Back on November 8th, my wife and I went to see a show by Dani Rovira. If you don’t know him, he is a massive standup comedian here in Spain. My absolute favorite.
During the show, he dropped a line that has stuck with me ever since: “Anxiety is living in the future, depression is living in the past.”
He delivered it with his usual funny touch, but let’s be real—it is a simple, powerful truth. It reminds me of that famous quote by Michel de Montaigne: “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
Through late 2024 and the beginning of 2025, I struggled a lot with depression. I opened up about it in this article. It wasn’t until recently that I realized why: for the first time in my life, I was living more in the past than in the present or the future.
You can imagine that working on AsyncAPI forced me to live in the future all the time. To lead a project like that, you have to be ahead of the rest of the world by a few years. I was used to having anxiety. I wasn’t used to depression.
But living in the future bites you, too.
Last summer, I went to the Pyrenees with my family in a van. A full month. No laptops. Just tons of books, mostly philosophy by Byung-Chul Han (recommended by @aleixmorgadas). Paradoxically, I hit peak anxiety there. I was obsessed with figuring out what was next for my career. I guess I had too much time to think. That is exactly when I realized I was tired of being “the AsyncAPI guy.” I wrote more about that realization here.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, and I had another spike of anxiety.
I got obsessed with how to make Commune’s network grow as fast as humanly possible. I was on week two with Commune, for crying out loud! Four newsletters and about 50 users is a really good starting point. But my brain was racing ahead, trying to live in a future that hadn’t happened yet.
Luckily, going to therapy has given me the tools to handle this.
As soon as I noticed the anxiety creeping in, I put the laptop on the table. I lay back in my chair, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. Five minutes later, I was on the street going for a walk. Thirty minutes later, I was back home. No anxiety. I could see things with perspective again.
If there is one thing you take away from this, let it be this: get the tools.
Go to therapy. Do it even if you don’t think you need it yet. It is way better to go early than late. You want to have the toolkit ready before the anxiety or the depression hits.
Honestly, it’s not just about managing your own head. It’s about surviving the noise everyone else makes. We don’t live in a bubble. When people refuse to look inward or deal with their own baggage, they tend to dump it on everyone else. We end up having to do the work just to handle the impact of their chaos.
To paraphrase Dani Rovira again with a sentence that is funny because it is painfully true:
“I’m absolutely sick of having to go to therapy because of people who won’t go.”
Take care y'all!
