What Did I Tell You About Thinking?
“When I am… completely myself, entirely alone… or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not, nor can I force them.”
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I wish I had some clean, stoic, neatly optimized explanation for why I’m writing this, but the truth is simpler: I’ve been walking around for months feeling like I might explode.
That’s usually how these pieces happen.
When trying to write these one off pieces, I usually spend months writing little things down into my notes. One liners, ideas, quotes, things I see, all end up in the notes app. The pressure builds and builds until one day I can’t take it anymore. It is like I am about to explode from the inside out unless I sit down to write.
And every time I ask myself the same question:
Why the hell am I like this?
Why do I think so much?
The quote on the tea I’m drinking right now is staring me in the face as I write - “Everything will happen the way it has to happen. Everything you’re stressing about will eventually fall into place.“
Thanks tea bag.
The last few months have been nothing but the universe giving me tests disguised as delays: sick babies, old friends popping back into my life, late-night spirals, and the kind of exhaustion where your soul feels hungover.
A rebirth, apparently.
Happy 33rd birthday to me.
the trip.
Flash back to May 2025. Our baby got sick before our trip to the east coast. My wife and I had very little sleep for multiple days. We both turned to each other in bed as the baby cried viciously through the baby monitor. My wife says out loud what I am thinking, “Should we cancel the trip?”
After some pacing around, I think of my old friend Jack. Jack would say “What did I tell you about thinking Molesy?”
“No we are getting on that plane.” I tell my wife.
It’s going to be hard but just do it.
Bring your kids along for the ride.
Don’t think too much about it.
We took planes, trains, and automobiles across our travels from the west to the east coast and had a blast. Some plans were on time and others severely delayed. However, sometimes when things go wrong it turns into a funny memory later on.
the overthinking spiral.
Stop thinking.
I find myself doing just that too much - over thinking. Overthinking this blog, my work, my life, my wardrobe, all of life’s inconsistencies. Perfection and control is what us humans want but life and especially children remind us that life is anything but that.
I often look for answers about life’s secrets in books. I have read a lot of books. I love to read. Yet lately, I pick up a book about love and it doesn’t make my love life better. I pick up a book about Stoicism or Buddhism and I feel less happy, peaceful, calm. I start over thinking. Why the fuck am I reading these books?
All these books on how to be happy, peaceful and live a good life, yet we are more unhappy.
Fuck the quotes. Fuck stoicism. Monk mode is overrated. Stop outsourcing intuition to books. Don’t look for the meaning of life, stop searching. Be yourself, embrace your individuality, leave a dent. Be a beauty.
rebirth.
The universe works in mysterious ways I tell you.
Right before I turned 33 — that age people love to assign “rebirth” energy to — life basically sat me in the last row of a very delayed airplane and said:
“Here. Sit with your bullshit. Think about your life up until this point.”
Old friends came back.
New memories formed.
Everything felt like a full-circle moment to me. A completion of a multi decade cycle if you will. It was the kind of moment you don’t notice until you’re forced to slow down. Well delayed 2 hours, deplaned, then stuffed into the back row by the bathroom with your wife, child, and your wife’s grandmother.
You gotta get lost to find yourself. Annoying, but true. And somewhere in the middle of sickness, chaos, airports, exhaustion, and mild existential dread… I started feeling something like clarity.
Not the clean kind.
Not the spiritual kind.
The real kind — the kind that comes after you’ve mentally given up and accidentally fall back into who you actually are.
the single tree.
While I was on that airplane sitting with my thoughts, I wrote this - “The mountains get the credit, the eye balls, the views. Give me the forest, the single tree in the vastness of life. Show me the small things that make up the large. For that is what makes the mountains.”
Life happens in the micro, not the macro.
washed up.
So yeah.
I’ve been washed up.
Overthinking everything until my back hurt, my shoulder tightened, and my brain felt like it might actually explode.
But washed up isn’t failure. It’s a clearing of what you thought was all true in this world.
It’s what happens right before the next version of you steps forward. It’s what happens before you trust yourself again. Before you stop gripping so hard. Before you stop searching. Before you start living instead of thinking about living.
So here’s what I learned:
Stop thinking so much. Thanks Jack.
Stop the self-help.
Stop trying to solve life like a math problem.
Pay less attention. Be less informed.
Oh and bring your kid(s). Get on the plane. Write your own story. Trust your own gut. Be yourself. Be a beauty. And if things go wrong? Fuck it…those become the best memories anyway.
Washed up isn’t the end. It’s where the real beginnings hide.
Cheers to the next chapter,
-Molesy
P.S. This story didn’t make the cut but I wanted to include it:
I watched this guy driving in NYC park, get out, open the trunk of his mini van, and use it as a shield from the rain while he smoked a cigarette. For some reason it was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a while. Truly not giving a flying fuck and totally in the moment despite the pouring rain. He just sat there and stared into the wet distance as I waited for my wife to finish shopping. We both were having a moment it seems.