Debt and borrowed time

I have been trying for weeks to write this one technical blog post on how Windmill secured over-the-air downloads on iOS. I just can’t.

My brain just tells me no, it refuses. It tells me I need to spend more time looking for a job. I am wasting precious borrowed time. I am piling up debt that I need to pay back. It tells me that I need to make some progress getting my life back in order.

I haven’t been in this situation since 2009 - 2010. Just before I decided to leave Greece and return back to the UK. I was in debt while also being in limbo. I didn’t want to leave Greece even though it was a dead end.

The way I was able to cope with the debt I was piling up was by thinking of it as borrowing time from the future. My future. It was just too much to think of it as monatery value. I was going to repay it back, eventually.

This wasn’t a strategic decision on my part. It wasn’t like taking a loan to use as an investement. It was a coping mechanism.

Whatever savings I had to support me while building Windmill have run out since the end of September 2018. Back then, with only the free version of Windmill on the Mac available, I decided to look for a job. You would think that with all that talk about the brain drain in Greece it would have been easy. It wasn’t, it hasn’t and still isn’t.

With the support and encouragement from my partner, I decided to push forward with the development of Windmill on the iPhone. This is precisely the moment where I started borrowing time, again.

It has now been 19 months of borrowed time.

This is not the complete picture though. This time around another human is carrying more than their fair share and while they do, I feel like I am holding them back. This is something that I struggle with as it goes against my beliefs in equality and opportunity.