The absurd is exactly this: a mind that asks questions the world is not designed to answer. – Albert Camus
Two days ago, I mentioned to Safo, a lawyer I had just met, that I spend a significant amount of time figuring out how to exist in the world.
It was a sentence buried somewhere in a ninety-minute debut conversation that felt less like a first meeting and more like a catch-up with an old friend. His reaction told me this wasn’t a common preoccupation for most people. Which makes sense, I guess.
But like I told him, I didn’t have much of a choice.
If I was going to dare to thrive in this world with the kind of brain I have, this work was non-negotiable.
Long before I consumed a single second of YouTube content about neurodivergence, time blindness, attention deficit disorder, or the growing vocabulary of pop psychology, I had already discovered a few things. A stopwatch made my brain work better. Closing every app on my MacBook every three or four hours was calming, and not by accident. I knew I recognised patterns and obscure connections between things: people, topics, behaviours. I also knew I would never be able to sustain a single focus or interest for very long.
Even before I knew what consulting was, I found myself describing, to a final-year student seated next to me on a bench, a job that sounded like what consultants do.
This was around 2017, when these things began to click. I was simply surviving. I did whatever I needed to do to feel better and get through my day.
Now, in January 2026, I know that I’m different. Not special. Different. And not different in the vague way everyone likes to claim. Different in the sense that if you plotted a graph of human cognition, I’d sit somewhere far to the right, among the strange ones.
There are perks. People think I’m smart. People come to me for ideas. I’m sometimes enjoyable to talk to. I see patterns and occasionally call the future before it arrives.
There are also costs.
Not being able to hold a single interest for long periods means not making the kind of progress, at almost thirty-two, that I might have made if I had simply stuck with one thing. It means not staying in well-paying jobs because of an uncompromising need for coherence between inner knowing and outer experience.
I don’t regret my life. If I were to die today, my list of regrets would be short. Still, it’s challenging.
So what do you do when your design is fundamentally at odds with the world you live in?
You find a way to exist.
You define new paths. You make uneasy alliances with ideas that don’t naturally belong together. You search for a unifying plane beneath things that appear incompatible on the surface.
The gift is that this forces a kind of depth most people never have to pursue. They fit the mould well enough. I don’t. And that depth turns out to be useful when I’m coaching CEOs, advising leaders, or even just having an honest conversation.
I’ve never spent much time worrying about neurodivergence trends, personality types, or enneagrams. This surprises people. I’m sure these tools are helpful. But they feel like boxes built from averages, and averages have never been a comfortable place for me to live.
So instead, I stare directly into the strange cocktail God put together in me and try to learn, a little more each day, how to exist.
I’m not writing this just to talk about myself.
I think there are others who need to do this work too. I work with some of them.
In a separate debut conversation that felt like notes to my younger self in 2017, an accountant training to become a software developer told me how he’d always felt something was wrong with him. That was until I shared some of this with him, in different words. His mind is a raging ocean, one he hasn’t yet learned to dam.
So the waves crash into him. Into his father. His school counsellor. His therapist. His friends and family. They’re not built to absorb that much force, so they give it a name. Crazy. Almost literally.
He, and maybe you, if you see your reflection here, also need to learn how to exist in the world.
You don’t have a choice.
Except insanity.