Everyone I know is exhausted. We're drained from ten thousand voices around us telling us how to live better, deeper, faster, richer, slimmer, and get better looking — or else. Comparison cuts us in half. Now our to-do lists have to-do lists and any thought that maybe we were doing ok, has been obliterated and replaced by a sense of demanding optimization.
Screw that. You don’t need more willpower. You don’t need another system. The world that asks for constant enhancement, but I think we should kick enhancement squarely in the nuts, exhale, and just be.
This is the story of how I landed thinking like this. It’s a bit of my manifesto for margin after the business world chewed me up like a dog toy.
The big year that broke me, perfectly.
The design agency model is stacked for pressure. Clients want cheaper work, faster timelines, and better results, all at once. Margins are tight, expectations are tighter. My last agency, Bunsen, was running hot. Big-name clients. A growing team. High-visibility and meaningful work for science clients doing cool stuff. From the outside, it looked like a high-performance machine.
Under the hood it was different. Pressure was building. My perfectionism was a cracked gasket. Nothing shipped without my sign-off. Wake up at 5:30 to push pixels, fix typography, clean up designs, cajole story into place, and regulate client expectations. Then I’d stumble into bed somewhere around 10pm. Rinse, repeat. I wasn’t leading a company, I was redlining.
Come December, I finally took a little break. In that space, a friend asked me a deceptively simple question: “What needs to be different in five years for you to be happy?” I knew the answer right away: Meaningful work, more time with family and friends, fewer meetings, less complexity, room to breathe. The follow up was kicker: “Will your current job get you there?” With painful clarity, I knew that it wouldn't. No agency, run by my perfectionism, would get me that life. That was the day I quit running a business that was always going to be at odds with just being present. I wanted to be here, now.
The pain of burnout is a good teacher.
Burnout, wasn’t just a collapse, it was a revelation. I’d spent years trying to become some optimized version of myself, chasing a life that looked impressive but felt more like a costume. When the whole thing finally buckled, what I saw in the wreckage was an uncomfortable truth: I’d been outpacing who I actually am. What if calm could be more than a break from the grind, and could actually be a way of life? I didn’t need to be better, I needed to be here.
So was the answer to figure out the right way to be calm? For too long I’d believed that if I could just bio-hack my way to better sleep, life-hack my way to better project management, lift more kettlebells, eat less gluten, I’d somehow unlock super-self and of course killer abs.
Rigid morning routines. Checklist guilt. Macro math. Parenting perfection. Trauma-avoidance calculus. Workouts felt like performance reviews. It’s like I was trying to qualify for being alive. Constant optimizing wasn’t helping me, it was exhausting me.
Eventually I realized the optimization mindset is just another version of anxiety and urgency. It’s control dressed in a productivity hoodie. And it robs us of what’s here, and now.
The answer isn’t decaf coffee, it’s decaf life.
I love coffee. I really do. Nothing like that morning cup. But after getting sober, I started to realize caffeine wasn’t just giving me a boost, it was dragging my brain through overthinking loops and anxiety spirals.
The caffeine isn't just in coffee, it's in our culture. It’s the liquid permission to override your body. It’s how we push through the stuff we’re not supposed to feel. We're told exhaustion, dread, boredom, and burnout are all feelings of the weak and soon-to-be left behind. Let me tell you from personal experience, that is low-grade bullshit.
Decaf can be your culture. The opposite of striving isn't laziness, it's presence, it’s permission.. Rebellion against obsessive optimization isn't a coma, it's acceptance and play. Ritual without the rev. A way to stay in the moment instead of exploding past it.
Wimp was my own way of drawing a line in the sand for myself, but along the way I found out a lot others that are ready to kick perfection to the curb. Decaf coffee can make for a calm morning, or a pleasant evening, but choosing margin and steadiness instead of steamroll can be a way to decaffeinate more than just our coffee.
Will you decaffeinate with me?
Wimp’s weekly emails have almost nothing to do with coffee. It’s 5 links that I find on the internet through my week that are beautiful, funny, interesting, and above all, just things that help me stop and connect with something right here, in front of me. When reply and tell me a meme made them snort-laugh, or a video of bird-calling autistic boy gave them a full minute of real joy. This is the juice to keep writing. It's not just another social "like", it's deeper. I can tell we all need this.
For people who are tired of trying so hard. For people who still want to care about their lives, but don’t want to chase perfection like it’s a job title. So we’re launching a little subreddit space called r/decaf-life. A place to dig in on this stuff together. Laugh about stuff. Appreciate each other. Look for good, and share some wisdom. Come on in! The water is perfect!
Work in progress.
Someone once shared “I don’t want a calm life, I want a calm nervous system.” When I read that I about fell out of my chair. I want to work hard on things that matter, take real breaks, and stop treating rest like a tax I forgot to file. I want to watch cartoons with my kids, travel with my wife, eat onigiri in the backcountry of Japan, and learn to speak the language fluently. I want to build something honest, and still have some brain space left to stop and watch clouds move across open skies — without feeling guilty.
But today, as an example, I felt rushed about getting a freelance design done, and I was worried that Wimp isn’t growing fast enough. What if someone does this better and faster than us? What if we miss out on our chance? Figuring out how to live decaf is a practice, not another thing to optimize.
reddit.com/r/decaf_life/ is where we can practice together.
