Then and Now – a 30 Day Blog Challenge – Dragos Roua

This year will mark exactly 2 decades for this blog. 20 years is a long time – many things can happen in this timespan. Contexts change, people change, life changes.

What I wrote 10-15 years ago may not be accurate anymore. Or it may not represent my current life views. So, I decided to do a 30 days challenge in which I’ll tackle 30 different topics that I heavily circulated here – and how they changed (IF they changed). At the end of each day, I will update the list of topics below, so you can just bookmark this and can back any time to see the progress, or to follow up on a topic that’s interesting you.

The first link on each row is the initial post, “then”, and the second one is the revised topic, the “now”. As I fill in the slots, I will update all the links (the order, and even the links themselves, may be slightly altered as I advance with the challenge, so make sure you come back to this post if you want a bird eye view of the entire project).

Without further ado, here’s the map of the challenge.

• 33 Questions for an Interview with Yourself → Answering My Own 33 Self-Interview Questions — 17 Years Later
  I wrote 33 self-reflection questions and interviewed you, the reader. Now I sit in the chair myself and answer them — because 17 years and a lot of life later, the answers are completely different.
• Tango Crush → What Tango Actually Taught Me About Relationships (A Decade Later)
  Two years into tango I tried to name the strange emotional entanglements partner dancing creates. A decade of dancing and teaching later, I can finally explain what was actually happening.
• The Secret Art of Keeping Card Castles from Falling Down → Everything I Built That Fell Down (And What I Learned From Building Anyway)
  In 2011 I wrote about the art of keeping life’s fragile structures standing. Since then several of my own have come down — all serving the same lesson.
• 25 Things to Do in Your Life → 25 Things To Do In Your Life – Then And Now
  A life list written in 2009, framed as advice for a bewildered alien. Some of those 25 things happened, some didn’t, and some I no longer want — while the 2026 list looks almost nothing like the original.
• Action Versus Reaction → The Action versus Reaction Trap (Why I Had It Half Right in 2009)
  The action/reaction framework was compelling but binary — and life since 2009 has presented situations where the most strategic move is a carefully chosen reaction, not an act of pure initiative.
• How and Why We Get Bored → Boredom Is a Feature, Not a Bug
  In 2009 boredom was a natural state that arrived when nothing interesting was happening. In 2026 the attention economy has nearly eliminated the conditions for boredom — which may be a much larger problem than boredom itself ever was.
• Raw Food Primer → Raw Food Diet in 2026 – What I’d Tell My 2009 Self About Eating Better
  I ran a raw food experiment in Romania in January 2009 and shared my notes. Seventeen years later, the diet landscape has shifted enough that the original advice needs a honest audit against what we now know about ultra-processed food and gut health.
• Lifestyle Design → 3 Lifestyle Design Blueprints I’ve Lived, Plus A 4th One That Works These Days
  “Lifestyle design” had a specific 2009 cultural moment — Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Workweek, the whole thing. That moment has passed, curdled, and been partially redeemed by the actual experience of people who tried it.
• 100 Ways to Live a Better Life → 100 Ways To Live A Better Life – 17 Years After, What Actually Worked
  A list written in 2009 and still widely read — but the “better life” frame of that era has since been complicated by what we know about wellbeing, optimization culture burnout, and the demands of surviving the 2020s.
• Social Networking Versus Real Life Relationships → 17 Years of Social Networks Later: What Actually Replaced What
  The “versus” implied a competition that has since resolved into something messier — people who have conducted full friendships entirely online, while also people who have never felt more alone despite being permanently connected.
• The Next Revolution Will Be Technological, Not Ideological → Technology, Ideology And What Actually Happened Since 2018
  I wrote in 2018 that technology would outrun ideology. It is now 2026 and both have accelerated dramatically — time to test the thesis against actual evidence rather than speculation.
• On Being Steadily Fluid → Steadily Fluid After 10 Years: How Does It Feel to Live With the Paradox?
  Steady fluidity — the paradox of reliable adaptability — was an idea I explored in 2018 at the ten-year mark. Seven more years have passed, and the concept has been tested under pressure in ways I didn’t anticipate.
• The First 6 Months of Blogging — The Series → The First 6 Months of Blogging After 20 Years of Blogging
  The blogging landscape of 2009 — RSS feeds, ad networks, early Twitter — barely resembles what it means to run an independent website in 2026. What from those first six months actually transferred?
• 33 Ways to Get and Keep Yourself Motivated → 15 Years of Motivation: From Tiny, Genuine Sparks to Burnout
  The idea of motivation as something you “get and keep” through technique has been significantly revised by behavioral science — and by the lived experience of people who optimized their drive straight into burnout.
• Can You Build a Fine Watch with a 0.5 Inch Wrench? → The Right Tool for the Job in 2026: What AI Changed About the Wrench Problem
  The granularity argument — having the right tool for the job — gets far more interesting when AI can resize itself to the task. The 2018 question needs a 2026 answer.
• 7 Personal Development Lessons — Kung Fu Panda Style → 7 Kung Fu Panda Lessons, 16 Years Later — What Po Actually Got Right
  I argued in 2010 that a cartoon panda understood personal development better than most self-help books. Sixteen years and four films later, I test that claim against real life — and find out which of the 7 lessons actually held up.
• 77 Things to Do Just Because You Can → 77 Things I Still Want to Do – 13 Years Later
  A list justified by “you can” takes on different weight when physical capacity, financial capacity, and available time have all shifted — and when the cultural context of what counts as audacious has changed since 2013.
• 33 Ways to End Your Day → How I Actually End My Day in 2026, Compared to 2011
  The smartphone has fundamentally restructured what “ending the day” means — the 33 methods assumed a kind of quiet, self-directed evening that is now genuinely difficult to protect.
• 7 Things to Do When the Shit Hits the Fan → 7 Things To Do When The Shit Hits The Fan – 15 Years Later
  Since 2011 there have been larger and more varied crises — personal, professional, global — that test whether the original seven steps are a real framework or a list assembled in one specific moment of pressure.
• Being a Digital Nomad – A Primer → 16 Years as a Digital Nomad
  The initial post was written in March 2010 at the very start of living that lifestyle. Sixteen years later — after COVID normalized remote work for everyone, digital nomad visas became a real category, and AI changed what a solo operator can actually build alone — the primer is worth reading again against what actually happened.
• 7 Reasons to Enjoy Life More → 7 Reasons to Enjoy Life More – 15 Years Later
  The 2009 framing assumed the main obstacle to enjoyment was forgetting to look up from the race. The 2026 obstacle is different: anxiety about large global threats, information exhaustion, and a world designed to pull you elsewhere.
• 77 Reasons to Love Your Life → 77 Reasons to Love Your Life – Why I’d Write Them Differently After 17 Years
  A gratitude list written in 2009 encounters a reader in 2026 who has lived through a pandemic, political fracture, and climate anxiety. The case for loving your life needs to be made differently, or more honestly.
• The Diamond Cutter — Tibetan Buddhism & Business → The Diamond Cutter, 12 Years Later – Buddhism as a Daily Practice
  Karma as a business principle, reality as constructed, results shaped by mental posture — twelve years of actually running things is enough time to know which of these Buddhist business ideas held up and which didn’t.
• Life Has No Meaning. And That’s Why It’s So Wonderful. → Life Has No Meaning – In 2026 I Still Think This Is Good News
  The years since 2015 include a pandemic and a generation actively in crisis about meaning — “what is the point?” has become culturally louder, not quieter, giving this post’s argument a more urgent and harder-to-make case.
• The Ancestor Syndrome — Or Why You Don’t Have Enough Money → The Ancestor Syndrome – Revisiting Inherited Money Beliefs after 10 Years
  A decade in crypto and tech entrepreneurship — environments with extreme wealth creation and destruction — plus the economic dislocations of the 2020s, have stress-tested the ancestor syndrome thesis in ways the 2016 post couldn’t anticipate.
• 7 Ways to Say No → Still Learning To Say No – 17 Years After I First Wrote About It
  Seventeen years since writing this: hustle culture valorized saying yes to everything, then burned people out, then “boundaries” went mainstream, and now AI is explicitly trained to be agreeable. The case for no has never been more urgent or more contested.
• 33 Ways to Overcome Frustration → Frustration as a Growth Signal – Revisiting After 15 Years
  “Frustration signals growth” is a powerful reframe — but fifteen years of growth also means fifteen years of accumulated frustrations that were supposed to be temporary. The honest accounting is worth doing.
• 10 Ways to Define Success → the 2026 Definition of Success – 10 Years after I Tried My First One
  Written in 2016, before crypto wealth cycles, remote work normalization, and the burnout generation’s public reckoning — all of which have changed what people count, and what they stop counting, as success.
• Are You The Best Version Of Yourself? → Are You Te Best Version of Yourself? Checking In After 16 Years
  The initial post used a software OS as a metaphor for self-improvement: defrag your mind, update your drivers, stay virus-free. In 2010 that was an analogy. In 2026, AI tools literally patch cognitive weak spots and run background processes on your behalf. The metaphor became more real, which makes the original question more interesting.
• The Power and Price of Illusions → The Price of Illusions – 16 Years Later
  Written before algorithmic filter bubbles, deepfakes, and AI-generated content — environments now specifically engineered to manufacture and sustain pleasant illusions at scale. The price has gone up considerably.

First post tomorrow.