Reflection

2026-05-22

From The Mobile Office

Today I am writing free-style. Low battery 🔋, no AI, just this highly-tuned 63-year-old man and his life experiences.

A man with at least three or four bucket lists still outstanding, the present one containing one-hundred and ten goals — Some are completed fully, many are seventy to eighty per cent completed.

Some have been neglected for two years or more, and a few have been untouched completely.

So here I sit, pondering which goals should become priorities and so forth.

Health first.

Financial stability is second.

(A joke 😄), wishful thinking pops into my mind.

With costs escalating and making it harder and harder to make money, especially in today’s unstable economy. Just yesterday, I discovered cat food is up another ten Rand a box. The day before, I received an invoice from my landlord for the replacement of the prepaid meter, adding R1550 to my debtors column on my spreadsheet.

Added to the thousand Rand I owe the local shop this week, my creditor column is very, very small. The cash inflow for this week is only R750 due Saturday, plus a R200 SASSA advance, which I am forced to take today.

That still leaves me with a R50 deficit for week four of this financial month.

Pressure that is unnecessary, unwarranted, but absolutely real.

I am tired 😫 — mentally, emotionally, spiritually — and sometimes I just want out. However, the giant hamster wheel I find myself trapped on keeps spinning faster and faster with no visible exit point.

Complaining about this does not help, so what do I do?

Catalogue it. Analyse it. Move on as best as possible. The biggest issue I presently face is the thirteen-square-meter trap Jules (Juelz) and I find ourselves living in.

Sadly, our landlord’s stubbornness seems to know no bounds. Just yesterday, I confronted him again about the lack of an earth-leakage unit, and he nonchalantly stated, “You do not need one because there are enough earth leakage units on the property.” When I reminded him we did once have one and that it was bypassed because it kept tripping, he again insisted it was not needed.

The young man standing with him (I believe to be his son) then added that “too many earth-leakage units on the same circuit will fight each other.” Albeit partially truthful on a shared circuit, individual tenants should each have isolated protection so as not to interfere with each other.

I stopped arguing. There comes a point where logic becomes exhausted from lack of oxygen.

I simply mentioned that I should perhaps get an independent contractor to investigate the installation, upon which the landlord replied that I could do so — provided none of his wiring was tampered with.

We left the conversation there.

The problem is simple: He knows I do not have the money for independent inspections, legal advice, relocation costs, or prolonged conflict.

And now comes the newest masterpiece of modern survival mathematics: Electricity.

The original agreement included electricity in the rental arrangement.

Now, suddenly, there is a prepaid meter, prepaid charges, and still the original amount remains embedded inside the rent itself.

In essence, paying twice. Double taxation for the crime of being poor.

The irony is almost artistic.

One spends a lifetime working, fixing trains, solving electrical faults, maintaining systems larger than entire neighbourhoods — only to arrive at old age arguing over plugs, prepaid tokens, and whether basic electrical protection is “necessary.”

And yet… In the middle of all this noise, stress, debt, uncertainty, and exhaustion, there sits another document quietly waiting for me:

My 110 Goals.

Yes, you read it right, one-hundred and ten of them. Not fantasies. Not billionaire dreams. Not motivational-speaker nonsense shouted from a rented stage.

Real goals.

Goals built from survival.

Goals born from decades of failure, rebuilding, adapting, learning, and refusing to completely collapse.

Some people see a list. I see proof that somewhere inside me, hope is still breathing. Because hopeless men do not make plans.

Hopeless men do not design Linux systems at two in the morning.

Hopeless men do not build fictional universes.

Hopeless men do not plan devotional archives, family histories, wallpapers, AI systems, memoirs, or science-fiction anthologies.

Hopeless men quit.

I have not quit. Not yet.

The strange thing about having 110 goals is that they begin revealing patterns.

Many of them are not actually separate goals at all.

They are connected gears inside one larger machine.

Publishing stories creates possible income.

Income reduces stress.

Reduced stress improves health.

Improved health restores concentration.

Better concentration improves coding and writing.

Better coding improves PlebMachine.

PlebMachine strengthens legacy.

Legacy creates meaning.

Meaning gives a tired old man another reason to wake up tomorrow.

And perhaps that is the true battle here.

Not money. Not electricity. Not landlords. Not debt.

But maintaining momentum while life continuously applies brakes.

That is the challenge.

To continue building while exhausted.

To continue planning while uncertain.

To continue creating while trapped inside thirteen square meters.

The goals themselves also reveal another truth: I do not actually want luxury. I want stability. A stable room. Stable electricity. Stable income. Stable health. Stable peace of mind.

I do not dream about yachts or mansions.

I dream about one full month where expenses are covered without panic.

One peaceful night’s sleep without calculations running through my head like corrupted software loops.

One morning where I wake up and create because I want to create — not because survival demands it.

Still, even in this pressure-cooker existence, progress has happened.

PlebMachine exists. My writing exists. My websites exist. My concepts exist. My devotionals exist. My ideas survived. And survival itself is sometimes an achievement people underestimate.

Especially at sixty-three.

Especially in South Africa.

Especially in an economy where pensioners often become invisible statistics.

So perhaps the solution is not trying to complete all one-hundred and ten goals simultaneously.

Perhaps the answer is identifying the “load-bearing goals.”

The goals that support many others at once.

Health is one.

Financial stabilisation is another.

Completing and publishing works consistently is another.

A functional workspace matters.

Emotional recovery matters.

Without those foundations, the other goals become difficult to sustain. I am beginning to realise that goals are not ladders.

They are ecosystems.

Neglect one area long enough and another starts collapsing beside it.

That is exactly what prolonged stress does.

It slowly eats the infrastructure of the human spirit.

And yet here I am. Still writing. Still planning. Still stubborn enough to believe that perhaps a railway electrician from Johannesburg can still leave behind something meaningful before the final chapter arrives.

Maybe one completed Book-Series.

Maybe a Linux system that helps old machines breathe again.

Maybe devotionals that help discouraged people survive another night.

Maybe a legacy archive for my family.

Maybe proof that endurance itself has value.

And maybe Goal 111 should not simply be “learn how to count.” Maybe it should be this: 111 — Learn how to keep moving forward while life keeps trying to push backwards.

That may be the hardest goal of them all.

I wrote this piece to reveal a small portion of my soul, to show the severity of the grind I find myself in, and hopefully one day soon I can look back to this piece of writing and say it was just a difficult chapter in an old-mans life.