A teenager can now wake up and summon almost anything on their phone: a tutor for the problem they did not understand in class, a research assistant to sharpen their essay, a programmer to debug the game they are building. The marginal cost…
It is Sunday evening. I open my calendar for the week ahead and feel the weight of a life I apparently approved.Calls. Meetings. Appointments. Dinners. Coffees. Quick chats. The thing on Friday I said yes to four months ago because the week…
The Portuguese coastline was turning gold at sunset, and I was struggling to stay alert on the bends.I had arrived from California the night before after a ten-hour flight. A friend had recently split up with her boyfriend, and we had spent…
I’m one of those people who can move almost anywhere and adapt relatively fast. I left Turkey more than twenty years ago and have since lived in London, Berlin, Basel, Los Angeles, and Lisbon. I also visit Nepal and India every year. Differ…
I’ve been in Delhi for a week now, attending a course with the 12th Tai Situpa—a Tibetan teacher whose warmth, joy, and peace put a soft smile on hundreds of faces at once.It is a strange and rather lovely contrast here: five-star hotel com…
Meditation isn’t about stopping thoughts. It is how we train attention, and here’s how to begin practicing without pressure. Most reinventions fail because they begin with construction instead of subtraction. We rush to build a new self bef…
June 2019. I spent a month alone in the Swiss Alps, repeating the same routine every day. It was almost monastic. Every morning I wrote, then went for a long hike, cooked the same meal, had an online Internal Family Systems session, and end…
Imagine Van Gogh standing in a room with a mop because the room needs cleaning. Not a brush. A mop. He'd do it, and I bet he’d do it well. That’s the point. The floor shines. The canvas stays blank. We romanticize wasted talent as the obvio…
There are boundaries we recognize immediately—the big ones that involve leaving, confronting, refusing, redefining. And then there are the smaller ones: the almost invisible negotiations that happen dozens of times a day. The hesitation bef…
When I ended a twelve-year relationship, something happened that cracked my understanding of people. Within a week of moving out, my ex was already in a new relationship. No overlap. No obvious deceit. Just speed. Watching that unfold was d…
The Ancient Greeks had eight different words for love. We use the same one for desire, attachment, duty, friendship, self-respect, parental love, loyalty…and then wonder why so many relationships feel disorienting or exhausting. It’s not th…
Let me guess. You meant to do a proper year-end review. Maybe even had a few tabs open for weeks—a half-written journal entry, some color-coded plans, a quote from Seneca, perhaps. And now it’s January. For some of us, the only reflection s…