There is a kind of paralysis that doesn't look like paralysis. Twenty tabs open, a queue of videos to watch, tutorials, events and networking. From the outside it looks like motion, but inside nothing moves. Brás Cubas, author of the 'A Tal Liberdade Moderna' newsletter, calls this state “the worst kind of stuck” and writes about it as someone who has made it out the other side.
The path the author describes is a string of beginnings. First he wanted to be a drummer, then a DJ, and on the side he started businesses with his brother. The DJ career was going well, with a record deal at a very young age, and it was abandoned anyway. According to the author, impatience and scattered attention led to deep depression and therapy, and there were decades when every day felt the same.
In the author's view, social media made things worse. Paths that used to be invisible, and that once required a mentor or privileged access, now show up in the feed all the time. Behind the urge to do everything, the author sees perfectionism in disguise: the search for the right door, the one that would mean never having to look back. In the author's assessment, that door doesn't exist. You choose an opportunity and then make it work.
The author chose writing, which he himself considers a bad opportunity, full of broke writers and people who cast themselves as victims. The odds were low, but the author says he made it work through relentless effort, ignoring the noise and spending more than five years figuring out the game.
The core point of the piece is that having many interests isn't the problem. The author kept his, but began devoting most of his time to writing and left his other curiosities for leisure hours. The distinction that, according to the author, changed everything fits in one sentence: “Multiple interests are fine. Multiple simultaneous pursuits are the problem.”
The piece also lays out the dark side of scattering yourself. Endlessly consuming content numbed the pain and avoided the act of creating. For the author, this dopamine-driven fake work feels like progress but is really procrastination. Imposter syndrome completed the cycle, until the author realized that audiences often prefer someone ten steps ahead over someone ten thousand steps ahead.
What took the weight off his choices was the realization that, in the author's view, 99% of decisions are reversible. That leaves room to experiment, act and adjust course, as in Silicon Valley's Lean Startup approach. The author compares each choice to a fake tattoo, like the ones his three-year-old daughter loves to wear, rather than a permanent one. He also cites a mentor who told him he would live multiple lives, an idea that buried the image of a 40-year career in banking.
In practice, having a goal helped cut the noise. The author began avoiding the “open loops” that drained his mental energy, bookmarked the creators and publications he liked to escape endless scrolling, and limited his time in group chats. The piece's conclusion is blunt: the biggest mistake isn't choosing the wrong path, it's never choosing one at all.
In this piece, Brás Cubas and “A Tal Liberdade Moderna” are fictional names for the original author and newsletter. The source is credited below.