1.1.2. Three ended lives

Part I: Recognizing death | Chapter 1: My own death

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.