Silence

"Beware the quiet man. For while others speak, he watches. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest...He strikes!"

One week ago I moved into a studio apartment in Ras Al Khaimah. Last week was my 40th birthday. As of today I have had only one IRL interaction with a very close friend and confidant.

And for the first time in years, this feels like progress.

There’s this concept in psychology: the “monkey mind.” Buddhism calls it kapicitta. That endless chatter. The lower consciousness. Reactive, anxious, hungry for stimulation, terrified of stillness. Feed me. Distract me. Show me something. Anything. The monkey mind built social media. This monkey mind built Dubai.

For years I lived in that frequency. Crypto Twitter. Discord notifications. Networking events where everyone’s scanning the room for someone more useful. The DIFC crowd, glass towers full of people performing importance. I thought I was building connections. I was just making noise with other people making noise. Lower minds bouncing off each other, mistaking friction for meaning.

Jung called it the shadow work, descending into the chaos of the unconscious before you can access anything higher. Schopenhauer said most men live their whole lives as slaves to the Will, this blind hungry force that keeps them chasing, grasping, never arriving. The lower mind doesn’t want you to be still. Stillness is death to it. So it fills every silence with panic.

And I’m done feeding this monkey.

Here’s what the noise cost me:

Years of transactional relationships I mistook for friendships. Seven crypto influencers I worked with, every single one fake. Smiling on camera, hollow behind it. They don’t want community, they want audience. They don’t want connection, they want extraction. And I played along because that’s what you do. That’s the game. Network. Engage. “Add value.” Perform.

But I was never wired for fakery. It exhausts me in a way that’s hard to explain. Like running on a treadmill that’s slightly too fast, you can keep up for a while but eventually your body just says no. My body said no. My mind said no. So I stopped.

Disconnected from the fake friends. The transactional ones. The people who only reach out when they want something. Let the group chats go quiet. Let the DMs pile up unread. Let the connections that were never real finally dissolve.

And something interesting happened: the real ones stayed.

Substack friends has been unexpected.

I have started writing again, really writing, not content, not threads, just honest words about my actual life and people have reached. Not many. But real ones. Readers who send messages that aren’t asking for anything. Just: how are you doing? hang in there..

That’s the higher mind recognizing itself. That’s what genuine connection actually feels like, not networking, not engagement metrics, just one consciousness reaching toward another and saying I see you.

And it’s not just Substack. Looking back, there have been good people along the way. At jobs. Random encounters. People who showed up without agenda. I think I was too busy performing to notice them properly. Too caught up in the noise to hear the signal.

The silence is teaching me to recognize the difference.

I’ve also started running again.

Every morning. Beach. Hayat Island. The Arabian Gulf doing its thing while I do mine. It’s not about fitness or it is, but it’s not only about fitness. It’s about returning to a state I lost somewhere along the way. Mental strength. Clarity. The feeling of being in your body instead of floating above it, anxious and scattered.

Calisthenics philosophy: you build strength by working against resistance. Gravity. Your own weight. There’s no machine to help you. No shortcut. Just you and the ground and the slow accumulation of capacity. Rep by rep. Day by day. You can’t fake a pull-up. Either you can lift yourself or you can’t.

I’m applying the same principle to my mind. The silence is the resistance. The stillness is the weight I’m learning to hold. Every day I don’t reach for distraction, I get a little stronger. Every morning I go to the beach and let the waves reset something in me, I’m doing a rep. Building back the mental architecture that years of noise eroded.

The strength is returning. I can feel it.

Here’s what I struggle with:

Ras Al Khaimah is not Dubai. It’s quieter. Slower. Which is why I’m here. But it’s also... emptier? There are beach clubs. Parties. Places where people congregate. I could go. I could “put myself out there.” Meet new folks.

But I already know what I’d find. The same facade, just with a different backdrop. Expats performing happiness. Conversations that go nowhere. The desperate energy of people trying to extract something from each other: validation, opportunity, sex, whatever. It’s exhausting to even think about.

And yet.

I’m 40. Alone. Building something from nothing. Part of me knows that isolation can curdle. That the lone wolf thing can become a cage if you’re not careful. That there’s a difference between strategic solitude and just... hiding.

Where do you meet real people? I genuinely don’t know. Not at networking events. Not at clubs. Not on apps. The real ones I’ve found have always appeared sideways, through the work, through the writing, through some collision I couldn’t have planned. Maybe that’s the answer. Stop looking. Keep building. Trust that the signal will find the signal.

I don’t know. I’m figuring it out.

The plan is unfolding.

Not a plan like a business plan. Not a five-year roadmap with milestones and KPIs. More like... a shape emerging from fog. I can see the outline now. Couldn’t before.

Build online. Research. Writing. Maybe a Discord community for people who think like I do: not moon boys and degens, but people who actually want to understand how the world works. Maybe YouTube eventually. Something that transcends jurisdictions, that doesn’t require me to pay $15,000 to register a company in a place that doesn’t care if I exist.

Start small. Stay quiet. Let it grow in the dark for a while before exposing it to the noise.

The silence isn’t emptiness. It’s incubation. I’m not hiding from the world, I’m composting. Breaking down all the dead matter of the past few years so something new can grow from it.

My mother called yesterday.

Same questions. Marriage. Stability. “What’s your plan?” The voice of the lower mind, externalized. Society’s checklist, delivered with love but landing like judgment. She doesn’t understand what I’m building because I can’t explain it yet. I can barely explain it to myself.

My father said nothing. As usual. And his silence felt like permission.

Maybe that’s projection. Maybe I’m making him into something he’s not. But I’ll take it. I need permission right now, even if I have to invent it.

Here’s what I know at 40:

The noise was never going to save me. The networking. The performing. The endless chasing of credentials and connections that were never real. That’s the lower mind’s game and the lower mind always loses. It just takes a long time to notice.

The higher mind requires silence. Space. The willingness to sit with yourself and not flinch. It’s not easy. The monkey screams when you stop feeding it. But eventually it gets tired. Eventually the static clears. Eventually you start to hear something underneath: quiet, steady, yours.

I’m one week into whatever this is. New apartment. New chapter. Running every morning. Beach every evening. Building something I can’t fully see yet.

The plan is unfolding.

The sun’s going down over Hayat Island. I’m going outside this time.