I just hit a few weird milestones over the span of three weeks, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about them. Consider this post me rambling out loud in public.
The first: I turned 33 in the middle of June1.
The second: a few days after my birthday, my revenue for 2026 overtook all of my revenue for 2025. 2025 ended at around 150,000€, which I called a solid, if not record-breaking, year at the time. 2026 cleared that in five and a half months, and is on track to double it2.
The third: with the first hour I worked in July, my total revenue as an independent technologist crossed 1,000,000€, counted from when I started out in 20203.
The usual caveats apply: all of these numbers are revenue, pre-tax and without VAT. Revenue is not profit, profit is not income, and income is not wealth. A good chunk of that million is long gone, into taxes, costs, and general life stuff. It’s a nice thing to reflect on, but I don’t really see it in my bank account in any way.
None of the milestones really did anything for me. I didn’t celebrate my birthday this year, because I was just coming back from a semi-private, semi-work trip from Norway/Sweden, and was exhausted. I did notice when this year’s revenue surpassed last year’s, but it didn’t make me feel anything. And I only noticed the first million today, a couple of weeks later. I don’t even know what project I worked on when I passed the milestone.
What did show up today, uninvited, was a strange feeling: why did it take me six and a half years?
I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds. This is a lot of money, more than most households see, and I wrote at length about my privileged position before. The feeling isn’t reasonable.
But I’m not known for being particularly reasonable. For some of my clients that’s why I get hired, and for some of my friends that’s the reason why we’re friends.
I come from a working class background, and I always felt weird and insecure about money. My instinct is to hold onto it like a security blanket, and I oscillate between spending entirely too much, and saving unreasonably.
One million sounds like a lot of money, but it averages out to about 154,000€ per year. That’s pretty good, especially considering that over six and a half years, the macro-economic conditions and general market changed repeatedly. So why does it not feel good?
A lot of my anxiety also comes from being the primary provider for my family. Whatever figure I earn, it has to be enough to give my family a framework to thrive and be happy—it’s not an indicator of happiness in any way, of course, but it’s certainly important to give them the freedoms and enjoyments they deserve.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. We marinate in a culture of screenshots—ARR milestones, exit announcements, salary threads—where every trajectory is a hockey stick and every timeline is compressed. Measured against that backdrop, everything real feels slow. I have a lot of “high-performing” friends, and monetarily, I’m certainly in the middle of the bell curve.
But that bell curve does what projections do. It flattens my story to a data point. Those six and a half years contained years of finding my footing, a pandemic, the births of my two children, care work, moving between places, professional and personal wins and disappointments. They contained a stretch where productivity simply wasn’t the priority, and that was the right call.
My spreadsheets don’t have a column for any of that, nor should they. I didn’t go independent in 2020 with a revenue target in mind. I went independent to own my time.
Which brings me back to my birthday, which is the oldest metric I have, so to speak. Few people feel different when they turn 33. You look at the number, you look at your life, and you try to work out whether they match—ahead in some respects, really goddamn behind in others, as a younger, just as angsty version of me put it. I guess I haven’t changed.
I think that’s the thread that ties these three numbers together: they’re all metrics. They tell you how far you’ve come or how fast you’re going, but certainly not where you’re headed.
I’m still figuring that out, I guess. Some days are harder than others.
I don’t have a grand takeaway, as usual. The year is going well, better than any before it, and I’m grateful, even if my first reaction to a bunch of positive news was to feel behind. I’ll do the full breakdown of revenue at a later time, when the dust has settled a bit. I am, as ever, undergoing a big shift right now, and I’ll need a few things to stabilize before I’ll put a pen to paper.
In the meantime: if you ever feel slow, maybe look at what you’re comparing yourself to and why. It might reframe things.
1. June 12th, for all of y’all keeping track at home. I’ve been oversharing about this date since at least 2018.
2. “On track” means signed and agreed work, not hopes and dreams. But 2025 taught me how quickly contracts can evaporate, so consider this a forecast, not a promise.
3. I can pinpoint it to the hour because I track my time obsessively, and keep track of entirely too many metrics.