It's Saturday night. You're sitting on your chair, staring at your laptop screen. You've done everything right — the affirmations, the vision board, the gratitude journal. You meditated this morning. You "let go" like they told you to.

And nothing changed.

So you grab your phone. You scroll. You find another manifestation technique, another spiritual teacher saying trust the timing. You save the post. You put the phone down. You pick it up again.

Because the silence is unbearable. Because if you sit still long enough, there's a question creeping in that you don't want to hear:

I know that question. I lived in it for years.

And I had it all backwards.

It's a Tuesday. Maybe 10 PM.

I'm supposed to sleep because I have work the next day.

But there I was, alone in my room, where the only light was from my laptop screen. I've just closed three YouTube tabs and opened three more — some manifestation guy explaining how to reprogram your subconscious, a frequency video with a matrix-green thumbnail, something about quantum jumping I'll never watch past minute two. My whole body feels like a room with all the furniture removed and no clean air to breathe. I'm not looking for information. I'm looking for a feeling. Something that tells me this is going somewhere. That I'm going somewhere. But it's just me, the glow of the screen, and a mind that won't stop negotiating with the universe for a life that feels light years away.

But here's the thing nobody talks about in those videos — you're not searching for a technique. You're searching for noise. Anything loud enough to drown out the three things you can't sit with:

The loneliness, the boredom, and the quiet, painful suspicion that you're standing still while the whole world moves on without you.

The YouTube tabs aren't research. They're painkillers. And like any painkiller, they don't fix what's broken. They just make you forget it's broken — until the video ends and the room is quiet again.

So what do you do when you can't sit with that?

You don't stop. You double down.

My own voice, through earbuds, on repeat. I said it in the morning. Between breaks. Before sleep. I said it so many times it stopped sounding like words.

Some nights, after pressing play, I'd just lie there smiling. I could see the car. The suitcase by the door. The boarding pass on my phone. I'd open Booking.com and scroll through hotels in places I couldn't afford yet — not to book anything, just to feel like I was closer. Like if I zoomed in enough on the photos, I could almost step inside.

Days went by. Then weeks. Then months. Nothing moved. I told myself I was doing something wrong — not affirming enough, not believing hard enough. The blame was always on me. Never the YouTube guy, never the book, never the universe. Me.

One night, I'm lying in bed, eyes closed, my own recording playing on loop — and I catch myself mouthing the words like a prayer I don't believe in anymore.

And I realize:

Another painkiller. Just dressed up in my own voice.

One year ago, I got a call from a close friend. He told me about a ski trip that was planned out. The hotel. The train tickets. The flight to France. Every single step was laid out.

At the end, he told me the sum.

I immediately said no. "I can't bro, I don't have the money for it now."

And my voice cracked on "now" — like my body was admitting something my pride still couldn't. I swallowed hard. Silence on the other end. I could hear him breathing, deciding whether to push back or let it go. And in that silence, I felt the full weight of it — not just this trip, but every trip I'd been declining for years while pretending I was "trusting the process."

I smiled, but nothing came out. Every declined invitation from the past few years flashed through my mind — the birthdays, the trips, the "maybe next time bro" that we both knew meant no. I wanted to say yes immediately, but something in me wouldn't let it. Like accepting meant admitting the grind hadn't taken me anywhere.

I said yes. Quietly. Almost to myself more than to him.

After I hung up, I just sat there. I didn't feel relieved. I felt exposed. Like I'd been holding a door shut for years and someone had just walked around it. I stared at the ceiling and waited for the guilt to show up — the voice that says you can't afford this, you haven't earned this. It came. But it was quieter than I expected.

I didn't affirm this trip. I didn't write it down in present tense. I didn't visualize it before sleep. It just came. And the only thing I had to do was stop saying no.

For the first time, I didn't need the thing I wanted to save me from the life I had. I just said yes to what showed up.

After that ski trip, I didn't have some big revelation about life. I just noticed what I stopped doing.

I stopped opening Booking.com at night. I stopped pressing play on my own voice telling me about a life I didn't have. Not because I gave it up — I just didn't feel the pull anymore. Saying yes to something I hadn't planned, hadn't manifested, hadn't earned on my own terms — it loosened something. The grip I had on how things were supposed to happen.

I used to think manifestation meant I had to build the life I wanted in my head first, then wait for reality to catch up. But reality was never behind. I was. I was so busy designing a future in my mind that I kept saying no to the present that was actually trying to hand me things.

And now when I think about that person on the chair — Saturday night, laptop open, doing everything right — I don't want to teach them anything. I just want to tell them: the life you keep trying to download isn't in the next video. It's in the call you almost didn't answer. The invite you almost declined. The moment you almost missed because you were too busy pressing play.

You did everything right. But the thing that changed it wasn't something you did. It was something you let in.

All Love,

Tomas

P.S. — Something new is coming. If this piece hit you, you'll want to be here for what's next.