40

Stockholm, 2024.

It's 2025 now and my age just reached 40.

40 may be an entirely new era for most people just because of the figure 40+ vs 30+. Just like products with something like £9.9 vs £10. But thing is: changes are always incremental.

From The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman I learnt that humans are imperfect so human errors should be embraced. Zero errors is not our discipline but we can aim it with creative ways like designing workflows and machines because we are born to be creative and flexible not robots.

Unfortunately our schools, workspaces and surrounding social networks always remind us of being disciplined like this, being careful not to make mistakes, being productive even with blame resulting in learned helplessness including guilty and shame.

I used to be this: always urge myself to be super fast without making mistakes... but I always ended up being miserable.

Doesn’t mean I don’t need to be responsible. But responsibility is to do something that people can't help you to: like reading, sleeping well, drawing in your own style, travelling to somewhere, learn something new — simply put, do something you like!

When you are 40, you already have more than 40 years of life, which is not too short at least, so I should have less worries and burden about how long I can live... I should live more freely than before!