Now

On a lot of personal websites you will find people telling you what they are up to 'now' (on dedicated /now pages, inspired and initiated by Derek Sivers). I am not the greatest fan of /now. The problem with now is that nothing is really now. You are reading about what was going on at a certain point in time in the past. Even when I am reading these words before publishing the blog post, they are in some way already a product of the past.

Alas, when people update their 'now' page, the previous 'now' is often lost to time (if not saved by some archiving tool). For that reason, I prefer posts over pages as the former usually come with a timestamp. The now pages I like the most are those that are posts in disguise. I had a look at the now pages from Denmark and I could see that some of them have not been updated since April 2024, August 2024, November 2024, and October 2025. If you click on any of the links, that might have changed at the time of reading, but that is a separate issue with these pages. The main issue is that most of those pages would work better as posts than as descriptions of what is going on now.

I was thinking about setting up a now page at some point (I also thought about setting up a uses page), but I am glad I did not. When I share anything here, the idea is that what I write will already be part of the past. Not that the information will be outdated, but that it will no longer necessarily reflect what is on my mind. If anything, I sometimes write about things so that they are no longer on my mind (and get them away from 'now').

In the spirit of knowing that now is never really about what I am doing now, here are ten things I am not doing now. The hope is that I will either continue not doing them or - in some cases - actually change my behaviour.

I am not drinking coffee. I have not been drinking coffee for a few months. I do not miss it. I was drinking a double-digit number of cups per day and I was indifferent towards the taste. This is not to say that I would not like to drink a cup of coffee now and again, but I do not crave it. On the contrary, I enjoy drinking various kinds of tea (and there should be some benefits to drinking tea). I have no idea how long I am planning to stay away from coffee, but I know that the next coffee I will consume will taste better than any coffee I have had in years. I also reduced my coffee consumption significantly back in 2024, but the difference now is that I am not drinking any coffee at all.

I am not training for a marathon. Well, this goes for most people, but this is slightly crazy as I am actually planning to run a marathon in the very near future. I am not following a programme. I am currently running, on average, once per week. I run without consuming any water or gels while I am running. I am basically not doing the things I should be doing at this point in time. And it is about time to change that. Seriously, I should be running a lot more.

I am not wearing a smartwatch. I got a smartwatch for my birthday a few years ago and I was wearing it day and night from then until the other day. I was, among other things, tracking my sleep score. I did learn a lot about the quality of my sleep over time, but my ability to predict my sleep score got to a point where it made little to no sense to even check the score every morning. I could, of course, also track my daily steps but ... why? More importantly, I do not find smartwatches visually attractive and I am more than fine not wearing one. The exception is when I am running, so my smartwatch is de facto demoted to a running watch.

I am not using 1Password. I cancelled my annual subscription the other day (a subscription I have had since 2017). There are two reasons. First, I do not agree with a certain decision made by the company in the Linux space as of late. Second, Apple Passwords now seems to be in a good place where it might be just as fine as any other password manager (see this article for a migration guide).

I am not writing a blog post on turning 38. Years ago I wrote blog posts around the time of my birthday (see 32, 33, and 34). It is interesting to read those posts years later and I was thinking about writing a post titled 38. I do not really have a lot of things to say at the moment about turning 38, and when I look at the now-old posts, I am not sure they are representative of what was going on in my life around that time. Maybe there will be another post in a few years' time when I turn 40.

I am not writing code. I wrote a blog post on ten great R functions the other day and I found myself writing R code for the first time in a long time. Not only did I write the code, I looked up the official documentation for multiple functions. This made me realise how much I have missed writing code. It all boils down to the fact that I am mostly using agents to write code now, and they do a pretty good job at that (both in R and Python). I doubt this will change anytime soon.

I am not cooking with meat. I have not been cooking with meat for the past few years, and I try not to eat meat at all. The exception is when I am eating out, and even then I find myself eating less and less meat. There are no strong principles at play. It is just easy not to eat meat. That is, meat is overrated.

I am not learning Dutch. I do have a 624-day streak on Duolingo but I am very much aware that it is not the same as actually learning Dutch. If anything, I feel like Duolingo is gaslighting me by telling me that I am doing a great job learning Dutch. I am not. I should start doing more to actually learn to read and speak Dutch.

I am not watching a lot of TV shows. In the past I would watch around a season a week, but these days I barely watch more than a few episodes a week. I guess I have given up on being a completionist. I started watching Spider-Noir but stopped after a few episodes. For It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I only watch new episodes with a great IMDb rating. I gave up in the middle of The Americans. For several TV shows, I have decided not to watch subsequent seasons (e.g., The Pitt and House of the Dragon). For other TV shows, I have decided to not even check them out at all (e.g., A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Widow's Bay).

I am not travelling. I have only flown a few times in 2026, and not during the summer. Life is happening and the days fly by. I guess it means that I am enjoying the day-to-day routine in the grand scheme of things in Amsterdam. But I should travel more. Something to consider now rather than later.