The Sleepwalkers Today, on a Sunday, I only wanted to buy a few yogurts. Instead, I found myself watching a small experiment in human nature...

Context Is the Real Product A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros store in Switzerland opened in my town. It is a small supermarket wit...

The Courage to Intervene One of the first things I learned as a social worker was that techniques are overrated. Not because they are useles...

The Pilgrimage I have been listening to a lecture series by the historian Teofilo Ruiz. His own life is remarkable. As a young man in Cuba, ...

Oversteering Yesterday, while I was on holiday in Istria, Croatia, a man suddenly collapsed in the restaurant where we were having dinner. H...

Switzerland Should Not Exist  Years ago, while studying in Zurich, I wrote a paper about William Tell. At the time, I argued that Tell was o...

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask At some point, I realized that I am often preoccupied with a different question than most people. Not becau...

The Goal Is Not Obedience One of the first disappointments of childhood is discovering that your parents do not know nearly as much as you o...

The Dreamer There is a bakery near where I live. The pastries are good, the coffee is good, and the service is efficient. Yet if I am honest...

The Bible Shelf The other day I visited Aligro, a Swiss cash-and-carry supermarket. If you have never been to one, imagine a place where e...

Beyond Authenticity Authenticity is one of the great ideals of our time. We are told to find ourselves. To follow our inner voice. To discov...

Friendly Faces When I was a child, it was usually obvious who the authority figures were. The teacher was the authority. The police officer ...

Build Systems That Can Correct Themselves Many people spend their lives looking for the answer. The right philosophy. The right diet. Th...

The Difference Between "God Believed" and Faith One of the most provocative statements Werner Erhard reportedly made during est wa...

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Trending The apocalypse will not be trending. It will not arrive with sirens. It will not interrupt your programm...

Reducing the Gap Between Map and Territory One of the most important tasks in life is reducing the gap between our map and the territory. ...

The Unexpected Lesson of Marte Meo Many years ago, when my daughter was still very young, I came across the Dutch approach known as Marte Me...

The Olive Oil Problem Years ago, I met a man who was convinced that drinking large amounts of olive oil was good for his joints. Not olive l...

The Myth of Authenticity For a long time, I misunderstood authenticity. Like many people, I believed that being authentic meant showing up...

The Underrated Art of Boredom During my years as a social worker, I noticed something curious: many children seemed to have busier schedules...

Playing Yesterday's Game The Peter Principle is one of those ideas that is so simple and intuitive that people repeat it endlessly. Empl...

What They Are While reading about the early years of the Soviet Union, I came across an observation that stayed with me. The communists of...

A Thousand Small Choices A wasted life does not happen in a day. It does not arrive with sirens. Not with a thunderclap. Not with a dramatic...

Practical Phenomenology When most people hear the word "phenomenology," their eyes begin to glaze over. It sounds like something t...

The Strange Case of est During the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people attended a controversial personal development program called est, ...

The Difference Between Phenomenology, Mindfulness, and Zen Spend enough time around philosophy, meditation, or personal development circles...

The Hidden Curriculum of Bad Days My twelve-year-old daughter had the day off school. The teachers had a conference, which meant that while ...

One Large Important Button I recently stumbled across a product called the Keychron Q0 Mini 8K Action Key. At first, I genuinely had no idea...

My Next-Door Neighbor My next-door neighbors are a large Swiss family. They have lived next to me for more than ten years. We greet each oth...

There Is No Donald Trump People still talk about Donald Trump as though he were a person standing inside politics. That already misses what ...

The Importance of the First Assumption Paul Watzlawick became famous for his work on communication, misunderstanding, and the realities peop...

The Quarter Millennium I rarely read newspapers the way I used to. Most days I skim headlines, glance at the first paragraph, and move on....

An Anthropological Visit to a Bakery There are two bakeries near where I live. The first one is deeply, profoundly Swiss. Not the products. ...

Understanding Is the Booby Prize One of the most famous lines to come out of est was this: "Understanding is the booby prize." The...

The Swedish Backpack This morning I had an argument with my daughter over a backpack. No family crisis. Just one of those ordinary domestic ...

We Already Know Modern society behaves as if human beings mainly suffer from lack of information. If people smoke, they need education. If c...

Forced to Spend the Afternoon at the Public Pool This is not satire. This actually happened. A Swiss newspaper recently reported on citizens...

Vendor Locked-In Organizations talk a lot about vendor lock-in. A government becomes dependent on Microsoft. A company builds its entire inf...

The American Presidency as Content: Governing in the Age of Stimulation Something is seriously wrong with the American presidency. Not just ...

TikTok Planet Something enormous is happening to human beings. Not politically. Not economically. Anthropologically. The species itself i...

Scrolling Without a Phone I recently went to a shopping center with my daughter and saw something so strange that I immediately thought: t...

The Dialectic of Attention Hegel believed history moved through contradictions in consciousness. Marx believed history moved through contr...

The Loop The philosopher Werner Erhard once used the word “distinction” in an interesting way. Not as a synonym for intelligence or clever t...

Questions and Answers I was listening to Werner Erhard speak the other day. Or rather, half listening. That always happens to me with certai...

The Dialectic of Veganism I bought a vegan protein powder recently. Not because I suddenly became vegan. I simply wanted to try it. The pa...

Social Work as an Art I was reading about Bismarck recently and came across a line that stayed with me. Politics, he said, is less a scien...

What Is Freedom For? For centuries, Western civilization fought to liberate the individual. From kings. From churches. From rigid morality. ...

Why Continue? For decades, modern Western society operated on a powerful assumption: human beings are unhappy because they are constrained. ...

This Is It A woman in a book from the 1970s describes the strange exhaustion of her generation. She had done everything. Psychoanalysis. Med...

The Softer Weapon People usually imagine control as something obvious. Police. Censorship. Threats. Prisons. Visible force. But most huma...