My parents used to tell me about a man who, the day before his wedding, had gone into his burning house to save his belongings.

He never came back.

After the tragedy, overwhelmed by grief, his bride-to-be had what my parents called a "nervous breakdown".

At that age, I couldn’t fully grasp what it meant to lose the person you loved. What stuck with me was another detail, much smaller and much stranger.

According to my father, this woman with long straight hair had found herself with a long, frizzy lock, white as milk, in the space of a single night.

In my mind, that was what a nervous breakdown looked like.

A Thesis, an Internship, and a Wedding

Fast-forward to 2008.

The year my older sister got married. No offense to her, but I don’t remember the exact date. What I do remember is that it was about a week before my thesis discussion.

The written thesis had to be handed in on August 18, in Milan.

Let me repeat that: August 18.

In Milan.

For anyone unfamiliar with Milan, legend says that the city gets so empty in August, that you could walk around naked in public without worrying about being seen. I had a hell of a time finding a print shop that was open, and they only printed my copy as a personal favor. There was even a mistake in my name on the printed copy, but I decided that was perfectly fine. I couldn’t bring myself to ask them to fire everything up again just to reprint the cover.

With the document handed in, I still had about twenty days to finish the technical part. The website was live, which meant I could keep making changes practically until the very last second.

Fun fact: the panda that’s stayed with me, in various forms, ever since was created as the logo for that project.

I worked all summer, every day, all day. I only stopped to go to work at the internship required for my degree.

I took my laptop to my sister’s wedding. I worked on the train, I worked during the wedding, I worked at night, too.

And I Felt Normal

I had a list of things to do, and I was doing them.

The morning after the wedding, I woke up and noticed something on the right side of my head. One of my curls was completely straight, sticking straight up without so much as a bend.

And it was white as milk.

I thought of that woman again. In the image I’d formed as a child, she had shut down. Burned out. But I was still working, preparing for my thesis, tweaking the website. I didn’t feel as though I’d reached the end of my reserves.

I hadn’t realized I’d pushed myself to the point of exhaustion.

That’s why, when I hear people criticize someone for not realizing they’re unwell, I find it hard to agree.

“How could you possibly not have noticed?”

But it is possible. I hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t deliberately ignoring a siren blaring at full volume: I didn’t even really know what I was supposed to be listening for.

I felt like one of the Knights of the Zodiac fighting my way through the Twelve Houses.

“Burn, my Cosmo!”

Except I was the one burning.

That first time, I had no immediate aftereffects that I knew how to recognize. My thesis went well, and I carried on with my life. Besides, no offense to my bald readers, but I had even more hair back then than I do now. A white lock of hair seemed better than a receding hairline…

I just thought I’d had an accident and walked away unscathed.

That didn’t stop me from falling into the same trap again.

The Second Burnout

A few years later, I was working at Feltrinelli Editore. I didn’t know it then, but those were my last few months there. During that time, I created what I still consider one of the best campaigns of my career, for Isabel Allende’s Ripper.

The book was a thriller. I’d drawn the novel’s characters as playing cards. The cards were printed, sent to bookstores, and slipped into other books: readers could find them, get curious, collect them.

They were beautiful. I still think so.

I’d done practically everything, from the idea to the execution. A one-man show, a way of working that would crop up again at other points in my career.

Toward the end of the project, though, I began to struggle.

The stylus for my graphics tablet seemed to be slipping out of my hands. Just opening Illustrator had become an effort. I think you can even see that exhaustion in the linework on the cards: the last character I drew was the dog, and honestly, it’s the weakest of the bunch.

This time, I didn’t need a white lock of hair.

I noticed something was wrong.

I was burned out. Again.

I delivered anyway.

That’s an important detail: the finished work can do a very good job of hiding what happened to the person who made it. From the outside, all anyone saw was a finished campaign.

Then the bill came due.

The Christmas break wasn’t enough. For weeks, my head was completely foggy.

And it wasn’t just work. For a few months, I couldn’t even get an erection. I’m writing this because when I say I wasn’t functioning the way I used to, this is exactly what I mean: that exhaustion had taken pieces of my life.

Recovery took a long time.

This time, I understood that I couldn’t just get back to it and pretend nothing had happened.

Learning to Stop

I’ve talked a lot about these episodes with my psychotherapist, and I’ll probably return to them when I write about my neurodivergence.

So I had to learn to set boundaries for myself.

A sprint needs an end decided before you start. And stopping has to be an option even if the work isn’t finished. Otherwise, the limit keeps moving along with the finish line.

Basically, you can go Super Saiyan 3 when you need to. You don’t do it to go grocery shopping.

The Exchange Isn’t Equivalent

I’m not telling you all this to say there’s never a reason to put in long hours.

I still believe in sprints. There are exams, projects, jobs, things worth believing in and putting serious effort into.

But knowing what I’m running for isn’t enough: I also need to know when to stop.

My thesis went well. The Allende campaign is still one of the projects I’m proudest of.

But neither was worth what I put on the line.

Like those anime techniques where the protagonist sacrifices years of their life to become incredibly powerful for a few minutes.

Except I wasn’t trying to save the planet.

I had to finish a website and draw a dog.

I keep seeing overwork glorified, especially on LinkedIn, with constantly pushing past your limits presented as a virtue. The problem is that those limits exist even when we manage to ignore them.

To borrow from the Elric brothers, the exchange wasn’t equivalent.

So go ahead and do that sprint, if you can afford it.

But the option to stop, your safety net, has to be part of the project from the very beginning.

It can’t be the reward you give yourself after you’ve finished.

All jokes aside (though it's not entirely a joke anymore), one of my biggest fears is that my kids won't remember me. They're still little. And since becoming a father, the thought that I could be here one day and gone the next has taken on a different weight.

But there's another reason, and what better way to explain it than with a story? If you know me, or get to know me, you'll know people call me "Papà Castoro": Papa Beaver.

Of green beards and briefcases

When I was a kid, back in preschool, two things made my dad instantly recognisable in my drawings. I'd put green dots on his face (I was convinced that my dad's beard, which he always kept shaved, was green) and give him a briefcase. My mum started to worry because even when I drew him at the beach, by the sea, or anywhere else, he always had a suit, a tie, a green beard, and a briefcase. Why? Well, probably because he spent most of his time at the office. I rarely saw him: just an hour or two in the evening, and on Sundays.

What did my dad do all day? What was he interested in? Who did he talk to on his lunch break? What the hell is a lunch break?

And even when my mum convinced my dad to take me to work with him... well, he worked in a bank, and French-style loan amortisation and interest rates aren't easy for a kid to understand. Or interesting. But I'd love to know what Dad did back then, what was on his mind. Things I could only have understood once I'd grown up.

So, kids, this blog is mainly where you'll find out what Dad was doing all day, shut away in his little backyard shed in front of a computer.

I owe a big part of my life to the internet

The internet changed my life. Really.

I discovered the internet (or, okay, the web, to be precise) in 1997. My first website went live in 1998.

My longest-running friendship started online. I met my other half through an app. Even my choice of where to live was tied to wanting to become a web designer. I wanted to build a life around making things on the internet.

Oh, the web was so damn cool back then. I'm sorry for anyone who discovered it late, but it really was an ocean to explore. Full of curious people, of people making things. Sure, we were mostly tinkerers at first, but you could build something, put it online, and meet other people doing the same.

Then the big companies arrived. Then the people who wanted to make money from it. And little by little, we found ourselves spending more and more time in spaces that belong to someone else.

We post, we talk, we share. But we're in their house.

Technofeudalism.

I've never been okay with that. I even tried working for one of those big companies (probably the subject of a future post). For now, let's just say it didn't feel right. It wasn't for me.

I don't want to get all nostalgic, though. I hate the whole "back in my day..." thing. The internet is still incredible, if only because it lets you talk to anyone. I have friends I talk to every day without seeing them. I work fully remotely. That ability to meet, exchange ideas, and make things together is still there, and it's part of my everyday life.

I just want a little piece of that space to be mine again. Somewhere I can decide what to publish and how, without having to be in someone else's house, without being at the mercy of algorithms, and without worrying that someone will delete it all.

That's another reason this blog exists.

Technology can also help us reclaim some space

None of this means I see technology as the enemy. That would be pretty absurd, given everything I've just said.

Take AI. It's changing our world, and it's changing my life too. But it's a tool: it can help us do things, it can free up our time. We don't have to see it as something purely negative.

I'm dictating these very thoughts to an AI. Then there'll be work to do: add some bits, cut others, put things in order, edit. And I'll probably get help from AI with that part too.

The work of figuring out what I want to say, though, that's something I want to do myself. I'll still spend a good chunk of my time in a text editor, with a nice Markdown file, copying and pasting sentences, words, and ideas around.

That's how I want to use technology. Also to reclaim something that technology itself has helped take away from me along the way.

For me, starting a blog is part of that attempt.

What you can expect

So, as someone who was shaped by the web, who became who they are partly thanks to it, I thought: fuck it, a blog sounds like a good idea.

I'll write about the things I'm interested in and about my life, mostly my working life, because that's the side of me my kids know the least. But there'll be personal stuff too. Maybe not the spicy kind. I already have a few ideas: the times I've burned out, my kids, how I work, what a typical day looks like. AI, obviously, which will probably be the subject of one of the very first posts. And cycling, because sooner or later there's bound to be a cycling post.

I wanted all of this to be written down.

I didn't want to start a podcast. Another white guy with a podcast: no thanks.

And I didn't want to make videos of myself talking to people while cycling.

I wanted to write because I want some mental effort to go into what I publish. To sit with a thought, try to explain it, read it back, and maybe realise I hadn't really understood it myself. Just putting something out there isn't enough for me: I want what comes across to be my thoughts.

Then again, maybe nobody will read it. Who knows.

But at least there'll be a trace. A drop in the ocean. And maybe one day my kids will stop by and find a little bit of me.