The
Overcoming.
150 kilograms off the floor. Months of letting go behind it. A new operating system, a clearer mind, and the strongest sense of freedom I have ever felt. This is the freest I have been.
Myself again
It feels bloody good to be myself again — after many months of learning to truly let go of a lot of things. The decade I spent as a former stoner has made me reflect deeply on the time I lost, because I was living in a state of complacency. Not moving. Not building. Just existing inside a fog I had convinced myself was comfort.
And then today happened.
On 14 June 2026, I deadlifted 150 kilograms in conventional form. Something I was never able to do before — and never truly understood the patience required to reach. The patience of allowing my body to regenerate. Proper, dedicated rest days between my three-to-four training days per week. Sometimes a full 48 hours of rest. Because to push past your natural limits, the body genuinely needs to recover across every layer.
No longer being locked into that dopamine shotgun to the brain. The years I spent on social media were no better — I know that now from personal experience. Constantly deleting accounts and making new ones. Never building a strong following. Never landing some big views-to-likes ratio that actually meant anything, unless it was shared by my former coach Amy's Unleashed training platform on Instagram.
Progress lives in the quiet
Detaching from so much of it has given my mind and body better buffers for true life improvement, as I call it. Living a productive, somewhat solitary lifestyle — away from switching on what I call my weird judgemental brain. My former self was too aggressive. He carried expectations of the entire world changing to suit some sense of superiority or idealism that was never actually needed.
I see it clearly now. The unconditional love of my family and my Jak Jak are all I need. The former friends, the old groups — they were chapters. And growing into a man with control and perspective is the reward of moving forward.
I am much happier doing things my way, without a platform directing me into some feed or trend. That is true magic at its fullest for me. Thank you God — your blessing is always welcome.
The digital framework of transformation
Aside from the iron, learning the Linux and open-source world has become the digital framework of my transformation. I feel strongly that Arch and NixOS are built for those willing to deep-dive their own systems. Any Linux distribution works as a base, depending on whether you have a defined workflow — or whether you just want something that isn't Windows.
Arch gives me the discipline to decipher the complexity of rolling releases — a system in constant motion, always updating, always current.
But removal is imperfect. pacman -Rns can still leave traces — orphaned files and old packages quietly taking up space across versions you no longer use.
NixOS lets me build my system to exactly what is necessary. Edit the configuration files and the flake ecosystem, and the system rebuilds only what changed.
You get generations — complete system versions you can roll back to if something breaks. And nix-collect-garbage cleanly removes everything obsolete. Nothing left behind.
Arch taught me patience with a living system. NixOS taught me architecture — the idea that a system should be declared, reproducible, and reversible. If a rebuild ever breaks something, there is always a generation to return to. That is digital sovereignty made real. Nothing wasted, nothing irreversible, nothing you cannot undo.
Combining my physical and digital paths is what creates spiritual balance for me. We live in the 20xx period and technology is only getting faster and more efficient. Is there a limit to this? Absolutely not — not unless we physically shut down. And I hope that day stays far away for everyone, because we live in the best of times. We have to make the most of it, or we stay stuck in limiting complacency.
What overcoming actually means
The state I am feeling in these modern moments is what Nietzsche described as the Übermensch — though the word is so often misunderstood that I want to be precise about it.
Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the concept in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). It is frequently misread as a claim about a superior type of person — a misreading that was later weaponised by people Nietzsche would have despised. That is not what he meant.
The Übermensch — the "overman" — is fundamentally about self-overcoming. The hardest task is to become master of oneself, which requires power over yourself, not power over others. It means refusing to be a member of the frightened, apathetic herd — and instead becoming the author of your own values, the poet of your own life.
Nietzsche wrote: "Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Übermensch — a rope over an abyss." The overcoming is the act of crossing it.
That is what I am feeling. Not superiority over anyone. Mastery over myself. Doing this takes the discipline and self-respect to go forward relying on nothing but my own resolve and my own mind — a lifelong student and a natural athlete, living a life that requires no approval from anyone or anything.
The work continues.