The world didn't end

So I left on a vacation for two weeks with my wife, which is not something I usually do. Normally we go for short one week stints or less, since the chances me and she can stand each other in close proximity for longer get increasingly slim afterwards.

Also, it was a really far trip, we went to Africa - East Africa, not the lame North- and it was the first time for both of us. A lot of fears of exotic diseases, political unrest or plain thievery or physical violence were high on our minds because that's what the Internet said when we searched for how to prepare. The Internet is biased against poor countries inhabited by people of color, apparently. I know, shocked me too! In short, things are much better than we are left to believe and worse in other ways that are usually omitted, but that's not the purpose of the post.

The thing I want to focus on is the feeling we had before "jumping" into this. It was anxiety, for us of course, but also for what would happen if we are not **here**. My wife with her own concerns and me... Lichess, LiChess Tools, the community I am trying to build, getting out of touch from what people want and talk about, "going off-grid". And guess what? The world didn't end because we were absent.

And it's not that nothing happened. As some people noticed, updates to Lichess conflicted with some LiChess Tools code and I wasn't there to fix it. Thankfully Thibault took this into consideration and came up with a fast solution, but even if he wouldn't have done it, nothing really bad would have happened. People would have just disabled the extension, hopefully temporarily, until I was back to fix it. Plants could have died, people could have gotten ill, houses could have burned, Trump could have attacked Iran while we were on a Doha flight, Russia could have nuked someone or invaded Romania. None of these things were actually under my control. And that's OK.

This is not the first time I fall into this trap. When I was working very hard for the companies I was employed at, I felt I was not only helpful, but necessary. My mind would tell me that if I am doing half of the work in a large team, then me leaving the company would hurt them badly. Guess what? I left and nothing meaningful happened. CEOs have left and nothing happened, either. I asked for more money and they just said "no". It was just a story I was telling myself about my own self importance!

Then there is the... let's call it social dependency... of feeling that if you leave, or change something fundamental about your life, or do anything really, it will impact family and friends. Yes, because they "love you" and they "couldn't stand" the alterations. Bullshit! If they love you they can cope with your life choices. And even if they don't, they just adapt really easy most of the time. No, the real reason why we feel this is because we need to feel connected and important, regardless of reality.

So this is it. I am not going to draw conclusions and teach you about my insights. This is just a feeling that I've had and then realized (repeatedly in different contexts) of how self indulgent and silly it is. The world doesn't revolve around me or anyone else. Make of it what you will.