Same beans, same grinder, same mug. But Saturday morning coffee tastes better than Tuesday morning coffee.
On a Tuesday I’m drinking coffee while running through a 23-item task list, mentally rehearsing the standup, calculating how many minutes until I need to switch contexts. The coffee is just background noise. On a Saturday, I’m drinking coffee. That’s it. I can actually taste it.
Naval Ravikant defined happiness as the absence of desire. Most of us are carrying around dozens of small desires. The urge to check your phone, the pull to be somewhere more important, the need to feel productive.
I think about this a lot because I’ve felt the treadmill firsthand. I reached a point of enough financial stability that the background noise went quiet. But new desires showed up almost immediately. A bigger score. The treadmill just upgraded.
So I started watching for what fewer desires looks like.
People who travel without a packed itinerary. No pressure to see five landmarks in a day to get most out of their trip.
Empty calendars. Packed schedules used to signal importance. Now I see a packed calendar as someone else controlling your time.
Phone permanently on do not disturb. Slack notifications off, email badges gone, no reflexive pocket check every 2 minutes. Laptop stays closed on the plane.
People who don’t need an exotic vacation to recharge. A coffee and a walk in the park does the job.
Investing in the S&P 500 and leaving it alone.
Obsessing over weird hobbies for unreasonable amounts of time.
People who have stopped accumulating obligations.
Some of these people have money. Others refuse to pay the price of wanting more.
I keep asking myself what I can eliminate.
I want to delete WhatsApp from my phone and not worry about what I’m missing. Say no to things without rehearsing a justification. Be in fewer meetings because presence isn’t proof of contribution. Spend an entire afternoon obsessing over typography without a voice in the back of my head calculating the opportunity cost.
I’m not there yet. I check my email too often, I feel a pull to look busy, and I catch myself measuring days by how productive they were instead of how present I was. But I’m paying attention now.
My coffee still tastes better on Saturdays. I’m working on making Tuesdays taste the same.