In childhood, I could never picture myself as an adult. As it’s sung/read in one of Nochniye Gruzchiki’s tracks, I genuinely believed I just would not live to see adulthood.

And then, without even noticing when it happened, I became an adult. From 20 to 30 I only kept getting more grown up: my first proper job, moving to another city, my first trip abroad, a better job, then a better one, and then an even better one. Switching to remote work, moving to Georgia in 2021 and, as it later turned out, leaving Russia for good, a promotion, registering a startup in Estonia, endless moves, moving to the EU, another promotion, this time a much more serious one, a yacht trip. All of this turned out to be so ‘adult’ that, without realising it, I slipped into a crisis that decided to crash into me right at the moment of this huge cluster of life events and at such a beautiful number – 30.

Is a crisis something bad? Not at all. It is just a point of active growth, around which some of your old views settle in or something completely new takes shape.

The main expression of this curious stage in my life is existentialism at full volume. The kind where you feel like reading something like Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ and realise you even have something to add to his thoughts. The kind where you start wondering whether life is nothing more than a road that leads to death, and we invent billions of our own meanings for that road. But you end up deciding no, simply because that is not interesting.

Yesterday I said out loud for the first time what my meaning of life is: my meaning of life is in the very fact of life itself, in all its manifestations and backstage moments.

What do I mean by backstage? For example, when you scroll Instagram or watch a vlog, you only see the pretty picture. You do not see what stayed off camera. That can drag you into a slump, because life around you feels bad, while everyone you know on Instagram seems to be doing great: they have good relationships, a new car, they just bought an apartment, they live in a wonderful city, and two days ago they got back from a vacation in some exotic country. And that friend of a friend has their own successful business with multi-million turnover. It all looks so amazing and you want all of that for yourself, and all at once.

For me, the most beautiful thing in life is seeing and fully living with my heart through everything that stays off camera. Feeling the truest, unfiltered emotions that get so mixed up you start feeling sad from laughter and happy from pain.

And of course, any crisis, and this one especially, helps you rethink your values, your view of life, and rewrite some very important points on your roadmap. But that is probably something for another time.

(I promise I will soon write something about Web Summit, and not only these kinds of reflections.)