What’s up, Kam Fam! ⚡ Hope this week is giving you something to push against.
This week we’re breaking down Saitama from One Punch Man.
And we’re not talking about his power.
We’re talking about what happened to him after he got it.
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And if you’re already part of the fam, share this with someone who’s been going through the motions on something they used to care about.
One Punch Man follows Saitama, a hero who trained so hard he became the strongest person alive.
Every fight ends in one punch.
Every enemy falls before the round even starts.
On paper, that sounds like winning.
But the show spends most of its time sitting inside the problem that comes after winning.
Saitama feels nothing.
Before Saitama was unbeatable, he felt something.
Excitement before a fight.
Fear when an enemy was stronger.
The rush of pushing past his limit and coming out the other side.
He used to dream about being a hero.
Used to think about what it would feel like to actually be that strong.
Then he got there.
And the feeling was gone.
Every fight now is a formality.
Enemies he faces, no matter how terrifying to everyone else, go down before they can give him a single moment of real tension.
He watches other heroes pour everything into their battles and feels something close to envy.
Not because they’re beating him.
Because they can still feel the fight.
There’s a moment in the show where he faces Boros, an enemy powerful enough to actually push him.
For one brief second, Saitama feels a flicker of something real.
Then it’s over.
And the silence comes back.
He didn’t lose his passion.
He outgrew every level that used to carry it, and never found the next one.
Most of us will never one-punch a monster.
But a lot of us know the version of this that lives in everyday life.
The job you worked hard to get that now feels like going through the motions.
The goal you finally hit that didn’t land the way you imagined it would.
The thing you used to love that you now just maintain.
That feeling, where something that used to mean something now just exists, is one of the quietest and most disorienting things a person can carry.
And most people don’t talk about it because it doesn’t make sense from the outside.
“You have what you wanted. Why aren’t you happy?”
Because the feeling was never actually about the thing.
It was about the stretch.
The challenge.
The version of yourself being built on the way to the goal.
There’s a line from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who spent decades studying what actually makes people feel alive, that explains exactly what Saitama lost:
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
He wasn’t writing about heroes or villains.
He was writing about the exact mechanism this whole post is about.
The feeling doesn’t come from the win. It comes from the stretch it takes to get there.
Once the challenge disappears, the feeling goes with it.
The stretch was never in the way of the goal. The stretch was the whole point.
If you’re reading this and you recognize that numbness in something in your own life, that’s not ungratefulness.
That’s a signal.
When passion goes quiet, it’s usually not gone.
Rather than fight through the numbness or resist it.
Accept the feeling and question it.
Your answer is waiting on the other side of curiosity to wake it back up.
Here’s the part that’s harder to sit with.
That emptiness isn’t a problem to fix.
It’s information.
It’s telling you that you’ve outgrown something.
That the level you’re operating at probably isn’t big enough to produce the feeling you’re looking for anymore.
Or maybe the direction that you felt was right before is no longer the case.
Saitama’s mistake, if you can call it that, is that he stopped after he hit his original goal.
He built himself to beat every enemy he knew about, and never asked what came next.
The goal is to look at the numbness and ask what would have to be true for the feeling to come back?
Not easier.
Not more comfortable.
What would have to be true.
For most people, the honest answer involves something they’ve been avoiding.
A bigger risk.
A harder goal.
Something with enough stakes to make failure feel real again.
Be honest about this part, because it’s not a switch you flip on a Tuesday.
If passion left slowly, over months or years, it doesn’t rush back in a week.
For more than 20 years of my life, I thought that graduating from college was going to solve my life problems.
Get that job, get money, have kids, bada bing bada boom, die happy.
Though literally one week after graduating, I felt that emptiness just kind of hit me.
This sense of lostness and stagnation.
The goal that drove me for so much of my life was somehow behind me, which was a crazy feeling
Kept telling myself that, “I should be happy” and that “I should be grateful”
Yet those words further drove me away from the feelings I was experiencing in the moment.
I definitely didn’t it accept it for at least a couple months. Just drifting in and out of this grey space.
Wasn’t till I actually chose to accept that feeling for what it is and questioned “what does this mean” and “what do I want to do next”
Sounds simple in hindsight, but for some reason, emotionally, just couldn’t put 2 and 2 together.
After only a couple of months of doing this on a semi-consistent basis, I was able to truly come up with my next set of goals.
— Devin (Kaminari Co-founder)
Finding the next thing that actually challenges you takes real work, and sometimes you have to try a few things that don’t land before you find the one that does.
That searching is uncomfortable.
It’s supposed to be.
The discomfort of looking for what wakes you back up is a better problem to have than the comfort of staying numb.
The Awakening would rather evolve through discomfort than stay trapped in comfort.
Saitama’s whole arc is an accidental warning about what happens when you don’t. He built for one goal, hit it, and never looked past it.
The passion dried up because nothing in his life was big enough to demand anything from him anymore.
The Awakening isn’t about being miserable on purpose.
It’s about recognizing that the numbness you’re feeling is a gap between who you are right now and who you’re capable of becoming, and choosing to walk toward that gap instead of settling into the quiet.
That choice is uncomfortable every single time.
It’s supposed to be. That discomfort is the feeling coming back.
Apply this week: Identify one thing in your life that used to excite you but now just feels like maintenance. Then ask yourself honestly: what would the version of this that actually scared me look like? You don’t have to do it yet. Just name it.
If you want structure behind this mindset, we’re building something called “The Anime Mindset.” More to come soon. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Saitama got everything he trained for.
And the hardest scene in the whole show isn’t a fight.
It’s him sitting in an empty room, completely unbothered by things that would terrify anyone else, quietly wondering why none of it feels like anything.
If you’ve been carrying that feeling about something in your own life, you’re not broken and you’re not ungrateful.
You’re just someone who’s outgrown a level and hasn’t found the next one yet.
The feeling isn’t gone.
It’s on the other side of something you haven’t tried yet because it still scares you.
That fear?
That’s the wall.
Go find the passion behind it.
💌 Big love to the Kam Fam ⚡ for showing up every single week.
Y’all bring real energy to this community, and that means everything.
If you’re new here, drop that subscribe so you don’t miss a post.
And if this one hit different, share this with someone who’s been going through the motions on something they used to care about.
This week, look behind the thing that still scares you.
That’s where your true wants and desires live.
— Kaminari, Your Weekly Anime Plug ⚡
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