Financial death ended my third life. Because yeah, I had three of them.

The first lasted from birth until I started working. From zero to twenty-one. I don’t remember that time well.

I was born in Łódź - one of the biggest cities in Poland. I was born at the very beginning of the 1980s, and as a child I lived through a collapsing communism.

As a teenager I grew up in the 1990s - when, as a society, we were lied to that communism had fallen. In reality it transformed into a hybrid of rotting, stinking, decaying communism mixed with rabid, animal capitalism. Former communist officials and party bosses moved from the front seat to the back seat, still steering the nation toward the same poverty as in the 80s.

So I grew up in a city with over 20% unemployment. In an eleventh-floor apartment in a communist-era block. Six families per floor. Two-room apartments. With my mother, father, brother, and a dog. In 30 square meters.

My girlfriend - later my wife - lived in the exact same setup in another part of the city. She also had a mother, a father, and a brother. But no dog.

We weren’t poor in the literal sense. We had food. We had clothes (one pair of shoes for the school year). Compared to others — living in real misery, starving or eating scraps - we were normal. Average.

But compared to today, then yeah… we were fucking poor…

I finished one school and went to another. Then I went to Tech University (that’s where I met my wife). I got kicked out quickly. Well, not literally - I just failed the semester exams. I dropped out because I didn’t belong there. So I switched to economics, part-time studies, and to afford them I got a job. That’s how I ended my first life.

The second life lasted a little over a decade - from twenty-one to my early thirties.

That’s when I built a career (I also finished my studies - I have a master’s degree in economics).

Poland entered its economic transformation period then - in 2004 we joined the European Union. Which pumped a lot of capital into this country glued together with ducktape and tied with string. You could say things started getting better (compared to the 80s and 90s).

My first and second jobs were shit.

First as a machine operator in a printing house, then in a local city office. The first was extreme physical grind (12-hour shifts were the norm, and I often exceeded them), and the second was mental vegetation for money impossible to live on independently (so I still lived with my parents).

But in the meantime, I worked hard on myself, building skills in computer graphics, IT, and web-related technologies.

Because of that I managed to get into a hosting company as a sales rep. Turned out I had a natural talent for it. I turned out to be a great salesman. A really good earner.

Then I started changing jobs and climbing upward. Always in sales, gradually also in marketing. I worked my way up to sales director and marketing manager.

At the end of the 2000s I tried being an entrepreneur for the first time. I started my own advertising agency (today they call those “boutiques”).

It survived - attention - four months.

I sank about €2000 into it - back then that was still a big amount for me.

Funny, because later I lost incomparably bigger money…

So after that false start I politely went back to working for someone else. Again I had great successes there. But I wasn’t happy.

I constantly felt I had to do something on my own. Stop multiplying other people’s wealth - start building my own. For myself. For my family.

Like Walter White.

So while still working at that company, I launched my second business, which ended the second life and began the third.

In the third life I became a 3D printing expert.

It lasted another ten years… from my early thirties into my mid-forties.

3D printing made me who I am now. What came before (in the first and second life) isn’t me anymore… that was a larval stage. Back then I was a crawling worm. In the third life I bloomed, spread my wings.

Even when I look at old photos from that period - the 90s and 2000s - I feel embarrassment. I see a poor-ass loser. I see a stranger.

Actually I recently realized how little I remember from that time. The only things left are snapshots - single images I have to painfully attach context to. Most of it I just don’t remember. I can’t recall what my life felt like in 2004… or 2008… I know what I did, but I can’t feel it. The page keeps whitening.

But the third life I remember almost day by day. Very few blank spots there.

Yes, the third life was the real one. The exceptional one.

And then it ended. Suddenly. Brutally. And I died.

But unexpectedly, I was reborn and I’m alive again! Living a fourth life. From a 3D printing expert I’ve been promoted to a 3D printing legend. There’s nowhere higher to go. But I’ll write more about that later.

A whore will always remain a whore, a murderer will always remain a murderer, a thief will always remain a thief. A raped child will remain raped even when they grow up.

There are things we do, or things we experience, that stay with us forever. You can’t erase them from memory - neither ours nor other people’s.

We call it trauma.

There are very sophisticated ways of treating people for trauma - psychological, psychiatric, pharmaceutical, spiritual. Scientific, religious, and quackish.

Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a person starts a new life, sometimes they stay stuck in it, pretending to themselves and others that they’ve dealt with it.

And sometimes they just kill themselves. Death by hanging. Or else…

But I’ll tell you what’s the hardest thing about trauma… A trauma is not equal to a trauma.

Generally, trauma caused by death, violence, rape, illness, or some other “terrible” event is widely accepted and respected. Victims of war, assaults, or accidents can expect understanding and compassion. The lack of it is practically condemned.

But there’s a whole mass of “ordinary” and “minor” things that lead to trauma.

For example, when you were reciting a poem at a school performance and forgot the lines, and the whole school laughed at you and pointed fingers at you for a week.

And to this day, you can’t get over it. You are always insecure. You always feel judged.

Or when you gave the first flower of your life to the girl you were crazy about, and she looked at you first with surprise, then with disgust, turned around and ran away. And later her friends laughed their asses off at the loser…

And that’s why you’re still alone.

Or when you lost your office job as a manager and for a year you couldn’t find a new one. And in the end, just so you wouldn’t starve, you started working as a courier hauling packages, or stocking shelves in a local grocery store.

Now that you’ve improved your life, you keep it a deep secret and consider moving to another town just to avoid your former coworkers - or worse, your former clients.

In each of these cases, those events become a source of lifelong shame. Low self-esteem. Even self-hatred. Trauma.

But nobody cares about that kind of trauma. Nobody treats it seriously. Telling these stories in the context of trauma exposes you either to ridicule or outright offense.

Because how do you compare a youthful heartbreak to a gang rape? How do you compare people laughing at you for forgetting poem lines twenty years ago to the death of someone’s only child from leukemia? How do you compare a company going bankrupt to the tragic death of a wife or husband in a car crash?

How dare you. Who do you think you are. Get a grip.

As a result, you’re left alone with your “not serious” traumas. Either you drown them out with heavy work or frantic partying, or you wash them down with vodka or bury them under drugs. Or eventually you choose the final solution.

In every version you lose. And nobody can understand it.

Because let’s take that whole bankruptcy thing… You’re a business owner or entrepreneur. You’ve got some successes behind you, you build the business for four or five years - maybe even a decade. And suddenly it’s over. You lose everything. You’re left with debts.

Pfft, big deal… Normal business risk. Normal company life cycle. Companies rise - companies fall. This one of yours just fell. What’s there to talk about. You’ll open another one. You’ll pay off the debts. What trauma, man? Don’t be a crybaby! What are you even doing. Feeling sorry for yourself. Pull yourself together. And if you can’t, then you weren’t cut out to run a business in the first place.

Trauma, fuck… What do you know about trauma… When I was a kid my father beat me and my mother just watched. She always stood behind him. Nobody defended me. And what - and nothing, fuck it, I’m alive! And your little business didn’t work out… Boo hoo… Crybaby. Acting like some loser.

My trauma! That was a real trauma where I come from…

So yeah. You always go bankrupt alone. Nobody sympathizes with you — instead everyone’s pissed off at you. Everyone wants everything from you. Even though you’re drowning in debt, everyone wants money from you immediately. In the end it doesn’t matter how much you owe. When you lose everything and can’t even afford bread, even twenty thousand euros of debt becomes lifelong.

Your old world is burning.

You fire people you only recently hired. You sell off furniture and equipment for one cent on the euro. You stand in front of furious creditors and have to tell them “I don’t have it.”

You stand in front of an employee you’re firing who can’t pay rent and has to move out. Or who took a loan a month ago and now has no way to repay it.

What are you supposed to tell him? That you yourself can’t afford to live? You? The entrepreneur? The boss?

What kind of boss does that make you? What kind of entrepreneur?

Where’s my money? What am I supposed to tell my girlfriend, my wife, my child? I have to get that money. I have to have it, you understand? Where’s my money? Where’s my money?

Or:

Sir, I understand your temporary difficulties, but you really must pay us. For the next installment. For the rent. For the delivered goods. For the internet. For the phone. For the last service. For maintaining the bank account.

When will you pay? Can you manage by the end of the day? By the end of the month? No sir, this is not how we’re going to talk.

No! Don’t interrupt me! That’s not my problem.

When will you return our money? Where is our money? Please return our money!!!

A silent scream. Teeth clenched. Fists clenched. Eyes fixed on the closed window. And for the first time that thought - maybe I should open it…?

Fear. Shame. Hopelessness. Breakdown. Shame. Panic attack. Fear of answering the next call. Fear at the mere sound of the phone ringing. Fear of the postman bringing more payment demands. Shame in front of the postman. Desperation. Depression. Fear. Shame. No sleep. Vomiting. Trembling hands and legs caused by chronic stress. Constant headaches. Nail biting. Digging your nails into your face, your hands, the rest of your body. Punching walls. Kicking chairs.

What’s wrong with you? What are you doing?

That look from your partner - girlfriend, boyfriend, wife or husband - piercing straight through you. A child who can’t understand why they won’t get what they always got before. Arguments - one after another - that you cannot win.

Unimaginable guilt. Fear. Shame.

Shame.

Shame.

You look at the window again.

There are only two things in life a person cannot endure more of: more pain and more shame.

Those are the only two things where death feels like the better option.

The catch is, you’re already not alive…

Because most people fight until the very end. They don’t give up, they don’t admit defeat. Only afterward comes the realization that in truth the bankruptcy happened half a year ago.

You died without even knowing it.

But you can be resurrected.
Come, I’ll tell you how…

PS: no, we’re not getting rid of trauma here. That’s not my department. I’ll only tell you how to rise from financial death.

Table of content:

Part I: Recognizing death

Chapter 1: My own death

My name is Paul and I survived financial death.

I come from Poland, where I’ve lived and worked since birth. One day I lost two companies - one that had been running for eleven years and another for three. My debts hovered around fifty thousand euros and were growing. Maybe today that doesn’t sound like much, but back then it felt like a life sentence.

Soon after that I was practically cut off from money altogether. The Social Insurance Institution - where I owed the most (over half of the total debt) - froze my bank accounts, making it impossible to withdraw any money at all, whether for business operations or for living.

For a moment I was not able to buy food.

I had a wife who had run our failed business with me from the beginning, and two teenage kids (17 and 12). An apartment I was still paying a mortgage on. Two cars (one of which I soon lost as part of settling debts).

I wasn’t even 45 yet. I was convinced it was the end. The end of everything. The end of life.

That everything good was already behind me. That the good days were over. That it would never get better.

I was convinced that until the end of my days I’d be doing some shitty job, earning some shitty money. On one hand trying to survive day to day, and on the other trying to pay off those fucking debts.

Which I’d never pay off anyway.

That’s exactly how I thought.

That’s also when I understood when life actually ends. Not when the body fails us. Life ends when we lose hope. A human without hope is dead.

I lost mine. So in consequence, I died.

But at the same time I discovered two very interesting traits in myself:

• The second is that I’m resistant to addictions. I describe this in detail later.

• And the first is that I’m immortal. Or rather - it’s really damn hard to kill me.

The Finns call it sisu.

Wikipedia explains it as a set of personality traits - endurance, stubbornness, willpower, mental toughness, but also courage, pride, and determination in pursuing a goal despite adversity or physical barriers.

In 2022 the Finns made an action film with that title. At the end of 1944, a gold prospector and former elite commando — Aatami Korpi — falls into the hands of SS troops who want to rob him. He kills them, but becomes the target of an obsessive pursuit by the unit’s commander. A ruthless fight begins, in which Korpi takes numerous wounds and at least twice it seems he loses his life. But he doesn’t give up. He fights to the end, defeats his enemies, and in the finale reaches a bank where he exchanges the gold for money.

So yeah, I’m sisu. I didn’t know it then. Now I do.

I died, but I came back to life. I clawed my way out of the months of misery my debts had condemned me to. I took back the initiative in my life.

More than that - a side effect of my slow, grinding return to life was that one day I discovered I was famous. And respected. My fame was niche - extremely specialized - but its reach was global.

A year after my financial death I started living again, fully. HA! A year and a half after financial death I was earning like in my best years. And eventually I reached the summit - the place only a handful of chosen ones ever reach. The very top of my professional specialization.

A year and a half after the collapse I became who I had always dreamed of becoming.

Sure, it happened in a twisted way, and it was paid for with unbelievable suffering, but I got there.

So be careful what you wish for… The road to fulfilled dreams runs over sharp stones that cut to the bone. Through thorns that tear the flesh. Through nests of venomous snakes lurking in the dark. Through spider webs and everything that crawls, bites, and poisons.

I died along the way. I came back, but there are those who stayed dead forever. Their stories now serve as signposts - like the frozen bodies of climbers on the slopes of Everest. Grotesque warnings carved in ice. Human monuments to failure showing others: here I fell, here the road ends.

But I kept going.

Unfortunately, all that time the stigma of failure weighed on my shoulders. Financial death left a permanent mark. Even though the successes were undeniable (and unbelievable), the experience of bankruptcy never let me forget what had happened.

At the same time I felt that my story - though deeply personal to me - was common and universal. That every day, all over the world, hundreds - maybe thousands - of people live through it.

People who, like I was then, are left on their own. Who thrash in desperation, blindly trying to run out of the maze of obligations and debts, slamming into walls at every turn.

People who die. In loneliness. In shame.

They drown in trauma. Which, to outsiders, looks pathetic.

Because a bankrupt entrepreneur is always assumed to be to blame. They fall because of their own incompetence.

If instead they’d died in a car crash, at least they’d be a victim. Victims can - and should - receive sympathy.

Bankrupts deserve only contempt.

Well, I think differently. And I want to help those who have fallen into the abyss. Who are staring into the beast’s eyes. Who are standing in the open window.

I want to show them that hope can be recovered. Pulled back from clinical death.

But I also want to show others what this really looks like. From the inside. From the side of the soul. That a collapsing entrepreneur is not a loser, not a screw-up, not a business retard - but someone who is actually dying. Yes, physically too.

That all they need is one small chance. Or just a brief break - a week or two. A moment to breathe, to put their thoughts in order. A quick reset.

An inconvenient truth to tell: if someone has gone bankrupt and owes you money, calling them nineteen times in nineteen days just to hear they have nothing to repay you with right now, won’t change on the twentieth attempt on the twentieth day.

The only thing that might change is their physical presence. Which might stop being physical at all.

Never underestimate shame.
Shame kills.