The Freedom That Comes From Losing It

The Freedom That Comes From Losing It

A rabbi said something the other day that stopped me cold.

He claimed that marriage makes you more free.

At first I smiled, the way you smile when someone claims the grass is blue, just like in that small fable about the donkey and the tiger.

But then the line stayed with me.

Like a pebble in the shoe that will not shake loose.

I thought about my own life.

About the years before I was married, drifting through countries and jobs, from living on a kibbutz to going wherever the wind pushed me. I had all the freedom in the world. Too much, maybe. Enough freedom to dissolve in it.

And then the years after.

Housing. Work. A child. Responsibility.

Rebel Without a Course

Rebel Without a Course

A shipwrecked Englishman washes up on a deserted island in the South Pacific.

Salt on his skin. Seaweed in his hair. He drags himself upright and sees locals stepping out of the trees. Tall, calm, carved by weather and silence. Spears at their sides. Garlands on their shoulders.

He staggers toward them.

"Thank God. Civilisation at last. Tell me, where is the British consulate? The governor? Who is in charge here?"

Freedom Begins With a Flaw

Freedom Begins With a Flaw

Everybody knows 1984. It became the mascot of every shallow conversation about control.

What most people do not know is that the blueprint comes from somewhere else. Two decades before Orwell, a Russian writer named Yevgeny Zamyatin had already seen the future forming. He wrote "We" in 1920 when the Soviet state was still young, when its language was still filled with hope, and when the machinery of control was only beginning to grow its bones. Zamyatin saw through the promises. He saw the steel frame behind the bright paint.

His book "We" is the original modern dystopia. Everything else grows from it.

Hell Is Not Other People. It Is You

Hell Is Not Other People. It Is You

Aristophanes liked to slip knives under laughter.

In The Frogs he sends Dionysus into the underworld to judge a poetry contest.

Hades turns into a stage.

The dead turn into actors.

Comedy becomes an x-ray.

He understood something long before psychology gave it a label.

Hell is not flames.

Hell is performance.

Left and Right and The Way Out

Left and Right and The Way Out

A view from a Swiss social worker

You don’t have to hate the Left to see its flaws, and you don’t have to hate the Right to notice it is turning into a circus. Stand still long enough and you realize both are malfunctioning engines grinding different kinds of people into different kinds of dust.

The Unexpected Journey of Kim Kardashian

The Unexpected Journey of Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian woke before dawn with a feeling she did not recognize. Not dread, not excitement. Something quieter, heavier, like the moment you realize your reflection has been lying to you. Her minimalist mansion was still. The gated community outside hummed its usual peaceful and quiet lullaby, but inside her chest a question had woken up. A small, stubborn question: Is this really all I am?

It was not a crisis. She had survived too many for that. It was more like standing in a room you have lived in for years and suddenly noticing the walls have been repainted without you remembering when. She felt bored with her persona, the one she had built layer by layer, the legend of Kim Kardashian as some would say. Bored with the camera-ready version of herself. Bored with being flattened into a symbol by strangers who did not know her real voice, her real fears, her real mind. And then she remembered something she had avoided for years. She did not know anymore who she really was either.

She sat up, pressed her palms to her eyes, and whispered the kind of sentence no publicist wants to hear:

"I want to understand who I am."

Why Some Kids Stop Being Kids

Why Some Kids Stop Being Kids

It was one of those Swiss Saturdays where every shopping center feels like a small riot.

Too bright. Too loud. Too many special offers. Too many people moving fast and thinking slowly.

My almost twelve year old daughter and I walked through it together, just trying to survive the noise.

Around us were kids her age, but they looked like smaller versions of adults. Handbags. Poses. Forced confidence.

Looks and outfits shaped for a life still far ahead of them.

Then she asked a question that cut right through the chaos:

“Why don’t they want to be kids anymore?”

When Experts Have to Say What Children Already Know

When Experts Have to Say What Children Already Know

There is something strange about the way modern societies talk. The microphones are expensive, the titles are long, and the speakers handle their words like glass, afraid something might break. Then an expert appears, a respected one, and finally says a truth so simple that any child could have spoken it.

Crime exists. Some groups appear in the statistics far more than others. Patterns are real. Problems grow when they stay unnamed.

None of this is profound. None of it requires decades of research. It only requires a person who is allowed to say the truth.

Fresh Fish Sold Here

Fresh Fish Sold Here

People like to pretend they see you clearly. They don’t. They see a projection walking around in your clothes.

One person says you should open up more; another says you talk too much; a third tells you to be softer; a fourth tells you to harden up. You are the same person. They are just reading you through different lenses.

It’s one of the oldest problems in human perception.

I Felt Like a Winner: A Conversation with a Cistercian Nun

I Felt Like a Winner: A Conversation with a Cistercian Nun

Sister Maria Veronika was born in 1973 in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. She found her way to God as a teenager, partly because her scout leader wanted to become a nun. Today she lives in Magdenau Abbey in the municipality of Degersheim in Switzerland, a monastery founded in 1244. I sat down with her a while back.

Marcel: My first question comes from my seven-year-old daughter. She wants to know your favorite color.

Children and Phenomenology: Seeing Things as They Are

Children and Phenomenology: Seeing Things as They Are

Adults like to believe they see the world clearly. They think experience sharpens perception, that the years sand down illusion. It sounds plausible until you spend enough time around a child who has not yet learned how to lie to herself. Then you realize something unsettling. Adults do not see more. They see less. They see through filters they no longer notice.

Children have no such filters. They meet the world head-on, without theory, ideology, or self-protection. They perceive the thing itself, not the story about the thing. That is phenomenology in its purest form.

The other night my daughter, who is eleven, watched "Gone With the Wind" with me.

The Vanishing Aura of Modern People

The Vanishing Aura of Modern People

I once stood on the border between Spain and France, at the place where Walter Benjamin ended his life. A narrow passage between mountains and sea, a place that feels too quiet for a philosopher to die in. But maybe the silence was the point.

People talk about Benjamin’s idea of aura. They usually mean the aura of a painting, the uniqueness of an object, the sense of presence that disappears when everything becomes a copy. But standing in Portbou, it struck me that Benjamin was not only describing art.

He was describing us.

Modern people have lost their aura.

TRASHION

TRASHION

My young daughter came into my bedroom the other day, held up a shirt with glitter on it, and proudly announced she was “into trashion now.”

She meant fashion, of course.

But the mistake landed like a small meteor in my skull.

Children do this sometimes.

They open their mouths and accidentally name the culture more accurately than a professor with six hundred pages of footnotes.

The longer I sat with it, the more it dawned on me.

The Question That Refuses To Die

The Question That Refuses To Die

I was sitting in my silverblue Toyota the other day, engine idling, rain tapping the windshield in that slow, distracted way it does when the sky can’t make up its mind.

And out of nowhere an old question drifted in.

One of those questions that has been following people around since we first started telling stories around fires.

If I’m trying to do things right, why do things still go wrong?

If I play fair, why do others walk away with the win?

The Break Room UFO Experiment

The Break Room UFO Experiment

There is a simple way to feel the emotional stability of a society. I made it up: it involves no data, no surveys. Just people being themselves before lunch.

Walk into a break room at 9:30 a.m., pour a coffee, look up at your colleagues and say, “Did you see the latest UFO footage?”

Then watch the room.

We All Bring Ourselves to a Text

We All Bring Ourselves to a Text

Some people think they are reading something, but most of the time they are only reading themselves.

A text becomes a meeting point: part the author, part the reader.

The Hypnosis of Certainty

The Hypnosis of Certainty

Some people speak with such confidence that the world mistakes it for truth. They do not persuade. They overwhelm. 

And something odd happens in their presence. Minds freeze. People stop thinking as soon as they speak.

It is not stupidity.

It is a kind of hypnosis.

Your Mind Is Not Software

Your Mind Is Not Software

Something strange has happened in our time.

People talk about the mind as if it were a device they can upgrade, a system they can optimize, a machine they can hack into obedience.

You see it online everywhere:

“Fix your habits, fix your finances, fix your environment, and your depression will quietly fix itself.” The confidence behind these claims is astonishing, and the simplicity with which they are presented is frightening.

Heaven Over Tea

Heaven Over Tea

Alan Watts once told a joke about an English vicar whose housekeeper had died. I heard the story only once, so the details might have shifted, but the core is the same. 

After the funeral, the mourners gathered for tea. It was all very proper. Club sandwiches, polite talk, the faint clatter of silver spoons. They spoke of how good she had been, how devoted, and how surely she was now with God.

The vicar nodded solemnly and said, “Yes, she has gone to be with the Lord in heaven, and one day we shall all be reunited.”

Everyone murmured agreement. Then, after a pause, the old vicar smiled gently and said:

Schopenhauer the Accidental Humanist

Schopenhauer the Accidental Humanist

I went for a run and listened to Epictetus railing against Epicurus. The whole time he kept hammering the same accusation like a drumbeat in my earbuds: “That man teaches you to withdraw from life!”

To Epictetus, Epicurus was not just wrong about pleasure; he was wrong about what it means to be human. Epicurus told people to retreat. Find a quiet garden. Keep desires small. Avoid politics, ambition, marriage, children, anything that might disturb your stillness. “Live hidden,” he said.

Epictetus saw that as desertion. Life for him is the arena of the crowded, messy here and now. The gods throw you into it whether you want to play or not: slavery, illness, tyranny, bereavement, public office, war. So every time Epicurus whispered “reduce your exposure to pain,” Epictetus heard “abandon your post.”

And the old Stoic had a simple way of cutting through a philosopher’s pose: if someone tells you to avoid people but spends his life writing for them, then he does not actually avoid people. His actions expose him.

Somewhere between two street corners and a black cat this thought turned and pointed itself at Schopenhauer.

Étude about a Pencil

Étude About a Pencil

A pencil seems like the most ordinary thing in the world. A stick of wood with a thread of graphite inside. Something a child can chew on absentmindedly during class. But if you listen closely, the pencil speaks in many voices: vertical history, horizontal systems, paradoxical complexity.

What to Carry Into the Next World

 What to Carry Into the Next World

They say you cannot take anything with you.

But that is not true.

You carry the weight of silence, the moments you could have spoken but did not.

You carry the way a child once reached for your hand without thinking.

You carry the quiet courage it took to keep going when no one was watching.

A Map to The Other You

A Map to The Other You

Counterfactuals are the what if stories we tell ourselves.

You change one small thing.

One choice.

One moment.

Then you watch the rest of the story shift.

Most people treat counterfactuals like harmless daydreams.

What if I had taken the other job?

What if I had stayed in that city?

What if I had walked away from my marriage earlier?

These thoughts drift by like background weather. But if you look at them with more seriousness, something sharper appears. Every what if has a structure. It is a simple game on the surface, but underneath it shows how your life is built.

David Lewis laid the groundwork.

The Man With A Hobby

The Man With A Hobby

I was out for a run when I saw him.

A grown man crouched over a remote-control car, the kind that races across asphalt with the seriousness of a machine that has no idea it is a toy.

I slowed down. I asked one harmless question. What do you have there?

It was like turning a key in a lock he had been carrying his whole adult life.

Bratwurst Rewards

Bratwurst Rewards

I am sitting in front of a supermarket. One of my favorites. It is clean, new, and almost always empty. You can walk through the aisles like a monk through a cloister, meditating on the emptiness of modern life.

Right now I am outside on a bench, chewing on something truly awful: Betty Bossi chicken pieces red curry. The Swiss should never try to imitate Thai food. They should stick to what my grandmother cooked, the kind of dishes that never pretended to be anything they were not.

To lift myself out of melancholy I look up at the sign in front of me.

Where Fact Ends and Opinion Begins

Where Fact Ends and Opinion Begins

There is a lot of noise why the founder of Wikipedia, or co-founder, or face of the organisation, does not seem to live up to the principles of the project itself. His Wikipedia page calls him the co-founder. In interviews, he calls himself the founder. People act as if they have caught him in a contradiction, as if the whole thing can be solved by a simple label.

This reaction misses the point. It misses it completely.

The Price of a Click

The Price of a Click

The internet has turned into an arena where almost anything can become a spectacle if framed the right wrong way.

The latest example was the viral clip of Jimmy Wales, the public face of Wikipedia, walking out of an interview, a 48-second implosion replayed millions of times. It spread because it had all the ingredients the online arena rewards: conflict, shock, a hint of scandal, and the illusion that we, passive spectators, are suddenly insiders to a drama we never asked for.

But the real story was not Wales.

No Monday Without It

No Monday Without It

I had just put my daughter on the bus to her mother. The house was suddenly too quiet. The shop was going to close soon. I stood there wondering whether to go out for milk or just surrender to the sofa.

Instead I did the stupid thing: I opened my phone. First thing on the screen was a picture of the universe, a bright, busy map of galaxies and clusters, like someone had spilled glitter on a dark table. Above it a serious question from a physics account:

"In your opinion, does the universe have a purpose?"

Stories Told, Stories Untold

Stories Told, Stories Untold

On most days the news feels like weather in times of constant climate change. A bit too much sun, a bit of poison rain, a few loud headlines drifting by like dark thunder clouds. Nothing really suspicious. Nothing that would stop you from sipping your matcha latte. Just the daily drift that everyone takes for granted, without asking where the current comes from.

Public opinion is not decided on Mount Olympus.

Why the Political Immune System Targets the European Right

Why the Political Immune System Targets the European Right

I’ve been wondering about something. Not out of outrage or allegiance, but quiet curiosity.

Why does Europe’s political system react so quickly, almost instinctively, when right-wing populist parties rise?

I am not interested in defending anyone, or attacking them either. What interests me is the pattern itself.