The Cost of Carrying What Is Not Yours Helping someone professionally is not the same as helping a friend. A friend asks for support. A clie...

Edible Entertainment Most of what we call food today is not food.  It is entertainment that happens to be edible. Designed in laboratories, ...

The Hand on Your Shoulder Most people think sunk cost is an economic concept. Something technical. Something neutral. It belongs in textbook...

Night I woke in the middle of the night, not dreaming, not yet awake. The mind unguarded. Thoughts arriving without invitation. What occurre...

After the Timeline Breaks There is a moment that comes quietly, often the morning after something decisive, when you wake up and time no lon...

What Happened to the Words, After They Were Spoken Old faces from another life surface like artifacts stirred up by a passing current. On an...

The Brutal Truth About Personal Change There is an entire industry built on hope. Seminars, books, coaches, podcasts. Different packaging, s...

The Lesson of a McDonald’s Drink The other day, sitting with my daughter at McDonald's, she sipped her drink and said something that cau...

Ghosts of Legitimacy I don’t know much about China. I’ve been there once. Took a train from Zurich to Shanghai. Travel doesn’t make anyone a...

Discount Dream I was in a German discount supermarket this afternoon. Fluorescent light. Grey floor. Long aisles of repetition. A young woma...

Atlantis, Lost and Found People keep scanning the ocean floor for ruins, as if Plato hid a city there for archaeologists with better drones....

The Death of Decorum Decorum is an old word. Today it sounds ornamental, like something to do with manners or polite distance. People associ...

The Failure of Utopias Utopias do not collapse because they aim too high. They collapse because they misread the material they try to shape....

The Right Temperature Gold is never pure when you pull it out of the earth. It comes mixed with the rest of the mountain. Fire is what separ...

Where Are You at Home? A street cat found me on Siam Square in Bangkok fifteen years ago. I noticed her near the Lido cinema. She had that l...

Hello, Friends My daughter was with her mother this weekend, so the apartment felt like a stage after the actors leave. Not lonely. Just hol...

You Are Dating an Ecosystem There was a time when a relationship meant two people in one household, trying to live with each other. That era...

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place Chaucer understood something about us that we still pretend not to know. On the Canterbury pilgrimage...

Zero to One for the Soul I read Zero to One the lazy way. A few pages. If I want to sound fancy, I call it the McLuhan method: let your own ...

A Manual for Spiritual Survival How to Hold the Line Between Peace and Poison: Some people can’t be cut out and can’t be let in. They hover ...

In Love With a Machine: The Sandman Algorithm In 1816 someone fell in love with a machine. Enter the Sandman. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandma...

The Sun Goes Down  There is a certain hour in a man’s life that feels like evening, even if the clock disagrees. A quiet hour. The sky does ...

Death Under the Tree: What Chaucer Knew About the Self-Help Industry In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales there is one story that feels like it was...

Reason, Or Whatever You Call This Craziness I was thinking about the Stoics again. About their quiet confidence that reason holds the worl...

A Short History of Sex If Michail Bakhtin can trace the shape of civilization through its jokes, then sex offers another clear map. Humor sh...

We Never Left the Dark Ages People like to talk about progress as if history were a staircase. Hegel built a whole philosophy on that: each ...

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 fre...

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. ...

Freedom Begins With a Flaw Everybody knows 1984. It became the mascot of every shallow conversation about control. What most people do not k...

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 ...

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 hat...

The Unexpected Journey of Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian woke before dawn with a feeling she did not recognize. Not dread, not excitement. So...

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....

When Experts Have to Say What Children Already Know There is something strange about the way modern societies talk. The microphones are expe...

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 pers...

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...

Children and Phenomenology: Seeing Things as They Are Adults like to believe they see the world clearly. They think experience sharpens perc...

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. ...

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 trash...

The Question That Refuses To Die I was sitting in my silverblue Toyota the other day, engine idling, rain tapping the windshield in that slo...

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 surv...

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...

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

Y our 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...

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 m...

Schopenhauer the Accidental Humanist I went for a run and listened to Epictetus railing against Epicurus. The whole time he kept hammering t...

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...

 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 mo...

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 y...

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 ...