This year will mark exactly 2 decades for this blog. 20 years is a long time – many things can happen in this timespan. Contexts change, people change, life changes.

What I wrote 10-15 years ago may not be accurate anymore. Or it may not represent my current life views. So, I decided to do a 30 days challenge in which I’ll tackle 30 different topics that I heavily circulated here – and how they changed (IF they changed). At the end of each day, I will update the list of topics below, so you can just bookmark this and can back any time to see the progress, or to follow up on a topic that’s interesting you.

The first link on each row is the initial post, “then”, and the second one is the revised topic, the “now”. As I fill in the slots, I will update all the links (the order, and even the links themselves, may be slightly altered as I advance with the challenge, so make sure you come back to this post if you want a bird eye view of the entire project).

Without further ado, here’s the map of the challenge.

• Raw Food Primer → Coming soon
  I ran a raw food experiment in Romania in January 2009 and shared my notes. Seventeen years later, the diet landscape has shifted enough that the original advice needs a honest audit against what we now know about ultra-processed food and gut health.
• 33 Questions for an Interview with Yourself → Coming soon
  I wrote 33 self-reflection questions and interviewed you, the reader. Now I sit in the chair myself and answer them — because 17 years and a lot of life later, the answers are completely different.
• 25 Things to Do in Your Life → Coming soon
  A life list written in 2009, framed as advice for a bewildered alien. Some of those 25 things happened, some didn’t, and some I no longer want — while the 2026 list looks almost nothing like the original.
• Tango Crush → Coming soon
  Two years into tango I tried to name the strange emotional entanglements partner dancing creates. A decade of dancing and teaching later, I can finally explain what was actually happening.
• The Secret Art of Keeping Card Castles from Falling Down → Coming soon
  In 2011 I wrote about the art of keeping life’s fragile structures standing. Since then several of my own have come down — and the lesson wasn’t what I expected.
• Lifestyle Design → Coming soon
  “Lifestyle design” had a specific 2009 cultural moment — Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Workweek, the whole thing. That moment has passed, curdled, and been partially redeemed by the actual experience of people who tried it.
• Social Networking Versus Real Life Relationships → Coming soon
  The “versus” implied a competition that has since resolved into something messier — people who have conducted full friendships entirely online, while also people who have never felt more alone despite being permanently connected.
• The Next Revolution Will Be Technological, Not Ideological → Coming soon
  I wrote in 2018 that technology would outrun ideology. It is now 2026 and both have accelerated dramatically — time to test the thesis against actual evidence rather than speculation.
• On Being Steadily Fluid → Coming soon
  Steady fluidity — the paradox of reliable adaptability — was an idea I explored in 2018 at the ten-year mark. Seven more years have passed, and the concept has been tested under pressure in ways I didn’t anticipate.
• The First 6 Months of Blogging — The Series → Coming soon
  The blogging landscape of 2009 — RSS feeds, ad networks, early Twitter — barely resembles what it means to run an independent website in 2026. What from those first six months actually transferred?
• Can You Build a Fine Watch with a 0.5 Inch Wrench? → Coming soon
  The granularity argument — having the right tool for the job — gets far more interesting when AI can resize itself to the task. The 2018 question needs a 2026 answer.
• How and Why We Get Bored → Coming soon
  In 2009 boredom was a natural state that arrived when nothing interesting was happening. In 2026 the attention economy has nearly eliminated the conditions for boredom — which may be a much larger problem than boredom itself ever was.
• 100 Ways to Live a Better Life → Coming soon
  A list written in 2009 and still widely read — but the “better life” frame of that era has since been complicated by what we know about wellbeing, optimization culture burnout, and the demands of surviving the 2020s.
• 33 Ways to Get and Keep Yourself Motivated → Coming soon
  The idea of motivation as something you “get and keep” through technique has been significantly revised by behavioral science — and by the lived experience of people who optimized their drive straight into burnout.
• Action Versus Reaction → Coming soon
  The action/reaction framework was compelling but binary — and life since 2009 has presented situations where the most strategic move is a carefully chosen reaction, not an act of pure initiative.
• Dream Big, Act Bigger → Coming soon
  “Dream big” culture has been absorbed into the same hustle ecosystem that later generated massive disillusionment — and a generation that is now arguably less dreamy and more cautious about promising themselves large futures.
• 77 Things to Do Just Because You Can → Coming soon
  A list justified by “you can” takes on different weight when physical capacity, financial capacity, and available time have all shifted — and when the cultural context of what counts as audacious has changed since 2013.
• 33 Ways to End Your Day → Coming soon
  The smartphone has fundamentally restructured what “ending the day” means — the 33 methods assumed a kind of quiet, self-directed evening that is now genuinely difficult to protect.
• 7 Things to Do When the Shit Hits the Fan → Coming soon
  Since 2011 there have been larger and more varied crises — personal, professional, global — that test whether the original seven steps are a real framework or a list assembled in one specific moment of pressure.
• How to Impress Others in 25 Different Ways → Coming soon
  Written before Instagram, personal branding, and AI-generated personas — the strategies for being memorable in a world of infinite curated content and audience fatigue are categorically different now.
• 7 Reasons to Enjoy Life More → Coming soon
  The 2009 framing assumed the main obstacle to enjoyment was forgetting to look up from the race. The 2026 obstacle is different: anxiety about large global threats, information exhaustion, and a world designed to pull you elsewhere.
• 77 Reasons to Love Your Life → Coming soon
  A gratitude list written in 2009 encounters a reader in 2026 who has lived through a pandemic, political fracture, and climate anxiety. The case for loving your life needs to be made differently, or more honestly.
• The Diamond Cutter — Tibetan Buddhism & Business → Coming soon
  Karma as a business principle, reality as constructed, results shaped by mental posture — twelve years of actually running things is enough time to know which of these Buddhist business ideas held up and which didn’t.
• Life Has No Meaning. And That’s Why It’s So Wonderful. → Coming soon
  The years since 2015 include a pandemic and a generation actively in crisis about meaning — “what is the point?” has become culturally louder, not quieter, giving this post’s argument a more urgent and harder-to-make case.
• The Ancestor Syndrome — Or Why You Don’t Have Enough Money → Coming soon
  A decade in crypto and tech entrepreneurship — environments with extreme wealth creation and destruction — plus the economic dislocations of the 2020s, have stress-tested the ancestor syndrome thesis in ways the 2016 post couldn’t anticipate.
• 7 Ways to Say No → Coming soon
  Seventeen years since writing this: hustle culture valorized saying yes to everything, then burned people out, then “boundaries” went mainstream, and now AI is explicitly trained to be agreeable. The case for no has never been more urgent or more contested.
• 33 Ways to Overcome Frustration → Coming soon
  “Frustration signals growth” is a powerful reframe — but fifteen years of growth also means fifteen years of accumulated frustrations that were supposed to be temporary. The honest accounting is worth doing.
• 10 Ways to Define Success → Coming soon
  Written in 2016, before crypto wealth cycles, remote work normalization, and the burnout generation’s public reckoning — all of which have changed what people count, and what they stop counting, as success.
• Don’t Spend Your Money Buying Friends → Coming soon
  The “buying followers” phenomenon that was nascent in 2010 has become a billion-dollar industry — influencer economies, paid communities, monetized relationships. The question of where friendship ends and transaction begins is now much harder to answer.
• The Power and Price of Illusions → Coming soon
  Written before algorithmic filter bubbles, deepfakes, and AI-generated content — environments now specifically engineered to manufacture and sustain pleasant illusions at scale. The price has gone up considerably.

First post tomorrow.