If I told 6-months-ago me that this would happen, he would have laughed.

After years of living in New York with 10 roommates and 200 neighbors, it was time to do something different.

In Georgia I lived in large, old apartments or tiny, new apartments. Never any other combination.

It was time for a dishwasher, more than one room and space to be creative.

Present me is not amused.

It all started mid-March when I came back from America. I was in a hurry. Don’t be in a hurry.

I found it. Great location, okay ambience, a dishwasher.

The vacant commercial space below? No big deal.

Then the vans came. Drywall. Tables. Glassware.

I can’t believe this is happening.

The illuminated sign comes on.

The tables come out, set.

The fat middle-aged men pull up in their G Wagons.

“ძმაო, როგორა ხარ?” rings loudly through the street below.

Something different every night.

Music. Arguments. The revving of engines (petrol, may you rest in peace).

Total mess. Clothes everywhere.

A vending machine sits in the doorway (can’t talk right now).

Boxes. Cameras. Bags.

Film. Speaker. Couch.

Painting (didn’t hang it up).

What’s for dinner?

Rice. Tomato. Egg.

What’s for work?

Computer.

Angry customer calls me at midnight. Don’t answer.

Eyes strained. Brain drained.

House music.

Urban living. We’re doing it.

I’m back, by the way.

From my notes:

Many eventually come to the realization that life goes on no matter what one does to try to improve.

Time will pass whether you did what you set out to do or not. No matter how well you plan for the future, you, too, will eventually die. In 100 years, virtually nobody will even know you existed.

Almost every essay I’ve read on this topic concludes by saying that you should live in the present and “just do it.” I don’t think it’s that simple.

Life is chaos. You should try to live however you see fit, but that alone won’t make you happy. You don’t have perfect access to information for decision making. In fact, most of life’s decisions could be left to random chance, and it wouldn’t affect the outcome that much.

I don’t think you can make people care about anything.

I once overheard a phone call between a young woman and one of her friends on an NJ transit train. She was on the phone discussing how, despite years of community college, she couldn’t get her GPA higher than 1.7. No credible institution will grant a degree with a GPA of less than 2.

She decided to persist, however, and I wonder why. Americans like the story of someone that overcame adversity, but if you’re studying as hard as you claim to be and can’t even manage a GPA of 2.0 at a community college, higher education is not for you.

This isn’t a value judgement — there isn’t anything wrong with not having an academic aptitude. There are plenty of jobs in this economy that do not involve these skills. Yes, on average university educated people earn more money throughout their careers, but you don’t need to go to university to earn a decent living in the United States.

I grew up in a nice suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. All of my neighbors were working class people who had started their own businesses. The family across the street had a painting business. The people who lived in the adjacent house had a commercial plumbing business.

I don’t know the numbers, but I’m quite sure these families earned more than my immigrant parents did working professional jobs.

I hope the girl on the train changed course and found something that she had an aptitude in instead of trying something that will never work for her in any meaningful way.

Best case scenario, she barely passes her course. What will that get her? A mediocre corporate job? She will never be able to compete with most of the people in that environment.

It would be like if I, somebody who’s not particularly tall and with unremarkable athletic ability, decided to become a professional basketball player. Absolutely no chance.

Everything I do is an intellectual pursuit, not because I sat down and decided that that’s what I should do, but because that’s what I naturally fell into with respect to my aptitudes. I actually have a chance of a decent outcome.

I think being in the 75th percentile of something is enough. It would be great to be one of the best in any particular field, but it’s essentially outside of your control.

You should try to find something that you’re good at but not necessarily a master of. What you shouldn’t do is go into something where you’re one of the least capable - you will struggle.

At 27, I’m finally settling into what I’m good at for the long haul. Even if I’m average in the two pursuits I’m currently active in, I think that I’ll be okay.

It Isn’t Just About The Money

I recently started thinking about how much our cultural context influences our thinking. What’s totally acceptable behavior in one country is sometimes totally unacceptable in another. It’s a status game first and foremost.

For Americans, economic success is the highest status achievement. It doesn’t matter how good your life is outside of work, if you’re not working the most hours and flexing with the biggest house and nicest car, you’re a loser.

As someone who grew up in that culture, I found it a bit silly and a complete waste of time to focus on money alone. While money is important, if you have poor physical and mental health, it doesn’t matter.

In the same way, cultures that value martyrdom, for example, are not concerned with these things. It doesn’t matter how educated you are, how hard your work or how much charity you give. As long as you died for your country/god/people, you and your family are high status, even if only posthumously.

Russians Are Cool With Faking Documents

Exhibit A:

Russians are much more comfortable faking documents than Americans are. I had a Russian friend growing up whose father wanted to get out of a cell phone contract. He would have had to pay the carrier hundreds of dollars to do so. There was, however, one loophole — you could get out of the contract for free if you moved outside of the United States permanently.

Instead of waiting it out or coming to a legal solution, his son created fake documents to demonstrate this permanent “move.” The typical American would NEVER come up with a scheme like this.

Exhibit B:

A friend of mine, a Russian guy who moved away from Georgia, had a package that needed to be picked up at the post office. The only way to get this package was by showing his original passport, which, of course, wasn’t in Georgia.

After making some phone calls, it was clear that there was no way around this. The next day, he casually asks me if I’m comfortable going to the post office with a fake passport. I refused.

Exhibit C:

I heard about a friend of a friend who successfully received a residence permit in a large EU country on the basis of fake bank statements.

I have overheard many such conversations between people, almost always from a former-Soviet country, discussing how they can bend the rules with fake documents.

The only faking of documents that’s widespread in America (amongst non-criminals) is driver’s licenses so that adults 18-20 can drink alcohol in public (the same people who can be held criminally responsible for their actions, buy guns and pay taxes).

Unrelated:

When I was 18, there was a referendum in my county about whether or not to allow alcohol sales on Sundays. Despite being below the drinking age of 21, I was allowed to vote in this referendum, and I did. It passed.

I’m a Cultural Hybrid

As I’ve written in a previous article, I am first and foremost American. I felt foreign growing up in the US, but having lived abroad for some time now, I realize that I am very American in my thinking, and that’s okay. It’s what differentiates me from the Georgians and Russians that surround me, whose goals in life are often very different from mine due to their respective cultural upbringings and status games.

It took me a long time to understand this difference, and it has brought me stability knowing that I can continue to play my American status games without wondering why people around me don’t value the same things.

My next article is going to tackle status games in more detail and how they shape our social environments.

I’ve often written about how I feel lost in life, and how my path forward is unclear, professionally speaking.

I grew up facing little academic difficulty, and I didn’t learn to work through serious problems until I was an adult. Even when something was difficult, I just had to practice a couple of times, and the rest could be improvised.

Later, when I got to NYU, it didn’t matter that I got a 5 on the AP Calculus exam - I got a C in Math for Econ. first semester.

Instead of going to the library and studying with laser-focus for a little bit everyday, I had other things on my mind. My conclusion was that, if I’m not good at math (I was good at math, I just didn’t want to do the work), I’ll do what comes naturally, and that was French.

Learning a foreign language was mandatory at NYU, and I decided to continue with French. I had taken three years of French in high school, but I tested into a level B1 class in university.

I grew up functionally bilingual, speaking Russian at home and English everywhere else. At 18, I was still at an age when languages were easy to absorb (I wish I knew then how difficult learning would become as an adult).

To my mom’s dismay, I switched my major to French literature. Intellectually speaking, these were the best years - once I got to level C1, all of my classes were in French.

NYU happens to have one of the best French departments in the United States (and perhaps the world), and I got to learn and write about French literature from the leading scholars on the subject.

The difference between math and writing was that writing wasn’t a chore for me. I spent hours writing these papers, endlessly consulting online dictionaries and source texts. It was excited to create something new, which is not possible for me with mathematics.

I fondly remember going to Bobst (NYU’s massive library next to Washington Square Park) at 9pm, buying a black Starbucks cold brew from the vending machine ($4 in 2018!) and sitting at one of the computers (didn’t have my own laptop) and writing a 10-page paper in French until 6am.

I didn’t know it then, but those were some of the most fascinating years of my life.

Reality Check

I graduated on May 20, 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. University commencement was canceled. Instead, they sent us a very strange graduation video, which I remember watching from a co-working space by myself in Manhattan.

I remember that day vividly, biking in Midtown with very few cars and living in a bubble of isolation, like everybody did at the time.

It felt surreal - I was finally free. Little did I know, that the next four years would be filled with bad decisions, debt and an adventure that will never be repeated.

I had worked as a waiter intermittently throughout university, and the day in-person dining resumed in Manhattan, I began working at Boucherie in the West Village.

Even at a restaurant like Boucherie (on the expensive side, but not fine dining by NYC standards), the pay was a bit limited as people weren’t dining out like they did pre-2020.

I worked there for a few months and later quit when one of the managers went on vacation, and his temporary replacement thought managing people meant screaming at them.

I then worked in commercial real estate, renting retail space in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I made real money for the first time in my life, but I dreaded going to work more than I did when I was a waiter.

Most people thought I was trying to scam them, and overcoming the lack of trust in that business (the industry is full of unscrupulous individuals) was extremely emotionally taxing.

I was living in a room in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for $800/month (a steal) when the landlord doubled the rent. That’s when I decided to reset my life.

I had enough credit card airline miles to buy a one-way ticket to Tbilisi for $20. I quit my job, sold my car and made the single most consequential decision of my life.

Back on Track

I’ve already recounted my time in Tbilisi on this blog, so I won’t repeat myself here (look at the previous articles if you’re not up to speed).

Between the gallery and the e-commerce store, I’ve realized that I’ve been building a marketing skillset by accident. I’ve had to figure out how to promote events, get traffic onto websites and get sales, with mixed results.

I’ve grown multiple Instagram accounts to thousands of followers (it’s a start). I now need to go all in on this skillset - not my passion.

Passion is bullshit you tell yourself to fuel your ego. I don’t care how much you like doing something, when you’re doing it full-time for money, it will become very unpleasant at times and will ruin your relationship with that thing.

I know some people who are perpetually studying. Well into their 30s, they pursue yet another academic degree. I was aware of such people while growing up, but it wasn’t until quite recently that I understood why people do this.

When we grow up, we’re put on a predictable path:

First, you go to school from six until eighteen years old. Then, if you’re smart enough, you go to university for four more years. Finally, it’s up to you. There’s no fixed path for the rest of your life.

What happens next is totally up to you. You can do whatever you want. Assuming you have some access to money, you can decide to go backpacking in South America. You can teach English in Asia. You can open a business in a middle income country. Or, you could do nothing.

Nobody is forcing you. Nobody is pushing you. You are free. You are free to fail. That scares a lot of people.

I spent my entire childhood fantasizing about how great my life will be when I’m finally done with school. Now that I’m eight years away from high school and four years away from my undergrad, I’m struggling.

Sure, I’ve done a lot of what I wanted to do, and much of my struggles are my own doing (moving from the United States to a developing country). These struggles, these feelings of uncertainty, they make you think; how can I avoid these feelings? If only there was a way I could avoid facing the discomfort of life.

More school!

So, you’re getting a graduate degree, not because it will teach you skills directly related to your field (that’s not the issue), but because it allows you to kick the can down the road for two more years.

Once you finish your graduate degree, you realize that you must finally face your uncomfortable emotions. Time for a doctorate!

Life Experience is Extremely Important

The problem is, university is now being pushed on everyone regardless of ability, which is a grave mistake, both for society and for the individuals who accrue debt for what sometimes amounts to nothing.

For those who are academically inclined, one alternative path is to never leave the academic environment, one whose rules are already well understood and whose path is well trodden.

They get a Master’s degree only to find that, in most cases, they are not much more employable than their peers who went to work after their undergraduate degree.

Of course, I’m not referring to people who have a graduate degree in a technical field that trains them for a very specific task – depending on the job market at the time, that may be a great decision.

I am primarily talking about people who decide to continue their humanities education, getting a graduate degree in 14th century Frankish literature, for example.

Often once the graduate degree is completed, a PhD is in order. Again, if you have a PhD in mathematics, you are very employable. Most people do not have the cognitive profile for such an education.

University has become a big business, particularly in the United States, but in many other countries as well. Universities are perfectly happy taking people’s money to give them a qualification even if there are far fewer roles requiring such a qualification.

Most people who dream of becoming a professor, for example, are in for a rough awakening once they get their PhD. Unemployment in academia is extremely high despite record university attendance.

Life experience is extremely important and culturally undervalued. I think we should stop telling young people that university degree with guarantee stability. This was true when a tiny proportion of the public went to university, but when half of the population has an undergraduate degree, it no longer confers a competitive advantage.

Your competitive advantage is no longer your credential but your experience. We should spend 25% of our time on theory and the rest on practice, not the other way around, which is the case in many educational schemes.

There’s a reason junior doctors are supervised for many years, sometimes longer than they were in medical school itself. You have to actually see patients and go through the process (I’m not talking about medical degrees in this rant; the theoretical training is absolutely necessary, and the earnings are all but guaranteed).

We need sensory input in order to remember. A hand motion, a smell, a horrible sight. We need to engage our emotions in order to truly learn.

I don’t see the point in being conspiratorial – there are plenty of at least somewhat-crazy people on the internet who will tell you that the government wants to keep the public as debt slaves and so on.

I don’t think most governments are competent enough to socially engineer the public to such a great extent.

The reality is that a lot of what our parents, teachers and government officials promised us is a bad deal, not because they have malicious intent, but because stability isn’t something you can guarantee anywhere, even in the United States.

Anybody can get sick or get into an accident. A rogue state can declare war. Everybody eventually dies. Stability is an illusion, and the sooner we embrace that, the sooner we can start living more meaningful lives.

I think that means having close ties with a few people, trying new things, taking risks, and most importantly, not worrying too much.

Let’s be realistic about what we can control and let go of what we can’t.

Part I - Perfect

I used to be a perfectionist. I used to believe that if I didn’t dot my i’s and cross my t’s that people would notice, and I would never recover. I became free when I learned that everyone’s just as scared as I am.

Part II - Gravity

I experience two simultaneous pulls - one craving stability, steady money and a feeling of belonging. The other, staying independent and living every moment as if the one before it didn’t matter and the one following it is only an abstract idea.

Let’s experience these two pulls equally. Let’s have a balancing act.

Yin and yang, man and woman, the United States and the Soviet Union, bagel and cream cheese, ginger and wasabi, cars and the bus lane, intuition and repression.

I made a list.

Part III - Stay put

Every action inside of one’s life is like a separate life in and of itself.

Let’s go to work for a day:

Birth: Entering the office

First steps: Greeting people and getting settled

Bar Mitzvah: First meeting of the day

Adulthood: The mundane tasks of the day

Death: Leaving the office

Sometimes it’s a bad day, and sometimes it’s not. Regardless, when it’s over, it’s truly over, and that’s okay. Time goes on whether you like it or not. Just be (the most midwit declaration of all).

Part IV - Deoptimize

My high school English teacher told me that incentivize isn’t a word. I kept it in my final paper anyway (it’s a word invented by corporations, but it’s a word nonetheless).

Live true to yourself. Do you know why you should?

There is no perfect country. There is no perfect society. There is no perfect partner. There is no perfect vocation. There is no perfect state of health. There is no perfect state of mind. There is no perfect environment. There is no perfect city. There is no perfect sidewalk. There is no perfect machine. There is no perfect flower. There is no perfect feeling. There is no perfect life. There is no perfect job. There is no perfect politician. There is no perfect language. There is no perfect culture.

Perfect.

The more perfect we think we are, the more unresolved demons are churning underneath it all.

Imperfection is endearing (punctuation optional)

See you next week.

Sometimes I’ll start writing an entire article only to rethink it later. Other times I’ll write two or three lines and change my mind.

I just opened one of my drafts to find the following:

I’m forcing myself to write something. A woman wearing strong, cheap perfume is sitting next to me at this cafe, and I want to vomit.

I have no idea what I sat down to write that day, but it certainly wasn’t a journal about my surroundings and how I feel about them (even though that’s what it often turns into).

My writing problems continued through yesterday until a chance encounter in the middle of the night made me rethink things.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

I’ve been in Tbilisi for nearly two and a half years. In that time I’ve visited many different bars in town where I met all kinds of characters, including musicians from England and refugees from Iran.

I thought I knew all the spots where expats and immigrants were hanging out. However, there remained one bar that I hadn’t visited.

I showed up at this bar last night and immediately ran into an acquaintance that I had met at a party over a year ago. We went to the same university and have a similar background having both grown up in America with Eastern European roots.

More people came, other Americans, and a few Russians. And then there was a forty-something American guy whose story was unlike anybody else’s. He lived in California and was visiting Tbilisi on his way to a work-related engagement in Armenia. He was bald with cauliflower ears and wore a denim jacket and jeans.

He made his way around the bar, chatting with almost everybody. One of the guys in our group struck up a conversation with him as he was getting a drink. Next thing I knew, he was sitting with us.

He started talking about his time Greco-Roman wrestling when he was a student. Fighting sports are big in Georgia, and we were hypothesizing about why Georgia and neighboring countries are so good at wrestling and other fighting sports (I think it comes down to culture).

We them learned about his six tours in Afghanistan, beginning shortly after September 11, 2001. I grew up hearing stories about people who had nothing to do with the army enlisting after having witnessed the attacks, but I never actually met someone like that. This guy did it.

He told us about the kinds of operations he participated in in Afghanistan (I’d rather not describe them here).

I got up for a few minutes, and when I returned, he was in the middle of explaining that he is an ad buyer on adult websites – he is responsible for matching sketchy products with ad space on sketchy websites.

What Does This Have To Do With Meaning?

This isn’t just a story about a crazy character in a bar. I’ve met dozens of these types throughout my life (I’m a magnet for characters).

I think it’s admirable that this guy had a strong conviction about something and acted on it with no regrets.

While I never fought in Afghanistan or managed advertisements on adult websites, I’ve taken massive action before, selling everything and moving to the other side of the world to open a business that was financially doomed from the start.

I’ve had a rough couple of months, applying for jobs and trying to figure out the next steps in my life. This week I went down a YouTube rabbit hole about stoicism and the search for meaning.

I had read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning when I was a freshman in university, but I now realize that I wasn’t yet ready to understand the meaning of this book.

Someone close to me recently read the book, and we were discussing it. The point of life, according to Frankl, is to manufacture it yourself. You can’t sit around and hope that the outside world will act and give you meaning. You must make it up.

Grappling with these ideas again has made me realize that my search for meaning is over.

I am now going to manufacture meaning for myself.

No Need to Change Location

I think some people have a strong desire to leave their current location whenever things go wrong. I come from a long line of people who have moved around. In some ways I am reliving my ancestors’ immigrant experience, whether from the Pale of Settlement to the big cities of the Russian Empire or to the United States and other Western countries.

I moved to New York at eighteen years old without any life experience. Now that I’ve seen a thing or two, it wouldn’t make sense to start from scratch again at twenty-six.

I’m not going to find meaning in a new city or country anymore. My journey to Georgia has taught me that meaning is something you have to choose for yourself.

The reality is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for meaning. Some people find it through work, others through spirituality and others through connection with people.

My mother was as a doctor her entire working life and based her entire identity on this.

It was the Soviet Union in the 1980s; medicines and treatments were rationed, and difficult decisions had to be made about who was going to be treated and who was going to be left to die.

It was only in America that her expertise was valued by those around her. She could now treat everyone without worry about running out of medicines or hospital beds. She could also be compensated accordingly.

I’ve concluded that I won’t find meaning from work. Work is fundamentally good, especially if you’re helping people, but I can’t invest my whole identity into it.

Art is not it either. I’m kind of over it, and I’m not the best cultural ambassador, and that’s okay.

Writing is closer to meaning for me. Even though I have tremendous reservations about publishing about very person issues (you should see some of my draft articles), it feels incredible meaningful when I get feedback from people. I am reassured by all the others who feel the same things that I do and who aren’t afraid to express it.

However, despite my narcissistic tendencies, praise from strangers doesn’t fill the void in my emotions (better to realize this earlier than later).

I’ve been told by many that I need a hobby. I’m still thinking about it.

This brings me back to the bar last night. I told my therapist that I’m my best self when I’m drinking. I’m not going to fall into the alcoholism trap; it’ll end badly. Instead, I have to work on being more open when I’m sober.

But in that bar last night, I found meaning. Human connection is what it’s all about.

I’d rather be a connected fish in a small pond than an admired fish in a larger one.

For over two years now, I’ve lived in Tbilisi, the capital of “the other Georgia,” as some Americans would say. While the rose-tinted glasses have long faded, overall, I’m fine here.

I remain because it works for me, not because I have no choice like many others I’ve met here.

Despite this lukewarm declaration of contentment, almost everyone I’ve become close to has left Tbilisi, including some locals I know.

In many ways it’s a tough place to live; everyone who makes it work has money coming in from abroad, myself included. This is usually some kind of remote work but can also be in the form of a business or remittances (I’m in the former camp).

Of the relatively-close friends I’ve made in my time here, only one is still here.

I see my friends on screens. I look at their Instagram stories driving a newly-acquired used car down the street in Cape Town. I say I’ll visit, but I can’t afford to.

I can only justify the expense of flying across the Atlantic to visit my family, which I’ve done three times now.

I miss the US a bit. I think about going back to LA where I felt alive, but I can’t afford to do that yet either.

I’ve put myself into a sort of purgatory, stuck in the golden handcuffs of quasi-reputational (albeit not financial) success along with the low cost of living. I’m stuck in a city I like but don’t love. I’m stuck in a society that I will never truly be a part of, no matter how well I learn their language.

I’m four years out of university, and life is what it is. When you have true freedom of choice, you can get stuck. That’s how I feel — stuck.

Thank you for reading this edition of What I learned this week. Please consider subscribing; I intend to release a new edition weekly.

Share

Furthermore, I run an art gallery in Tbilisi for which I publish a separate weekly newsletter showcasing artist from Eastern Europe and around the world. I kindly ask, for those who are interested, to have a peek here.

Dissolution Gallery Newsletter

The second half of my twenties is a time of transition. What worked ten years won’t work now. The social environments, and thus the rules, have changed. In the first half, I learned about my limits. Now in the second half, I’m trying to see just how far I can take the things that I’m good at.

10,000 Steps Daily

I’ve had a fixation on mental state for quite some time now. This began when I was 20 years old and went to Paris for the first time. I caught a red-eye, and found myself on a different continent the next morning.

I remember walking around for several days, full of life and energy.
I was in flow state.

I was hyper-social and was able to overcome the crippling shyness that plagued me throughout my childhood. This feeling wouldn’t last, and by the time my travels brought me to Lyon, the momentum was lost.

I spent several years since ruminating on this feeling; why was I so open on that trip? What made Paris different? I had a goal, to reactive this mental state at will. It was illusory.

I recently had an idea – maybe it was the enormous amount of walking that brought me into this flow state?

Whenever I find myself in a new city, I walk around day and night, intently focusing my attention on my surroundings.

Sure, I’ve walked around plenty in New York, where I lived at the time, but things were different in Paris. I was able to express myself. I was able to be the real me (the real self doesn’t exist, by the way).

I’ve been trying to live more intentionally, and is seems that movement is key in doing so. I’m making 10,000 steps a day a habit.

But movement isn’t enough. I walk plenty Tbilisi, and I can’t quite get in that same flow state. However, sitting in a cafe in Tel Aviv writing, I’m hyper-present, in a peak flow state.

Unfortunately, changing cities and countries seems to do the trick. This isn’t necessarily good for the environment, but the existence of humanity itself isn’t good for the environment, and I would be a fool to advocate for the destruction of humanity.

There aren’t many of you, but I feel obliged to admit to you that I burned out. Not from the newsletter, but from my travels, work and other obligations. I realized that writing argumentative essays is not for me.

I spent my undergraduate career writing these types of essays in French, and I was relieved when I’d never be forced to write another. A good friend of mine from Tbilisi (who has since moved back to New York) started writing, and it pushed me to get back into it.

Now I’m here, and I’ve had a think. You may have noticed on my Instagram that I have been dabbling with writing my thoughts by hand on pieces of paper and posting them in a carrousel. I’m going to continue with that, but in a format called What I learned this week.

In this first edition of What I learned this week, I will write a few of thoughts with some context. Think of it as something between Twitter and a blog.

Consistency Is The Only Thing That Matters

I had a meeting with a writer New York last month. During this meeting, she said something that I think about almost every day. I had mentioned the luck component of building anything, and she immediately commented that consistency is all that matters.

This isn’t anything new. I’m sure most of us have heard that consistency is very important. Going to the gym once a month will not make you stronger, but going once a day absolutely will, even if you perform the same exercises.

As I’m writing multiple newsletters for small (but growing) audiences, her words help push me to publish consistently.

Take Everything One Step At a Time

People often ask me for things. I get an email asking me to put someone on in my gallery almost every day. Most of these people are not serious. Occasionally, one of these proposals catches my eye.

I usually ask for more information; a proposal, a CV, something. I almost never hear back. That’s how life works.

I often get excited about project ideas, but it’s important to keep one’s head on straight and make sure the person you’re dealing with is actually serious. Always have some next steps for them to complete in order to move whatever it is you’re doing forward. Only commit fully when they’ve demonstrated competence. This will save you from major headaches later.

I’m Really Fortunate Not to Live in a Police State

I just came back form a small vacation in Turkey. While I enjoyed the food and the environment, I began to notice just how much the Turkish regime is involved in daily life.

No matter where you look, you cannot escape Erdoğan and his associates; their faces are plastered absolutely everywhere. This is partly due to upcoming municipal elections, but even when I was in Istanbul last year, the president’s face was on the side of many buildings.

Another strange feature of these faces was the minimal text accompanying them. I can’t imagine an election poster in the United States that only contains the candidate’s face with no slogan or policy information whatsoever.

Police states usually pop up in low-trust societies. Turkey, in my opinion, is such a society.

The VPN I normally use didn’t work in Turkey, and airport-style security is ubiquitous. I’m happy to be in Georgia where people enjoy much more freedom, and even my home country is extremely free compared to Turkey.

Most Places Aren’t A Good Fit for You

I can count one hundred times on both hands how many times things weren’t a good fit for me. Jobs, relationships, nightclubs, book clubs, social media platforms, blah blah blah.

KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU.

Nobody can tell you what’s best for you, only you can. If everyone invests in crypto, but it rubs you the wrong way, DON’T DO IT. If everyone goes to Bassiani and you prefer a good dive bar (not giving away my spots), go there instead.

Disclaimer: If you’re under 25, experiment to find out what it is you like. If you’re over 25 (like me and most of my readership), lean into what works best for you.

I work on my own projects because I’m extremely disagreeable, and that’s okay. It took me many years to accept myself for who I am (still working on it). Try to do the same for yourself.

Thank you for reading the first edition of What I learned this week. Please consider subscribing; I intend to release a new edition weekly.

Subscribe now

Furthermore, I run an art gallery in Tbilisi for which I publish a separate weekly newsletter showcasing artist from Eastern Europe and around the world. I kindly ask, for those who are interested, to have a peek here.

Dissolution Gallery Newsletter

I haven’t kept my writing schedule because I haven’t kept any schedule. I’ve turned my life upside down, changing cities and time zones weekly. However, as strange as it sounds to say, it’s good to be back in America (at least temporarily).

Sure, the food isn’t very good, the people love their cars and everything is really expensive. However, it’s nice to go to the store and not have the cashier look at you like it’s their last day on this earth.

I saw some good friends, in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Birmingham. I saw my family, including distant relatives I haven’t heard about in over a decade. It’s nice to pop in.

I opened my eyes to potential business opportunities that would generate real money. I encountered a Georgian at a bar in LA which neither of us could believe (ქართული ლაპარაკობ, ბიჭო?).

I feel disconnected from every place, from every time. I feel like an island in the middle of the pacific, greeting tourists from faraway lands wondering what it is that I’m still doing here.

I don’t want to live in the US again, but I don’t know how I feel about Georgia. Let’s see what happens this year.

“Imagine a black dot suspended in space,” a taxi driver once said to me. “Now imagine that said space is a different color, perhaps white. That black dot, that’s your knowledge, everything you’ve ever heard or read about. Now imagine that you’ve learned something new. As your knowledge increases, so too does the size of that dot. In fact, the dot is no longer a dot but an ever-increasing mass stretching across the white space. However, no matter how large that mass becomes, it doesn’t get any closer to the edge of that space. As you learn more, you realize the magnitude of that which you’ll never understand.”

This metaphor was originally conveyed to me in Russian using Georgian phraseology, so my summary loses almost all of its stylistic characteristics. However, Giorgi made a good point that evening as we drove down Rustaveli Avenue in his white Toyota Prius.

As Aristotle famously said, “The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.” While Giorgi probably isn’t Aristotle (I’ve never seen them both in the same room), he came to this realization as he listened to audiobooks while driving around.

We then got into a debate about whether it’s better to be an incurious normy and enjoy life or to be interested in expanding one’s knowledge at the expense of sanity and a sense of calm on this earth.

While the incurious are almost certainly the happier of the two categories, they are at the mercy of their emotions. They aren’t able to step back and understand why they feel the way that they do in a particular situation. However, they probably don’t have daily existential crises about what it means to live and what it means to eventually be dead forever.

On the other hand, while gaining knowledge is scary, particularly when you realize the implications, you are subsequently better able to process the grim parts of existence as well as to understand your own emotions. Once we’re courageous enough to sincerely engage with these questions, we will be better able to cope with the realities of existence.

I’ve made a lot of progress with this in my own life, and apparently so has Giorgi.

Act II: I’ve never had an original thought in my entire life, and neither have you.

Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus around the same time independently of each other . Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace independently came to the same conclusion about natural selection. Even when we’re thinking in a vacuum, we’ll often come to the same conclusions. It’s almost impossible to have original ideas (the concept for this article isn’t even my own idea).

Everything I have ever written or will ever write in this newsletter has already been thought of by someone else. I usually come across these ideas by having read about them somewhere that one time. Maybe a friend or acquaintance mentioned something that stuck with me (that’s where this idea came from). Perhaps I came to a conclusion independently only to find, after a quick Google search, that I am not alone in my thinking.

This realization was not pleasant for me. We live in a culture that rewards narcissism and self-aggrandizing behavior; “How could it be that I didn’t come up with that?” For the average ape scrolling through TikTok, this is only natural (I’m an ape too, relax). There are a trillion “theories” on TikTok. String theory, jello theory, insert theory here theory. You can search these theories yourself, they aren’t particularly interesting. None of them are original, but the “creators” of these theories don’t know that. In fact, TikTok is a factory of regurgitated bad ideas (perhaps I’ll elaborate in a future article).

I think that the lack of originality in life is a gift creatives. Most people think that creativity and originality are synonymous, a divine image that appears in the mind of an artist. We study the stories of great innovators who, seemingly out of nowhere, realized something that nobody else could. This is a caricature of the creative process. Every innovation stands on a series of previous innovations, without which no further progress would be possible.

Even Pablo Picasso and Jean-Luc Godard built their approaches to visual art and cinema respectively on mountains of predecessors. Godard’s work would have been radically different had he worked fifty years earlier. Picasso’s cubism was heavily influenced by African art, and his work would go on to influence architecture and many artists after him.

This doesn’t just apply to great thinkers and creators: every one of us is the product of hundreds of generations of people who had to figure out how to do what is now taken for granted.

I am writing this article in a café in Birmingham, Alabama, on a computer. I drove here in a car. I’m drinking coffee and consuming electricity. I’m writing in English using a latin-derived alphabet. Somebody had to come up with every component of these things. I’m not just talking about inventing the computer. I’m talking about mining. I’m talking about power generation. I’m talking about the internal combustion engine.

If these things were never discovered by people that neither I nor my ancestors ever met, I wouldn’t be writing these articles, and you wouldn’t be reading them. We would likely be working in farms, or, if we go far enough into the past, hunting in the bush.

While creativity and critical thinking are essential for child development, our culture’s emphasis on originality is creating unrealistic expectations about life, or worse, delusions of grandeur. There are degrees to which this grandeur influences child development. If your parents are both 5’5” tall (about 165 cm), let’s say, there’s almost no chance for you to become a professional basketball player, no matter how talented you might otherwise be or how hard you work on your jump shot.

You can’t do whatever you want in life. We all have aptitudes, things we’re naturally good at and things we’re naturally bad at. Great success at anything in life involves a combination of natural ability and hard work. While you can outwork others in the short term, talent will eclipse that hard work in the long run as everyone at the highest levels of any endeavor are both extremely talented and working every hour of every day to achieve their goal. Even if you’re in the 75th percentile, you have no chance of getting to the top.

While most of us will join the workforce in entry level jobs and play the political games of the office, others will naïvely decide that they are some kind of genius that can do it all by themselves. The latter group is deluding themselves, but the beauty of life is, generally, unless you really are a genius, you will be humbled in the marketplace. For every massive business success, there are one hundred failures.

Even what many consider to be the safe route, getting a corporate job, can be a dead end if the choice for a promotion is between you and somebody supremely more competent.

I grew up with the very delusions I write about. I mentioned in a previous article that I grew up in a somewhat unusual environment as an only child in a non-visible minority ethnic group. I sincerely believed that I could become anything. I came into adulthood with an enormous ego and a sense of indestructibility. This was luckily crushed by living in the real world, but it still led to me choosing the crazy path that I’m currently on.

I’ve always struggled working in a hierarchical structure because I usually felt that I could do my manager’s job (sometimes true, but sometimes not). I would rather go out on my own, make mistakes and embarrass myself than put myself at the mercy of another person with character flaws similar to my own.

Working independently gives me an illusion of control. I use the word illusion because instead of a boss firing me, a client could simply decide not to buy from me again/renew an agreement/collaborate with me in the future.

Sure, with a good offer in the marketplace, you can make money/achieve your goal/get attention (these are interchangeable for most).

However, it ultimately comes down to the desire to be original, to make your own path. Our culture, the American culture, glorifies this kind of success. America is a country built by people who, at some point in their lineage, decided to drop their former lives and get on a boat to some totally unknown land, never to see their relatives again.

This characteristic of Americans is why this country is the number one economy in the history of the world. It is also why this society is so broken in many other ways.

Entrepreneurship is the most American story. It’s why having a government job in the United States is, from a cultural standpoint, for losers, while civil service à la République française is competitive and considered prestigious.

Life is a series of tradeoffs, and, sometimes, we must make an economic tradeoff for one of lifestyle. I made an economic tradeoff by living outside the US, and I don’t regret it so far.

I just turned twenty-six and feel like time is slipping by particularly fast. I started to feel this time pressure at twenty-five, but it’s more noticeable now. My concerns are primarily financial. Like many twenty-somethings, I am not financially in the place that I thought I’d be by this time in my life. Growing up with the internet, I was exposed to a lot of outliers who were earning ten times the amount of money at twenty years old than I’m earning now.

Almost all of us are average in almost every way. When I was a kid, I thought things would be different because I grew up a bit of an outlier. I was a Russian-speaking Jew in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. I seldom tried in school and still managed to do well.

University taught me how the world really works. I suddenly had to try, although I was able to pass some classes with a medium amount of effort (I think some of the mandatory courses freshman year were designed purely to funnel tuition money).

Once I left my not-so-little town, I realized that I was just like everybody else. Not strikingly good looking, not genius-level intelligent. There’s always a room where you’re average, especially in New York.

Every since I graduated university in 2020, I have involved myself in high-risk business ventures yielding various results. I thought that it would be a good idea to rent commercial real estate. I thought it would be a good idea to open an art gallery. The former made a decent amount of money and gave me a reason to stay in New York. The latter made a small amount of money and gave me a reason to self-loathe. Neither of these things, however, really made sense for me.

Some of my friends and acquaintances, meanwhile, picked paths on the corporate ladder; growth and security. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to everything.

Sure, they got guaranteed pay. They valued stability and a known path.

This path, however, came with temporal inflexibility. They had to be in the office at a certain time. Their boss would call them and ask them to do more, and they couldn’t say no. Sometimes they couldn’t go too far away from the city unless they took some time off.

Subscribe now

I said no to stability, the idea being that there will be enormous upside after several years of making very little money. That might happen. It might not.

I’m still thinking like an American when it comes to money, specifically when it comes to the amounts of money in question. By European standards, especially by Georgian standards, I’m doing okay. But as an American, I feel like I should be earning more.

When I met people from Ukraine who had quit their comfortable lives to move to the US under brutal conditions in exchange for a larger nominal salary, I couldn’t understand why. Now I do.

They became lower status relative to their new neighbors, but they also became higher status in their home country simply by having “made it” to America. The fact that they were getting paid minimum wage washing dishes and that they lived with 4 roommates suddenly didn’t seem to matter.

Let’s divide people into two categories — those who don’t have the urge to drop everything and fly to the other side of the world, and those who does. I’m firmly in the latter camp.

There have been many stories of those who didn’t act on their youthful impulses and came to regret it. It’s now clear to me that I have acted out my rebellion to my parents and my country, and that, were I to return permanently to the United States, I could lead a full life knowing that I didn’t hold back on my dreams.

I don’t want to end up like like another DJ who moved to Tbilisi at forty years old in order to find himself.

I suppose the grass is always greener.

This journey through mediocrity, however, has shaped me. New York David wouldn’t recognize Tbilisi David. New York David would likely have never been able to shake off his urge to move abroad.

I don’t regret leaving New York, nor do I regret settling in Tbilisi. It may be an unconventional path, but if you know me well, you know that I was going to do something crazy anyway.

However, no matter what happens to me, there’s always corporate America waiting to put me in golden handcuffs.

The article I had written for this week didn’t feel right in the context of the holidays. Therefore, this week’s From the archive is going to be a short year in review in chronological order.

I entered the year while visiting my family and friends in the United States. It was my first trip back since moving abroad in early 2022. If felt weird coming back; the food portions were huge, and the people were polite. It was nice seeing friends. I could speak “normal” English instead of the slow Euro-English that I’ve learned to speak in Georgia when people couldn’t understand me.

I went to Albania again. I drove to Batumi with a guy who promised to run our new film lab, only for him to decide that he didn’t want to run the lab after all.

I ended up flying back to the US a second time in March for family reasons. It was brutal, flying halfway across the world only for a week. I didn’t sleep much as I had an intern working at the gallery who required constant feedback. She would get into work at 3am US Central Time…

I went to Yerevan to participate in a group exhibition only to find that despite including an image of mine, they didn’t include my name in any documentation.

I curated a terrible open call art exhibition.

I moved the gallery from our street level location to the third floor of an office building in 40° C heat (around 104° F).

I went to Svaneti and hiked to the top of a glacier. I suffered from heat exhaustion in Zugdidi days later (I almost missed my train back to Tbilisi).

I was invited to check out Contemporary Istanbul in September. I met a lot of interesting people from around the world and gained a better understanding of the art business.

I made a lot of new friends during this period and lost many of them after October 7 (political ideology).

I sold our remaining film lab equipment.

I launched the filmclub.ge website which changed what I thought about myself and what I was capable of.

I turned the gallery into a Soviet apartment for an exhibition nobody could find the entrance to.

I decided to move to another country only to realize that I have momentum in Georgia, and I don’t want to give it up.

გილოცავთ ახალ წელს. Let’s see what happens in 2024.

I’ve had a really busy week. The film business is taking off, the gallery is moving online and I’m slowly getting ready to move countries. I even started writing another article for the week, but it’s not ready yet, and today’s my self-imposed publication deadline. [The article’s coming out Friday. -Future David]

This had me thinking about what it means to put something meaningful out on a regular schedule. The beauty of writing is that it’s flexible — I can write 2 or 3 long articles in a day if I’m really inspired, or I can write nothing for weeks if I’m not.

Sometimes I have ideas that would be really interesting to read about, but when I go about writing about them, I realize they’re half-baked and not as interesting as I thought.

However, the writing process itself forces you to think stuff through; I’ve written some stuff that wasn’t fully developed until all of the words were written down.

I’m flying to the United States in January (that’s not where I’m moving to). This means many hours on airplanes and in airports, the perfect limbo in which to write.

I was a content writer when I first came to Georgia. I found it torturous. However, when killing time in airports, it felt good. I felt inspired (whatever inspiration means when you can’t leave the building you’re in).

I used to fly from Tbilisi to New York via Munich, and that connection was often 6 - 12 hours long. The international terminal in Munich is relatively small, and after walking through it several times, I would inevitably sit down and produce decent work.

About a year ago I landed a consistent content writing gig with some kind of cooking blog. I was writing articles about how to make turkey and other things I’d never cooked before. At the time I really needed the money, so I tried really hard on my first task.

My boss really liked it and started giving me a lot of assignments. However, I got too comfortable too quickly, and the quality of the work declined rapidly. Apart from not knowing how to cook the things I was writing about, I didn’t care to know how to do so.

I remember waiting until the last minute to finish one of those articles. I had just arrived in Munich from New York, and my flight to Georgia wouldn’t be for another twelve hours.

I decided to go into the city. Apart from a brief break looking at the Frauenkirche, I hopped around from café to café writing an article, the contents of which I no longer remember. My boss didn’t like it

Despite forcing myself, I ultimately decided that I would write whatever came to me, ignoring the quality of the results. This was my last content writing job.

I hated content writing. The subject matter was boring, the articles were unattributed, (not that I would have wanted my name on them anyway) and the pay could have been better. I decided that I wouldn’t write things that I wasn’t interested in anymore.

This newsletter is the first thing I’ve written in many years that I’ve (mostly) enjoyed process of making. Even articles like this that amount to a rant elicit some element of joy.

I’ll leave you with this for this week — sit down and do something. Have you procrastinated on writing something? Open your Notes app and spend ten minutes writing the first thing that comes to mind.

Painting something? Paint something.

Taking meaningful action to move your career forward? Go into your boss’s office and refuse to leave until they double your salary (I cannot be held legally responsible for the consequences of my sarcastic advice).

Do something.

I’ve dedicated a significant portion of my waking time to languages. My native language is Russian, but growing up in the US, my primary language is English. I learned Ukrainian as a teenager traveling back to my parents’ home country. At university I learned French and Hebrew; the former interested me generally, and I was compelled to learn the other one because of my ethnic background. Additionally, I learned basic Spanish in the kitchens of restaurants I used to work at in New York.

Now that I live in Georgia, I can add Georgian to that list (although I’m not exactly fluent).

I generally identify as speaking five languages. This indirectly translates to having five personalities, nuances and all. Those of you who are polyglots may have noticed that whenever your language environment changes, so to does your behavior.

With every language comes a new tonality. Your body language changes too. You talk with your hands more, you take long pauses. Perhaps you even think before you open your mouth.

In this article, I’m going to summarize how I feel about each of my languages.

English

Admittedly , English is the language I’m most comfortable speaking. It’s the language of my societal upbringing and most of my education. It’s the language that comes most naturally to me.

I effortlessly understand the cultural nuances that come with English. I hadn’t put much thought into this until I showed a Russian friend of mine an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, a comedic show about a self-obsessed Jew, Larry David, living in LA. It immediately became apparent that without an understanding of American and Jewish culture, the show is extremely confusing, and most of the jokes are difficult to understand. Furthermore, viewers should also familiarize themselves with stereotypes about people in Los Angeles and what that city means in the context of American culture.

My English has definitely gotten worse since I left the United States as I’m no longer using it nearly one hundred percent of the time. It helps that I’ve met some Americans here and that I’m able to communicate using normal English vocabulary instead of a dumbed down version that I use with people who otherwise wouldn’t understand what I’m saying. This newsletter also helps as I’m forced to organize my thoughts through the medium of the English language for the first time in many years.

French

Learning French was when the personality theory was born in my mind (although it isn’t an original idea). I started learning French in high school where I was forced to chose between French, Spanish and Latin.

I had previously taken some Spanish in elementary school with little to show for it, and Latin is a dead language, so French was the obvious choice for me (I wasn’t particularly interested in Spanish or Latin-American culture at the time). It’s important to be interested in the culture of your target language, otherwise you’ll get bored quickly. At one point I had attempted to learn Chinese just because it’s a “difficult” language. That didn’t last very long as there was no other motivating factor.

My French learning accelerated as I traveled to Montreal for the first time when I was sixteen. I was disappointed to find that everyone could speak English fluently. Upon hearing how horrible my French was, everything remained in English.

I later studied at NYU and ended up with a French literature degree. Almost all of the coursework was in French, and I was able to learn the language primarily through reading books.

I went to France in 2018, first to Paris, then to Lyon and Grenoble, where I studied for a summer. It was there that I realized that I am much more animated when I speak French. I was quite shy growing up, and I was able to somewhat overcome that timidity in childhood through developing myself in that language.

I use my hands and have much more tonality in my voice when I speak French. This change in behavior creates a disconnect from my past “self,” allowing me to become more expressive.

Now at twenty-five years old, I no longer feel particularly shy in any language. Nonetheless, the French “me” could talk to any stranger before the English me could.

I once saw a car with French license plates stop in front of my office here in Tbilisi. The driver got out, and I asked him, in French, if he had driven all the way from France. Zurab, the driver, was Georgian. He had lived in France for many years.

We stood there and chatted for twenty minutes. He gave me his number and said to call him if I needed anything (very Georgian).

I don’t think English me would have done that. I’ve seen cars in Tbilisi with UK plates, but I’ve never once inquired regarding their journey.

Russian

I have a difficult relationship with Russian. It’s my parents’ primary language, and before I started going to school, it was the only language I knew. Growing up in America meant that while my Russian vocabulary was rather developed, the cultural bits of speaking Russian were conveyed in a limited capacity.

I was not aware of this gap until I traveled to Moscow with my mom at the age of thirteen. It was quite difficult to understand what people were saying to me, and I couldn’t quite grasp what was going on. This experience left me quite nervous speaking.

This nervousness persists to this day. I’m afraid of making mistakes, and I’m petrified of not understanding a particular word which a native speaker would otherwise.

I speak with a slight or no accent (depends on who you ask), and as a result, when I have one of these lapses, it’s not obvious to the other person that I’m a foreigner. This has lead to some awkwardness in the past.

Sometimes I out myself as an American early on in order to secure plausible deniability. Then, when I make a very strange mistake, there’s an excuse.

Living in Georgia has helped me with my Russian. I met a lot of people my age from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, and I’ve been able to speak more clearly.

Ukrainian

Ukrainian is fun. I understand almost everything people say to me (unless they’re from the border regions of Western Ukraine, in which case nobody can understand what they’re saying).

I went to Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine, for the first time when I was fourteen years old. At this stage I only knew a few words. I quickly discovered that if I spoke Russian in that city that nobody would help me and that English was much more effective even if many people couldn’t understand what I was saying.

The English situation in Lviv and in the rest of Ukraine has significantly improved since then, and so has my Ukrainian level. I feel more free speaking Ukrainian than Russian because it feels like a foreign language to me. I an express more emotion and feel less cringe when I make mistakes.

Hebrew

I decided to learn Hebrew in university because I’m Jewish. This was the first non-Indo-European language that I decided to learn.

I grew up with a poor connection to Jewish culture. In my secular post-Soviet family, religion was taboo. This was not simply speaking because of my parents’ ideology, but rather my parents’ and grandparents’ upbringing in a totalitarian, atheist state.

Israelis are not shy to tell you when you’re not speaking well. If I speak Hebrew for more than a few minutes, I am usually asked to speak English. This is not dissimilar to when I attempted to learn Chinese and my Taiwanese roommate told me I shouldn’t even try to speak if I’m going to pronounce words like that.

Despite the discouragement, I find myself drawn deeper into the language as world events unfold.

Georgian

As of this writing, Georgian is the latest addition to my languages. I moved to Georgia at the beginning of 2022, and I have an article that briefly explains how I ended up here. The only word I knew before I came here was გამარჯობა (gamarjoba; hello).

Learning Georgian has been more interesting than learning any other language as I haven’t had any formal instruction. First I learned how to read (the alphabet is mostly phonetic, it’s the easiest part of learning Georgian, trust me). Then I learned basic vocabulary primarily in taxis talking to the driver. Their GPS taught me the words for right, left, straight, traffic light and so on.

I attempted to take lessons a few times, but I wasn’t able to find a teacher that would work with me in my preferred format, which is discussing very complex things and me asking what words mean when I don’t understand.

As I speak Georgian daily, I feel like it’s my new “default” language. I associate the language with going through the motions of life.

More likely than not, I’m leaving Georgia for good sometime next year, so perhaps I’ll write an article about my sixth personality in the near future.

When the time came, we would execute. Maybe, if everything went really well, we would do a second thing that day. On some magical days, we would do a third or even a fourth thing. Doing a fifth thing in a single day was unheard of.

Any rational person may now wonder what it is that I’m talking about. What exactly is a thing? Put simply, a thing is the main actionable task you’re trying to accomplish on any given day.

Many of us set lofty goals. In our hustle culture dystopia, the more you accomplish during your waking hours, the greater your value as a human being. These hours should be extended as long as possible, impairing judgement as long as you can tell everyone you’ve ever met (and those who you’ve yet to meet) that you wake up at four every morning. I like to think that I’ve overcome this way of thinking (mostly).

My old boss would take a step back and ask the golden questions: What is the one thing I could do today that will move whatever I’m doing along? Instead of wasting all day on busy-work nonsense, we would focus on just one thing.

Would said thing take the entirety of the day to complete? Probably not. Would said thing make you feel more productive than other things? It depends. Nonetheless, the thing in question will move other things along the most. Said thing was the most high-impact activity.

I’m working on a billion projects right now (okay, five if we count them up). I used to plan these out meticulously. For each project I’d write down the next five to ten steps that I perceived to be necessary in order to move them along. While this seemed like the right thing to do (it’s what many self-appointed productivity experts claim is best), it becomes totally overwhelming, especially when you have a diversified set of goals.

Ultimately, I wouldn’t get very much done. My mind would instead experience a loop of anxious thinking. Not the result I was hoping for.

That’s when, recently, I returned to the idea of only one thing. Now, every evening (or morning, I’m only human), I make a list of each of my five projects and only mark one task for each.

The task is selected based on what I thing will move the project the furthest that day. That’s it. There’s nothing more to this. I’ve never been more productive.

Subscribe now

Potential objections:

1. Only one thing? There are 16 waking hours everyday (20 hours if you hate yourself enough). What am I supposed to do all day?

Enjoy your life. For many of us, myself included, it’s very difficult simply to be. I have a joke amongst my friends that the meaning of life is simply არის (aris, the Georgian word for is). What I mean by this is that we must learn to sit with ourselves, to be in the moment.

Another point I’d like to make is that while we have a lot of hours in the day, we’re not running at peak performance all day.

I, for example, am a morning person. My most productive hours are from eight in the morning until noon (it’s about ten in the morning as I write this article). Unless there’s an urgent deadline, I do the vast majority of my work before noon. I’m still working in the afternoon, but not as hard.

If you’re a night person, your productive time is likely going to be later in the day. That’s fine. The point is that whatever needs to get done needs to be getting done at peak hours.

2. If I only do one task daily, my competition will destroy me.

While this seems to be the case, I don’t think that most of the people claiming to work 16 hours everyday are actually being productive during all of those hours. Apart from the genetic freaks among us (let’s be honest, you’ve either got it or you don’t), most of us cannot sustain such a schedule.

What I’m promoting is a sustainable approach to a productive life. Instead of a seasonal sprint followed by burnout (there will be a future article about this), my approach can be maintained consistently for many years. Consistency is the pièce de résistance to a fulfilling life.

3. Every thing is made up of many little things. Where do I draw the line?

My view is that a thing should take up approximately 3 or 4 hours of undivided attention. If you’re feeling scandalous, do one thing, have lunch, do a second thing.

This article didn’t take me three hours to write; I’ve only been sitting here for about thirty minutes. That was my thing for the purpose of my writing, one of five of my projects.

Tomorrow I will edit this article and insert the images, but for today, since I have plenty of energy, I’m going to now tackle my one thing for project number two. That should be enough to do until lunch.

This week won’t be the standard one-thing-a-day model as there’s an exhibition in the gallery on Thursday, so that has to be sorted.

Until next week.

This image is of Rustavi, Georgia, from a hill tens of kilometers away. I’ve been living in this country, Georgia, for nearly two years now. How did I end up here? I ask myself that question often.

I came here for fun in the beginning of 2022. I was working in real estate in Manhattan and hated it. I had just changed companies, from a tiny brokerage in Ridgewood with a great manager to a soulless office high rise in the city. I sold my car and booked a one way ticket to the other side of the world.

I landed in Tbilisi with no plan. I spent about a month wandering around. I thought about opening a coffee shop (luckily I didn’t). Instead, I opened an art gallery (even worse decision). Thus, in a basement on the corner of Kekelidze and Paliashvili Street, Dissolution was born.

I did everything wrong. Hired the wrong person, did the wrong marketing, surrounded myself with people who didn’t share my interests. I learned a lot about business, money and life. I put too much trust in people I barely knew. I just wanted to do something. I thought about quitting a thousand times. I did quit publicly, only to then become inspired a week later.

Okay, I didn’t do everything wrong. We had a few great exhibitions, one even sold out. We participated in Tbilisi Art Fair in 2022. I’ve sold some of my own work. I started a moderately successful import business. I discovered myself and my identity. I learned how to better screen people and how not to jump into things head first with strangers.

So, friends (and enemies), join me on this journey. More next week.

Subscribe now