finding my northstar at 28

I'm 28, single, no kids, unemployed, and living with my parents in a small Costa Rican town that feels like the Shire from Lord of the Rings. Comfortable, safe, predictable.

Four months ago, at 4 AM during one of my nocturnal walking sessions, I found myself trapped in a thought loop: "I am nothing. I am lost. I have accomplished nothing." Instead of drowning in the spiral, I grabbed pen and paper and started writing down everything I wanted to change. The list kept growing.

As I stared at that list, I had my first real insight: what I longed for was entirely possible, but I was nowhere near being the version of myself capable of achieving it.

That night marked the beginning of everything changing.

Thoughts versus reality

When basic survival isn't your primary concern (thank you, Mom and Dad), you gain this extraordinary opportunity: the freedom to question. But there's an important distinction here - having shelter, food, and safety doesn't mean having money to actually participate in life. I can't afford coffee with friends, can't buy books, can't go anywhere.

So I've been sitting with this discomfort, learning how to just walk in my garden, how to be in my bedroom without constant stimulation. Learning to not listen to music all the time, to be in silence. Learning to fill my time differently - reading, audiobooks, no Netflix, just YouTube and podcasts.

They say we become the five people we spend the most time with. I said goodbye to parties, raves, psychedelics, participating in society - but connection is still a human need. So I've built these parasocial relationships with podcast hosts through content consumption. It's my way of finding mentors when I can't afford to be in rooms with people who inspire me.

I've been challenging systems my whole life. Refused catechism at 9 years old. Dropped out of high school at 13. I've always had this instinct to resist being told what to do, what to believe, how to live. Now I'm testing spiritual and personal development concepts against my actual experience to see what really works.

Two approaches, one problem

Through this content consumption, I kept encountering two seemingly opposite approaches. First, there were people like Joe Dispenza talking about how thoughts create reality, writing letters to your future self, embodying the feeling of who you're becoming. The idea that consciousness itself could reshape material reality.

Then there were systematic thinkers like Tim Ferriss (who I find incredibly attractive and funny and weird) with his approach to lifestyle design - do the math, work backwards from what you need, build rational systems.

At first these seemed contradictory. How do you reconcile "manifest with your mind" with "build a logical business plan"? But slowly I started realizing they're not opposite approaches - they're both required. You need the consciousness piece AND the practical piece.

The challenge with the spiritual concepts isn't that they don't work - it's learning how to feel abundance in your body when your current reality doesn't match that emotional state. How do you embody the feeling of making $40,000 a month doing what you love when you can't afford coffee with a friend? How do you visualize having a nice apartment, traveling, and a decent car when you're relying on your dad to pay for your website hosting?

What if changing your thoughts isn't just about manifesting those things, but about questioning why you thought you needed them in the first place? What if manifestation works, but only when combined with rational action?

Developing masculine energy

This questioning led me to a deeper realization about myself. I've always been spontaneous, goofy, impulsive, highly emotional, flowing with whatever felt good in the moment. But I started questioning my self-worth and the patterns in my relationships. I'd never really dated seriously, but I began asking: who do I want to attract? And more importantly, what version of myself would be capable of attracting that kind of person?

I realized that within me, the feminine energy was strong - the flow, intuition, emotional intelligence, creativity. But my masculine energy felt wounded, underdeveloped. Not masculine in the gendered sense, but the universal masculine: structure, discipline, follow-through, rational thinking, the ability to build and maintain something over time.

So I started consciously healing and developing my masculine energy. Waking up at the same time. Walking every morning. Working out. Grounding practices. Most importantly: showing up for myself in what I said I'd do.

Each morning I wake up and do what I said I would do; I'm proving to myself that I can be trusted. That consistency became my first real practice of healthy masculine energy - not the toxic "suppress your emotions" version, but the reliable "I keep promises to myself" version.

This work connects directly to my questions about relationships, self-worth, and entrepreneurship. We attract what we are. If my energies are wounded and unhealed, I'll attract wounded people. But if I develop healthy masculine energy - reliability, self-trust, the ability to follow through - I'll attract someone who also has those qualities.

As I'm awakening to social conditioning and deconstructing my inherited self, my alignment needs to match whatever I decide to pursue as a source of income. How can I create something authentic if I don't trust myself?

Who I want to attract became inseparable from who I need to become.

Starting from zero

What I love about Tim Ferriss's lifestyle design is the rational approach - if you need $10k a month to live well and travel, you work backwards from there. You do the math of exactly what you need, create systems to generate that income, and design everything else around the life you actually want.

This systematic thinking was missing from my natural approach of going with the flow and not planning for the future. The math forces you to get specific about what you actually need versus what culture tells you to want.

I know entrepreneurs exist all over the world, and there are success stories everywhere. But Costa Rican reality is different: we don't have incubators, venture capitalists, or entrepreneurial hubs like San Francisco or Austin.

So when you have no money, no connections, and complete uncertainty about what you're actually good at - how do you actually become an entrepreneur? I know that greatness comes from repetition and effort, but when you have no savings, net zero income, and you're relying on a contribution from your dad to even host this Squarespace site (lol), what's the starting point?

I know entrepreneurship is the only way to have real wealth and agency. I don't want to rely on a single source of income - I need to diversify and be able to create something. I've read Alex Hormozi and Noah Kagan's Dollar Weekend, but I want to match my work and time with alignment of who I actually am.

Yes, I hear the voice that says just get whatever corporate job and make money, save up, then decide what to do. But I want to believe that if I'm aligned, if I find my blue ocean - my category of one - that's not necessary. That there's a way to create income that doesn't require compromising who I'm becoming.

This forced me to strip entrepreneurship down to its essence. Without all the resources, what's left? What can you actually create when you're starting from complete uncertainty about your own capabilities?

I created one rule while I figure this out: I only work on projects that teach me something I want to learn. If an opportunity doesn't expand my skills or align with where I want to grow, I say no. I need to feel a genuine connection to the founder, the mission, the purpose of what I'm contributing to. Work needs to mean something beyond just paying bills. This means saying no to opportunities that don't align, even when I need money.

This means fewer opportunities short-term, but everything I do develops the person I'm becoming rather than just surviving another day.

Making connections

As I was developing this practical foundation of self-trust and routine, I kept encountering ideas that expanded my understanding of what was possible. Martha Beck's "The Way of Integrity" showed me how cultural conditioning traps us away from our authentic selves - how we fall out of integrity by conforming to social constructs in the name of love, security, and acceptance.

Beck writes about soul teachers appearing as guides on our path. So I started asking source for guidance, asking to be connected with my intuition, to receive whatever teachers I needed. This led me deeper into understanding consciousness through quantum physics, exploring shamanism and awakening the divine feminine energy through various teachings.

But here's what I'm grappling with: how do I integrate all these teachings in practical ways? I'm in this process of doing the daily work - the routines, the self-trust building, the systematic thinking about income and lifestyle design. But I'm also connecting with source, with my inner knowing, learning about manifestation and energy work.

Like Dante awakening in the "dark wood of error," I realized I had found myself far from my true self through a series of wrong turns - society encouraging me away from who I really am in favor of social consistency.

The question becomes: how do you live in both worlds? How do you take inspired action while also building concrete systems? How do you trust your intuition while also doing the math on what you need to earn? The spiritual seeking and practical work aren't separate - they're informing each other. Creative visualization combined with building routines. Manifestation paired with rational planning. They're part of the same process of becoming someone who can hold the life I'm designing.

What I'm actually doing

The questions that drive me now all center around one thing: What if this apparent disadvantage is actually my advantage? What if living with my parents and being unemployed is giving me the freedom to think clearly? What if I can build something meaningful precisely because I'm starting from uncertainty about who I am and what I'm good at?

When people ask what I do for work, I've started saying "I'm figuring it out." The silence that follows tells me everything about how uncomfortable we are with not-knowing. But I'm learning to sit in that discomfort differently than I did during that 4 AM breakdown four months ago.

I don't see this as something to be ashamed of anymore. I see it as an incredible opportunity, and I feel enormous gratitude toward my parents - my best friends - who have given me this space to question everything.

I feel like Bella Baxter in a way. She says, "I am a flawed, experimenting person. I seek outings and adventures. There's so much to discover. And there is a world to enjoy, circumnavigate. It is the goal of all to improve, advance, progress, grow." I feel like I'm seeing life in technicolor, through a different lens - where not knowing becomes the adventure itself.

Writing has become my form of accountability. I don't know what I'm creating yet, or if any of this will lead to anything that makes sense to other people. But I'm more interested in these questions than I've ever been in any job I've had.

Maybe that's enough for now. Maybe the questioning itself is the work.