It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and just checked in, despite all good intentions. Nearly every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I wake up intending to make a coffee and write a little summary of the week.
Today, however, I suddenly looked up, and nearly two and a half hours had slipped by. I caught myself thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” Instantly frustrated that I’d let YouTube sneak back into my life—and not even under the guise of French immersion. No, I was just watching trash: content with just enough happening to keep the dopamine firing.
I was so pleased with myself at the start of the year when I finally managed to kick the YouTube app off my devices. But slowly, it’s crept back—this time, simply through the Safari browser. The initial revulsion at the inferior user experience was only marginally offset by an ad blocker, which replaced the increasingly aggressive ads with a ten-second delay.
Yet the creep is relentless. An accidental misclick — or a clickbait thumbnail — is all it takes, and the cancerous YouTube Shorts force themselves into my life. It’s fascinating how aggressively Google is pushing the Shorts medium. Despite explicitly telling my ad blocker to block them, they persist.
What used to be a 3-by-2 grid of long-form videos on the YouTube home screen has now been replaced by two medium-length videos, immediately followed by a near full-screen selection of Shorts. It’s disgusting, really.
Anyway, enough of this. I didn’t intend this rare offline moment to turn into a diatribe about the enshittification of yet another Google property.
In fact, I should have taken the other fork in the road when I started writing this.
I’ve been thinking for a while that I should return to daily journaling. Somewhere on my blog, there’s a single entry from around this time last year, where I vowed to start a daily blog in French as part of my francisation effort — an effort that, if I’m not mistaken, lasted all of one post.
Still, I’d like to make more of an effort with journaling—especially in a daily five-minute format. Just something simple, a memento of the passing days, a way to train my brain to focus on the good things in my life.
Recently, while scrolling through my phone’s photo album, I realized I’ve barely taken any photos since October. The cheapskate in me is annoyed—I spent all that money on a fancy Pro phone, justifying the purchase with superior camera tech and a high screen refresh rate, yet I’ve barely used it.
I’m also becoming increasingly aware — maybe with age, maybe with some wisdom — that my life… it is… Not luxurious… that’s not the word. And privileged doesn’t feel right either. But my life is good. Maybe even great.
And yet. And yet…
And yet, I’ve never felt so — not disillusioned — but ungrateful.
I spent so many years working hard to get here. And now that I’m here, I can’t seem to enjoy it. By every metric, I’ve built the life I dreamed of as a little boy — and yet, I can’t let myself enjoy it. Instead, I wallow in contrivances, quibbles, and annoyances.
Take this, for example: it’s tax season here in North America. After a few drinks with an old friend, I realized just how insane the situation is.
This year, I’ll pay over $120,000 in taxes — federal and provincial — without even considering city, school, and sales taxes. My first job in Canada paid $60,000 before tax.
This year, I’ve paid more than double my first Canadian salary in tax. Which. Is. Bonkers.
A quick check on the Statistics Canada website shows tax brackets only up to the top 1%, 5%, and 10%. It’s fair to say we’re probably in the top 2-3% of wage earners in the country.
And yet, my brain instantly jumps to—well, yes, salaried taxpayers. Because there’s a whole cohort playing accounting gymnastics—construction folks, cash jobs, small-business owners, two-sets-of-books types—who’ll never declare their true income.
Still, my kid goes to school in a nice part of town. My running loop winds through another well-to-do borough, where a garage or granny annex starts at $10 million. And I can’t help but feel like the game is rigged.
If I’m in my prime earning years, working in tech, mortgaged to the eyeballs for a three-bedroom apartment, still driving a Toyota… maybe in another 20 years, I’ll afford the down payment on one of these family homes.
This year, we managed one vacation with the kids. We’re not sure if we can afford another this summer—let alone cross the Atlantic to see family. Assuming we even want to. (But that’s another story.)
I don’t know. The whole thing seems bonkers. This month, I’ve been staring down the barrel of a large credit card bill, and every week that passes, no money has gone toward it.
It feels bananas to be pushing 40, earning this much on paper, and still feel like there’s no slack in the system. No emergency fund. No rainy day money. No vacation pot. Just a large line of credit.
The mortgage is at minimums. Condo fees are still crippling. What else is there?
Maybe this is taking up more mental space than I realized.
Perhaps it’s time to reassess the financial situation—to see where we really are.
It’s funny. Of all the things I could have reflected on this week:
- I’ve taken apart the dishwasher twice after it flooded the kitchen
- I took the car to the Toyota dealer for a safety recall that was preventing the airbags from deploying—only to leave with $1,000–2,000 of bumper damage
- I interviewed for a new job
- I tried out three new French tutors
- My marriage
- Doug is coming to Canada
- New medical stuff
- The latest client drama at work
- The company all-hands meeting
And yet. And yet…
And yet, here I am. Whining about money.
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