I have more questions than I have time to ask them. My lease ends this week. I'm living out of boxes and suitcases, trying to see every friend and family member I can, tying up loose ends, and still trying to write and build in whatever hours are left. The questions that actually matter keep getting pushed behind things like canceling my internet and figuring out how much of my life fits in a 70-liter backpack.

The answer, it turns out, is not much. Which is maybe the point.

Here's the question that keeps coming back: what should I actually be focusing on? Not "what skills should I learn" or "what's my plan." Something more fundamental. What deserves my attention right now, given that the floor is dropping out underneath all of us and nobody seems to agree on what to do about it?

You know the numbers by now. 113,000 tech layoffs this year. Companies spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure while cutting the people who built them. Platforms changing terms whenever it suits them. The entire professional class watching the deal get worse every quarter and being told to upskill, adapt, stay relevant. Relevant to what? To a system that's actively figuring out how to need you less?

I'm not going to rehearse the doom. I've spent seven editions on it and if you're reading this you probably already feel it. What I want to talk about is what you do once you feel it. Because I think there's a gap between "this is broken" and "burn it all down" that nobody's really occupying. Most of the discourse is one or the other. Either everything's fine and the pendulum will swing back, or we're all doomed and the robots are coming. Neither of those is useful. Neither of those tells you what to do on a Tuesday.

What I've been doing, imperfectly and without a grand strategy, is building in parallel.

Not opting out. Not tearing anything down. Not even fully leaving, because you can't. We're all tenants. My email is rented from Google. My AI tools are rented from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, take your pick. My professional network lives on Microsoft's servers. My cloud storage, my calendar, my design tools, all of it belongs to someone else, priced and governed by companies whose priorities have nothing to do with mine. That's the reality. Having a subscription for life is a tough pill to swallow, but it is the pill.

The question isn't how to stop renting. It's whether renting is the only thing you're doing.

A few weeks ago I set up a VPS. Virtual private server. Six euros a month. I installed open-source AI models on it. They're slower than the commercial ones. Less capable. When they break I'm the only one who's going to fix them, and sometimes that means an hour reading documentation written for people who know more than I do.

I want to be honest about what this is. A VPS is still renting. Six euros a month to a hosting company. If they change their terms, I'm in the same spot as anyone whose landlord sold the building. This is not sovereignty.

But it felt like something. The best I can describe it is a de-alienation from my own output. The models are open-source. The configuration is mine. Nobody's training on my inputs or deprecating features I depend on because they didn't hit some product metric. It's an inch closer to owning my own infrastructure, even if it isn't actually ownership. And I think that inch matters.

It matters because it changed the question. Before the VPS, every time I needed a tool, the only question was "which service do I subscribe to." Now there's a second question: "could I build this myself?" The answer is usually no. Sometimes it's yes but not worth it. But occasionally it's yes and the cost is a weekend of learning something I'm bad at. And every time I take that path, the distance between me and my own work gets a little shorter.

That's what I mean by building in parallel. Not replacing the rented infrastructure. Building alongside it. Something small, something mine, something that doesn't require anyone's permission or anyone's platform. Not because the parallel thing is going to overthrow the system. Because having it changes how you see everything else. It turns a set of default behaviors into a set of choices. And choices are different from habits, even when you end up choosing the same thing.

The trip works the same way. I'm not leaving Chicago because I've figured out something better. I'm leaving because staying felt like the only option, and I wanted to find out if that was true or just familiar. Most of my friends and family are supportive. Some of them think I've lost it a little. I get it. But I can't debate someone into believing their life might be better configured differently. You can't argue that. You can only show it. So that's what I'm trying to do. Not prove a point. Run an experiment. Build a parallel life and see if it holds.

Will it? I genuinely don't know. I have a list of questions I can't answer and the list keeps getting longer.

Will I find a community of like-minded people? Will I find a place that feels like home? Will I run out of money or actually produce something of value? Will I come back to a country that's worse off than the one I left? Will friends and family eventually follow a similar path? Will this all come crashing down?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I hope so. Maybe.

But here's what I do know. The act of building in parallel, even small, even uncertain, even six euros a month, is different from waiting. It's different from hoping the deal gets better. It's different from optimizing your performance inside a system that's already told you it's trying to need you less.

You don't have to leave the country. You don't have to set up a server. But you can start asking what it would look like to build something that's yours alongside everything you're renting. Something that doesn't need a platform or a permission slip or a quarterly review. Something small enough to start this weekend and real enough to change how you see the rest of it.

That's not a solution. It's a start. And a start is different from waiting.

Tyler