The Quiet Riot of the Soul

I came across this video recently by After Skool, one of my favorite YouTube channels. It tells the story of an 85-year-old woman who wakes up for just one day in her 36-year-old body. She gets to relive all the tiny, ordinary moments—her son waking her up, her husband making coffee, a phone call with her mom.

It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It hit me hard.

Give it a watch:

https://youtu.be/5TcB50M4vHA?si=4K_mTVx-ywQQoUYj

(Seriously—go ahead. I’ll wait.)

The Beauty in the Ordinary

Sorry—I probably should’ve warned you that you might need some tissues.

And if you didn’t tear up even a little?

Go hug a tree or pet a kitten or something, you Neanderthal.

Because wow. That poem cuts deep.

Not because anything “dramatic” happens. There’s no plot twist. No epic reveal. Just… life.

A child waking you up.

The slow shuffle into the kitchen.

The warmth of a coffee cup in your hands.

Your son rambling on about superheroes and robots and monsters.

These are the kinds of moments most of us rush through. Or multitask through. Or outright ignore. They're small, unglamorous, repetitive. The kind of stuff our fast-paced, efficiency-obsessed culture loves to optimize away.

But seen through older eyes—through wiser eyes—they become sacred.

The poem turns up the contrast between how we live and what we’ll miss one day.

• The snack spilled in the car seat

• The body that still moves without pain

• The simple miracle of being able to call your mom and hear her voice on the other end

None of those moments would make a highlight reel. But they are the real highlights. We just don’t know it until they’re gone.

Nothing Lasts Forever (and That’s the Point)

Here’s the thing: nothing lasts.

Your kid’s voice won’t always sound like that.

Your back won’t always bend like it does now.

The people you love won’t always be a phone call away.

And deep down, we all know this. But we don’t live like we do.

We treat time like it’s something we’re trying to beat.

We treat bodies like machines.

We treat relationships like inboxes to be cleared.

And we treat ordinary moments—those quiet, fleeting, sacred little things—as if they’re distractions from the real work.

But what if those small things are the real work?

The poem gently reminds us: these days won’t always be here.

One day, the car seat will be empty.

One day, your kid will stop telling you wild stories about monsters and space robots.

One day, the hand you always reach for won’t be there to hold.

It’s not meant to be morbid. It’s meant to wake us up.

Because when we realize how fragile it all is, we stop rushing. We stop numbing. We stop trying to fast-forward through the very moments we’ll ache to relive later.

And maybe that’s the beginning of wisdom: not clinging, not controlling—just cherishing.

The KPI-ification of Everything

I work in the corporate world—right in the thick of the technology industry.

Right now, the hype machine is running full tilt on AI. Everyone wants to optimize. Everything.

Every click, every gesture, every transaction is something to be analyzed, reduced, made cheaper, faster, more efficient.

And it doesn’t stop at the business layer. The pressure is on to entrepreneur your life—monetize your hobbies, build your brand, hustle your passions. Everything is a potential revenue stream. Every relationship, a network opportunity. Every human experience, a productivity metric waiting to happen.

We talk about KPIs (key performance indicators) and shareholder value like they’re sacred.

We reward scale. Visibility. Virality.

We act like the faster, the better. The bigger, the better. The more optimized, the more valuable.

And because tech is so influential—so embedded in how we communicate, connect, and live—this mindset doesn’t stay in the office. It seeps into everything.

Our friendships start to feel like check-ins.

Our meals get interrupted by Slack or email or another notification.

Even parenting becomes a performance—are you maximizing enrichment activities? Tracking screen time? Documenting milestones?

We’re abstracting life behind dashboards and digital signals.

We’re trying to automate away the messy, unmeasurable parts of being human.

But in doing so, we’re also slowly sanding off our soul.

Because the things that make life rich—holding someone’s gaze, listening without multitasking, getting bored together, laughing at something that doesn’t scale—don’t live in metrics.

They live in presence. In slowness. In smallness.

What Does It Mean to Be Important?

There’s a strange thing that happens when you live in a world defined by metrics:

Importance gets really loud.

It starts to look like:

• A massive following

• A big title

• Viral impact

• A name that shows up in articles or on stages

• A LinkedIn post with thousands of likes

Importance, in that system, is something you have to earn. It demands constant proof. Constant validation. It feeds on visibility—and it’s never full.

You can be “important” today and forgotten tomorrow. 

That version of importance shouts. It builds platforms. It tracks ROI. It makes you feel like you always have to do more, grow faster, leave a legacy that the world will remember.

But the soul doesn’t define importance that way.

To the soul, importance is quiet.

It’s sacred.

It’s hidden in the small.

It’s the feeling of your child curling into your lap without saying a word.

It’s making someone laugh during a hard moment.

It’s holding space for another person’s grief without needing to fix it.

That kind of importance doesn’t trend.

It doesn’t need to be seen.

It’s already complete in its smallness.

And yet, even in our attempts to “spiritualize” importance, sometimes we end up reinforcing the same cultural values.

I remember a sermon I heard once—well-meaning and heartfelt. The pastor told the story of meeting a beggar in India. He gave the man his coat, some money, and offered him prayer. Twenty years later, the story goes, they met again… only this time the beggar had become a mayor—or some kind of public official.

And the message was this: “You never know who will become important.”

But even in that beautiful act of kindness, there was something embedded in the story that stuck with me.

The beggar only “became important” because he rose in status.

Because he gained a title.

Because he made it.

But what if he was already important? What if his humanity didn’t need a promotion to be worth our attention?

The Quiet Riot of the Soul

Here’s the truth most systems won’t tell you:

They need you to feel like you’re not enough.

Political systems, business empires, even churches at times—they all clamor to be seen as essential, world-changing, moving the needle forward. They measure impact in headlines, influence in followers, and success in scale.

And to keep that machine running, they push. Deadlines. Quotas. KPIs. Do more. Be more. Sell more.

And when you’re exhausted? They’ll dangle the next carrot: money, fame, legacy, God’s will—even “changing the world.”

Just enough to keep you going.

But here's the good news: you don’t have to play by those rules.

Yes, we live in this culture. Yes, we participate in its systems. But we don’t have to sell our souls to them.

You can be in the meeting and still be fully human.

You can show up to work without hardening your heart.

You can deliver excellence without worshipping efficiency. 

You can leave people warmer than you found them.

You can bring a bit of levity into a world that takes influence way too seriously.

You can choose presence over pressure.

Contentment over comparison.

Smallness over spectacle.

And here’s the beautiful, ironic twist: people notice.

They may not say it. They may not even realize it. But they feel it.

There’s something different about someone who’s not chasing every new trend, not bowing to every algorithm, not performing for some unseen scoreboard.

It’s like a low, steady bass note humming underneath the noise.

Grounded.

Rooted.

Real.

That’s the quiet riot of the soul.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t campaign. It simply is—a defiant whisper of what really matters.

I know this world is demanding. It pushes you to your limit—emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It tells you to keep climbing, keep optimizing, keep producing.

And it never tells you when to stop.

But you are allowed to step off the treadmill. You are allowed to care more about being than achieving. You are allowed to choose stillness, softness, slowness.

And in doing so, you just might rediscover the sacredness of your own life.

“The antidote to exhaustion is not rest. It’s wholeheartedness.”—David Whyte

So go live with your whole heart. Not for applause. Not for metrics. But for the moments—the quiet ones—that make it all matter.

Up 2.8 pounds.