razor.blog: where philosophy meets the road.

Yes and No

In the twelfth century, Peter Abelard wrote a strange little book called Sic et Non, Yes and No. It did not tell readers what to believe. Instead, it placed authoritative Christian texts side by side that flatly contradicted each other. One Church Father said yes. Another said no. Both were respected. Both were orthodox. Abelard offered no resolution. His point was not to solve the contradiction but to force the reader to think.

What made this radical was not disagreement itself. Disagreement had always existed. What shocked people was the refusal to harmonize it. Abelard quietly implied that moral and theological certainty was not handed down fully formed. It had to be worked out in the mind and conscience of the individual. That was dangerous. It shifted responsibility away from authority and onto the person reading.

That small medieval exercise turns out to be uncannily modern.

Inner Economy

At some point, something shifts. Not with a bang or a dramatic decision, but with a quiet refusal. You realise that continuing to participate costs more than it gives. Not just time or energy, but something harder to replace. Attention. Integrity. Calm. Once that realisation settles in, the old questions lose relevance. The question is no longer how to win, or how to fix the system, or how to be heard. It becomes how to remain intact.

Understanding how power actually operates has a sobering effect. It does not automatically make you cynical, nor does it turn you hungry for dominance. It strips away illusion. You see that institutions are not guided by their stated values but by incentives, visibility, fear, and internal politics. You see that competence offers no protection, that good intentions generate no leverage, and that results matter only when someone powerful chooses to recognise them. This knowledge is not corrosive. What corrodes is pretending otherwise.

A Different Kind of New Year

You expect New Year to be a celebration.

Fireworks. Music. A brief agreement to feel hopeful.

This year showed something else.

My twelve-year-old watched the ball drop in New York.

The crowd cheered. The singer did her job, standing alone on a stage meant to carry meaning for millions.

Beneath the lights ran a live ticker of words.

Not wishes.

Not joy.

Mockery. Cheap cruelty from strangers paying nothing for attention.

It unsettled her.

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 client often arrives because everything has already collapsed.

Many professional helpers are driven by a quiet hope. They want to repair a part of themselves by repairing others. They want to be useful. Needed. To believe that effort can still turn chaos into order.

Edible Entertainment

Most of what we call food today is not food.

It is entertainment that happens to be edible. Designed in laboratories, refined in marketing departments, calibrated to hit the brain’s reward circuits harder than hunger ever could. We keep eating not because the body needs more, but because the dopamine loop has not yet closed. Appetite ends. Stimulation does not.

So perhaps the simplest form of rebellion left is this: eat real food. Food that grew somewhere, lived somewhere, died somewhere. Food that exists outside spreadsheets and branding decks. Real food does not chase you. It does not negotiate with your impulses. It supports the body quietly, builds instead of hijacks, and produces energy that lasts longer than the buzz.

The Hand on Your Shoulder

Most people think sunk cost is an economic concept. Something technical. Something neutral. It belongs in textbooks and business schools, not in daily life. In practice, it runs much deeper. It is one of the quiet ways the past keeps a hand on your shoulder long after it should have stepped back.

The gym is just how it introduces itself. You keep paying not because it works, but because you once believed it would. The money is already gone, yet it still expects loyalty. You tell yourself you should go more often. Not out of desire. Out of obligation. Loyalty to a decision made by a slightly younger, slightly more hopeful version of you. That person no longer exists, but the invoices keep arriving.

Once you see the pattern, it becomes hard to unsee.

Night

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

What occurred to me was simple.

In the future, being rich will not mean having more things.

It will mean still being a self.

Poverty is usually described in material terms. Money, comfort, access. That language belongs to a receding world. The one forming now sorts people differently.

Those who still think.

Those who are thought for.

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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.

Reason, Or Whatever You Call This Craziness

I was thinking about the Stoics again.
About their quiet confidence that reason holds the world together.
Logos.
Order.
Some hidden intelligence humming under everything.

It sounded noble enough in the morning.
Then I looked out the window.

A Short History of Sex

If Michail Bakhtin can trace the shape of civilization through its jokes, then sex offers another clear map. Humor shows what people dared to laugh about. Sex shows what they feared, what they cherished, what they tried to control, and what they quietly understood about themselves.

Walk through history and you see every age circling the same fact: desire comes first and explanations come later. Everything else is a system built to manage that truth.

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 century a step, each step a triumph, civilization climbing upward with the smug confidence of someone who never bothers to check the ground beneath them.

Then you read Rabelais and feel the staircase shift under your feet.

He wrote in the early 1500s, but he sounds like a man watching our news cycle from a bar stool, laughing into his sleeve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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