razor.blog: where philosophy meets the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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.

The Day My Daughter Chose Her Own Future

Today is Zukunftstag in Switzerland, the Future Day. A day where kids are sent out to peek into the machinery of adult life. Supposedly to inspire them, but really, it is to start shaping them into something manageable.

The idea is polite, the execution sterile. They call it opportunity, but it is more like orientation toward the narrow lanes society still calls the future.

They dress it up with moral slogans: girls should try male jobs, boys should try female ones. It sounds progressive, but the message underneath is the same. Be what we tell you to be, just under a different banner.

My eleven-year-old daughter did not buy it. She said she wants to be an artist.

Children Are Not Algorithms to Be Programmed

There’s a whole breed of people online giving advice to parents and kids as if they’re training algorithms, not raising humans.

You’ve seen them. They post slick threads about discipline, focus, optimization, resilience, and not one of them has ever spent a night in a psych ward for kids, sat across from a teenager who can’t stop cutting herself, or tried to comfort a child breaking down from too much pressure at school.

The 4.6-Star Prison

My eleven-year-old daughter read The Count of Monte Cristo and asked if the Château d’If was real. We checked. It was. A fortress in the sea, stone built for despair. Then she laughed.

“Why does it have 4.6 stars on Google?”

The Job Interview Script

There is a script for job interviews, and everyone follows it, knowingly or not.

The interviewer plays the gatekeeper. The candidate plays the supplicant. The whole thing is a managed ritual of submission.

The unspoken rule: you must justify yourself; they never have to justify their judgment.

Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

There is no witness.

The stars burn and die without memory. The galaxies turn like slow storms, but not for us. They do not know we’re here.

Everything you love, your child’s voice, the warmth of a body beside you, the sound of rain on the roof, exists for an instant and then is gone. No trace, no record. Even the atoms that hold you together will scatter into space, indifferent to what they once composed.

There is no plan. No hidden architect. The universe doesn’t experience itself through you, it doesn’t experience anything at all. It expands, cools, collapses, repeats. Meaning is not lost; it was never there to begin with.

Look long enough into the dark and the difference between love and hunger, between creation and decay, begins to blur. All motion is the same motion. All warmth leaks into cold. The sun will die, and the Earth will die, and the last thought ever thought will vanish into silence.

The Most Famous Italian: Caligula’s Horse

Someone asked, Who’s the most famous Italian in history?

It tickled my national pride a bit. A couple of weeks ago, I found out I’m twenty-five percent Italian. I could have said Super Mario and called it a night.

Instead, I wrote: Caligula’s horse.

The joke writes itself.

Well, not really. It is not a joke. If you think about it a bit deeper, it is a mirror.

The Frist Tweet

The First Tweet

Scene: A crowded Athenian marketplace. A man stands on a crate holding a small wax tablet.

HERALD: Attention, citizens! An Etruscan garment-bearer has invented a new thing called Chatter!

FISHMONGER: What does it do?

HERALD: You shout short thoughts into the air, and strangers argue with you about them!

OLD WOMAN: We already do that!

HERALD: Yes, but now it’s sexy!

(A crowd gathers, murmuring.)

YOUNG MAN: Can I complain about my neighbour?

HERALD: Of course! That’s called a thread!

OLD MAN: And if many people agree with me?

HERALD: Then you’re famous!

OLD MAN: And if nobody agrees with me?

HERALD: Then you’re a philosopher!

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Scroll long enough on X and it starts to feel like a digital monastery where everyone is trying to be the next Socrates or Machiavelli. Robes optional, certainty mandatory.

Quotes clash like swords. One posts a thought, another a graph, and soon three more join to debate the metaphysics of lunch. The algorithm smells blood.

Everyone is enlightened now, but somehow still angry.

The Walk Home

Nine o’clock in Switzerland

means the world has gone still.

Windows hum with warm light,

and the old streets forget their names.

My eleven-year-old called, said she’d come home.

Then called again:

Can you pick me up?

Four hundred meters of cold night.

I almost went.

153

It is Sunday. I’ve been running. When I passed some people on their way to church, someone said, “The number 2 in the Bible means society.” For some reason, that stuck.

Two people, two sides, two faces. Maybe society, I thought. Makes sense. Hegel said that to know yourself, you need another — consciousness needs a mirror. You can’t have a story with one person. Not even a tragedy.

Since the days of Covid, when they replaced holy water with sanitizer, I don’t go to church anymore.

Germany: No Country to Fight For

Politics in Germany lived for decades in two truths.

One: a moral exile born of twentieth-century crimes.

Two: a practical Europe born of the postwar settlement.

Together they created a civic caution that looked like humility and felt like self-doubt. For a long time that doubt seemed like virtue. Germany defined itself through restraint, treating moral weakness as moral strength.

Then the world changed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revived old fears and offered a new stage for virtue. The language of guilt became the language of defense. The instinct that once forbade power now justifies it.

When German leaders speak, their voices divide.

Career Advice

Me: “GuruAI, should I tell my boss the truth?”

GuruAI: “In principle, yes. Truth builds trust.”

Me: “He called security.”

GuruAI: “MindShare miscalibration and unemployment often travel together. Would you like a reading list on Stoicism and office politics, or shall we begin with Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy?”

The Transformation of Revenge

My eleven-year-old daughter came to me tonight talking about The Count of Monte Cristo. She spoke of it in detail: names, betrayals, even the quiet moments I had half-forgotten. When she finished, I asked what she liked most about it. She didn’t hesitate. “Revenge,” she said.

It startled me a little, not because of the word itself, but because of the clarity with which she said it. Children rarely speak of abstractions with such conviction. Yet there it was, revenge, bright and simple, like a spark in her eyes.

I thought about what that means at eleven.

When Clarity Kills Ambition

I once watched an interview with Christopher Langan, often called the smartest man alive. The question was simple: why would someone like him live quietly with horses instead of chasing power or prestige?

He smiled and said he could already see ahead. He knew what the game would do to him. That was enough to stay out.

Sushi in Space

It was one of those freezing Alpine nights that make silence sound crystal clear. I had just picked my eleven-year-old daughter up from her Ukrainian friend’s place. The air was clear, the kind that feels older than the world itself.

She looked up and said the sky was full of stars, and some were moving. Maybe planes, maybe satellites, maybe something else. Then she smiled. “If they’re UFOs, I don’t mind being kidnapped, if they have good food and no school.”

You Can’t Fake Yourself into Engineering

In the real world, gravity doesn’t care about charm.

A bridge either holds or it doesn’t. A circuit either lives or dies. You can’t talk your way into building an aeroplane. Reality has no audience. It simply is.

That’s why I respect the builders, the ones who answer to the laws of nature. No posturing. No rhetoric. Only the quiet dialogue between mind and matter: steel, current, pressure. A world that doesn’t flatter.

In that world, truth has teeth. Nature enforces honesty. If your calculation is wrong, something breaks. Feedback is immediate, brutal, and fair.

Outside that world, almost everything can be faked.

Explaining the Trinity to My Daughter

This morning, on the way to school, my daughter asked, “Papa, what is the Trinity?”

We were running late, and I said the only thing a parent can say when facing two mysteries at once — time and theology:

“I’ll explain it later,” I told her. “Actually, nobody really understands it anyway.”

She looked at me, unimpressed.

“Well,” she said, “it sounds even more complicated than Hinduism.”

And that was the end of our morning theology lesson.

Why Cities Vote Left

I do not like when my writing sounds political. I am not trying to convert anyone or wave a flag. Politics, to me, is mostly show wrestling, with bright lights, loud voices, and a script that keeps the audience divided. I have met enough politicians to know how the act works. I have even worked for some. Let's just say I am not a fan.

Still, politics has a way of sneaking in when you look closely at the world. After elections, the maps light up, and in my knowledge, though I am not an expert, most of the major cities in the West glow in the same way. Left.

To give two examples, New York and Zurich. New York because there just was an election. Zurich because it is close to me. It is not a major city in the world, but it is a major city in Switzerland. And the same dynamics apply there. Both cities rely heavily on finance, both have a rich and well-educated population, and yet both lean strongly left. I have always wondered about that, especially in Zurich, which I know well, where, by common sense, one would expect the opposite. Yet the city government is very progressive and does not like cars at all.

It is odd when you think about it.

Navigating Moral Responsibility in the Modern World

I looked down at my shoes before heading to the supermarket.

Brown leather. Solid. Reliable. A brand with reach.

Which meant the leather wasn’t from an artisan’s hands but from a system: cattle, factories, ships.

Supply chains looping the planet to feed demand.

How many cows for these shoes?

It wasn’t pity that I felt, but clarity.

A still moment of seeing things as they are.

Risk to be wrong!

I see people quoting famous writers and scientists left and right, as if wisdom only counts once someone else has said it. Every argument draped in authority, every thought wearing another man’s name. But why don’t they come up with their own?

The world is plastic. It bends. Everything is still being written. We can say what we want and shape what we see. We can test truth by living it, not by citing it. I’ve met people who collect quotes the way others collect stamps. They know what Nietzsche said about God, what Augustinus said about time, what Camus said about absurdity.

But ask them what they think, and the room falls silent.

LSD, Therapy, and the Courage to See Yourself

Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser studied medicine at the universities of Fribourg and Bern. After several years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics, he became a certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist. For almost 30 years he has run his own practice in Solothurn, Switzerland, combining a conventional medical background with a quietly revolutionary interest: the therapeutic use of LSD.

Peter conducted the first therapeutic study with LSD examining LSD-assisted psychotherapy after the substance was criminalized worldwide around 1970.

I first met Peter in 2014 when I travelled to Solothurn to interview him for a paper I was writing on LSD. I was studying social work at the time and I picked a controversial topic just to see if it would make my university sweat.

Two weeks after my interview, The New York Times ran a piece about Peter titled “LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy.” The following conversation took place in 2021 and has not been published until now.

The Sweet Cesspool

Dear friend,

I woke thinking about George Sanders again.

You remember, voice like velvet laced with arsenic, face lit by that old-world boredom, the kind of man who always looked like he had read the last chapter first. The man who left us with a line too precise to ignore:

“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

That was it. No drama. No lament. Just a sigh, a shrug, and the final door closing.

But what a door it was.

Retconning Reality

(On how the edits we make to survive can become the lies we live by.)

I was looking for a new job in social work. The interview went fine: polite smiles, a glass of water, the usual nods and compliments on my unusual CV, from farming in the Negev to working for a Thai Chinese politician. For a moment, I thought I had a chance.

A week later, the rejection came. They wanted someone more conventional. I was angry at first, but that faded. By evening I told myself I hadn’t really wanted the job, that the interview had felt off. By next week I was sure I’d only applied to test the market. A month later I caught myself telling a friend the whole idea had seemed wrong from the start and that I was happy where I was. It wasn’t true, but it felt true now.

That’s how it starts: the small rewrite that makes disappointment bearable.

The Cybernetic Apostle

Today is All Saints’ Day. Paul is a key figure in Christianity. His life, work, and letters form the backbone of Christian doctrine. He is venerated as a saint, and his epistles make up a significant part of the New Testament; about a quarter of it, depending on which letters one attributes to him.

Don’t worry, this won’t turn into a missionary blog. I only thought of Paul and the society that grew from his influence: a world that calls itself secular, yet still runs on a Christian operating system. Our ideas of morality, justice, compassion, and even personal redemption are shaped by his inheritance, whether we believe or not.

Paul wasn’t an architect of theology so much as a regulator of souls.

Halloween: The Inheritance

We hang skeletons in windows and call it Halloween.

But the real ghosts live in bloodlines.

I saw a picture once, a boy beside a devil.

The caption said: If you don’t face your demons, they’ll raise your child.

I never forgot it.

Demons don’t vanish.

They travel.

What It Means to Be Human

The night had a cheap kind of beauty, the kind that flickers on wet asphalt and pretends it’s eternal. Somewhere, a cat yawned against the dark, and the city kept humming, half-asleep, half-guilty. You could almost believe the world was at peace if you didn’t know better.

Being human is knowing better. It’s walking through a storm and still noticing the way the rain hits a lamppost, the way it glows like a small apology. It’s the weight of memory sitting in your pocket like loose change, useless to trade for anything, but you keep it anyway.

When Adults Turn into Children Online

The screen removes the gaze of the other. In public, we behave because someone might look at us. Online, no one looks, only reacts. So we regress. We throw tantrums, demand attention, form cliques, and shout “mine!” as if the world were still a sandbox.

Somewhere between the comment box and the feed, grown-ups forget themselves. COVID turned neighbors into epidemiologists or denunciants. Donald Trump splits the online crowd like no one since Moses parted the Red Sea. And Gaza has turned the internet into a madhouse of rage. One side posts grisly corpses, the other posts colorful vegetable markets. Each screams, “Look! This proves everything!”

But nothing is proven.

Adaptation 101

“What kind of skill do you need in life, but they don’t teach you in school?” my daughter asked.

They teach you how to multiply numbers, but not how to face loss.

How to pass exams, but not how to handle people.

How to chase goals, but not how to slow down and think when nothing makes sense.

Then she said, “Maybe the kids in my class know how to clean dishes. Maybe they can go buy milk. But do they know any real stuff? Like how to talk your way out of getting beaten up?”

The Razor’s Edge

I named this little blog after a line from the Katha Upanishad, the one Somerset Maugham used for The Razor’s Edge:

“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.”

I always liked that image; walking a blade between chaos and clarity.

Somerset Maugham’s book was about a man named Larry Darrell, a pilot shattered by the First World War, who abandons wealth, society, and love to search for truth. He drifts through Paris, India, and the Himalayas, looking not for success but for inner peace and meaning in life.

Today that search feels harder than ever. The edge has grown thinner.

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