Out of Office

Out of Office

I’m going to take a few days off over Christmas.

If you’re bored, feel free to wander through the older pieces. 

Some of them age better than expected. Others didn’t.

Either way, have a good time.

-Marcel

After the Timeline Breaks

After the Timeline Breaks

There is a moment that comes quietly, often the morning after something decisive, when you wake up and time no longer feels continuous. The past is still there. You remember it clearly. But it no longer reaches forward and carries you with it.

It made sense then.

You were there when it happened. You acted without watching yourself act. You endured without narrating endurance. You responded to what was in front of you, not to an idea of who you were supposed to be. The coherence of that past was not heroic. It was lived. The moment demanded something and you met it. That was enough.

Now that certainty is gone.

What Happened to the Words, After They Were Spoken

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 ordinary day they appear, as they do, in the drifting feed of Facebook. Suddenly the past is in the room again. Not the whole thing. Just a face, a name, a few afternoons in the heat of a kibbutz, a sense of being young and raw and still becoming someone.

Then the pull: should I reconnect?

It is not a question about a Facebook click. It is a question about what to do with a ghost that is not dead. It’s like a hand pressing to the glass from the other side.

The Brutal Truth About Personal Change

The Brutal Truth About Personal Change

There is an entire industry built on hope. Seminars, books, coaches, podcasts. Different packaging, same promise: you can change, you can become more, you can finally arrive. The tone is warm, encouraging, almost parental.

It sounds good. It just isn’t very true.

The Lesson of a McDonald’s Drink

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 caught me: “This one isn’t too sugary. It’s not too bad.”

An innocent remark. But it stayed with me.

Children meet the world with untrained senses. They test, they sample, they conclude quickly. If something doesn’t taste like poison, it must be acceptable. That is not stupidity. That is freshness.

Yet behind that cup, behind the red and yellow arches, sits one of the most efficient machines of extraction ever built. McDonald’s is not really about food.

Ghosts of Legitimacy

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 an expert. 

But from a distance, I see a paradox: a state that quotes Marx while running one of the hardest capitalist machines on the planet.

People say Xi reads Marx in the morning while presiding over property bubbles, sweatshop shifts, and a billionaire class that could buy half (or probably all) of Switzerland. Everyone knows it’s absurd. Yet the portrait of Marx stays on the wall. Marx himself remains as a ghost. A relic that blesses what would otherwise look like plain authoritarian capitalism.

But the West should not laugh too loudly.

Discount Dream

Discount Dream

I was in a German discount supermarket this afternoon. Fluorescent light. Grey floor. Long aisles of repetition.

A young woman passed me. She worked there.

Her face was flawless. Full makeup. Camera-ready. She could have stepped out of Germany’s Next Topmodel. But her body moved on autopilot. Slow. Procedural. Her eyes were empty behind the lashes.

And I thought: what happened?

Atlantis, Lost and Found

Atlantis, Lost and Found

People keep scanning the ocean floor for ruins, as if Plato hid a city there for archaeologists with better drones. Marble columns under saltwater. Temples sunk in silt. Walls that collapsed in a single tragic night. They wait for a diver to surface with proof.

They keep looking in the wrong place.

The Death of Decorum

The Death of Decorum

Decorum is an old word. Today it sounds ornamental, like something to do with manners or polite distance. People associate it with surfaces.

That was never its core meaning.

Decorum was about fit. About whether someone’s behavior made sense in light of the situation they were in. About carrying yourself in a way that matched the role you occupied and the weight that came with it.

Some positions demanded restraint. Others demanded authority. Sometimes silence mattered more than speech. The point was not virtue or performance. It was coherence.

A shepherd borrowing the voice of a ruler would have sounded wrong immediately, as if he were wearing clothes that did not belong to him. A ruler was expected to absorb pressure without complaint. When a judge began to seek attention, the office itself was already compromised.

Not because these people were better than others, but because their roles imposed limits. Those limits gave shape to conduct.

The Stoics took this seriously. For them, ethics did not begin with self-expression. It began with accepting the part you had been given and acting in a way that honored it. No fantasies. No escape hatches. Just the role that was actually yours.

That way of thinking assumed a world with weight.

The modern world does not have that kind of weight.

The Failure of Utopias

The Failure of Utopias

Utopias do not collapse because they aim too high.

They collapse because they misread the material they try to shape.

Every ideal begins clean and ends like a smudged memo no one wants to sign. The idea is rarely the enemy. The human animal usually is.

They always open the same way.

A wound in history.

A promise of something better.

A new design for living.

Communism began like that. The European project began like that. Countless bright-eyed communes did too. Blueprints always shine before the first dent.

The flaw sits in the center.

The Right Temperature

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 separates what belongs from what only clings. There is no drama in it. Just heat, rising until the metal answers.

People are not gold, but the principle holds. Most of what we carry is not essential. It is drift. Opinions never examined. Fears inherited without consent. Obligations that hardened into reflex. A cargo of small untruths we keep because the world rarely demands that we wake up.

Life stays lukewarm for years. In that temperature nothing burns away.

Where Are You at Home?

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 look street animals get when they have already decided something and are just waiting for you to catch up. She followed me. She was talking to me. Not desperately. Calmly. As if I was late for an appointment.

I told myself I would keep her for two weeks. Long enough to find someone sensible. Someone settled. Someone who knew how to do things properly. Fifteen years later she is still here. In another country. In the snow. 

I named her Lido, after the place where she chose me. The cinema is gone now. She isn’t.

Hello, Friends

Hello, Friends

My daughter was with her mother this weekend, so the apartment felt like a stage after the actors leave.

Not lonely. Just hollow in a way the walls already know.

The night before, I had visited a friend. We drank a little wine, talked the usual nonsense, and I came home late. I slept longer than I meant to. The kind of sleep where you wake up blurred around the edges.

I stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee. I wasn’t awake yet, not really.

And there they were.

Three flies, circling in the middle of the room like a miniature weather system.

A tiny cyclone with wings.

Before I understood what I was doing, I heard myself say it.

Hello, friends.

You Are Dating an Ecosystem

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 is gone.

You don’t date a woman anymore.

You date what her feed serves you.

Her group chat.

The Instagram explore page that shapes her taste.

The vocabulary borrowed from her favorite online therapist.

Micro-influencers she follows without thinking.

The TikTok algorithm that nudges her mood.

The attachment style she diagnosed herself with.

Opinions from friends, refreshed by the hour.

You are never with one person alone.

You are dating an ecosystem.

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Chaucer understood something about us that we still pretend not to know.

On the Canterbury pilgrimage he places two tales side by side.

First comes the Knight, offering a vision of order.

Then the Miller barges in with a joke that scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

What follows is more than medieval storytelling.

It becomes an x-ray of the human condition.

Zero to One for the Soul

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 mind fill the rest.

So I have to warn you. I don’t know anything about Peter Thiel. But I saw a ghost leaning over his shoulder: René Girard.

Thiel doesn’t have to write the word mimesis. It’s already in the paper. Girard said people don’t really want things. They copy each other’s wanting. They borrow desire the way drunks borrow lighters. Half-conscious. A little sad. Not very original. Desire spreads like flu. Thiel turned that insight into business advice: stop copying, stop competing, build something no one else can imitate.

A Manual for Spiritual Survival

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 at the edges of your life like unstable weather.

Sometimes bright.

Often dangerous.

Always unpredictable.

You learn to read them the way sailors read skies.

You don’t argue with a storm.

You steer around it.

In Love With a Machine: The Sandman Algorithm

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 Sandman is not just a gothic relic from another century. It reads like a warning about the world we walk through now.

The plot: Nathanael falls in love with Olympia, the beautiful daughter of his physics professor. He pours his longing into her stillness and mistakes his own reflection for her perfection. When he learns she is an automaton, the shock breaks him mentally. The story of the Sandman shows what happens when a fragile mind prefers the comfort of its own delusions to the weight of reality.

It feels close to home.

The Sun Goes Down

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 not fall, but it leans. Shadows stretch, not as threats, but as reminders. I can hear my own footsteps in that hour, even in a crowded place. I can hear my past. I can hear the version of myself I almost became.

This is the hour this song lives in.

Death Under the Tree: What Chaucer Knew About the Self-Help Industry

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 written for our time: The Pardoner’s Tale.

It is short, brutal and absolutely merciless.

Three young men, drunk and angry, stumble into a tavern one morning and hear that their friend has died. They swear an oath to find Death and kill him.

Their quest is not noble. It is ego, rage and bravado, the usual human cocktail.

On the road they meet an old man who tells them that they will find Death under a great tree.