2026-02-07 08:00:00
On these rainy days, I am reading two books that are shaping me more than I expected. Or maybe they are simply putting words to things I already felt.
One of them is Anna Karenina.
I see myself clearly in Levin.
Konstantin Dmitrich Levin is a landowner who spends most of the novel in an existential crisis. He could live off his wealth or take an important role in Moscow. He chooses neither. That life feels wrong to him.
He rejects the modern world. He keeps asking the same question. What is the point of living?
Levin represents a quiet kind of vitalism. His wisdom does not come from ideas or debates. It comes from physical work. During harvest season, when he joins the peasants in the fields, he finds peace. While working, he stops thinking. He stops searching for answers because he no longer needs them.
The other book I am reading is Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Tolstoy and Nietzsche were contemporaries. They probably never read each other. Still, they shared something essential. A deep rejection of rational modern life. A life lived from the head instead of the body.
But they looked in opposite directions.
Nietzsche looked upward. Toward the overman. Toward the creation of new values. Toward saying yes to life in all its cruelty and beauty. His vitalism was aristocratic. Heroic. Vertical.
Levin looked downward. Toward the land. Toward humility. Toward dissolving the ego through work and family. His vitalism was rural. Horizontal. Grounded.
Yet both say the same thing in different ways.
You can only live through action. Never through pure thought. You do not need permission. You do not need justification. What you live is who you are. Nothing more.
Modern culture twists this message.
It tells you that the path to authenticity is knowing yourself. As if you were a fixed object. As if you did not change over time.
That is the trap.
Because if you are always evolving, there is always more work to do. Always another layer to dig into. And as Byung Chul Han puts it:
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
You exploit yourself because it is never enough. Because you are never ready.
Kierkegaard saw this coming in the nineteenth century. He called it despair. Infinite reflection that paralyzes you.
His answer was not more analysis. It was the opposite. The leap of faith.
You commit to a way of living. To a decision. Irrationally. You stop weighing options. You jump without a safety net. You suspend judgment and move forward.
For me, real vitalism lives between Nietzsche and Levin.
Nietzsche reminds you to stop acting like a victim. Stop blaming circumstances. Act in line with what you want.
Levin reminds you to be humble. To accept limits. To value small things. To live simply.
Leaving big questions behind and focusing on living feels like the right response to chaotic times. Focus on what you can control. Take the leap of faith. Let life move again.
No rush. No self exploitation. Just motion.
Life does not wait. And it is only through action that you become someone.
Everything else is suffering.
2026-01-30 08:00:00
The other day I was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra and I stopped at this line:
That everyone has the right to learn to read corrupts in the long run not only writing, but even thinking itself.
Nietzsche saw something early on. When a skill becomes universal, the craft behind it often erodes. Not just the result, but the way we think. The relationship between effort and mastery starts to weaken.
It made me think about AI.
With AI, everything becomes more accessible. Writing a message. Writing a letter to someone you love. Building an app. Making a film. Speed increases, but something important quietly disappears. The relationship between the creator and the act of creating.
That friction between wanting to make something and actually making it used to matter. It was part of learning. Part of ownership. You struggled, failed, tried again, and through that process the idea became yours. When creation becomes instant and disposable, what remains of that bond? What does it even mean to make something anymore?
And that is where the real risk appears.
Not that machines will replace us, but that we will start creating without care. That we will outsource not only execution, but intention. That we will become operators of tools rather than participants in the act of making. Everything polished. Everything correct. Everything strangely empty.
Yet maybe this loss carries its own answer.
In the film Her, most communication happens through AI. Still, Theodore’s job is to write letters by hand for other people. Why would anyone pay for that when a machine can do it faster and better?
Because in a world optimized for efficiency, people begin to crave the opposite. The imperfect. The human trace. The feeling that someone real was there.
That is the line I hope we do not cross.
The need for the human. The imperfect. The crafted. Not because it is more efficient, but because without it, we risk forgetting what matters at all.
2026-01-20 08:00:00
About a week ago, Picmal reached 200 users.
For some people that number might feel small. For others, big. For me, it’s symbolic.
When I was 15, partly out of curiosity and partly out of boredom, I started a forum that mixed two things I loved at the time: football and video games. I called it futbolgame. Not very original.
I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t think about growth, positioning, or marketing. I just wanted to build something. And somehow, without really understanding how, that forum also passed the 200 registered users mark.
What surprised me most was not the number itself, but everything that came with it.
I started learning Photoshop because some users wanted banners for their profiles. I met people I never saw in real life but spent hours talking with, mostly about football. The forum never became anything big, but it gave me something more valuable at that age: curiosity, momentum, and the feeling of creating something that mattered to a few people.
Looking back, I realize how easy it is to overcomplicate things now. We obsess over names, branding, positioning, storytelling. We try to make everything perfect before it even exists. And often, that’s exactly what kills the idea.
Back then, I had no strategy. No expectations. I just made things, learned along the way, and enjoyed the process.
And honestly, that’s still what matters most.
If you enjoy creating, the rest is secondary. You never really know if something will turn into a living until you try. And you cannot force yourself to care about an idea just because it sounds good on paper. Real interest does not come from an idea bank. It comes from being genuinely curious, from wanting to understand a problem, from spending time with it.
That is where the best things come from.
I am not in a position to give advice, but if there is one thing I believe in, it is this: create if you feel the urge to create. Follow what genuinely pulls you. Try things. Express yourself.
In a world where everything is measured, optimized, and packaged, seeing someone do something honestly and without pretending is rare. Maybe it makes less money. Maybe it never becomes a business. But your soul does not run on revenue.
If we spent less time chasing what seems profitable and more time exploring what truly interests us, we would probably see better ideas, more originality, and work that actually means something.
2025-12-29 08:00:00
As 2025 comes to an end, I realize I have written less in this newsletter than I would have liked. Maybe my sometimes extreme perfectionism has held me back. Partly because I felt I had nothing worth sharing, and partly because what I wrote did not feel good enough.
I think this is a feeling we all experience at times, whether when writing or when trying to express ourselves in general. But the point of this newsletter is not to deliver something polished. It is more a way to talk about what happens to me, how I feel about it, and how I interpret it, while I try to make a living from this whole entrepreneurship thing.
So I guess I should think less and do more. I have applied that advice to other areas of my life, but not here. And 2026 feels like a good moment to start.
When I say I have not been writing here, I really mean it. I did not even write to say that I launched an app. Picmal is my first 100% native Mac app, and by not overthinking things and simply shipping something that was useful to me, I ended up discovering that it is useful to others too.
I am close to reaching 200 paying users. From the outside, especially when you see so many companies making millions every year, that number might seem tiny. For me, it feels huge. It is proof to myself that I can build things that are genuinely useful to other people.
So yes, the same idea again: think less and do more. By pure algorithmic coincidence, this YouTube channel found me. Elisha talks a lot about how his life started to improve once he stopped overthinking and began acting more, referring to it with the term _retardmaxx_.
I guess he is right. And since my newsletter is called nonsense, maybe I should start honoring that name a bit more.
Last year, when I wrote my year review, I mentioned something I have been doing since 2021. I take the photos I shot during the year and go through them month by month, writing down what I was doing and small anecdotes from those moments. It is my way of keeping those experiences alive.
Last year I changed that dynamic a bit. Instead, I started answering a set of forty questions. I liked the idea because everything becomes much more concrete, while the goal stays the same: to preserve those small moments you lived during the year so that when you come back to them later, once they are no longer fresh, they are still there waiting for you. Almost like a freezer for memories.
I added one more thing to this ritual last year, borrowed from my friend Marynes. At the end of the year, she always creates a vision board with things she wants to do in the following year. If you are a visual person, having this present throughout the year helps a lot. With a single glance, it reminds you of what you want for the year, and of the ambitions or aspirations you have for the future.
It felt like a much healthier way to approach next year’s goals. Not as another checklist or yet another work project to deal with, but rather as a gentle reminder of what we want to prioritize, both in the coming year and beyond.
Beyond Picmal, I have a few apps planned for next year. Some of the problems I want to solve:
All of them will share one thing: AI as a quiet assistant, not as the main character. I believe AI works best when it supports your thinking, not when it replaces it. A subtle layer that helps you move faster, not one that takes over your ideas or decisions.
I will share what I learn along the way here. The wins and the failures.
There are also some questions I have been sitting with, and that I want to explore more deeply:
I do not have answers yet. But I think writing is a good way to find them.
So, bye 2025. A year where I learned, again, that the best way to move forward is to stop waiting for things to feel ready. The only way of learning is by friction.
I would love to hear from you. What are your end of year rituals? Any offline places or online corners you discovered this year that I should know about? And what are you planning for 2026?
You can just send me an email to hello[at]albertogalca.com.
See you in 2026. With more nonsense.
2025-10-13 08:00:00
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with death. It’s a topic many cultures don’t discuss much, yet it’s fundamental for the simple fact that we’re all going to die at some point.
I’ve always had this idea of collecting reflections from others, not so much to think about death, but rather to learn how to live. To learn what mattered to those who are no longer here and how, thanks to that, we can reevaluate our existence on this planet until we’re no longer here.
The title of this essay encapsulates the philosophy of my life perfectly:
The continuous work of our life is to build death
No one embodies this philosophy better than Montaigne.
He was a skeptic through and through, so much so that his main motto was: “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?). But his doubt wasn’t paralyzing, it was liberating. By recognizing the limits of his knowledge, he freed himself from pretending to live perfectly or appearing to be someone he wasn’t.
In 1571, he retreated to his castle tower to write. There, surrounded by books and aware of his mortality, he decided to observe himself without filters. He wrote about everything: his fears, his contradictions, his failures, even the most mundane aspects of his existence. He explored, doubted, contradicted himself from one essay to another. His writing is radical in its honesty: personal, contradictory, profoundly human.
Montaigne viscerally understood something Euripides had expressed centuries before:
How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely?
This awareness of fragility didn’t paralyze him, it awakened him. He knew his time was limited and that spending it on pretensions or living for others was wasting it. That’s why meditating on death didn’t seem morbid to him, but practical: know yourself, accept yourself, and live calmly, without thinking you’re more than you are, knowing your time is limited.
For Montaigne, preparing to die was the first step to living well. Accepting that you are ephemeral, contradictory, and imperfect finally allows you to be fully alive.
You’re in that tower, whether you know it or not. The question isn’t whether you’re going to die, but whether you’re going to live before you do.
Some of the references in these essays are from the book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer , which I recommend.
2025-07-20 08:00:00
I’m someone driven by obsessions, and by phases.
When I’m in one of those phases where I want to do everything on the computer, I forget about the rest of the world. I can spend 18 hours straight in front of the screen, and as you can imagine, that’s not sustainable. Because then I burn out and go three months without wanting to touch the computer.
I’ve always tried to set a time to shut down the computer and do something offline, like writing or reading. That time has always been 8:00 pm. And I’d be embarrassed to admit I could count on one hand the times I’ve actually done it on my own will.
So I said: “Fuck it, I’m going to find a way to fix this.” I don’t want to be the one deciding anymore. So here’s a super simple tip for how I handled it.
Just open your terminal and type:
crontab -e
Once you’re in, add this beautiful line:
0 20 * * * /usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell app "System Events" to shut down'
If you want to pick a different time, just ask ChatGPT how to do it or change the 20 to whatever hour you want (for example, 7pm would be 19).
To exit vim successfully, remember to hit :wq. Finally, check that everything is in place with crontab -l.
If it shows up, you’re all set. You can close the terminal and forget about it. Now, every day at 8pm, your computer will shut down and you’ll have no choice but to settle for a sad little notebook or a boring book.
