Yesterday evening I was going through my pictures with Photo Swoop, an app that lets you clean up your folders Tinder-style: swipe right to keep a picture, swipe left to delete it. It saves a lot of effort, since you don’t have to tap twice to delete each picture.

While swiping, I resurfaced an old TikTok of an interview with Liam Payne, who was a member of One Direction. He talked about what it was like to be in a boy band and tour the world, and said it severely limited his freedom. As he told the story, I could picture it: they go on tour, get on the bus, travel to the next city, check into the hotel, play the show, go back to the hotel room. Then they’re alone in their rooms with a minibar, and that’s basically how he got into drinking.

The point is that these people are richer than 99% of the population. Their bank accounts show huge numbers, yet they’ve built lives in which they’re as restricted as someone in prison. Somehow their decisions led them to a life that robs them of both autonomy and connection, two basic human needs. They have shallow fans instead of real relationships, end up isolated in hotel rooms with little else to do, and are stuck in their contracts. So someone can look rich and have a lot of money, but be in debt to obligations and responsibilities. Be careful what you wish for.

I’ve also been following the Chess Olympiad 2026 these past few days, and I see the same thing play out on the board. When grandmasters outplay other grandmasters, it’s not only through tactics. What enables the tactics is that one player gains freedom of choice while the other gets more and more restricted: their pieces have fewer and fewer options. It’s fascinating to watch the player with the better position allow no counterplay and no infiltration, using Zugzwang in a very clever way.

I see the same thing in my own life. You don’t want to keep buying more and more; you want to pour energy into things that actually replenish you and contribute to your well-being. Funnily enough, buying more stuff, doing more, and achieving more doesn’t lead there. Being sick almost constantly over the last couple of months has opened my eyes to that: the way I’ve been living isn’t good for my well-being.

I hate the word agency, but if I had to describe my journey in the last five years, it has been about gaining more agency, gaining more freedom, or at least studying the structures around myself very deeply, to discover hidden affordances, just to make sense of how things work, maneuvering my way through life. That has been an enlightening experience, developing my Hacker Mindset, and just figuring out how to get what I want, and becoming aware of what I need, processing my shame, and grieving, that has made me more open and more free.