Day
10,950.

On May 1st, 2027, I turn thirty. If I live to ninety — which my grandfather managed and my father might — then thirty is the end of the first of three acts. Three decades down. Six to go. Day 10,950 of roughly 32,850. One-third of the way through the thing.

This is the clean way to say it. The less clean way is that this is the only time in my life I will close act one, and I have decided not to close it the way I opened it — by accident.

I spent my twenties adding. Another goal. Another city. Another tab open in another browser. The sum of those tabs is not a person. It is a menu. I am writing this because at some point in the last year I noticed I was living inside a menu and calling it a life, and I decided to do something about it before the clock ran over.

So the ask is simple. Between now and May — about three hundred and sixty-five days — I want to close out this first third with something I can name. Not a brag. A posture. A way of standing in a room. A set of five things I can actually do with my hands and body. A small list of rules I actually keep. A shelf of books I have actually read rather than owned. A few people who can say, without hedging, that I showed up.

That is the argument. Everything else on this site is a footnote to it.

I chose five skills. Not fifteen. Five is few enough to commit to and enough to compose a year. Each one is the answer to a question I have been asking myself for longer than I want to admit.

Sail is the answer to can I be trusted with a passage? Not the coastal day-sail you can abort into a marina. The real thing. A night watch alone at the helm with a cold front building and no one to ask. A voyage is the oldest test of whether a man can hold a plan through bad weather, which is to say, whether he can hold a plan at all.

Freedive is the answer to can I stop arguing with my body? The first two minutes of a breath hold are a negotiation. The third minute is where the mind realizes it does not get to win by arguing. You cannot bargain your way down a line. You can only arrive, one meter at a time, more relaxed than the meter before. This is the lane beneath the other lanes. When I am stressed at the galley stove I remember what it felt like at ten meters.

Spear is the answer to can I feed the people I love from the water in front of me? It is freedive with a reason. It is also the first time in my life I will bring home a dinner that I caught. I do not think that is a small thing. I think I have been living too long at one remove from what I eat.

Kitchen is the answer to can I make the room a place people want to be in? A hundred dishes, from scratch, by the end of the year. Not because I want to be a chef. Because the kitchen is where my friends sit down, and I would like to be the one who makes that possible rather than the one who orders it in.

Foil is the one lane that is purely for the play of it. No certification, no number, no table. Just the feeling of flying half a meter above the water on a weekday morning, because a man who does not play stops being interesting to live with. I include it on purpose.

Together, the five are the thing. Each on its own is a hobby. Together they are a posture. Water, weight, wardrobe, and the quiet work of getting my shit done — written as a tagline, but meant as a frame.

Underneath the five lanes are a few rules I am trying to live by. Not virtues. Rules. Rules are things you can break and catch yourself on. Virtues are things you can lie to yourself about forever.

There are only a handful of them and I have written them out properly on the Principles page. The short version:

One. Never alone on the line. The water rule. Extended, it is also the life rule. Do not do the hard thing where no one can see you. Being seen is the mechanism, not the vanity.

Two. The narrow lane. I can only do one thing well at a time, and if I try to do three I will do none. Pick the lane. Close the tabs. Finish the loaf of bread before I start the soup.

Three. A bad session is information. A pushed session is injury. True underwater and true everywhere else. The difference between a discipline and a grind is whether you can come back tomorrow.

Four. The table is the point. All of this — the sea hours, the dishes, the dives — reduces to: did I make the people around me a better place to land. If no, the numbers do not matter.

I am reading about thirty books this year, on purpose, in an order. Not a reading list. A curriculum. The distinction matters. A list is something you show off on the internet; a curriculum is something you work through in private and come out the other side of changed.

Roughly: one book per lane per season, plus a spine of older writers — Marcus, Montaigne, a little Seneca, the occasional novel when the technical stuff gets too clean. The shelf itself is visible on the site, in order, with honest progress. If I abandon a book I say so. If it was a mistake I say so. I am not performing literacy. I am trying to actually learn a thing.

I considered doing this privately. I am doing it in public instead, for three reasons.

The first is rule one: never alone on the line. A private year is easier to fudge. A public one is harder to lie to.

The second is that I have a small number of friends who I would like to include in this, and a journal that updates is a cleaner way to include them than a group chat that I will forget to use. If you are reading this and you know me, this site is partly for you. Thank you for being here.

The third is the film. On the first of May 2027, I turn thirty. On the same day I intend to release a short film — twelve or fifteen minutes, the shape of it is not yet known — that compresses this year into something I can hand to someone. Some of it will be good. Some of it will be embarrassing. I am publishing the dispatches along the way partly so the film has an honest ledger to be measured against.

So that is the argument. Thirty is not an ending. It is the clean edge between act one and act two, and I would like to cross it standing up.

If any of this works — and I don’t know yet that it will — I will meet thirty with five things I can do with my body, a small honest set of rules, a shelf I can point to, and a few people who can say I was around when it mattered.

If it doesn’t work, at least there will be a ledger.

— J.

Los Angeles, May 2026.