine desire to help people, to be part of something larger than myself, to contribute to the collective project of making things better.

On the other hand, there are all the traits about me that can be succinctly summarised as introversion, though that word doesn’t quite capture it. I felt it with the book club, which I joined with genuine enthusiasm and good intentions. I felt it more recently on the strata committee, where I thought I could contribute something useful to my building community. In both cases, I discovered that I simply don’t have the capacity for the social interactions required. Not that I can’t do them, but that doing them costs me something I can’t easily replenish. I feel guilty about it. It’s hard for people who are energised by socialising to understand, who leave a conversation feeling more alive than before, so I often feel like something is wrong with me. I have to remind myself not to spiral down those thoughts.

Similarly, people are confused when I interact with colleagues every day and seem fine, yet I’m completely worn out afterward. They see me functioning in meetings, making small talk, collaborating on projects, and they assume this means socialising doesn’t cost me anything. The obvious conclusion, that I’ve already exhausted my social capacity through work, seems to elude them because they aren’t experiencing my experience. From the outside, it looks effortless. From the inside, it’s a resource being depleted hour by hour. I suppose this loops back to subjectivity. As I mentioned earlier, these differences exist for reasons, and those reasons are worth understanding even when (especially when) they make life more complicated.

At the end of the day, I need to keep exploring what works for me. Some combination of collaboration and solitude that lets me contribute without destroying myself in the process. I might never find the right scenario, though. That possibility sits with me, neither accepted nor rejected, just present.

Writing is also, for better or worse, a way I “do together” while staying alone. It’s slower than a room full of people, and less demanding than constant interaction. It’s a contribution I can make without having to perform myself in real time.

7. Aim to help in ways that build capacity, not dependence.

I feel as though I’ve slipped on this one. The principle still makes sense to me intellectually: that sustainable help means building capacity rather than creating dependence, that the best thing we can do for someone is often to help them help themselves. But the practice has fallen away.

Likely influenced by tiredness and burnout, I just want peaceful times with those close to me. Quiet evenings. Low-stakes conversations. It’s hard to care much beyond that, hard to summon the energy for the patient work of teaching and mentoring and capacity-building when just getting through the day takes everything I have.

I don’t know if this is a temporary retreat or a permanent narrowing. Maybe I’m just in a fallow period and the desire to contribute more broadly will return. Maybe I’m learning to accept that my capacity is smaller than I wished it was. Or maybe I’m making excuses for a kind of withdrawal that I’ll eventually regret. It’s hard to tell from inside the experience.

8. Take ideas and language seriously, and resist the pull toward gossip and smallness.

Similar to the last point, I’ve been putting in less effort, mostly because I don’t feel much hope for making positive change on individual levels. We can have the deepest conversation with someone, lay out ideas with perfect clarity, really connect on an intellectual level, and then watch them go right back to whatever they were doing before. Not because they’re stupid or malicious, but because individual conversations are a weak force compared to the systems and habits and material conditions that shape behaviour.

My partner recently said that people don’t change; they just circle around an anchor point and drift from one thing to another. I pushed back on this. I claimed I had changed a lot during my life. But when I tried to think of how, tried to point to specific transformations, I ended up proving his point: I still avoid confrontation, still have a lethargic, depressive temperament, still don’t want to interact with people and would rather be left alone to dabble in various mini-projects. Details have changed, such as how there is more knowledge and understanding in my mind. But the underlying structure, the shape of who I am, has remained remarkably stable.

Perhaps it will be in writing that I can see my own stability and change side by side. I can’t always feel growth while I’m living it, but maybe I will find it in old paragraphs that I’d forgotten I wrote. Or maybe I won’t...

9. Choose principles over comfort when they come into conflict.

With all this said, I still do my best to make choices that align with my ethical principles. Even when I’m tired. Even when it would be easier to go along with whatever’s expected. Even when taking a principled position means awkwardness or conflict or being the person who makes things difficult.

Life itself is exhausting, and I’m not a role model in any sort of way. My energy is limited, my impact is small, and most of the time I’m just trying to get through the day without making things worse. But at least I can claim I’ve managed to stay principled in the ways that matter to me. The things I buy (or more often don’t buy), the work I’m willing to do, the compromises I refuse to make. They’re still my quiet, mostly invisible choices that help me be a version of myself that I can live with. That has to count for something.

10. Be kind about mistakes, but don’t opt out of trying.

The past couple of years have had ups and downs, but overall it’s been alright, and I’ve tried to be gentle with myself. That sounds simple, but it isn’t. I’m constantly trying to find a balance between doing less and still doing something; between doing what actually feels restorative to me and doing what other people recognise as “fun” or “normal.” I feel pressure from others who read taking it easy as complacency. Or maybe I’m projecting that pressure and fearing judgment that isn’t really there. It’s hard to tell, because what people say and how they act don’t always line up. Sometimes I wonder if I still just don’t understand anyone.

Maybe I just feel like a burden, like someone who doesn’t quite fit. I know the things I think about don’t really interest anyone, and the things that interest everyone else are usually too exhausting for me to keep up with, especially lately. It leaves me feeling like I’m constantly trying to force myself to care about things I can’t justify caring about. But maybe that isn’t my beliefs changing so much as my mood sliding.

I saw my psychologist recently. She said I looked tired and burnt out. I agreed with her because it seemed true, but upon reflection, I’m not sure “burnout” is quite the right word. Burnout implies that my woes are external, mostly work-related or stemming from specific demands of life, such that I can rest, recover, and things will be fine. Like a battery that’s been drained but can be recharged. The more I think about it, the more I suspect what I’m experiencing isn’t just burnout. I’m not merely without energy for work or taking care of myself. There’s an underlying lack of hope for anything in the future. It’s hard to find something to look forward to, hard to locate a reason to bother with the effort of continuing.

That said, I’m functional enough, going through the motions, meeting my obligations. But there’s a greyness to everything. The future feels less like a space of possibility and more like a series of events to be endured. I don’t know what to do with this. Rest doesn’t seem to help; I wake up just as grey as when I went to sleep. Playing games, reading, and watching series and movies is still fun, but the feeling is always there underneath, waiting.

Maybe what I need isn’t recovery but reconfiguration. Perhaps it involves learning to move forward without needing to know why. Or maybe this too shall pass, the way other difficult periods have passed, and I’ll look back on this writing and wonder what all the fuss was about.

I don’t know. But if it doesn’t pass, I’ll figure out what comes next. That’s the one commitment I can make: to keep figuring out what comes next, even when I don’t particularly want to.