The Miserable Loop

I can pinpoint the exact moment I lost the ability to enjoy life: the day I decided, with Días Felices, that I wanted to make a living from music.

The problem wasn’t Días Felices itself but the person I became because of that decision—a person who, for 13 years, chased an idea: making a living doing what I love.

During that time, I tried to live off music, lead software development teams, and build video game studios.

The life cycle of all these projects was essentially the same, something I now call the Miserable Loop: a beginning filled with high expectations and intensity, followed by gradual social burnout, intellectual and physical disillusionment, abandonment, and finally, an irrational rejection lasting for years.

Around 2010, Días Felices more or less disbanded. In 2011, I released a song as Eleven Stories, and after that, I unsuccessfully tried to continue with music. By 2013, I had almost stopped listening to music altogether. It wasn’t until 2022 that I regained some enthusiasm for listening to and composing music, largely thanks to mewithoutYou, Say Anything, and SOPHIE.

In 2012, I left quov.is to focus on video games. I was completely burned out. quov.is was a workers’ cooperative, and I’ve never participated in a cooperative since. From then on, I became detached from everything happening in web development. When I returned in 2017, it felt like an entirely different world, one I still don’t feel comfortable in. To this day, I can’t understand why anyone would use React—it’s utterly baffling to me.

Last year, Hidden People Club finally collapsed. Today, I feel a budding indifference and even some cynical disdain toward video games, even the “non-commercial” ones. A similar thing happened with Nastycloud and Nubarron, and I haven’t touched platformers since. I’m trying to dive into this feeling to mitigate its effects, hoping to achieve something like what the Galactic Encyclopedia did for the centuries of barbarism in Foundation.

First Attempt: Career Capital

For much of these years, I attributed my dissatisfaction to a lack of money. In 2020, I improved my financial situation by applying the principles of Cal Newport’s Career Capital Theory.

To simplify, Newport argues that if you have rare and valuable skills, you can “trade” them for qualities you value more, like free time, flexibility, or money.

In my case, I improved my financial situation by identifying clear areas where I provided value. This gave me the chance to gain more flexibility and free time.

This allowed me to explore my ideas for creating games in alternative ways with Hidden People Club. However, it did nothing to address the Miserable Loop.

The problem, then, was evidently deeper. I managed to accumulate career capital, trade it for freedom, and use it to create a job with all the features I wanted. Yet, there was no place in the world for it. The industry demanded other things, and to meet those demands, I had to compromise my principles.

Not only that, but in Hidden People Club, I noticed something stranger—a dissociation between my thoughts about the team and my personal values. I had to make decisions I wasn’t morally comfortable with, all while suffering from intrusive thoughts I despised.

All of this led me to believe there was something more behind it all—something structural and sinister.

Capitalist Realism

In 2009, the same year Para Cambiar el Mundo was released, and around the time I decided to quit studying Computer Science to make a living from music with Días Felices—thus sealing a decade and a half of guaranteed dissatisfaction—Mark Fisher published Capitalist Realism.

I only encountered the book this year. It devoured me intellectually, broke me emotionally, and gave a name to the Great Contradiction that haunts¹ me. It also offered me the first steps toward moving forward.

Fisher begins with the phrase, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” He did an extraordinary job linking the mental health crisis we are immersed in to capitalism (something Cal Newport also identifies but attributes solely to social media and the attention economy).

I quit social media in 2019. While my attention span improved significantly, my mental health didn’t fully recover. Fisher gave me a lifeline—a thread to follow toward a new path.

I recommend the book 200%.

The Next 10 Years

The theme for 2024 was the next ten years.

Initially, I thought this would be a pragmatic exercise: a series of decisions followed by plans to organize certain goals across various timelines (decade, year, month, etc.).

While the foundations were there—intentionality, quality of life, sustainability, creativity—it ended up being something entirely different: a complete paradigm shift. It’s impossible to plan concretely, but it’s a vision that excites me far more because it brings me back to the person I was before “living off what you love” became the main motivation.

But “living off what you love” shouldn’t be a bad thing. It’s not fair.

That’s why I’ve been reflecting on this over the past month.

Living off what you love

As any self-proclaimed well-read person with deep intellectual interests would do, when I needed a precise definition of a word as important as living, I asked ChatGPT:

Fran: Define living in one sentence.

And it replied:

GPT: Living is embracing each moment with intention, learning, growing, and connecting with the world and yourself.

Nishitani would argue that we need to think about this from other angles to understand life, but this definition works for me.

If living is embracing each moment with intention, learning, growing, and connecting with the world and yourself, then when I ask:

Fran: And “living off what you love”?

It answers:

GPT: living off what you love is transforming your passion into sustenance, aligning your work with your values, and enjoying the process while earning money.

Why do I ask ChatGPT this? Because ChatGPT responds with what the average person would say by definition. And it’s not wrong.

Capitalist Realism has hijacked the very concept of living itself, and starting today, I’m going to deconstruct it—for the sake of my mental health.

This cannot be the definition of "living off what you love." I refuse to accept it. I prefer to use the initial definition of living.

From now on, I’ll live off what I love and make money from whatever brings in money.

I’d like to think that even though I don’t have the tools to change the world as we preached with Días Felices, I at least have some agency over what concerns me. I hope to have some impact on my concentric social circles.

Cal Newport, in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, suggests using money as a “neutral indicator of value.” We need a new metric because the mental health consequences of this advice are becoming too severe.

There’s a lot to rethink and reevaluate, but what a beautiful thing it is to have doubts in a world where everything seems answered in a YouTube video.

Rumbo a lo desconocido, con temor, pero contigo... ²