Bart Blog

Just do it. Three words. A summary of everything motivational magicians try to force into your head.

Granted, they have different methods, approaches, and ideas they try to teach you. But all of it requires the same leap: to break the chains of whatever was stopping you until now, and start to act.

We are saturated with a single, comforting story: that success is primarily a function of mindset, discipline, and personal technique. If you fail, you did not want it enough. If you succeed, you earned it fully. This story is emotionally appealing, commercially useful, and largely false.

The myth of total agency

The modern ideal of the self-made person rests on a sleight of hand. It speaks endlessly about effort and grit while quietly standing on foundations it does not acknowledge: health, timing, safety, education, geography, social capital, historical moment.

Coaches, TED talks, productivity gurus universalize personal trajectories that were only possible because conditions already allowed agency. They then sell those trajectories as methods.

This is not optimism. It is a category error.

Survivorship bias completes the illusion. We hear from those who caught the wind, not from the thousands who prepared just as diligently and still drowned. Their absence is mistaken for proof.

The world is not romantic

The world is not hostile or benevolent. It is largely indifferent.

Most of the time, effort does not translate cleanly into progress. Most lives are not heroic arcs. Most days are maintenance.

This is not nihilism. It is realism.

To deny this is not empowering, it is cruel. It turns structural limits into personal failures and replaces solidarity with judgment.

Conditional agency

Agency exists, but it is conditional.

You can prepare. You can build sails. You can work, train, learn, endure. But movement still depends on wind.

When the wind does not come, effort becomes flotation.

When the wind comes, responsibility returns. Not to create opportunity, but to recognize it and use it.

This is a harder truth than total control, but a more humane one.

Life without romanticizing

Rejecting the romance does not require rejecting life.

There is a way of living that is clear-eyed and still capable of love, joy, and accomplishment; if you are lucky.

Luck does not negate meaning. It contextualizes it.

Joy is not owed. Meaning is not guaranteed. Success is not proof of virtue. Failure is not proof of defect.

And yet sparks still happen.

Quiet rejection of circumstances

For many people, resistance is not grand rebellion. It is quiet.

It is getting out of bed.
It is doing mundane work honestly.
It is refusing to be drowned by narratives that explain your life away.

This is not resignation. It is lucid persistence.

You do not conquer the ocean. You do not need to.
You only make one step forward when a step is possible.

That is enough to build a life.

A long view

Perhaps one day, centuries from now, starting conditions will be sufficiently equal that we can say, without cruelty, that success truly lies in individual hands.

For thousands of years, this has not been true.
Pretending it is true now serves ideology, not people.

Until then, honesty matters more than inspiration.

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Becalmed

The mercy of the ocean is all you can get
That, not even always

Most of the time you can only float

Sometimes the ocean wants you
It reaches you and swallows
Resist, and wait

Sometimes there is a wind that you can
catch
if you have sails

Most of the time you can only float

It does not care if you love it
Or if you hate it
But it’s not going away

If you reach the shore
It’s just a short rest