The Life That's Already Here

We drove to Vancouver last weekend. No particular reason. My wife and I had a free Saturday and Sunday, and Vancouver is close enough from Bellevue that you can leave in the morning, cross the border, and be walking around a different city by early afternoon.

After checking into the hotel we walked to the waterfront and took a water taxi to Granville Island. We found a spot at one of the food stalls and ordered lobster rolls. A street musician was playing nearby. He was playing Tennessee Whiskey. I remember eating slowly and not checking my phone.

For about an hour, nothing else existed. Not my job, not the projects piling up at work, not PuraLetra sitting at thirty users, not the essay I needed to write by Friday. Not the question of what I'm building or whether it's working. Just a lobster roll, a musician, and a Saturday afternoon in a city that wasn't home, accompanied by my wife.

I haven't had many moments like that lately.

The past few weeks have been full. Work has been intense. Work has kept me busy beyond my usual scope. I've been helping outside my team, and there are a few things on the horizon I'm still thinking through. I had a company hackathon. Participated with two different projects. Next week I fly to Chicago for a work on-site, and after that my wife is meeting me and we're flying to New York to visit our son and daughter.

Meanwhile, PuraLetra has been sitting still. Thirty free users. I shipped a couple of new features recently, article collections and a trend discovery page, but the user count hasn't moved. The newsletter picked up a few new subscribers, but the LinkedIn engagement that felt strong in the first few weeks has slowed down. By any measurable standard, the building-my-way-out project is in a quiet period.

I am not going to pretend that doesn't bother me. I write a weekly essay about building toward independence, and right now I'm not building much. I'm working, I'm traveling, I'm living. But the side of things that's supposed to be my future is on pause.

There is a version of productivity culture that would tell me the Vancouver weekend was a mistake. That I should have been shipping features, writing copy, figuring out distribution. That every weekend is either a sprint toward the exit or a wasted opportunity. I've read enough of that advice to recognize it. I've also lived long enough to know it's wrong.

My kids live across the country in New York. My wife and I have the kind of life where we can drive to another country on a Saturday morning because the weather looked good. If I can't enjoy that because I'm calculating how many more users PuraLetra needs, then I've already lost the thing I'm supposedly building toward.

This is the part that's easy to forget. The whole premise of this series is that I want more freedom, more autonomy, more control over how I spend my days. But some of that freedom is already here. Not all of it. Not the financial part. But the part where I get to sit on Granville Island with my wife on a Saturday afternoon or take a long walk around Stanley Park and not think about anything for an hour. That part exists right now.

I think about my parents in Mexico. They didn't have a plan to build their way out of anything. They worked because that was what you did, and they rested when they could. But the moments I remember most from growing up aren't the ones where they were productive. They're the ones where we were all sitting together doing nothing in particular. A meal that lasted too long. A conversation that went nowhere. An evening where nobody had anywhere to be. A surprise weekend-long trip to Chapala just because.

Those moments weren't wasted time. They were the whole point.

I'm not arguing against building. I'll be back at it this week. I'll keep writing essays on Fridays, keep improving PuraLetra, keep working through the math I laid out a few essays ago. The exit number hasn't changed. The desire to get there hasn't changed either.

But I'm starting to notice something about how I frame this project, even to myself. I talk about it as a journey toward something. Building my way out. As if the life I want is somewhere in the future, waiting for me to arrive. And maybe some of it is. But the Vancouver weekend reminded me that a lot of what I'm building toward is already happening in the spaces between the building.

Next week I'll be in Chicago for work. I am excited to meet some of my new coworkers in person. The week after, I'll be in New York with my family. I'll write from wherever I am. But I'm going to try to be there, too. Actually there. Not planning the next feature while my son or daughter is talking to me. Not drafting an essay in my head while walking through a city I love walking through.

The building will be here when I get back. It always is.

This is essay eight of Building My Way Out, a weekly series about one engineer's attempt to build a life beyond employment. New essays every Friday. If you're not subscribed, you can sign up here.