Wanting More, Craving Less

On the strange tension between ambition and exhaustion, and what I finally understood about wealth at 32.

Now that I’m sitting here with the blank page in front of me, I realize how difficult this article is to write. How close it actually comes to who I am as a person, and how vulnerable it makes me feel. Many of these things are things that few people know about me, and those who know me well have always seen them as a strength. But behind the light, it doesn’t always feel that way.

Inside my head, there is always a storm, and it has been like that for as long as I can remember. Not a storm as in everything tumbling around all over the place, but more like there always has to be strong winds and preferably a tornado of things I need to work on. If there is no tornado of things, I get bored. And when I get bored, I get good ideas for how I can fill the void. There is never calm.

I remember when I taught myself to play guitar. It started as a small interest, but within a few weeks it had consumed me completely. I spent day and night on it. Between classes at school, I would go down to the music room to continue. I played in the morning before school and in the evening until my fingers hurt. It was not something I chose to do. It was something I could not stop doing. The same force has since driven me to learn drums, bass, ukulele, and tin whistle. The same force made me change careers and teach myself to program, after which I have worked for the last many years alongside incredibly skilled and well-educated developers. And it was the same force that made me write and publish a 300-page book on sustainable web design in just six months. But all the things I have learned and done are only the byproduct of the storm I have inside. They don’t say much about what it’s actually like to live with it.

Because I hate being bored. I simply cannot stand it. But at the same time, I also don’t like being completely worn out from all the things I throw myself into. It is a cycle of either doing too little or too much, and I have never really found the balance. I have gotten better at managing it over the years, but I’m not there yet. Maybe I will be one day. And that is sort of what this article is about. Pace. And what I have begun to understand about what I am actually looking for.

In 2025, a lot happened all at once, and it was those events that forced me to see some things about myself that I had not seen before.

My wife worked as a store manager and spent most of her waking hours handling over a hundred employees, progress in the store, and everything else that waited for her. At the same time, I worked full-time as a developer and had my own growing company on the side. It added up to a lot of working hours. And when you are also parents to two small children and own a house and a car, there is a lot that needs to be taken care of daily.

One day my wife got the opportunity to move to a position in Denmark. It was a step down the ladder, but it was something she wanted. She had realized that her current position involved too much stress, and that she missed having more time with the children at home. So we decided to quit our jobs, sell the house, sell the car, and move to Odense in Denmark to start a calmer life than the one we had built up in Sweden.

But when I sit and look back on that time now, I can feel how stressful it actually was. Selling the house and the car was easy enough, but getting everything to fit together was something else entirely. We stood in a limbo between being homeless in Sweden and trying to make it all align with finding an apartment and work in Denmark. There was all the administrative work that needed to be sorted out. There was the uncertainty. And on top of that, I went full-time in my own company for a while, even though my business partner was on sick leave, and I was trying to earn my salary through a business that was not ready for it yet. It was not sustainable. I still feel the consequences of it today. But that whole experience has also made me think about something I had not really thought about before. What wealth actually means to me. And what I want with my life.

I have always believed that wealth was the goal. Being able to buy the things I pointed at. I have had a childhood dream of wearing a Rolex one day, flying first class, maybe owning a big house. And that dream has made me work a lot. But as they say: the more money you earn, the more money you spend. We fell into that trap too.

I have also had another dream. A dream that many people who work in tech will probably recognize. The dream of throwing all the technology away, moving out into nature, and just living far from everything and everyone. I cannot count on my fingers how many times I have told my wife or my business partner about that wish. The urge to get away for a weekend and sit in a small cabin and do nothing. Or try one of those experiences where you sit in total darkness for several days without any stimuli at all.

But I have started to believe that this wish is not about wanting to get away.

I think it is a symptom. A symptom of living your life wrong. That what you spend your time on takes up so much space that you never get to fulfill the wishes you actually have. And that escaping to nature would not solve anything, because the problem is not where I am. The problem is how I spend my hours. I have read several books over the years that all mention the same thing: we only have 24 hours in a day, and it is the same for everyone. But I don’t think I ever really understood what that meant, until now.

We all have 24 hours. But for most people, a large part of them are traded away in exchange for money. Money to pay rent, food, clothes, phone, car, education, and everything else. For every obligation we take on, we take away a part of those 24 hours. And those hours we never get back.

When I started seeing things that way, something changed. Instead of looking at the price of something in money, I started asking myself: how many hours of my life does this cost? Not just what it costs to buy, but what it costs to maintain. To take care of. To worry about. Is it worth trading the time I will never get back for this exact thing?

And when I started asking that question, I started saying no more often. Not because I became stingy, but because I could see what I was actually trading away.

I have started thinking differently about what I want to use my income for. Not to buy things that don’t create value for me, but to buy myself more freedom. To invest in things that over time give me more options. To create income sources that are based on something I care about, so I don’t have to spend time on things I don’t like. The goal is not to stop working. The goal is to work in a way where time slowly begins to belong to me again. The fact that I have made this discovery does not mean that I have suddenly figured everything out. I still take on too much work. I still do things I don’t care about. The storm inside my head has not disappeared, and it probably never will. But I am more aware now of what is right for me. And that means that already now, at the age of 32, I can start to course-correct instead of waiting until I am 60 and thinking that it is too late.

I know what wealth means to me now. It is not a Rolex. It is not first class. It is not a big house.

It is being able to take a Thursday afternoon off to go to my daughter’s school play. Being able to shut everything off and sit and have dinner with my family, go to bed at night without worries in my head. Not because I asked for permission. Not because I traded a day off somewhere else. But because I decide over those hours myself and don’t stress myself unnecessarily. That is what I am working toward now. Not to work less, but to work in a way where time slowly becomes my own again.

I don’t know if it will work. But for the first time, I feel like I know what I am looking for.