Era: California 2018
Steven arrived in California in October 2018 for an Epitech exchange semester. He was 21. The timing was largely accidental, by his own account. He had “s’est masturbé les 3 précédentes années” of Epitech before managing to leave for the “destination de mes rêves.”
The journal as homework
The first journal entries from this period were written as homework for a teacher named Ms. Rahmati, who assigned free writing exercises. The entries are formal and deferential in address, but already push against the frame. Steven writes, “I’ve never been good when it comes to apply rules. I hate myself for that.” He immediately spent more than the allotted time, could not restrain himself from depth, and apologized for it.
The first entry (November 4, 2018) frames the move as a new beginning, a planetary alignment, an opportunity to become the better version he had been imagining for years: “Today my life is changing, and I have the opportunity to start everything again.”
The core realization
By December 2018, a shift had occurred. The “land of all promises” had not delivered automatic productivity. The pattern that had followed him everywhere, elaborate planning, imagining outcomes, not executing, had followed him to California too.
The journal entry written Christmas Eve 2018 (first Christmas away from family) crystallizes what he calls a “mental breakdown” and the lesson that emerged from it:
“No one is coming. Tomorrow doesn’t exist… If you don’t feel like doing something today, you won’t do it tomorrow either. Motivation is no such thing or always really brief. Just fucking do it.”
This is the origin statement of the “No one is coming” philosophy. It is one of the clearest intellectual formulations to appear across all sources. It reframed his approach from anticipation to action, though he later returned to the anticipation pattern many times.
The broken reward system: first articulation
A December 2018 journal entry, written at 3:20am, contains the earliest diagnosis of his reward system problem:
“I think it’s broken. Because the fact is that I think a part of me like all of this. I like pushing myself to the limits, more and more, which makes me feel really alive, then I regret. Every time I’m getting close to my goals of having this stable and healthy standards of living, I’m getting bored and just kinda pop all of my balloons one by one to fall on the ground, and start all over again after a period of nonsense.”
This observation, written at 21 while ostensibly doing homework, anticipates the next seven years of documented behavior almost exactly.
Reading, learning, early Adderall
The July 2019 entries, written after return to France and possibly re-read during a later period in California if dated correctly, mention reading The Secret and Uninhabitable Earth, the “slight edge principle”, and Adderall use over two days of high productivity. The Adderall use is contextualized as the moment when he “found something that I really like doing, the flame is on again”, an early instance of stimulant use enabling executive function.
Significance
California is the moment Steven left the provincial social trap, bullied at school and without real peers nearby, and entered a world where he could be anonymous and capable at once. The exchange semester coincided with early gay identity development. He arrived knowing he was gay, and the distance from family enabled fuller expression. The semester ends with him 35 days from departure and attempting to institutionalize good habits before leaving.