2024 was incredibly rough … but it taught me a lot

We’re closing on 2024, It’s been a rough ride, this year taught me a lot.

This year felt like a storm, like I had my head under water. I’ve had three jobs, struggled with immigration, almost burnt-out and had nowhere to stay at some point.

And I think that we should all do that, introspect at the end of the year.

To take a look at what we’ve failed, accomplished or went through and to then create a vision for the year to come.

So here’s my doing this, and those are the five main lessons I learned the hard way this year.

The Storm Doesn’t Last Forever

January of this year, I came back to Canada after returning to Europe.

To be honest, I thought I wouldn’t come back, but I did.

At the time, I had no apartment, a job that paid minimum wage, and I was trying to build my case to apply for permanent residency while facing some problems with the immigration procedure.

Everything felt distant and impossible, as if life here could only be rough, bumpy, and draining.

My mindset at the time wasn’t the greatest. I was just hanging in there, in the middle of the storm, feeling like I had no control over anything.

That being said when I decided to come back, I also decided to bring order into my life and do everything required for me to live a more fulfilled and less hectic life.

Anxiety was the biggest enemy. I felt like my head was always just above water, while the rest of my body was immersed in cold water.

I had graduated from university a few months prior and was working full-time at minimum wage, unable to see a way out.

Right after uni, I started working a 9-5 as a social worker and let's just say that it wasn't the life I'd envision for myself. Having to do overtime, going to court every other day and the rest of your time destroying your brain on an old computer screen.

I quit that job after 3 months, I said no to that life and I started doing part-time coaching, and the rest of my hours were spent cleaning the gym and picking up after people.

I’ve always been an anxious person, and I know it’s easy for me to get stuck into anxiety loops. Where my mind races, and my thoughts are negative all the time.

And remember, it was winter, in Canada. You get up in the morning tired, go to work while it’s still dark outside, and come home at 6 or 7 PM when it’s dark again.

Everyday feels like it's the same and you can't differentiate them anymore.

I’ve realized that those are patterns, loops and that those storms aren’t as bad when you look at them from an outside perspective.

Those hard times will forge your mind if you go through them with a growth mindset.

If you’re willing to learn, understand, and observe, hard times will show you exactly the way out. And sometimes, the way out isn’t out there in real life. Sometimes, the way out is within, you have to shift your mindset.

More often than not, the real storm is in your head rather than in real life. By that, I mean there’s little objective or physical danger, but emotionally, your brain is still operating under loads of stress.

The storm is there, and you have to go through it anyway, so the only thing that really matters is your perception of what’s happening and the way you react to it.

As long as you don’t give up, as long as you keep going, you’ll eventually make it out. I’ve learned that it’s your duty to be optimistic; otherwise, you’ll be crushed.

And people don’t always win, by the way. I’ve met people who have been crushed by the storms in their lives.

Even if they’re still functional and waking up in the morning, they gave up a long time ago.

You can see it. They no longer believe they can make it out. They’re stuck in the same reality forever, even when brighter days have replaced the clouds and there’s nothing left to fear.

They’ve been so traumatized by the tempest that it’s safer for them to behave as if they’re still in the storm.

But the reality is that the storm can’t last forever. It will happen again, but you’ll deal with it the best you can, with what you’ll have. You need not to fear it; otherwise, it will dictate your life.

It is your responsibility to believe that when the time comes, you’ll be able to get out of it.

Rich People Are The Saddest

Working in the fanciest sports club on my city, I’ve learned an immensely valuable lesson that I think most people learn much later in life.

If you focus your life on the pursuit of external goals like building money, success, and wealth, you’ll probably end up being miserable.

Even though I did not have any money, I was surrounded by people who had a lot of it, and I realized that it changes almost nothing to your reality.

Shire they had Porsches, Watches that cost the deposit on a house and fancy apparel.

But rich people still have to face sickness, failed relationships, and emotional distress.

I knew that money doesn’t buy happiness—everybody knows the saying. But you still imagine that life is better with money, that with it you’ll be able to do all those great projects, move to a really cool place, and start working for yourself.

But I’ve come to find that all those things are not the byproducts of money but rather of the qualities you have to develop in order to get it.

Money is just the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t solve anything. In fact, if you’re born with money, I think it’s a disservice because you don’t have to learn all the skills needed to earn it as well as the true value of money.

Most people who have money have done the work to get it but haven’t built the deep qualities that come with earning it.

More than that, most of them have sacrificed other areas of their lives to get there: family, friendships, and physical health.

And this, in my opinion, is not worth it.

The last thing I want is to wake up when I’m 40 years old and think, “Where have the last 20 years of my life gone?”

I learned that lesson vicariously through the interactions I had with people on a daily basis. Some of those were millionaires who were going through divorces, no longer talking to their kids, and in a pre-diabetic state.

The thing I took away from those interactions is that I don’t want to end up with a lot of money but nothing else in my life. I don’t want to spend my life chasing money just for the sake of having it.

This is I think the biggest trap young people are falling for in modern societies. We're lead the believe that your life starts when you start making decent money but before that you can only hustle.

But if I don’t want this life, then I need to make different decisions. I need to prioritize other aspects of my life and make decisions based on my intrinsic motivation, not on what other people think is meaningful.

The problem is, when you’re 23 years old, you don’t have much idea about what you want from life. Instead of just letting myself wander, I’ve decided to truly search for the things I judge worthwhile in my life.

One thing’s for sure that I've understood : physical health is to me, way more important than money. That’s rule number one.

Of course, you need a certain amount of money to fulfill your basic needs, but beyond that and a little extra, working more becomes stressful, and you don’t have enough time to rest, therefore your health takes the hit.

Paradoxically, at that time, I got a second job to try to make ends meet and started working even more to have enough money to cover necessities.

But that became the goal: take great care of my physical health before anything else, money is not first on the list.

Happiness Is Not Guaranteed

Happiness is not a byproduct of life; most people around seem to be quite unhappy, in fact. Happiness, gratitude, and contentment are choices—values that you need to cultivate.

Funny thing is, no one ever told me that I had to find my own definition of happiness and that working towards society’s definition of happiness is unlikely to bring me genuine happiness.

Worse than that, you can lose your life chasing things that don’t even matter to you in the end.

You can spend your whole life working for a company you don’t care about, watching shows you don’t really pay attention to, and scrolling on Instagram looking at people you’ll never meet.

This past year taught me that modern life isn’t designed for my happiness but for efficiency. At first at thought that this was just depressive and pessimistic, but after reading enough books on the subject, I’ve come to realize it’s true.

Happiness is not guaranteed, and it’s not even the primary goal of modern society.

Paul Mazur said it in 1927: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed.”

For a hundred years now, society has been shifting towards promoting wanting, chasing, and buying.

If this led to giant economic growth (which is a good thing), it also led to never feeling like we have enough. In North America, you’re literally trained to want more, to buy more, even if this means trading your time and health for the things you want.

I realized that this is the opposite of what I want for my life. In fact, I think it’s the opposite of what everyone should want.

No one wants to spend their lives chasing random material things that society tells you that you need.

I believe all of this is motivated by comparison—social comparison. The reason I wanted to buy new and shiny stuff was because other people around me or on the internet had it or told me I should want it.

But this is not genuine. I didn’t really want or need a new jacket, a new smart watch. Just like I didn’t want to pay for a membership where people told me exactly how to get rich or invest in crypto.

All of that comes from a sense of lack. You look at the things you don’t have instead of focusing on what you do have, and that’s what this society wants because it pushes you to buy more, which leads to economic growth.

But this wouldn’t happen if you weren’t bombarded with ads all day, if you weren’t spending 4 hours per day on social media, and if you asked yourself, “What do I really want?”

The advice I'd tell myself is don’t fall for this. I’m sure half of the things on your to-buy list right now are things you want to show off to people and not things you really need.

If you want to work towards being happy, you have to shift back to a mindset of need when it comes to material possessions. Otherwise, you’ll spend your whole life chasing the new iPhone when there's a new one every year.

The Long Way Is The Short Way

We’re always looking for hacks, for ways to compress time, for the fastest route, for the most efficient way to invest, and for productivity tips.

But this stresses your brain. Your brain doesn’t really do shortcuts; you have to learn, and in order to learn, you have to put in the time and effort.

I learned that you can’t cheat the system. You can’t lie to yourself and convince yourself that you’ll be able to hack this thing, whatever it is.

In fact, looking for those shortcuts will just create more anxiety and amplify the feeling of not being enough at the moment.

Again, as someone prone to anxiety, this year I’ve learned that I needed to stop trying to move as fast as possible.

The faster you try to go, the less you can enjoy the view and appreciate the journey. And I’ve come to find that it’s not worth it.

The quicker you move, the more resources you consume, and the quicker you wear out your body.

Ultimately, in my opinion, this is the reason why most people seem overwhelmed, burnt out, and stressed every day.

It’s because they are burning their bodies way too fast, largely due to the pace of the culture. American culture is fast: fast life, fast food, fast fashion.

But if your way of living is fast, your life will feel like a glimpse.

After having experienced that, I’m convinced that the way to live life isn’t to try to fast-track the process and get access to everything as quickly as possible but rather to do the opposite.

I think we all need to slow down. I think that this current lifestyle is not sustainable and that it explains, in part, the modern rise of anxiety, depression, and unhappiness.

The reason we want a shortcut is that we want to avoid the discomfort and pain associated with the effort necessary and the time it takes to truly develop the skills we’re looking for.

But, paradoxically, by trying to hack my way through, I just ended up feeling even more overwhelmed and exhausted than if I had just taken my time and slowed the process.

This is an idea that has been hugely influenced by the book Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.

Now I believe that I should work on being more patient, that things take time, and that trying to get everything as soon as possible isn’t a sustainable way to live.

Instead, I should have a clear plan and work on it every single day. The time it takes me to achieve doesn’t really matter as long as I produce quality output and work at a natural pace.

That’s what I did in my life. I found a third and more stable job and quit the other two jobs to access more slowness and really work on my skills instead of chasing opportunities and fast money.

Rest Is Not A Sign Of Weakness

Life works in equilibrium. All living organisms tend towards a state of balance; it’s called the law of homeostasis.

If it’s cold outside, your body temperature will drop as a result, and your body will respond by heating itself up to get back to an acceptable temperature.

If you don’t sleep for a whole night because you’re up studying, you’ll have to sleep the major part of the next day.

So, if you take your body to an extreme, it'll then need to go to the other end of the spectrum to rebalance it.

I personally understood this concept on a micro scale, but this year I’ve learned that it works on a macro scale too. In fact, it applies to absolutely every sphere of your life.

Work too much, and you’ll be tired because your body will want to return to a resting state. Exercise and burn energy, and your body will produce more energy to sustain the habit.

But the most important reaction is this one : if you lack motivation, energy, or willpower, force yourself to do something hard, and your body will release dopamine as a reaction to rebalance the pain that you've experienced.

When you understand that concept, when you understand that you can deliberately trigger the response you want through a certain pattern of behavior, you unlock a human superpower.

Now for me, the equilibrium I lack is between work and rest. I tend to push the work part a lot and fail to balance it with its opposite.

I’ve accumulated a great load of fatigue without allowing my body to balance this state with the appropriate amount of rest.

This year is the first year where I’ve actually allowed my brain and body to slow down and rest more.

Most people don’t realize this. They think they can sleep 5-6 hours every night for years and not face the consequences.

Most people think they can work 40-50 hours per week and then chill out at 40 years old when they really start to make money.

I don’t think that’s true. Again, I think that in doing so, you take your mind and body to the extreme, and it tries to return to the point of homeostasis. But when you’re too far gone, you start to pay real consequences.

You develop diseases, burn out, age faster, and your mental capacities diminish. In doing so, there is no doubt you’ll just die faster.

I understood that I needed more rest and more relaxation. It took me a while to accept this and to stop seeing rest as a weakness but rather as a human need.

The problem is that the society around us, as we said earlier, operates at a very fast pace. Either you’re in the race, or you’re not.

Those who need rest are seen as weaker because they’re not as “efficient” as the rest who work 60 hours a week.

But again, it doesn’t work like that if you consider yourself a living being and not a robot. The sooner you realize this, the better, because you’ll help your body return to a state of equilibrium that’s ideal for a good life.

This is what I’ve learned in 2024 and the lessons I’ll carry into 2025. I think you should do the same.

I think you should pick up a pen and paper and write down the most important lessons you’ve learned this year.

Anyway, I hope this helps. Trust the process.