Stress-Testing your Life Systems 🧪

April 22, 2025

Hey there,

Have you ever felt like life tends to throw its wildest curveballs at you just when you've finally managed to create a neat schedule for yourself? As in, right when you've finally been going to the gym consistently for a few weeks, work is running smoothly, you wake up feeling refreshed — bam, you get hit with a sudden flu, or a random light starts flashing on your car dashboard, anything and everything to throw you off the horse.

In this issue, I want to dive into this aspect of systems-building — stress-testing your systems, so they (and you) become more stress-resilient. 🧱

I've started thinking of these moments less as bad luck and more as unintentional simulations — life's way of running a pressure test on everything I've built. Not to sabotage me, necessarily, but to show me what would actually hold up when things get wonky.

We don't usually build our systems expecting them to fail — it's a bit counterintuitive, after all. We build them for "ideal days" (happy flows, as we call them in the UX/UI world) — when we're well-rested, motivated, and uninterrupted. But life doesn't seem to operate on a happy flow 100% of the time. It operates on noise, randomness, and plot twists. So eventually, even the best-looking structure gets hit with real-world turbulence. 🍃

For me, this February was such a turbulence.

Not a dramatic breakdown, but a steady stream of friction. A few days of brain fog. A skipped run here, a late start there. Then the cold weather increased the friction to going out even more. A checklist that quietly got ignored. And then the realisation: this isn't just a bad week — it's a systems test.

The good part? It wasn't that deep, I just hadn't prepared well for anything BUT the happy flow. If I had given myself more buffer, a bit more realistic expectations, and planned for at least one thing to potentially go sideways — I would have saved myself from some stress.

So here's what I'm adjusting going forward — to be better calibrated for the expectedly unexpected things:

• Plan for the 80% version of me → I won't be feeling like a 10/10 every day, and I shouldn't depend on consistent motivation to get stuff done — that's where habits and automations come in handy. 🤖
• Add intentional buffer → Not everything needs to be back-to-back and airtight. I'm learning to leave space between tasks: for chaos, context switching, recuperating. 📅
• Watch what breaks first → It's a sign of the natural way you order your priorities — for me, fitness tends to take a backseat in times of stress, which isn't great. I should just double down and use the gym time in an anti-stress fashion, rather than turning it into a "punishment". 🧠

I still believe in well-built systems. But now I see more power in ones built for resilience.

What are some ways in which you've been challenged recently? Did it break you down or build you up?

Weekly Insights

• Unintentionally, this Easter week felt like a return "back to the roots" in some simple domains — some old friends reached out, happened to park outside my high school (talk about change of perspective 🕶️), and I even decided to make coffee with a moka pot for the time being, as I used to do in my uni days.
• At the same time, as I'm constantly kinda focusing on the near future, I spent quite some time with ChatGPT, curating the context it had on me so it could be even better at assisting me with tasks.
• In one of these brainstorming sessions with GPT, it managed to craft the above image with the cars, which I immediately set as my laptop wallpaper — I'm consistently in awe of how good of an output it produces with minimal input/prompting. 🙌

Series Highlight: The Last of Us

I had completely forgotten about this gem of a series, since its first season was back in 2023 — until I stumbled upon the trailer for its second season, coming out right now, so, guess we're back into the world of The Last of Us. 🧟

The current second season just released its second episode, which I managed to watch just before sitting down to write this newsletter, and oh boy, they're not wasting their time when it comes to the plot moving and characters clashing.

For those of you that somehow missed the hype around the first season 2 years ago, the series is an adaptation of the game of the same name, which is a world-renowned success. Features Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, as they travel a post-apocalyptic zombie-ridden world and, well, try to stay alive. The series is crazy exciting, with lots of action, but also a lot of heartfelt moments. As many zombie-focused movies and series do, they deliver the message of "the real monsters are usually just the humans, not the actual monsters", but here this is just a side note — the main arc focuses on the found-family trope, the father-daughter dynamic between the two protagonists, and ultimately, what I enjoyed most — the question of whether it's better to save the world, or your family.

I have very high hopes for this second and last season currently coming out, and I'm sure it'll be one of the best series 2025 has to offer. If you're looking for something exciting, that still makes you ask questions about what's the right move all the time, The Last of Us hits the bullseye.

Worth Watching This Week

You'll see this when you're in between phases of life (then never again) by AJs Life — a quiet meditation on the in-between seasons that are easier to spot in hindsight than while you're living them.

5 Rules for Getting Rich in 5 Years or Less by Captain Sinbad — an opinionated, no-fluff take on the few principles that actually compound when it comes to money.

Closing Thoughts

Till next week, stay safe, stay curious, and keep kicking. ✌️