Carnival and productive solitude
It used to be 4 days of partying. Now it's 4 days of creating in silence. And I wouldn't change a thing.
Carnival used to mean one thing: 4 days of not thinking. Alcohol, friends, loud music, sleep three hours, repeat. The version of me that did that wasn't wrong — he was at a different stage. Looking for what everyone looks for at that age: forgetting everything for a while and feeling that life is an eternal party.
And it worked. I don't regret a thing. Every seco drink at 4 AM, every questionable decision, every morning without remembering how you got home — all of that was part of the process. It wasn't wasted time. It was the lab where you learned what doesn't fill you.
The silent break
Nobody warns you when it changes. There's no dramatic moment where you say "I don't want parties anymore". It's subtler than that. One Carnival you wake up on Saturday with no plans, and instead of feeling panic about not doing something social, you feel... peace. You sit down with your matte, open your laptop, and the hours disappear. Not because you're escaping — because you genuinely prefer to be there.
That's the break. It isn't that the party stopped being fun. It's that you discovered something more fun: creating.
Productive solitude ≠ isolation
Let me clear something up because people confuse these things all the time. Productive solitude isn't depression dressed up as ambition. It isn't locking yourself away because "they don't understand you". It isn't rejecting the world.
It's something much simpler: discovering that your favorite company is yourself. And that, even if it sounds like a cheap Instagram quote, is probably the most honest indicator of self-esteem there is. If you can spend 4 days alone with yourself and come out more energized than drained — you're doing something right.
The person who enjoys being alone isn't afraid of silence. They're afraid of the noise that steals creating hours.
The discomfort no one mentions
But it isn't all zen peace and glamorous productivity. There's real discomfort in this change. When you're on your laptop on a Carnival Saturday while your friends are posting stories from the beach, something inside asks you: am I doing the right thing?
You don't always know what you're building. Sometimes you open a project and you have no idea if it's going to work. Sometimes you read something for three hours and couldn't explain what you learned. Sometimes you just sit and think — without producing anything tangible.
And that discomfort is exactly the signal that you're growing. If you knew exactly what you were doing and where you were going at every moment, you wouldn't be exploring new territory. You'd be repeating the known. The comfortable. The dead.
Every stage was necessary
The biggest mistake would be to look back and judge. Saying "I wasted time on parties" is as stupid as saying "I wasted time learning to walk before running". No, brother — you needed to saturate yourself with the surface to value the depth.
If you had never been at those parties, you would have never felt the emptiness afterward. And without that emptiness, you would have never looked for something that actually filled it. The road wasn't straight — it was perfect.
Marcus Aurelius said that the obstacle is the way. The empty parties were the obstacle that pushed you toward productive solitude. It didn't happen in spite of the parties — it happened because of them.
What now fills those 4 days
Code. Reading. Half-formed ideas you write in notes at 2 AM. Running when the city is empty because everyone's out partying. Conversations with yourself that nobody hears but that change how you think. Projects with no deadline because they're not for anyone but you.
And the silence. That silence that used to terrify you and is now your favorite place in the universe. Where ideas breathe. Where the world's noise doesn't reach. Where you are enough.
If this Carnival you chose to stay creating while others celebrated — you aren't missing anything. You're finding yourself. And when you look back in 5 years, these will be the Carnivals you're most grateful for.
The biggest party you can throw yourself is building something that didn't exist before you sat down to create it.
— Archy