You are standing alone in a big empty house. It was built in the 16th or 17th century, creaky floors, high ceilings, the kind of place that holds its history visibly. You are moving through it at night.

One version of yourself believes in nothing. Or rather they believe in science, in happenstance, that there is no higher reason for them to be here and that nothing beyond the natural world exists. They walk through with ease. There is no weight in the air, no sense of presence. They do not look over their shoulder. They move through life, through the evening, entirely untroubled.

The other person believes in something bigger. They feel the energy of the house, the weight of who lived and died inside it. Someone is always near them, amongst them, and it does not scare them. It just makes them question the bigger picture. It makes them feel that there is something more.

Would you rather be blissfully unaware, or a little unsettled but believing in something bigger?

I have been sitting with that question. And the more I sit with it, the more I think it is not really a question about the house at all.

I think our generation will crumble under the gaze of no job and no religion. What we sought before in community was our church. What has now become is our work. Take that away, and the question becomes: how do we connect to the parts of ourselves that relate to others? My friends who are lawyers, engineers, consultants, they have something bigger than themselves to move toward, and they are being challenged inside it. Even the ones who are not particularly happy in their roles, the structure gives them something. A team. A reason to show up. A mission larger than any single person. For the past few generations, work became the thing you organized your life around the way people once organized it around a parish.

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I spent time working alone. Freelancing, building things independently, moving from place to place. And what it revealed was not that I needed more discipline or more focus. It was that I missed working toward something with people. The isolation was not logistical. It was something quieter. The sense that what I was building was only for me, and that at times there was nowhere for it to land.

The individualistic culture we have adopted has a real emptiness to it. And then you find your family and your people, and you realize you are not alone. And that can be the moment things shift.

But what I am not willing to do is fill the space with something that does not fit just because the space feels too large to leave empty. I am not willing to take a job I do not believe in because I am lonely. I am not willing to join a religion because I am lonely. Those are the same error wearing different clothes, and I do not think they are valiant reasons to betray your intuition on something.

Our emotions are data for who we are. How lucky are we to be so responsive.

I am writing this before the decision. A week ago I flew to Los Angeles for an interview at a company doing something I did not even know was possible. And in the days after, a whole life arranged itself in front of me. The apartment, the role, the people, the version of myself I would become inside it. Every detail felt right. The excitement was overwhelming precisely because it was not mine yet. I wanted the rejection just to end the uncertainty.

What the interview was actually doing was showing me what I want. Not the job specifically. What I want is to be challenged, to contribute to something that matters, to work alongside people who are serious about what they are building. Not disruption for its own sake. Something with a reason behind it.

That is what fills the space. Not the title. The mission underneath it.

And alongside that, I have been realising something else. Everything in my life has always felt temporary. Moving around a lot when I was younger. Summers spent in different places. College was temporary. Studying abroad, each place was temporary. You never quite get the chance to settle. You are always arriving and always leaving. And then one day you notice you are longing for something different. You start to want a place that is yours, people who are yours, a community you have actually built rather than borrowed.

That longing is data too. It is pointing at something real: you cannot build a life while living entirely in transit. You can travel, and I think I will always need to. But travel is not the same as impermanence. You can move through the world and still have somewhere to return to. Still have roots. Still be building, alongside people, toward something. My brother who spent years as a nomad started by creating roots somewhere he loved, a city he could always return to. He built community slowly, and it took time, but it was real. That is the version I am working toward.

The question of what we build toward has been coming up for me in another place too. I have been questioning religion recently. Not as a thought experiment but genuinely, sitting with it. I come from a family that celebrated Christmas and Easter for what they have commercially become. I never thought deeply about it beyond that. Then I started noticing how many people around me, people I deeply respect, were seeking something there. They had all grown up religious, and when things got hard, that existing faith deepened. I am not in that position. I am starting from somewhere different, and I want to be honest about that difference.

I believe Jesus was a person. That much feels solid to me. Where it gets harder is the miracles. The resurrection. The supernatural. Because if you believe in the miracles, you are stepping into a different question entirely. You are no longer just admiring a teacher or a philosopher. You are saying something happened that cannot be explained by the natural world. And that is exactly the person in the house who feels the weight of the walls, who senses something that the other person cannot. The one who believes there is more than what is visible.

I do not know that I am ready to make that claim. But I know I cannot dismiss it either. Because I do believe in the intelligent design of everything. I stand in front of the ocean, any serious piece of nature, and I feel immediately that something made this and that it was not random. I believe in energy, in something larger than any individual life. Where I land on whether that something is the God of the New Testament, I am not certain. What I am certain of is that I am finally curious enough to look properly, and I refuse to arrive at an answer for the wrong reason. Not to fit in, not to feel less alone, not to half-ass something sacred.

Which brings me back to the house.

The person who moves through the night untroubled is not wrong, exactly. There is a kind of freedom in it. But the person who feels the weight of the walls, who senses history and presence and the possibility of something more, they are carrying something. And I think that something is what makes them reach toward other people. When you believe the world is larger than you, you naturally want to build inside it alongside someone else. You stop operating as though you are the only one here. You stop thinking in terms of every man for themselves.

That is the realization underneath all of this. Our emotions, our longing for community, our hunger for work that actually means something, our pull toward the spiritual even when we are not sure what to call it, these are not problems to be solved. They are signals. They are pointing at the same thing: we are not meant to do this alone. Young people backed by a real mission, ready to build something toward a higher good, not because it is profitable but because it matters. That kind of work exists. Those kinds of people exist. And the fact that so many of us are hungry for exactly that, even when we cannot articulate it, even when it surfaces as anxiety about a job or an inexplicable pull toward a church we have never attended, says something about who we are.

It says there is something bigger than us. It says we already know it. And it says we are going to have to build toward it together.

Week 6 of the 100-Hour Passion Project. The challenge: 100 hours of deliberate skill-building over 11 weeks. This week’s hours were irregular, imperfect, and entirely worthwhile.

Last weeks reflection:

Let me paint you the moment I am writing this from. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons blasting in my headphones. A shaky little economy seat tray with my computer perched horizontally. A natural fibers bamboo set I bought in Malaysia, the first clothing item purchased after a long pause and worn religiously since. The man two screens ahead cycling between Angry Birds and 2048, playing so poorly that something in me genuinely cannot look away. Turbulence outside the window, and the feeling of stun that hits you after you hear something that felt like it was meant for you exactly in that moment.

I had been listening to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. When he started talking about hypersensitivity, the common trait of the artist, I felt like he was talking directly at me. The way some people have big emotions and struggle with where to place them. How when you try to express them it can feel like nobody sees you, nobody truly understands. How isolating that is. How lonely. He also said that the artists are the ones who tend to fall hardest. That the people who feel the most are the ones most at risk of not surviving those feelings. I sat with that for a long time.

Because I recognise that in myself.

I felt numb once. For years I had bottled up emotion, and I ached for a release that would not come.

Then I did a lot of soul searching and with time emotions came. vocalaizing and working through things, i became an uncapped fountain of proecessing and suddenly it felt like they were too big to manage.

There was one stretch where I was excessively happy, the kind where it felt impossible to ever be sad again. My friends were literally asking me how I was so happy. and I would give them a long and thoughtful answer. But even while living that high I was honestly just worried about the low. I saw it coming. Like when you have an incredible night out and let loose and then the next three days you are terribly depressed because your dopamine is working overtime to restore itself. I watched it arrive, right on schedule.

I tend towards depression. It runs in my family. We were artists and poets, big ideas and big expectations. But I have come to understand that that fact can make it too easy to give up your agency in the name of heredity. And that is not the answer either.

See, this week had a lot in it. In the span of about three days I applied for something, had the interview, and suddenly this whole life started shaping itself in front of me. Every detail felt right. The role, the location, the company, the life I would have in turn. And it created such an excitement that was overwhelming because it was not mine yet. That is a specific kind of anxiety. I wanted to receive a rejection just to end the suffering.

And underneath that I am grieving. A place from my childhood is changing shapes. It is not physically going anywhere, just going to look a little different. My heart rate has been elevated. It has been harder to fall asleep. My nose has lived in a book, in anything, to bring some distraction. The past few months I have forced myself to be stoic, to speak from reason and not let my emotions overtake me. Waiting to hear back, knowing I had done all I could, all whilst grieving.

So I was walking around with this inner tension, one that felt like I could explode and disppear into nothing.

Then walking up the stairs the afternoon before, mental chatter persisting, an inner current gave me the choice of deeming myself depressed or to overcome. Instead I turned the music up really loud and moved my body. Shaking legs, hips, hands waving, twirling.

I picked up my dog and spun her around and I danced until I felt like I had shaken the self-doubt and the troubles out.

For a second I wondered if this counted as avoidance. An attempt to push things deeper down.

But a real sense of awareness resolved it. I am working through things, I am writing, I am thinking. Even while I work through it, the feelings still live inside me. No matter how aware we are, we cannot remove the way that we feel. Some things we have to accept, some things we can continue to evolve in, but some things just need a place to go.

When I was feeling broken, the answer was singing. When I could not sleep, when the world felt like it was crashing down, the answer was to use my voice, with pen to paper. It changes you. I did not know how much I needed it.

Marcus Aurelius reminds us it is a choice. On the cloudy days especially, it is a choice. And I think he is right. Not in the toxic positivity way, not in the pretend-it-is-not-there way. Just in the sense that when you are walking up the stairs and the sadness is waiting for you at the top, you are allowed to choose differently. To reach for the thing that moves it through you rather than the thing that lets it settle in.

This is week six of the challenge, and if I am being honest I did not do it the way it is supposed to look. I did not sit down for a structured hour of focused skill practice every day. But I taught my first two yoga classes and it felt incredible. I wrote a piece I feel quite proud of. I found a new and growing confidence in my French, the real kind. The kind where even though I was tired at the dinner party I was following the conversation. Where when the woman at the check-in desk asked me something specific I not only knew what she said but responded reasonably. I opened a drawing app on my phone and sketched a face that actually looked like one. Suddenly I was creating in ways I had been longing to.

A few weeks ago I was smashing random piano tiles yet somehow it sounded like a symphony to my ears and my ears only. It was the big kind of loud expression and exactly what I needed in that moment. A lot of noise I created, put together in a kind of flow.

The skills have been improving. The intention has lived there all along.

Find your expression. Dancing to your favorite song, jumping, twirling, head banging, whatever it is. A finger on a canvas. A loud and private note held too long. Big love, freedom, running in the rain. Moving from the most honest place within yourself, like absolutely nobody is watching. Big emotions are not a problem to be solved. They are a signal. And the signal is asking you to move.

xx, HM

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I am one year out of university, watching the world move faster than I think any of us could have been prepared for. This piece is the culmination of what this year taught me.

A year since I graduated, and what has changed.

I have been reflecting on this over the past month. May was especially hard because that realization landed on me all at once. I felt like my life had been completely changed in the fall, and then I let myself sink back into old patterns. I say this however with little regret, I lived and I enjoyed and I was young.

I spent the season teaching skiing in the mountains, making new friends, being exactly where I was.

When I was catapulted back into reality, returning for one month to a startup society I spent time at in the fall, and suddenly I was overcome with inertia. It was not just that I had not moved forward. In some real ways I had moved backwards.

While I was in what I can only describe as Peter Pan land, the world kept moving. New technologies, new companies, new startups, new ideas. All of it accumulating at a rate that felt, for the first time, genuinely dizzying.

I came out of the fall full of passion and mission.

A year before that I had been completely lost, the kind of lost that made me quit my startup job in San Francisco and wander. There was one feeling I was listening to: it was not right. So I took the time to explore. I started writing. I started detaching from all the things that felt wrong. I became, for a while, quite extreme with the learning process. Life’s lessons were shoveled consistently in my face.

Slowly, my biggest fear took shape. That time would fly and I would sit there passively letting it happen. That I would end up somewhere ten years from now and everything would feel like it flew by and I simply existed. That I did nothing to change the things that were stressing me out, the things I was struggling with.

The thing is I know I will get there. I will live the next ten years, circumstances allowing. But how do I make sure those ten years put me at 33 in a place I actually want to be? Who do I want to be on that birthday? That answer needs to come from somewhere real, not from what I see other people having, not from what I see online, not from what I am culturally told I am supposed to want.

The twenties are hard. But this piece does not only apply to people in their twenties. It applies to anyone living through the next ten years, because the risk is the same for all of us. If we do not figure out who we want to be, we passively move through all of this and the decade shapes us instead of the other way around.

We are living through the fastest decade in human history. Technology is coming out at a speed with no historical precedent, turning into real tangible impact faster than most of us are prepared for: software, hardware, inconveniences erased, entire industries restructured. Suddenly we have all these things that are easier. And we still do not have ourselves.

I want to name what I think is happening underneath all of it: identity drift. The quiet pull of the current when you are not actively steering. The world is moving so fast that if you are not intentional about who you are becoming, the decade picks a direction for you. Most people do not notice it happening. They just look up one day and wonder how they got here.

The antidote to identity drift is agency. George Mack wrote about what he called high-agency people, those who, faced with any circumstance, find a way rather than an excuse. The essay spread widely among the most ambitious people in Silicon Valley, and for good reason. But I want to expand the frame slightly. High agency has become associated with a very specific kind of success: companies, capital, a particular zip code. I think that is too narrow. The same quality, the decision to be the author of your own life rather than its passenger, applies to anyone building anything. A business, a creative practice, a family, a life with more meaning than the one that was handed to you. Agency is not a Silicon Valley value but a rather human one. The key is simply if you apply it to your own definition of success.

Philosopher René Girard wrote about mimetic desire, the idea that we do not actually know what we want: we want what we see others wanting. Social media was built almost precisely on that theory, whether its architects knew it or not. Being thrown other people’s lives continuously, their careers, their relationships, their bodies, their apartments: how are we supposed to know what we want for our own? We have inclinations in certain directions. But when given a moment of real stillness, a quiet meal alone, a bus ride without a screen, suddenly we are trapped in a mind we do not recognize, with thoughts that would be difficult to claim as our own.

Our nervous system is not helping. The sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight one, is constantly activated because we are watching short-form videos and skimming short form notes notes all day, in need of constant stimulation just to feel like we are paying attention. We are not learning. We are consuming. There is a difference and our brains know it even when we pretend otherwise.

Marcus Aurelius — Roman Emperor, Stoic philosopher, and the most powerful person alive in his time — wrote that vacations and retreats are quite unphilosophical, because we already have access to the one thing that should calm us most: ourselves. The place in ourselves that lives self-assured. That is a startling thing to read in a world where being alone with your thoughts is one of the things people fear most. It tells us exactly where the work lies.

Our tendency when things move this fast is to want to stop it, to go backwards, to opt out. That is the wrong instinct. What needs to happen is a system update. We do not need to slow the decade down. We need to know where we are going so the speed works in our favor.

Nobody is going to tell us who we should become. As much as we wish someone would just write it out for us, the risk is too high that we would be unhappy with their answer. We only have a certain amount of time. We want to make sure we are spending it building toward something real.

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Here is the reframe that changed everything for me.

“Who am I?” is an archaic question. It assumes a fixed self, waiting somewhere inside you to be uncovered, like archaeology. Slow, inward, circular, and when asked from a place of anxiety, it produces more anxiety.

“Who do I want to become?” is an agency question. It assumes the self is built through inputs, through choices, through kept promises to yourself. It moves.

Luck does not just happen. It is putting yourself in the right place at the right time as the right person for what you want. That last part is the one most people skip.

This is my seven-step guide to becoming that person before the decade decides for you.

1. Get out of fight or flight first.

Nothing else on this list works without this one.

I arrived in France after a month where scrolling on my phone was the only thing that could ease my mind. Boredom escaped as fast as it came around. I felt, in no other way to describe it, numb and entirely anxious at the same time.

A year ago, when I left the startup society, I was full of life and ease and momentum for all the things I was going to build. I lost that when I let myself return to the version of me that was expected. When I lost sight of my own strength and became a part of what everyone else my age was doing. Passively watching other people’s lives. Overstimulated, yet with little stimulation of my own.

I had fallen back into my addiction to social media, and I felt its impact in every part of my life. The only thing that truly moved the needle was cutting it out entirely. Deleting it off every device. Committing to a month without it.

It is incredible how fast things changed.

In anatomy, we learn how interconnected our systems are. Our sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight. Our parasympathetic is our rest and digest. What social media does is activate the sympathetic continuously, so we are living in a state of fight or flight without even being aware of it. It has created a false sense that returning to our phones calms us down. What it actually does is activate parts of our brain subconsciously: lives we wish we had, careers, followers, identities and clothes and friends, all of them slowly weaving their way into our thinking. Running in the background as we operate through our days, quietly overwhelming us.

You cannot hear your own signal through that noise. This does not require a ten-day silent retreat, though if you have access to one, go. It requires one daily pocket of genuine quiet. Not passive scrolling, not background noise. Actual quiet. A breakfast in silence. An afternoon walk with nothing in your ears.

If staying off the app feels impossible, delete it.

Start there. Everything else depends on it.

2. Externalize your thinking.

Find the practice that lets you see your thoughts rather than just have them. Writing is mine. For others it is voice memos, conversation, drawing. The method matters less than the output: your thinking, visible, outside your head, where you can actually look at it.

Marcus Aurelius kept his own version of this. His book of Meditations which were never meant to be published, his private notes written to himself, ongoing audits of his own thinking. The most powerful person alive in his time needed a daily practice to stay accountable to himself.

When applied on my own life, it became the truest and most impactful change in my life. So impactful that I built a tool for others to do it with me. Calya a self-study as my own mini meditations. The platform is a journaling tool at its core, but has grown into writing groups, community, and the kind of structure I’m hoping can make this practice actually stick.

Because it took time, months of entries, but I wrote until eventually I could see all the thoughts I kept returning to. Reading them back, I realized the narratives I had held about myself for as long as I could remember looked, on paper, entirely untrue. You can surprise yourself.

When we are spiraling, putting pen to paper makes it easier to fight the urge to escalate. A voice of reason enters that does not exist solely in the mind. Like when you are mid-complaint with a friend and suddenly, in the saying of it, the solution appears. Most of those moments do not happen if the thoughts stay bottled up.

Analyze yourself the way you would analyze a character in a film. What is the main thing this person is searching for? What do they keep returning to? Where do the patterns emerge? You cannot work with what you cannot see.

3. Audit what was installed by someone else.

When I quit my job, I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that I had my entire life ahead of me and endless possibilities, but no way to decide which one was right. You never really know. What you can do is figure out what is not right. Sometimes it takes living it. Sometimes it takes an honest look at what you have absorbed into yourself: parts other people brought into your life that do not feel aligned, parts that took a different shape than they were supposed to.

Most of what runs our behavior was put there before we were old enough to choose it. Parents, schools, early jobs, the first culture we belonged to. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is a 2010 operating system running on 2026 hardware. The audit is not therapy and it is not about blame. It is pattern recognition. Ask, when you make a choice: is this mine, or am I running a script? Whose voice does this sound like? That clarity alone can move mountains.

4. Quiet the inner critic.

Once your thinking is visible, you will also see the voice that is continuously shutting the ideas down. Entertain yourself for a moment. Ask what would happen if you just did not listen to that voice, just once, and let the ideas through. The odds are you will find more energy and enthusiasm for the things you actually want to do. It is easier to create from a place of authenticity when nothing inside you is insisting that the most interesting parts are wrong.

5. Find the sparks and take them seriously.

This summer I have been sitting with this question heavily. I was beginning to feel like an imposter in the life I had decided to shape, and the reason was not irrationality. It was passivity. I had not actively participated in the things I always believed I was passionate about. Putting in the time and effort to actually get good at something felt heavier than simply claiming passion for it.

“Follow your passion” is too big and too vague. Start smaller.

What makes you lose track of time? What do you do when no one is watching and nothing is at stake? What have you always been drawn to but never given yourself permission to pursue seriously? Think about five things you did this week that felt aligned. Commit to them. These sparks build agency, they build something to do with your time outside of scrolling, and they are little puzzle pieces to figuring out who you want to become.

I am doing this by spending an hour a day getting better at something I have always wanted to improve. It is not always easy or fun. But it ignites something. A hint at a possible version of me. The sparks are data. Hints about who you are becoming, not proof of who you already are.

6. Build a belief system you can return to.

Every community, every practice worth anything, is centered on something that grounds people when the stakes are high. When you are standing between two versions of your future and you have to choose, you need something to return to that is yours. A philosophy, a faith, a set of values you have written down and tested. Something that is not an escape, but a north star. It makes decisions easier because you already know what you stand for.

It took a lot of reading and searching before I found mine. But when I did, it was the first stone turned in the building of a real foundation.

The law of attraction, God, circumstance, physics, Stoicism, energetic principles, nature. Whatever it is: brilliance has existed long before we did, and the greatest minds in history dedicated their lives to understanding how we function, how we relate to each other, how meaning gets made. There is a framework for everyone. The only condition is that you engage with it actively. A belief system you hold passively is just aesthetic. One you actually live inside changes the way you decide.

Life is guaranteed to kick your ass sometimes. Having something to return to is how you bring your feet back down to earth and understand your role in the bigger system.

7. Build evidence, not certainty.

You will not figure out who you are becoming by thinking about it. You figure it out by making small commitments and keeping them.

For a long time I was living in “fake it till you make it,” envisioning the life I wanted and assuming it would come. I still believe in parts of that. But there are other parts that matter just as much.

When someone gave me a compliment, I felt ashamed in my inability to accept it fully. Not because I did not appreciate it, but because deep down I had not done the work toward what they were complimenting. We make agreements with ourselves constantly, things we are going to do and things we are not. When we break those agreements repeatedly, we break our own confidence. It becomes hard to believe you deserve what you are receiving.

Self-trust is not the starting point. It is what accumulates through micro-agreements you actually keep. Promise yourself something small. Do it. Then something slightly larger. That is how blind confidence stops being blind and starts coming from a place of evidence. Suddenly you can take bigger leaps, because you know you show up for yourself.

The people navigating this decade well are not the ones who have it figured out. They are the ones who asked the question early and kept asking it. They kept their eyes open for the opportunity that matched the person they were building. They understood that putting yourself in the right room as the right person is the closest thing to luck that actually exists.

I am still building. Still finding my way back some mornings. But I am energized by the mission now, genuinely, in a way I was not when everything felt heavy. There is a difference between existing through an extraordinary decade and actually shaping it.

xx,
HM

If this resonated-

Everything in this piece is the work I have been trying to build infrastructure for. Calya is where I am putting it: a home for self-study, with a journaling tool, weekly writing groups, community, and occasional workshops. The kind of place where you actually do the seven steps instead of just reading about them.

It is free to try. No credit card. Just start writing.

If you want more essays like this one, I publish twice a week here on Substack — longer pieces and shorter ones in between. The best way to not miss them is to subscribe below.

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The 100-Hour Passion Project is one hour a day, all summer, dedicated to the thing you’ve always meant to build. I’m sharing a weekly update here: the creation log, the honest account of how it’s going, and whatever it has me thinking about. If you want to start, it is absolutely not too late.

The clock bell rings here three times a day.

Seven in the morning to wake the winemakers. Noon to bring them in for lunch. Seven in the evening to close it out.

They work hard every single day and then they meet at the only restaurant in town, the same one every day, and share a drink and talk, and they have been doing this for years.

Who knows what they are talking about by now but the conversation never seems to end. They go home to their families, wave to the neighbors they have known since they were children, come back to a meal made from produce pulled out of their own gardens or traded from friends down the road.

When you sit at a table like that, when you say thank you for the food on your plate and actually know exactly where it came from, from whose hands grew it, something in you exhales.

A tension you did not know you were holding. It is a feeling of groundedness we do not realize we are missing until we are standing inside it.

I have been living in a small village in the south of France for just over a month. I come here periodically throughout the year, never more than a month really, but every time I find myself returning to a rhythm that feels powerful, that feels grounded and aligned.

It is funny how every summer I feel like I return to myself, and then throughout the year I get scraped down and I lose pieces. It happens almost every spring. I arrive and something settles. Then November comes and the pieces start falling away again.

This time I stayed longer. Something is different.

Family was here for a stretch of it, filling the house with laughter and noise and that particular kind of aliveness that only comes from people who know your whole story.

Then they started trickling out. Suddenly the house was quiet again.

More time to think, less time in laughter with others.

I enjoy both parts of living so deeply. They come in phases. The trick, I am learning, is not to mourn one while you are inside the other.

About a week ago a worry surfaced. Not loudly. It festered quietly in the background while I was sitting in the house, probably watching something, probably a film with the kind of life in it that makes you take stock of your own.

The worry was this: by committing to stay here, by saying yes to building here, I would be on pause from life.

From making friends. From finding the man who fits like one of the big connecting puzzle pieces. From a career that looks like what careers are supposed to look like. I looked around the village and thought, with some honesty: 66.6% of what I want is not going to happen here.

And then I thought about what has happened here.

I passed my yoga teacher training. I studied more than I needed to, mostly because I had not taken a test in a while and refused to be sitting in front of the screen drawing a blank, but also because the material genuinely captivated me.

The truths that live in nature, in eastern philosophy, in how we function and how energy travels through the body.

They had it figured out long before we did. It took a hundred years before we understood that gut health is foundational. Before natural living became mainstream enough to have a word. They were not wrong. They were just early. I learned all of it and I understand it, which is different from knowing it, and that distinction matters.

I finally began to enjoy The Brothers Karamazov after 500 pages. I will take it. At least I got here at some point.

My mother and I have been building a yoga studio out of our home. A yoga café included, which I recognize is most girls’ dream and I am living it, and I am counting my blessings. We do not have an unlimited budget or an unlimited amount of time but we are having fun and it is being produced entirely from passion, and that matters in ways I cannot fully account for yet.

An artist in the village has become a mentor of sorts in my furniture and painting journey. Music arrived by force, as it tends to do when you slow down enough to let it. My French is slowly becoming less embarrassing.

The 100-hour passion project is working better than I could have imagined. And now it is time to get back to the bigger mission. To become the writer I dream of. I want to write the stories of this farm. I want to teach kids how to wonder, or better, to let them teach me, to remind them never to lose their wonder. I love to teach. I am starting to understand that this was always true.

There is something I keep circling. Something that will need its own essay, probably more than one.

We are all craving this. The bell, the table, the food from the garden, the winemakers who wave to neighbors they have known since childhood. Something in us recognizes it and reaches for it. I have sat with people across every political line and the fantasy is the same: a farm, a community, a slower rhythm, a place where you are known. The details change. The longing does not.

I do not think this is nostalgia. I think it is a signal. And I think we are just beginning to understand what to do with it. But that is for another piece.

What I want to say here is smaller and more personal. It is this:

I was afraid that staying would put me on pause. That I would look up one day and find that the world had moved without me. But every summer I return and recover myself, and then leave and get scraped down again, and I used to think the answer was to stop leaving. Now I think the answer is different.

This time I’m not just recovering. I’m building.

All the little pokes, all the threads, all the little strings I have been tying together here: the yoga, the reading, the painting, the writing, the studio being constructed from passion and very little else. They are making a stronger version of the person who will eventually walk back into the world. When I live in a city. When I study somewhere. Whenever I am, wherever I am, whenever I meet him. I will not be there yet. You are never fully there. But I will be more. I will be closer.

It is funny how everything becomes so abundantly clear one day when the whole time you were really just throwing things at the wall because you felt pretty great when they stuck. That is my way out of the dark places and into discovery, into exploration.

So to the question I keep being asked, the one I keep asking myself: should you stay? Should I leave? Is it ok to take the year and figure out who you I am in the quiet?

Not everyone has the choice. But if you do, I say take it. Do not think about what you are leaving behind, what you are missing out on. The city will still be there. The career will find the person you have been quietly becoming. So will the rest of the puzzle pieces.

Build your third first. Then go.

xx,

HM

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Thanks for being here and reading this, it genuinely means the 🌎. This series is free and will stay that way, but if something here resonated and you want to support this project, you can buy me a coffee and I will be very grateful and probably use it to buy an oat milk latte in this little French village and think of you fondly.

Buy me a coffee ☕

Day 15: I contemplated what I wanted to do with my life. I read and I wrote.
Day 21: I made a sommartorta pavlova, and a flower crown, because both felt necessary that day. (midsommar eve)
Day 23: I finished East of Eden by the river, in the sun.
Day 28: I wrote a piece that crawled out from under my skin about how afraid I am of waking up one day and realizing I was beautiful the whole time.
Day 31: I started building a second brain. More on this soon.
Day 32: I drew again, badly at first, and the rhythm came back the way it always does, slower than I want it to.

It’s been over two weeks since I last wrote one of these. I got busy.

The heat wave hit France, the kind that turns a house into a single shared room where everyone hovers near the one good AC unit, and my family arrived to stay.

Four people, four enormous projects, all of us cooking up something in the same kitchen at the same time. My father is building the future of food as medicine. My mother is working on connection between midlife women. My brother is mapping uncharted territory in archaeology and the way our industry finds its own news. His girlfriend is rebuilding fashion from the ingredient up, healthy fashion, clean materials, nothing about it superficial. I'll link all of their work at the bottom of this so you can see what I mean.

Watching four people I love attack four different mountains in the same overheated house did something to me I wasn't expecting. It made me ambitious again, in a way I'd quietly let go of somewhere in the last year, telling myself I'd be satisfied with less.

My priority that week stopped looking like a checklist and started looking like an actioned conversation I wanted to leave the room to avoid.

It still counted. It just took me a few days to admit that.

I went into this project thinking the hour a day was about the skill. The drawing, the cooking, the yoga certification. What I’m realizing one month in is that the hour was never the point. It was practice at choosing the thing that costs something over the thing that’s free, in a container small enough that failing didn’t matter. A pavlova that collapses is a Tuesday. A conversation you walk away from is a lifetime.

In my last Calya session the prompt that came up was when do I choose pain over new possibility. I sat with it for a while and didn’t like it much. It felt like it was fishing for a confession, like the answer it wanted was a list of every time I picked the easy exit. I’m the person who goes home early. Who finds peace in a quiet room over a party I’m not sure I’ll enjoy. That part of me isn’t a flaw I need to read out loud and apologize for.

But the question kept sitting with me anyway, the way the good ones do.

I finished East of Eden in the middle of all this and the whole book is arguing against the binary the prompt was asking me to confirm. Brothers who seem born good or born ruined turn out to be neither, permanently. Timshel. Thou mayest. The choice stays open the entire time, for everyone, including the characters who seem incapable of making it. I read that and thought about a year that has felt like one long sequence of hard things landing on top of each other, and about how much of myself I used to believe was simply fixed. The avoidant part. The leave-the-room part.

I picked up Marcus Aurelius the same week. My dad and I talked about Stoicism for an hour before either of us called it that, about how you stop dwelling without becoming cynical, how you let the world be loud without letting it crack what you’ve built underneath. What stayed with me afterward wasn’t the discipline. It was that Marcus Aurelius lost both parents young and was raised, on purpose, to be emotionally attuned instead of armored. He didn’t arrive at stillness by avoiding feeling. He arrived at it by practicing with it until he trusted it.

That’s the part I want to be honest about. The hard conversations I had this month, four or five of them, the kind I’d have run forcefully from, I had them. Badly sometimes. I cried after some, quietly, the kind of crying that isn’t a collapse, more like a release valve finally opening. I didn’t leave the room.

For most of my life I would have left the room.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence and I don’t think it’s about willpower either. I think it’s the same muscle the drawing and the cooking and the philosophy have been training, quietly, for thirty-two days. You don’t build the capacity to stay in the hard conversation by deciding to be braver. You build it by choosing the slightly harder thing in rooms where almost nothing is at stake, over and over, until the choice stops feeling like a decision and starts feeling like who you are.

When do I choose pain over new possibility. Less than I did a year ago. I got up the next morning after the hardest conversation with more ambition than I’ve felt in months, the kind I genuinely thought I’d misplaced somewhere in my broken trust agreement I now earned back.

That’s not nothing. That might be the whole project, actually, hiding inside a different question than the one I thought I was answering.

xx,

HM

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Imagine you’re sitting in a rocking chair on a porch with an ocean view, a gentle breeze, and a hot tea.

You’re 80, the years flew by, you didn’t think they would, sometimes it felt like they didn’t, years long and painful, some quick and revitalizing, some still yet full. No matter which way the time passes we know it did just that.

naturally you begin to look back.

Days become stiller, we begin to appreciate certain things more, realize the ones that matter.

All the lessons, they’re beginning to unravel, and the energy you craved for so long has lived in you for many years now, the one that didn’t care what others thought, the one that decided that life was meant to be lived and that it should be lived at the benefit of oneself. and that that wasn’t selfish.

You wonder what you could have done differently.

You acknowledge the regret but you don’t fester in it.

because you have read enough to know that nothing good comes from the dwelling of past mistakes.

Yet you can’t help wonder what it was that broke your spirit at times,

what made you act from a place of insecurity.

Knowing everything becomes clearer in hindsight and suddenly that becomes your secret medicine

You pull up a picture of yourself at 20. your hair is long, healthy, glossy in a way you never saw it past 25, your smile is from cheek to cheek and the memory of the day, sailing with your new friends, ones who eventually came to be your next door neighbors and champions, the community that supported you. You’re overcome with love for the people in your life

You look at a photo from 16, you were halfway through high school, you’re running down the soccer field, power radiating from your legs, strength from your core, and intensity in your face, there was no stopping you at that age.

You thought you were weak then, you remember that like it was yesterday. Looking at this picture now you don’t see it. You want to pick up the picture and scream you are strong, you are so strong your body is supporting you, its a weapon it is powerful, don’t tell it you hate it, don’t look at yourself in the mirror and sigh because the world around you makes you believe it needs to be better.

You see a photo of you at 25, your moving in to your first apartment in a new city, you have a gentile smile, one that encapsulates everything you were feeling.The memories come rushing back, dinner parties, game nights, date nights, birthday parties, quiet evenings alone, you loved to host, your energy was contagious, you held the room together like it was your vocation.

but suddenly you’re reminded of how insecure you felt then.

how quickly you jumped to noticing the small moments of awkwardness carrying them like they were purely your own, dwelling on the relationship that went sour, the people who just didn’t get you.

That was the space you lived in all to often then.

It fills you with a feeling that starts at the fingers and works its way through your chest, if only you could tell her, you could say some how in a letter, in one sentence, that she is wonderful, that she is smart and appreciated, that she has so much more value than she gives herself.

A photo at 23, you’re visiting your parents for the holidays, you take a family photo, the first one in a long time. You can see how tightly you were squeezing each other, almost like we were afraid to let go, the comfort and ease, the honesty that they brought to you. You missed them then and you always did.

Theres something there you can’t help but notice, digging at you.

The feeling you remember just briefly. This feeling that lived in a big part of your youth. the one exacerbated by social media.

The one that made you constantly compare your life to others.

You remember it so clearly, much of your life was dedicated to that sensation. That no matter how tightly you were squeezed you always felt like you wanted more. someone else’s more.

Someone else’s life at times.

You are just horrified by that now. the feeling you live with constantly these days is gratitude

You can’t believe, genuinely in disbelief at how lucky you are.

To have had the family, the life, the stories. You view yourself as the luckies girl in the world.

It gives you a chill, maybe you knew it all along, maybe you just got swept up in the online world and whenever you took a step back, whenever you were with family, in nature, you felt the feeling you live in now.

that gives you peace. it wasn’t you, it was the world you were taught to live in.
You know that the good things that came to you in life came from the place of gratitude and you have a lot of it.

Then you look at the picture of you at 20 again, your skin glowing, your hair natural and long, your cheeks bright, your eyes powerful, naive.

it hits you that in all of these photos, in all of these years, you had never realized how beautiful you were.

You went through the motions, you had the family and created a life, you are satisfied.

but there lives the regret.

everything else, you knew and carried it with you.

but you forget the hours, the days, the years you spent

scoffing at the mirror,
erasing pictures,
editing them,
covering your face up with make up
hiding away
undermining yourself

It pains you,

what would your life have looked like?

and maybe its not even that.

you are truly content with how your life turned out, you don’t dwell on regret

but you are stunned

its like you were struck by this sudden awe

this realization

that you never realized
how beautiful you are.

One year ago I graduated uni. Everyone around me started applying for jobs, had been for months. I didn’t, I quit mine.

And certainly not because I had a better plan paved out or because I was fearless. But because something in me knew, with a stubbornness I couldn’t argue with, that I wasn’t meant to do what everyone else was doing. At least not yet. Maybe not ever.

So I’m writing this to walk through my reasoning. To figure out if I’m delusional. And to make the case that the future of work looks nothing like what we were told.

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Look around at your peers. Really look.

There’s a drain in the energy of people our age that’s hard to ignore. Wether its, despising Mondays, facing a shrinking job market, or a realization that it wasn’t what they thought it would be.

And yes, some people love it. Some are full of momentum, genuinely lit up by the hustle, by the marketing job or the startup or the climb. I’m not here to talk them out of it. But even for those people, the question tends to arrive eventually. What is this all for?

Because the job can give you purpose. A reason to show up, a group of people to do it alongside. That’s real and it matters. But for a lot of us it starts to feel like borrowed purpose. Like we’re running on someone else’s fuel.

For a while the startup world felt like the answer. Hate the corporate ladder? Go work somewhere that’s changing the world. Move fast. Feel important. Meet interesting people.

I thought that’s what I wanted. Then I worked at one.

It was exciting, genuinely. The pace, the mission, the sense that what you were doing mattered. But somewhere around month six you start asking the real questions. What are we actually building here? Who does it serve? And carefully crafted shine comes off and you realize most startups, however world-changing their origin story, eventually become big machines like the rest. The original hunger gets swallowed by growth and money and momentum.

The people that stay tend to burn out after a year or two. And then one day they come up for air and realize there is more to life than this—even the founder.

And its true, finding a conventional job right now is hard.

Not because you’re not good enough. But because companies are leaning out. They’re doing more with less, using better tools, staying small on purpose. The army of entry level roles that previous generations walked into is shrinking. And that’s disorienting when you did everything right.

So, I want to be clear about who I’m writing this for.

There’s a whole world of people who always knew. The ones who grew up wanting to be doctors, teachers, athletes, artists, people with a calling that was never in question. That world is changing too, but it’s not my world to speak on.

I’m writing for the generalist. The one who got a business degree, a humanities degree. The one with a lot of ideas and no obvious direction. The one who worked hard, followed the path, and then stood at the starting line of their actual career and thought; wait, this is nothing like I expected.

There are more of us than we think. Probably at least one per friend group, one per family. I’d actually argue we’re the average, and the person who always knew exactly what they wanted is the outlier.

If that’s you, walk with me through this.

The thing about life that we eventually wake up and realize.

Maybe through epiphany, a good book, a person who embodies it. whatever it is we realize that we need to live it.

and we haven’t been—to its full potential.

We need to laugh and dance and enjoy. To push ourselves, yes, but for our own benefit. Because pushing yourself to create something, to run ten miles, to write a book or even read a long one, those things compound your uniqueness. They ground you and elevate you at the same time.

Working until 11pm to report to a firm that doesn’t know your name, or sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 accomplishing a handful of things that won’t matter next week let alone in five years , what is it really for?

And I mean that seriously. What is it for?

Strip everything back to what we actually know is real.

For most of human existence we moved, we solved problems, we built community, we lived by instinct. We were creative out of necessity. Our minds were clear because they had to be. That was the human operating system for a very long time.

Now look at what a freelancer’s life could look like. Working on problems they chose. Using their specific skills. Structuring their own days. Building a reputation through genuine connection and real ideas.

That’s closer to the original human experience than a cubicle ever was.

Freelance isn’t radical. The 9-5 is radical. We’ve just been living inside it so long we forgot to question it.

and heres the thing:

The word passion gets thrown around so much it’s lost its weight. But I think it’s actually the whole thing.

When passion is present, everything else gets clearer. Identity, confidence, direction, they all sharpen. When it’s absent, you get the drain I described earlier. You get people who are technically fine but quietly going through the motions.

The current system doesn’t breed passion. It breeds compliance. And for a long time, compliance was a reasonable trade for security.

But the trade is getting worse.

So what do you do if you’re one year out of university with little to no experience and no network in a field you can start from, but a nagging feeling that there has to be another way?

You productize yourself. Stop thinking about what job you can get. Think backwards from who you are and what you uniquely offer. Then build toward that person relentlessly.

For me, that lives on the creative plane.

That part of me was dormant for a long time. Pushed aside for practicality, for fitting in, for doing what made sense. But it never left. And I’ve decided I owe it to that version of myself to bring her back to life fully. To stop treating creativity like a hobby I’ll get to eventually and start treating it like the work.

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

You don’t need a company to build a reputation anymore. You don’t need ten years of experience to have something real to offer. What you need is to go deep on what makes you specifically you, and take it as far as you can.

AI is collapsing the barriers that kept individuals small. Businesses want to stay lean. They need people with taste and ideas and genuine perspective. The fractional worker, the creative consultant, the person who understands things fundamentally and can apply that understanding across different problems, that role is real and it’s growing.

A leaner company still has all the same problems to solve. It just needs people who can come in, own something specific, and deliver. That’s not a full time hire. That’s a contract. That’s fractional. That’s you.

And honestly, that’s also one of the best ways in if what you actually want right now is something more permanent. You do good work for someone on a project basis, they see what you’re capable of, trust gets built. A lot of full time roles get created that way. You’re not closing any doors by starting there.

So the choice isn’t really freelance versus job. It’s more about where you put your energy while you figure it out. And right now, building something of your own while staying useful to others seems a lot smarter than waiting for an inbox to light up.

The personal brand isn’t vanity. It’s the mechanism.

Maybe I’m delusional. I hold that possibility with some seriousness.

But I’m also tech-native, idea-rich, and finally committed to letting my inner artist come back out. I understand business. I have things to offer that others don’t, because I’m uniquely me. And the longer I spend becoming more specifically that, the more valuable it gets.

The worst case is I learn a lot.

The best case is I was early.

Either way I’m not getting on the hamster wheel.

The 100-Hour Passion Project is one hour a day, all summer, dedicated to the thing you’ve always meant to build. I’m sharing a weekly update here: the creation log, the honest account of how it’s going, and whatever it has me thinking about. If you want to start, it is absolutely not too late.

Week two’s inspiration started with a film.

See day 8 started with perusing a garden art festival, where I spoke to some artists in French, and then watched Je m’appelle Agneta, the story of a woman coming back to life, returning to her childhood self with the help of an eccentric yet slightly troubled gay man, the two of them searching for their “libido” and finding in it a more creative and artistic way of moving through the world. Through movement and creation and delicacy and sound. It was wonderfully charming and it became, without me planning it, the backdrop for everything that followed.

Day nine I biked to the farmers market, a ride that brought harsh clarity through movement, then I drew, read and felt entirely awake again in a way consistency had struggled to commit to.

Day ten I drew for hours and I began to brainstorm, the ideas started coming, so many ideas, one after another, each one feeling brilliant in the moment before an even better one appeared and I was suddenly swimming in possibility and completely overwhelmed by it.

Day eleven I finished the drawing, my brothers birthday present, and the ideas kept coming but something shifted underneath them and I found myself questioning everything, cycling back to older thoughts, not quite sure which direction was forward.

Day twelve was a morning met with yoga, and more indecision warranting further brainstorming, and further indecision. Made a quiche, and then I ran felt clarity thrust upon me, danced, did a lot of dancing.

Day thirteen I cooked all kinds of things(seed crackers, energy balls, pesto), hosted a dinner with fresh produce from the garden, wrote a little, and drew for an hour and a half listening to classic rock with sandelwood lit, which is a combination I will most definitely be returning to.

Day fourteen I wrote two pieces (this being one), finished a drawing, and finally felt genuinely clear on my next steps.

I want to be honest about the middle of this week because I think it’s the most important part.

Coming to France for the summer was the easy option.

The comfortable one.

And somewhere in the back of my mind I had known that, but I hadn’t quite looked at it directly until day nine, twenty miles into a bike ride through roads so beautiful it felt almost unreasonable, when I had enough time and enough quiet that the thought I’d been circling finally landed.

Everything I had been working towards before making the decision to come here had been coming from the wrong place. I had lost the ground beneath me. I was floating, and you cannot build a strong foundation, one of passion and confidence and real direction, from a place so unsteady it’s hard to keep yourself upright.

But here is what else became clear on that bike ride: I had found my way back. Not fully, not yet, I needed another day or two, but I could feel it.

And with it came the return of something I have a complicated and deeply affectionate relationship with, which is the version of me that views her life as exponential and full of endless possibility, the one who wants to be riding horses and teaching in the mountains again and building a profound and heartfelt life that means something.

The one who had been running away but suddenly understood that it was not too late to make something of this time, to use it, to not let it slip by unmarked.

So I started thinking about what was next. And that, it turned out, was its own kind of problem.

Part of what this challenge has meant is deleting social media and anything that functions as an unhealthy mentality tool, and one of the days this week I sat on LinkedIn and felt the comparison come flooding back, that particular flavour of dread that comes from watching everyone else’s curated highlight reel when you’re in the middle of your own unfinished process.

It took time before I found my way back to the version of myself who understood how young I am, how I am not behind at all, how I don’t need to be impressive or tell everyone what I’m doing in search of their validation. So I left the platform and returned to the drawing board. Literally.

If you are someone who has a million ideas and cannot figure out which one to commit to, this next part is for you.

Over the following days, encompassed in gratitude and with the dam finally torn down, the ideas started flooding in and each one sounded completely brilliant right up until the next even better one arrived.

I was overcome with indecision in the most wonderful and also genuinely maddening way, the kind where you can see so many possible versions of your life so clearly that choosing one feels like grieving all the others.

So I did what I do when I need to think clearly: I wrote, I ran, I talked it through, and I slowly started working through the real questions underneath the excitement.

What my actual experience is.

What problem I feel genuinely called to fix.

What my network looks like and what it’s built for.

What I actually need to be earning and by when.

What resonates not just as a brilliant idea but as something I could pour myself into and believe in.

Each day the ideas kept coming but I was slowly honing in, circling something, getting closer. And then I was running through the vineyards when I was struck with nostalgia for a project I had left behind, one that was researched and mapped out but had required an element I had lost along the way; the belief in myself to pull it off.

Which is exactly what this project is about.

And I know now that I live in the creative landscape. I had just needed two weeks of drawing and running and cooking and dancing in the kitchen and speaking broken French to artists at garden festivals to remember it clearly enough to trust it.

So week two and my confidence is on the rise.

I see my drawings not for the result but for the improvement in the pen stroke, the confidence in it, the declaration, the lack of hesitation. I speak to artists and feel kindred in a language that is not natively my own, rough and choppy but we find a way to understand each other and laugh and encourage. I run and remember why I love it, it is no longer difficult to convince myself to go. I’m turning pages rapidly and in a six hundred page book the satisfaction of the right side getting thinner while the left thickens is completely undisputed.

I shared the project with an artist friend in the village and she lit up and said she would join me.

The point is not to become an artist, an athlete, a chef.

The point is to make an agreement with yourself to improve on the things you have always wanted to, and to trust that the confidence that builds from that will make every other decision clearer.

In two weeks I already am, and let me tell you it feels just so wonderful. It is a pathway to the person you want to become.

Fourteen days in. Eighty six to go.

It is absolutely not too late to do it too.

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Thanks for being here and reading this, it genuinely means the 🌎. This publication is free and will stay that way, but if something here resonated and you want to support this project, you can buy me a coffee and I will be very grateful and probably use it to buy an oat milk latte in this little French village and think of you fondly.

Buy me a coffee ☕

I want to tell you about the week I just had, not because it was dramatic or because anything particularly remarkable happened, but because something quietly shifted in me.

Day one I read for four hours. Jet-lagged and slightly braindead and honestly just grateful to be still, and I felt my mind doing this slow, satisfying thing where it unknotted itself and became calm and creative at the same time, which is a combination I forget exists when I’m not actively protecting the conditions for it.

Day two I drew all day, sat in the art gallery, cooked a nice meal, and fell into a kind of deep creative quiet where I realized I was thinking in prose, like my internal monologue had shifted registers and everything felt a little more intentional and a little more observed. I wrote a poem that evening and the emotions just poured into it, surprising my intention, proof that they were words waiting to be written.

Day three I woke up with words flowing before I was fully conscious, which is my favourite way to start a day and happens so rarely that I always feel slightly chosen when it does. I watched the drawing from the day before improving in real time and felt that quiet specific satisfaction of visible progress, a kind that didn’t require anyone else to notice.

Day four I read and I ran, and when I was moving my body something came alive in me that I can only describe as gratitude so physical it made me want to skip and twirl and tell someone, anyone, about it. I pushed myself hard and I wanted more.

Day five I worked at the bakery, practiced my French in every conversation I could, drew for three hours, and felt this pull towards people, towards their stories, towards asking the next question and then the one after that.

Day six I wrote in the morning, made bone broth, read, drew, cooked, and felt something I can only describe as action-oriented in the best possible way, like I had something to give and I was figuring out how to give it properly and generously.

Day seven I wandered the flower market and read and wrote and felt, for the first time in a while, genuinely strong. Like I had located something I’d been slightly misplacing.

Seven days. Some of it slow, some of it boring in exactly the way I promised it would be, the early stages of getting good at anything have that texture of mild frustration you just have to sit inside and keep going anyway. But there was something underneath all of it that I haven’t felt in a while. The sense that the hours were mine. That I was filling them with something I chose. That I was building something real out of what would otherwise just be time passing.

And that feeling does something to the way you see everything else.

Allow me to indulge myself for a moment, because I’ve been reading articles all week that are helping me understand why this is hitting me as hard as it is, and I think it’s become something bigger than a personal project.

I keep thinking about the brilliant people of the world, the ones who are genuinely fascinating to be around, and what they tend to have in common is that they touch so many different areas and go very deep on a few. It makes their knowledge expansive and their comprehension expansive and it makes them the kind of person you leave a conversation with feeling like you understand the world a little differently than when you walked in. Creativity and curiosity are the engine of that, being curious about the world, about other people, about ourselves, and actually doing something with that curiosity rather than letting it get swallowed by the scroll.

Which brings me to the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

There is so much doomerism right now about what AI means for work and purpose and identity, and I want to say clearly that I don’t share it, not even slightly, and here’s why. The doomerism comes from looking at what we might lose and I think it fundamentally misreads what we’re building towards. We could see the future the way ET sees it, a world that makes us lazy and disconnected and robotic, outsourcing our thinking and our creating and our connecting until we’re just passengers in our own lives. That’s one version. But there’s another version and it’s the one I keep returning to, the one where all the functions that currently eat our hours — the maintenance, the administration, the execution of a thousand necessary but uninspiring things — simply get handled, and what’s left is us. Our creativity. Our communities. Our capacity to go deep on the things that make us interesting and alive and worth knowing.

Maybe we end up more like action figures, accumulating skills and levelling up every time we learn a new one, each one expanding what we’re capable of and who we are. Or maybe something even older reasserts itself, apprenticeships, craftsmanship, the kind of structural relationship to knowledge and making that we’ve spent a long time moving away from and secretly miss. Maybe once the functions that maintain society are taken care of, the cleaning and the maintenance and the innovation, what’s left is to create and enjoy the art that comes in the meantime. To exist in nature again. To sing and dance and hold each other close and experience the full beautiful complexity of being human in a community of other humans.

The societal problems, the war and famine and inequality, those exist because of scarcity and competition and the crushing weight of unmet needs. In a world of abundance, those pressures change. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict, we’re human and sometimes we simply can’t help ourselves, but it returns to the tribal level, the community level, which is a scale we actually know how to navigate.

Imagine that world with me. The positive one, the one of abundance and creativity and people who are deeply, specifically, gloriously themselves. I believe wholeheartedly it is the future we will create. And I think the 100-Hour Passion Project is, in its small and personal and entirely unglamorous way, exactly the right practice for it. We are building towards something, not away from something else. Towards more individual freedom, closer connection to each other, better paths to self-discovery, and a continuous loop of learning which, if you ask me, is what meaning actually is.

Maybe what's coming looks like more of this. More people learning to sketch so they can draw the faces they want to remember. More people learning to cook because gathering around a table is one of the most human things we do and food is the oldest language for love. More people learning the guitar and the languages and the old stories and the philosophy of people who thought harder about existence than most of us have had the time to.

Maybe we get to be more human, not less. Maybe we get to exist inside our communities and our creativity and our relationships with a depth that the current structure of our lives doesn't always make room for.

I’m building towards being someone who can sketch a new face to remember it, who can play guitar around a campfire and gather people to it, who can hold a real conversation in French with the wonderful souls in this village, who knows the greatest minds and stories and can carry them into every room, who writes in ways that don’t just resonate but revive.

Seven days in. Ninety three to go.

And I am, without any reservation, outrageously optimistic about what comes next.

Love,

HM

The community absorbed me almost immediately; a kitchen to cook in, a cool stone studio to survive the worst of the afternoon heat, followed by candlelit evenings that forced a slowness I was craving.

The WiFi is shaky on a good day and I’d just come off a month of being on screens from the moment I woke up, so stepping away from my devices felt less like deprivation and more like the first full breath I’d taken in a while.

The first two days I read, entirely and gloriously, just sat with books and the sound of the village doing its unhurried afternoon thing and felt my nervous system unknot itself.

Then I picked up my sketchbook, the one I’d bought with a set of guides I fully intended to use many summers ago and then absolutely did not, and I just started. I began my little stint in this wonderfully eccentric antiques and art gallery some friends are running nearby. I came home that evening, made dinner from whatever was salvageable from the very sad situation that was our defrosted freezer.

Then I sat with the quiet for a long time, ate a gummy, and slipped into the most wonderfully expansive creative headspace I’d been in in months. And that’s when it became very clear.

I had been slightly lost in exactly what I wanted to work on. I knew it was creative, I knew it would come, I’ve learned to trust that about myself, that the right environment will always surface the right ideas.

And there it was, sitting in a warm French balcony with an Orengina and an embarrassing abundance of time, suddenly entirely obvious.

I want to be good at the things I always said I wanted to be good at.

And I have no excuse anymore.

Here’s what I think is actually going on

not just for me but for a lot of us, and bear with me because this is the part that matters.

Our generation grew up without real boredom. Not in a complaining-about-phones way, I mean it as a genuine observation about what we missed, because boredom is actually where you figure out who you are. It’s the uncomfortable idle space where your brain, with nothing external to latch onto, eventually turns inward and starts inventing things to want.

We got the phone instead, every single time, the beautiful endlessly refilling pool of other people’s lives and ideas and content. So the question of what we actually love never had the space to answer itself properly.

And it’s less about phones and more about what we’re missing when we don’t have things we’re genuinely building.

Passion makes life worth living. In the most literal sense, it’s what makes you want to get up in the morning, what makes time feel inhabited rather than chased, what gives you something to talk about that actually lights you up rather than something to perform.

And the thing about passion is that it takes time to develop. It’s not always fun, it’s not always immediately rewarding, and the early stages of getting good at anything kind of suck, but that’s not a reason to avoid it, that’s just the texture of building something real.

Passion gives you agency. And agency is the most underrated contributor to actually being happy, like genuinely happy rather than distracted-enough-to-not-notice-you’re-not.

When you’re building something you care about, when you’re good at something, when you can feel the compound interest of your own effort, you stop being as available to self-doubt and insecurity and the exhausting low-grade anxiety of not knowing who you are. You’re too busy becoming them.

We only have one life. And I think we forget it constantly, we live like we’ll get another go, another summer, another chance to start the thing.

The only thing we know for certain is right now, and it is genuinely hard to be present in right now when you’re full of self-doubt and insecurity and the quiet grief of not being who you wanted to be yet. But the answer to that isn’t to wait until you feel better. The answer is to give yourself something real to work on and watch how much lighter everything else gets.

And here’s what makes this moment even more important; AI is about to decentralise knowledge entirely.

Anyone can ask anything and get an answer instantly, which sounds like it solves everything until you realize that reciting facts isn’t the same as knowing things and it absolutely is not the same as being someone genuinely interesting to talk to.

Knowledge compounds the same way skills do, and a conversation where both people are quietly consulting AI to sound more informed isn’t a conversation, it’s a performance.

What’s going to matter, what’s already starting to matter, is the person who actually went deep on something because they loved it, who has real opinions and real fluency and real taste, and that only comes from putting in the hours.

I find that so exciting rather than scary, because it means the differentiator is exactly the thing this project is about.

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So I had this realization about my inability to accept compliments.

Someone says something kind about my writing or something I’ve made and I immediately find a way to explain why it isn’t quite true, why it doesn’t fully count, why they’re being generous. Even if I don’t say it out loud part of me feels like it was undeserved. I always sort of attributed this to some vague low self-esteem I was working on, but sitting in that French balcony I finally understood it more honestly than I had before.

I can’t take the compliment because I haven’t done the work.

I’ve dabbled in everything I care about, picked things up and put them down with varying degrees of commitment and told myself that counts for something, and it does, a little, but you cannot own something you haven’t earned.

Guitar for a month here, French in short bursts, drawing on the rare occasion, writing when inspiration strikes rather than when it doesn’t.

Somewhere underneath all the self-belief and the optimism and the genuine conviction that I’m on the right track, I’ve known that.

The imposter syndrome isn’t irrational, it’s just pointing at the gap between who I want to be and the work I’ve actually put in.

So this summer I’m closing the gap.

Here’s what I’m doing and why I think you should do it with me.

I’m calling it the 100-Hour Passion Project, and the whole thing rests on one very unsexy premise: an hour a day, dedicated to the thing you’ve always meant to develop,

and if you do that all summer you will have given yourself 100 hours of intentional practice in something you actually care about, which is genuinely a lot, more than most people give to anything outside of what they’re required to do.

The most important thing, and I want to say it clearly because I think it’s the part that makes it actually work, is that we are working towards something we want.

There’s an enormous difference in those the directions and you feel it in your body. If the story you’re living inside is one of scarcity, if you wake up every morning oriented around what you don’t have yet, the confidence, the body, the relationship, the creative life, then that deficit is what everything gets organized around and it colors everything you make and everyone you meet.

But if you spend an hour every day actively becoming someone who does the thing, your internal story starts to shift. You accumulate evidence. You start to feel like someone who shows up for themselves, and that feeling compounds in the most wonderful way, and the things you’ve been hoping to attract start to have somewhere real to land.

I want to stress that this is not a weight loss challenge.

If your hour goes into fitness, it’s not because you want to shrink something, it’s because you want to build towards something; the person who runs ten miles, who feels genuinely strong, who moves through the world in a body they feel proud of because they put in the work for it.

There’s a version of that goal that comes from a place of punishment and a version that comes from a place of vision, and only one of them actually works. Same goes for everything else here. Whatever you’ve been feeling most insecure about, you’re not attacking it, you’re growing past it.

If what you want is a great relationship, spend the summer becoming more interesting and more confident and more at home in yourself and then watch who starts showing up. That’s not a detour, that’s the most direct route there is.

For me the hours are going into drawing, French, guitar, literature, and writing with more consistency than I usually manage.

Yours will be completely different and that’s the whole point, this is radically personal, self-guided, deeply yours. Put it in your calendar if you need the structure, let it find its own place in your day if you have the freedom. I’m going to let it move around and see where it naturally wants to live.

I’m documenting this on Substack because accountability is useful and because writing more is itself one of the things I’m practicing, so it fits. I want to see what 100 hours actually does.

This is for you if you just graduated and the structure fell away.

If you’re in a job that pays you but doesn’t interest the most alive parts of you.

If it’s summer and you have pockets of time and you keep filling them with your phone.

If you’ve been waiting to feel ready, which, for the record, is a feeling that doesn’t arrive before the work, only because of it.

And if any part of you has been quietly carrying around a list of things you’ve always meant to get good at and you’re tired of it just being a list.

We have agency over our lives.

We’re not waiting to be assigned the interesting version of ourselves.

We get to build them, an hour at a time, starting right now because it’s June 1st and the summer is completely, outrageously, wonderfully here.

100 hours. All summer. What are you working towards?

In a sport that I knew I was going to be bad at but I wanted to give myself a chance because it seems so enjoyable. Racket sports have never been a thing I’ve considered myself capable of, from experience. But I’m getting better.

The thing is that when the moment comes where the ball is flying towards my face, everything speeds up and I don’t know what’s going on and I just forget all the training and it disappears.

This is the pattern. I’m confident and capable until the moment actually matters. Then I crumble. And I’m starting to understand why.

The Question I Keep Asking

What if I just started acting from a place of high confidence?

From a place of knowing exactly what I wanted and that I could achieve whatever that was.

I kept asking myself this. Kept repeating it. And it became an internal dialogue around the idea that I simply had to fake it until I make it. That recently I’ve been acting from a place of low confidence.

Some people you can tell. You can just see it when they’re acting from a place of low confidence. For guys we call it Low T, and for girls it’s just insecure.

Causing issues, struggling with everything, demanding help, or a perpetual non belonging.

because insecurity is incredibly destabilizing.

But here’s what I’m realizing about trying to act from high confidence when you don’t actually have it.

You can’t fake it. You can’t think your way into it. Because confidence doesn’t come from positive self-talk or affirmations or telling yourself you’re capable.

Confidence comes from evidence.

And when you’ve spent years letting yourself down, when you’ve broken promise after promise to yourself, you don’t have evidence. You have a track record of abandonment.

The Relationship We Ignore

I think we sometimes forget that the relationship to ourselves functions similarly to the ones we have with other people.

We say something weird and we judge ourselves. We do something we said we weren’t going to do and it makes us lose trust.

Maybe it’s a testament to our outer world being a projection of our inner one. That the way we talk about other people, think about other people, they’re all reflections of the narrative we have about ourselves.

Just like any relationship with a friend, once you break that trust it takes a lot of work and time to rebuild it.

And I’ve broken trust with myself. Over and over.

By not showing up. By saying I’d do something and then not doing it. By choosing the easy thing instead of the thing I promised myself I’d do. By crumbling under pressure so many times that I started expecting it.

Performance pressure grows from a negative self-image. One that tells you you can’t do something. That tells you you’re bad at something.

And as I’ve grown to see the inconsistencies behind those words, I’ve been able to change the narrative intellectually. I can tell myself I’m capable now. I know I’ve evolved.

But it doesn’t change the moment where practice, or pressure comes to fruition.

When the ball is flying at my face and everyone around me is relying on the fact that I hit it back, well that’s when I crumble. That’s when I forget everything and all I feel is pressure, disappointment, and maybe even disrespect. Like I just look down on myself suddenly.

And like I’m letting everyone around me down too.

Where This Shows Up

I’ve noticed myself in action in every field of my life where I don’t overthink and I suddenly I become a natural. It’s in skills where I feel confident, or in trying new things when I’m feeling confident.

Tennis when I’m just hitting the ball around with no one watching. Writing when it’s just for me and there’s no audience. Talking to people when there’s nothing on the line.

But the moment it matters? The moment people I actually care about are watching or I’m writing for someone I respect or there’s something real at stake? I get in my head. I overthink. And suddenly everything that came naturally five minutes ago disappears.

When I’m not trying, I’m great. The second I care about the outcome, I crumble.

Maybe it’s because I’m protecting myself or maybe it’s performance pressure. Probably the latter.

So when we failed ourselves in the past, when we didn’t show up the way we wanted to, suddenly we begin retracing our past steps. Our disappointment reappears and we are met with a crippling sense of performance pressure.

Because we don’t trust ourselves to show up when it matters.

The Cycle

I knew it was going to come to an end. The waking up every day full of life and excitement and optimism. I knew it would but I deep down was really hoping and praying that it wouldn’t. I wanted so badly for that reality to continue.

But that’s the thing. There’s always ups and downs. We just have to not forget what moved the needle. We have to continue the things that improve us so that even though it’s two steps forward one step back we got those two steps forward.

And I noticed it recently. The familiar feeling of things slipping. Not showing up the way I said I would. Letting small promises to myself slide.

I lost trust in myself around the way I took care of my body and my brain and my ability to push myself and to accomplish my goals.

When you let yourself down enough times, it becomes hard to act from high confidence. Because you’re struggling to see the evidence beyond the fact that you should have it.

I needed this to see that you can go through the motions but if you aren’t doing it intentionally it will never give you the outcome you hope for.

We have to intentionally love ourselves and trust ourselves. As much as it sucks to realize it, loving yourself doesn’t really ever become second nature. It takes work. Because it’s a relationship. And relationships take work.

Whether it’s aesthetic maintenance, or trust. Little things. Following through on what you want. Achieving micro goals. Affirmations. Anything you need to help you realize that it can be rebuilt.

The Rebuild

So what do I do?

I start showing up for myself in little ways. Like any relationship I start building it up again. And it takes time but it means finding things that are easy and attainable for me.

Goals that I know I can achieve.

Maybe it’s not losing a certain amount of weight but maybe it’s showing up at the gym every day.

Maybe it’s not that I won’t scroll at all but maybe it’s that I leave my phone outside my room so that I won’t do it in bed.

Maybe it’s not suddenly turning this Substack into something that makes money but instead deciding that I’ll show up every day regardless. Back to publishing a post a week because that was a manageable and important ritual and cadence for me.

Not that I’ll suddenly go get a relationship but that I’ll commit to being open to conversation, to trying new things, to adventure.

And not that I will suddenly become an expert at tennis but that I’ll show up and I’ll take a deep breath with the intentional narrative that I have the knowledge and skills I need to do well.

And not putting the pressure on the performance.

Every kept promise is a trust deposit. Every broken one is a withdrawal.

I’ve been making withdrawals for so long that my account is empty. And you can’t spend what you don’t have.

So I’m rebuilding. One small promise at a time.

One thing I’ve decided to commit to is trusting how I show up. In conversations. In moments that matter. In the spaces where I used to get in my head.

Because I’m learning that the spiral starts the second I doubt myself. And the spiral stops the second I remember I’ve shown up before and I can show up again.

What This Actually Means

Performance pressure doesn’t come from the moment. It comes from the years of broken promises that came before it.

When you trust yourself to show up in small ways, you’ll trust yourself to show up in big ways.

And then the ball won’t feel so fast. The guy you like won’t make you weird. The writing won’t freeze you.

Because you’ll have evidence that you show up for yourself.

The less I think about it, the more I simply let myself be, the happier I am with the outcome. And maybe that’s because thinking equals narrative equals old story. Being equals presence equals no story, just action.

Learning to trust yourself means letting the moment slow down. Taking a deep breath and letting the new relationship that you’ve fostered take the reins.

Acting from a place of high confidence. Always. In every area. Being confident that you can achieve it.

But confidence built on evidence. On kept promises. On trust that’s been earned back through small, consistent follow-throughs.

In the end I think that’s what will get me out of this rut.

Rebuilding the relationship.

I’m not there yet. I’m still rebuilding. The tennis ball still feels too fast sometimes. I still get in my head when the stakes are high.

But I know the way back now.

And knowing is half the work.

Right now a teacher is helping her navigate AI and I’m watching it happen in real time. The way he breaks it down into progressions. The way he simplifies something that feels overwhelming. The way he sees where she’s confused and adjusts. The moment it clicks for her.

Behind me there’s a guy who came up and demanded help because he felt so lost with technology. He expressed how we is an educator himself but all i heard was his frustration. Entirely overwhelmed and scared—desperate for someone to guide him.

What I was really seeing was the necessity of custodians.

Real life people who will guide us into the AI age, I see so much opportunity here.

I’ve been talking to friends, strangers, students who are so fearful of where AI is taking us. The amount of jobs that will be lost. The sense that the ground is shifting into the unknown faster anyone can keep up with.

Recently I was ideating with a friend about what the world might look like next. Musing about how there are so many different directions this could go. But in the spirit of imagining the world we would like to see here’s my argument for why teachers aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

After having been one for the winter, I see all the dots connect in front of me—it’s clearer than ever.

Teachers will be the custodians of AI.

This isn’t just a career that’s incredibly valuable right now—it always has been even if society hasn’t shown it.

Here’s why.

What We Got Wrong

In education we look to teachers to be custodians of knowledge. But sitting in a room with unconventional thinkers, you often hear how the education system wronged them.

Not necessarily because they had bad teachers but because the traditional academic institutions placed limits on them.

They teach the same catalog over and over and aren’t encouraged to break the script. Creating a toxic cyclical nature; we teach to teach what we already “know” but not to learn and explore.

I think that the intentions are pure. I really do. I don’t know a single teacher that is doing it because they hate it. Or because they want to corrupt minds and lead them away from critical thinking. I believe they want to love it.

My brother was the first person to make me question academia. He was a good student but he was always getting in trouble for questioning the conventional. When he gets excited about something he goes deep on it and it challenged the normal conventions of the education system(big time nerd). And the education system resisted it. They didn’t like the fact that they were questioned. And it speaks to how broken the system really is.

Think of the times you learned the deepest. You dove into something so deeply and were able to not only explain it to someone but when you did, you did it with passion, with energy and excitement and it brought you to life in a lot of ways.

I had a professor once who was so incredibly passionate about the subject that it was contagious. It forced us to want to participate. To ask deeper questions. and even though she wasnt always able to answer them, she encouraged the discourse. The class became abotu questioning the conventions and we dove down rabitholes together.

But in many cases this was not the experience. Students we’re coasting through the education system and maybe it’s because teachers were spread thin. Or maybe its because they lacked focus and they lacked passion.

Education lacks passion.

But teachers are not the problem.

They could be the stewards of this passion. We can use them as vessels. Not for knowledge but for what is possible.

And I myself love being one. A teacher. That’s part of why I’m writing this.

Because passion breeds curiosity. About an idea, a topic, a person. And right now we confine it to a textbook, to a certain time, to a curriculum that strips the humanity out of learning.

What AI Can Actually Do

AI doomeriss has this tendency to talk about all the jobs that will be lost and I often hear the premise that teachers are part of that.

With AI tutors and online systems for learning you might wonder if they are necessary. But that neglects the intended purpose of a teacher. Because they aren’t just there to convey information. They are there to guide us as we learn how to learn. And they are often essential for facilitating the energy and the enthusiasm.

Teachers should be so passionate about what they’re teaching that it gives the students an idea of how passionate they could be one day. That’s where it goes wrong with all the subjects and topics and the constant switching.

When we reenvision education maybe we can see view AI for exactly what it is, a tool. One that can not only excel us but guarantee that learning was actually achieved.

I imagine tests where you just sit and talk to an AI and it asks you real questions. Not answers that you memorized to prove that you actually understand what you’re talking about. And you check in all the time as you are studying to show that you understand and if you don’t it’s not your fault. The AI can take the extra time to dive into the topics with you.

AI can handle information transfer. It can personalize pacing so no student is left behind or held back. It can verify understanding in ways that standardized tests never could.

But the passion? The leadership? The moment when something clicks because someone showed you they believed in you? That comes from the teacher in front of you.

There is space for both. For AI and the teacher. Because ultimately the teacher will be able to connect and excite in a way that AI never will be able to.

We see in others the passion we hope to cultivate in ourselves and it can be a driving force.

What Teachers Actually Do

It’s a skill in its own, being able to convey something to anyone. Breaking it down in progressions. It’s something that you learn and grow at and it’s underrated.

I saw it with my mom. Watching her face when it clicked. The teacher didn’t just give her information. He gave her confidence. Made her feel capable instead of lost. That’s teaching.

AI can explain skiing. It can generate a lesson plan. It can describe the physics of turning. But it can’t pick you up when you fall. It can’t see the fear in your eyes and know exactly what to say. It can’t make you believe you’re capable of something you thought was impossible.

Teachers ensure students acquire not only knowledge but also the ways of thinking and problem-solving that define communities of practice.

AI can explain. But it can’t model mastery in a way that makes your brain fire up. It can’t make you part of a community of practice. And for a large part, the learning that will be valuable going forwards is in the relationships between people.

Teaching isn’t about having information and it never has been. It’s about transmission. About ignition. About making someone care enough to want to go deeper.

Why This Has Always Been True

It reminds me of the concept of apprenticeships.

Apprenticeship was well known in ancient civilizations such as Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In medieval Europe, guilds fostered the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next through apprenticeships that typically lasted 5-7 years. In Japan, the tradition of “uchideshi” has preserved traditional arts like pottery and woodworking for centuries.

Skills that we used to find valuable but don’t as much anymore. Gardening, cooking, craftsmanship, hunting, storytelling. Things that in ancient times meant life or death, community or culture. And they were passed down through lineage, through neighbors, through apprenticeship.

This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s actually biology.

Neuroscientists have discovered mirror neurons that activate both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing it. When you watch someone perform a task, it activates the same brain areas involved in doing it yourself, priming your system for action. This is why apprenticeship works. This is why apprentices learned through imitation and trial and error under master craftsmen.

Our brains are wired for this. Situated learning theory shows that novices learn by observing members of a community and slowly moving from the periphery to full participation. Learning is fundamentally a social process, not solely in the learner’s head.

Many skills require a teacher that challenges them. That makes them question everything. That pushes them until they almost give up and that’s the moment it clicks like in Karate Kid. We need senseis. That’s not going away.

Apprenticeships give the lessons. The deeply human and the purely technical. A space to be learned. We can run simulations but AI and your physical reality are just too far apart.

The Opportunity

So as we enter an era of AI doomerism and questions about what comes next, what purpose comes next, well the ability to educate, to teach, to share and connect I think will be one of the most valuable skills of all.

We create the reality we want to see. And we pay for what we find valuable. Anything the future evolves into comes from the consumers willingness to pay for it.

I believe when something feels out of our scope we find value in other people’s ability to convey that lesson to us. Teachers are incredibly valuable and they have been undervalued for so long.

The education system being broken doesn’t contradict what I’m saying here. It contributes to it. We’ve undervalued the skill so much that people aren’t incentivized to be good teachers and it’s broken our education systems.

The main thread here is how much they affect us. How much we should be valuing them. And when we think about the world we want to shape and what comes next teaching should exist at the center.

Not because AI can’t do the job. But because AI finally lets educators do the job they were always meant to do. And it highlights how valuable the transfer of skills is going to be.

Information transfer? That’s AI’s domain now. Let it handle that.

But ignition? Guidance? Showing someone they’re capable by example? Picking them up when they fall? Showing what’s possible through your own passion?

That’s teaching.

And in a world where information is infinite and accessible that becomes the most valuable skill there is.

What This Means Going Forward

I watch my mother learning. I watch the teacher guiding her. I see the moment it clicks.

The man behind me who felt lost. Who needed someone to help him make sense of something overwhelming. Who just needed a custodian.

We need custodians to guide us into the AI age.

If you understand AI make yourself a resource. There’s opportunity here. Huge opportunity.

If you’re looking for what to do, what to focus on, what becomes valuable in the world we’re building, here’s what I’m thinking about.

How to be the best teacher I can be. How to communicate clearly. How to break things down. How to ignite curiosity. How to help someone understand not just the information but why it matters.

Because AI will give us the facts. But it can’t give us the spark.

And the spark is what changes everything.

If this resonated, here’s how to go deeper:

🖊️ Join the next writing session (May 17,) — we spend an hour writing & talking through the questions you’re actually grappling with. Sign up here.

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🔁 Share this piece if you know someone worried about AI taking their job — or someone who’d make a great teacher.

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💬 Leave a comment — I want to know: have you had a teacher who ignited something in you? Or are you thinking about becoming one? What would that look like?

After a week-long road trip across the great big USA, there were days where I was so full of joy — glee, laughter, and adventure. Late night scooter rides in Nashville. Three-hour singalongs. Joy at the dumbest — and I mean dumbest — roadside attractions. A peach painted on a water tower. The world’s largest easel. (keep reading for pics)

But there were also moments where I felt tired and irritated and exhausted and just so miserable about myself. I would shut down deep in thought, feeling heavy from the lack of movement and the copious amounts of roadside bites.

And I’m realizing that I fall back into that pattern way too often.

I went into this trip with the intention of presence and optimization. This might be — and I mean no offense by saying this but hopefully — the only time I ever spend a meaningful amount of time in Kansas City, or St. Louis, or the entire state of Kansas really. So ultimately that meant saying yes to every opportunity that presented itself in the limited time we were running with.

The adventure was too good to be bothered with projects.

All this sitting brought reflection to the fact that if we’re constantly doing things, we realize how little we have and it breaks us until we need to find the next thing.

But the more I understand about my humanness, my nature, I realize that I want to find peace in stillness. To be entirely content with absolutely nothing. Not having to see or do things to feel good about myself.

But that’s in some ways a lie we’ve been sold. A story told of striving for nothing in order to make us believe that it can be as simple as that.

Because happiness — contentedness — well, there takes some maintenance. Physical exercise being amoung the most important, but in sum it’s health maintenance. If you can maintain good health, then the next thing is presence, and then comes contentedness.

It doesn’t have to be happiness all the time, but contentedness.

Why Is It Impossible to Remember the Good When We Are Deep in the Bad?

I’d venture to guess that is one of the big challenges we face as humans — the polarity of emotions.

Sure, it’s complex. And we can define deeper, complicate with words that seem to express exactly how we’re feeling. But there are emotions just like colors that don’t go together.

Disgust and love.

Ambition and presence.

They work in isolation of each other.

There’s an essay in itself in the way that we eat in America and how I felt the whole time. How I felt physically ill for a large part of it because I was sitting all day and then eating literally whatever I wanted. It was eye-opening.

Sometimes I was so happy and living life to the fullest. But other moments I was cripplingly upset about how I looked, felt, and was acting.

When I felt poorly about myself this week and last, it was difficult for me to pull my mind out of the gutter.

Our brains can’t access positive emotional memories when we’re in a negative state. This is called state-dependent memory. When you’re stuck in the bad, the good doesn’t just feel distant — it feels like it never existed.

American food culture and a sedentary lifestyle create bodies that feel bad. And when our bodies feel bad, our minds follow. This isn’t metaphorical. It’s biochemical.

The Weight Our Words Carry

Often when it came to my physical appearance, there were simple ways out.

Something I keep coming back to is the weight our words carry — the narrative we tell ourselves, a projection of our inner world, becomes a clear as day outcome of our realities.

So when I told myself I looked fat, I FELT fat. I looked for the flaws in the pictures, the lines I wished weren’t there.

It’s crazy the mirage we can create in a mirror with sheer will.

But I also found this time to come into my power.

I realized that if I actually just stopped myself while I was ahead — I said there’s nothing I can do about my physical appearance right now, so I have two options.

I can be depressed, self-conscious, embarrassed, and carry that gray cloud over my head.

Or I can start by a simple: well, I love myself. And that doesn’t sound fun, so I’m going to accept and embrace the way I look right now and know that I have power to change it. But also that I love myself either way.

It didn’t work immediately. I didn’t suddenly love my body.

But I stopped letting the hatred run the show. And that was enough to break the loop.

Research on self-compassion shows that accepting where you are — even when you don’t love it — is more effective than self-criticism for actual change. Hating yourself into transformation doesn’t work. Never has.

The Female Tax

Traveling with a guy — sure, he was gay, but still — it came up several times where the things required for female maintenance were baffling to him.

And I’m on the very low maintenance end of things. I have friends with hour-and-a-half-long morning routines.

Although I will admit, the times of my life where I had a routine like that brought an immense sense of confidence to me. It feels good to be clean and it feels feminine.

Things like skincare, makeup, picking an outfit, hair styling. These are allotted an immense amount of time for us. We want to look and feel good, and nurturing our external tends to do that.

Anyway, it takes a lot to get there and I guess it’s a verbal contractual agreement we make with ourselves — how much we care about our appearance.

Being vain sucks, but taking care of yourself is empowering. So what is the in-between?

It can pull most girls out of their slump. Eat right for a few days, workout, do your skincare, and suddenly you feel good about yourself again.

We have the keys. The truth is they just take effort to maintain.

Its called “aesthetic labor” — the invisible work women do to be acceptable. The constant self-monitoring. The time, money, energy, and mental space it costs.

These aren’t shallow acts. They’re creating the physical conditions that allow your brain to believe you’re worth loving.

The Thrift Store Breakthrough

I went thrifting and found some pieces that I love. They’re fun and unique and ultimately very me.

I haven’t bought clothes in a while because I wanted to save money and because I had ambitions of a body recomposition — so why buy for something that will change?

But this stopped me from finding my sense of personal style because ultimately it left me with some black and white t-shirts, a dark pair of jeans and a light pair. Easy to mix and match, but expressing no sense of style. Given that they’ve been worn out, I can’t even say they look chic anymore.

And so desperately I’ve been looking for the fun parts of my style. The unique pieces. The colors that work for me. All without spending much.

And I feel like I really found some pieces that resonate with me. I was able to style them in a fun way too, and that gave me so much confidence.

I posted a mirror selfie, which is actually something I probably wouldn’t have done before.

Finding my style didn’t fix my body. But it gave me something that loving my body never had: agency.

When you hate your body, you’re waiting for it to change before you can start living. But style is something you can control now. And control is what breaks the spiral.

What My Friend Taught Me

I’ve also been in the process of discovering, accepting, and embracing my weirdness because I felt so vanilla before. Not enough laughs. Especially not enough belly laughs.

But man, have I had many of those in the past few months. Deep, loud, and powerful laughter.

Starting with unleashing my inner child, strengthened by a confidence in a skill, and exacerbated by a new closeness from unexpected relationships.

I have a best friend who is truly one now — one of my closest. And while it’s never going to get that much deeper than it has, it’s shown me how close I can be to someone. How much I can share. How much time I can spend. And how much fun I can have.

I’ve had a week of a friendship that I know can last a lifetime.

And this is an area where I’ve let myself down in the past.

A love letter to my friend Joe because he helped me see that I am not only lovable but fun. We laughed so hard. We adventured and dealt with shit and it went well.

All these doubts I carried — the ones of being unlovable — well, sure, our relationship has nothing to do with how I look, but still, personality-wise, I can have a relationship, a close one. And that’s important. That’s an important view I’ll carry of myself.

The week I felt worst about my body was the same week I learned I was lovable.

Those two truths existed at the same time.

Which means the body was never the problem.

Research on attachment shows that being loved by others teaches us we’re worthy of love. Joe didn’t fix me. He showed me what was already true.

Wholeness

Miserable — what a word.

Misery-able.

Stuck in misery.

A state of severe emotional distress, deep unhappiness, or physical suffering.

Why do we make ourselves miserable?

Lord knows I have so much to grow and evolve.

At least I see now — the highs do accompany lows and I’m not sure that I can call this one.

So what would I do if I believed this?

Walk with ease, speak with honesty and vulnerability.

Laugh openly.

Love outwardly.

Believe wholeheartedly.

And stay true to that vision of myself.

I wouldn’t falter in a time when I seek strength most because I know I am whole now and nothing can be done to break that.

I am whole.

I have all the things I’ve mentioned. I’m so lucky and so loved and loving.

And most of all, I am whole.

I don’t necessarily believe it as I write it, but I’m working on it.

What This Road Trip Taught Me

A lot has been going on and it’s left me with little to no concentration on myself. A week-long road trip across the country that taught me real friendship and longevity. Spending entire days in cars with someone, followed by days exploring cities and adventuring.

I have many friends who live in a constant state of struggle with their relationship to food and their body. I watched it this week. I lived it this week.

Comments about appearance. Guilt over eating. The same loop playing out over and over.

So that’s what this is. A piece about our bodies and loving ourselves.

An essay pleading, begging, and jumping with joy the moment it clicks for you. When you realize that this is a reality you can live in — one where every part of your being loves every part of your being.

Simply for the fact of you being.

I’m not writing this because I figured out how to love myself.

I’m writing it because I got a glimpse of what it feels like when you stop fighting yourself long enough to just be.

Late night scooter rides in Nashville. Belly laughs over the world’s largest easel. A friend who showed me I was lovable even when I didn’t feel it.

And yeah, I also felt terrible. Heavy. Self-conscious. Stuck in a loop of self-criticism that I couldn’t escape.

But here’s what I’m learning:

What you tell yourself matters. The narrative you carry becomes your reality. When I stopped telling myself I looked fat and started accepting where I was, the spiral loosened its grip.

How you take care matters. The maintenance isn’t vanity. It’s creating the conditions that allow you to believe you’re worthy of love.

Who loves you matters. Being loved teaches you that you’re lovable.

And presence matters. Wholeness, even when you don’t believe it yet. Even when you’re working on it.

I don’t have this figured out. Most days I’m still working on it.

But this road trip showed me something.

You don’t have to love your body to love your life. You just have to stop letting the hatred run the show.

So this is my love letter. Not to perfection. Not to finally “fixing” myself.

But to the body that carried me across America. That laughed until it hurt. That sat for too many hours and ate too much gas station food and still woke up the next day ready to try again.

To the friends who reminded me I’m lovable. To the thrift store finds that gave me my style back. To the moments of joy that existed right alongside the self-loathing.

And to you, if you’re stuck in the same loop:

It’s not your fault that it’s hard.

But it’s still worth trying.

If this resonated, here’s how to go deeper:

🖊️ Join the next writing session (May 10th, free) — we spend an hour writing & talking through the questions you’re actually grappling with. Sign up here.

💌 Become a paid subscriber — get access to all writing sessions, our private Discord, monthly deep-dives, and direct access to me for feedback.

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🔁 Share this piece if it helped you see something differently. The algorithm won’t show this to anyone unless you do.

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💬 Leave a comment — I want to know: do you relate more to self-awareness or self-consciousness? Where do you see this playing out in your life?

It was a Saturday morning on the mountain when a student asked me what I thought the main problem with the world was.

Not exactly typical ski lesson small talk.

He was an interesting guy. The first question he’d asked someone in our group earlier that day was “What do you think your meaning in life is?” — which naturally left the other person slightly taken aback. But he had a huge smile on his face and a great attitude. I could tell he was smart. Everything I was teaching him, he was able to relate to some bigger phenomenon — within the human body, human nature, even society.

I love these kinds of people. Creatives constantly drawing parallels. It’s the sign of the type of person who isn’t afraid to try something new.

During lunch, we started sharing more about our backgrounds. I mentioned my reasoning for studying international affairs in university — the realizations it brought me to. I studied it so I could fully understand the issues facing the world right now. To take a macro and micro-level view of hypotheticals, history, and the present to draft some kind of conclusion as to what positive impact I could make.

Then he asked me bluntly: So what is the main problem with the world?

I don’t believe something so complex can be answered with a platitude. A carefully rehearsed sentence diagnosing the world’s problems. But I did land on something like an inherent disregard for our nature.

We have fought and fought to build a society and world in ways that contradict the things that make us who we are. Biology. Science. The animal kingdom. Sure, we’re complex, but the fundamentals are quite simple. We learn this in teaching kids — Maslow’s hierarchy. And we learn it in how we relate to others and the world. How our primal instincts appear.

This answer led me down the rabbit hole of what I’m working on right now. How I discovered writing and believe it to have awakened me to who I really am. My humanness.

And I labeled it as self-awareness.

Which he didn’t like.

“It’s taboo,” he said. “It’s an overused term that the industry has begun to move on from.”

It was the first time I was hearing this, but I believe it to be true upon further research. So as much as I could plead to disagree, I decided to take it as silent resistance to give myself time to develop my conclusion.

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The Problem with Self-Awareness

Here’s the thing: he was right.

Self-awareness has become a buzzword. Overused and saturated to the point where it became necessary to contradict it.

I heard it again recently on Modern Wisdom, and I found myself scoffing. They were discussing self-awareness as a negative — because when a successful person is aware of the bad things they did to get there, they can’t enjoy the success.

But should they? Would be my question.

If they don’t, won’t they just continue that way?

It’s not meant to feel good to lie and cheat and act only in your own self-interest. In Ayn Rand’s perspective, we should live and work for ourselves only — but the catch here is that it doesn’t feel good to screw people over, thus it’s against our interest.

And I felt that there was an important distinction between the awareness as they named it and the principle I’ve evolved to admire.

Because here’s what I think is happening:

We’re confusing self-awareness with self-consciousness. And it’s stripping us of agency.

This realization came from a writing session with my group last week. We spent an hour unpacking exactly this — what self-awareness actually means vs. what the industry sold us. If you want space to think through your own patterns like this, join the next free session on May 10th.

The Difference

When I was younger, I ruminated on everything and considered myself to be quite aware. But wasn’t that a lie I was telling myself? Wasn’t that a representation of the narrative I had grown to shape?

It wasn’t that I was self-aware. It was that I was introspective.

And these can be very different things.

Self-awareness, to me, is about being conscious of the fallacy. Catching every thought that’s expressing definitions on topics where that’s far from possible. It’s understanding our patterns, our processes, our values, our ideals.

Self-consciousness is rumination. It’s being hyper-critical. It’s knowing all your flaws and using that knowledge as an excuse not to change them.

There’s a phrase I hear a lot now: “At least I’m self-aware.”

And I used to think this was a cop-out. Someone acknowledging their flaw as a shield against having to fix it.

But I’m starting to see it differently.

When someone says “I know I prioritize my own needs” or “I know I’d rather sleep in the comfy spot” — and they own it without pretense — there’s something honest about that. It’s a sign of acceptance. A sign of choice. Of agency.

And that’s what matters to me. That we realize we have agency to change these things.

The problem isn’t noticing. The problem is when noticing becomes the end goal instead of the starting point.

Agency Is the Point

I was talking with my roommate about this last night. How it is a person’s choice what they do with their life, because the reality is we have agency.

It is a choice to not make a lot of money, to be overweight, to be alone, to be unhappy.

There are, of course, exceptions to this. People born into circumstance. Systems that make certain choices nearly impossible.

But once we are aware, it should give us the agency to do something about it.

To work harder or change careers. Network your ass off. Read all the books. Become an expert. These are choices, especially in this day and age.

To buy the more expensive organic healthy option might not be a possibility — but to eat smaller portions and get 10,000 steps a day and try to reach for less of the white stuff and more of the green or brown? These are choices.

In terms of happiness, there are things that are very circumstantial. But the truth is our mindset is our choice as well. We can choose to take the positive. We can choose to think harder and find other solutions instead of accepting the easy route. We can choose to feel love and gratitude for the simple thing of existence.

It’s not easy, and it’s a choice you have to make every single day. And sometimes it’s impossible. But most of the time, it is a choice we make.

We’ve been conditioned to think that life happens to us. And it does — if we let it. But once we are aware, we can counter that. We can fight back and reclaim our lives.

Self-awareness gives us that agency. It gives us our power back.

Where I Still Struggle

I’m not immune to this paradox.

There was a moment recently of burnout. A moment of ruminating on retreating back to old habits. To the place where I had little self-confidence in my ability to show up as a friend, present with only one other person.

That’s been a consistent thread in my life. Being in my head and causing the silence. Not being in the mood for jokes or feeling like they roll off my tongue awkwardly.

I honestly think I was just tired. I had been around my roommates nonstop for five days, and I’m not the type of person who handles that well historically, especially with a lack of sleep. And as wonderful, truly incredible the time was, I think I had hit my limit and needed a moment to regroup. Get work done. Lock in and rediscover my way back to that girl.

The thing I ruminate on most is my physical appearance — wishing I could make better decisions around food, to really hit my fitness goals. I make healthy choices 80% of the time, but the other 20% really weighs on me. Especially when I don’t hit the goals or meet the outcomes.

And this is an area where the less I think about it, the more successful I am.

So this is where I see it. Where I wish I would think less about it and just live my life and be happy with the decisions I’ve made.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have agency over this as well. That it is my decision to not show up at the gym or whatever it may be. And I’m not the most self-aware here.

I’m aware of my unconsciousness. Of the times I go onto autopilot and work from low confidence or respect for myself.

Being aware doesn’t necessarily change those thoughts either. The only element of awareness here is that I know consciously that the less I think about it, the better the outcome for me.

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The Two Voices

I don’t think awareness is about overthinking. I think it’s just understanding.

There’s a voice that appears in our early twenties. The one of reason. The one that cuts through the noise. That starts connecting the past and the present to make decisions in the moment.

I don’t think it was always there.

Before, the only voice that existed was the one that took me deep inside my mind. The one that reacted to everything in my environment. This is the same voice that, when meditating, has a hard time staying quiet.

But there’s the new voice. The strong one. The powerful one. The one that actually has the power to change what we’re thinking. It’s our mindset.

The narrative is the background. But the mindset is the stern and powerful.

That’s the one that awareness rules. The other is our consciousness.

I urge you to think of these as different parts of you. Just as we have the human and the monkey parts of our brain, these come from a deeper place — an almost spiritual one. It’s the self and the ego perhaps.

But they both shape who we are, so it’s our duty to give attention — awareness — to the more powerful of the two.

We strive for presence, but it’s the difference between the voice that’s spiraling during your meditation (the figurative clouds passing by) and the stern voice saying “I’m going to focus.”

It’s not even a voice most of the time for me. It’s a feeling. An awareness that I am spiraling, and that allows me to draw back into the moment.

So Is It a Paradox?

I don’t think so.

I think we’re confusing self-awareness with self-consciousness, and it’s stripping us of agency.

Self-awareness is supposed to be a tool. A way to understand your patterns so you can make better choices. A way to see the clouds passing by and choose not to follow them.

Self-consciousness is the trap. It’s ruminating on your flaws until you’re paralyzed. It’s performing awareness as if noticing is the same thing as changing.

The difference matters.

Because self-awareness without agency is just self-torture.

Real self-awareness gives you your power back. It helps you see the choice in front of you and trust yourself enough to make it.

And maybe that’s the real meaning of self-awareness: not just seeing yourself clearly, but giving yourself the agency to do something about what you see.

That student on the mountain was right to be skeptical of the term. The industry has made it toxic. It’s become a performance. A way to get credit for noticing without doing the work to change.

But I’m not ready to abandon it yet.

Because when self-awareness is used correctly — as a tool for agency, not an end in itself — it’s one of the most powerful things we have.

So maybe the question isn’t whether self-awareness is good or bad.

Maybe it’s whether you’re using it to understand yourself or to excuse yourself.

One gives you power. The other takes it away.

And once you know the difference, the choice is yours.

If this resonated, here’s how to go deeper:

🖊️ Join the next writing session (May 10th, free) — we spend an hour writing through the questions you’re actually grappling with. Sign up here.

💌 Become a paid subscriber — get access to all writing sessions, our private Discord, monthly deep-dives, and direct access to me for feedback.

Subscribe now

🔁 Share this piece if it helped you see something differently. The algorithm won’t show this to anyone unless you do.

💬 Leave a comment — I want to know: do you relate more to self-awareness or self-consciousness? Where do you see this playing out in your life?

Is self-awareness helping you or just giving you more to overthink?

I’ve been sitting with this question all week after listening to this Modern Wisdom podcast about the paradox of self-awareness.

The guest—Robert Pantano—argues that consciousness is both “the most horrific, terrifying thing in the known universe” and “the most beautiful thing” — because it’s the only way we can understand existence at all.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: does understanding yourself better help you move forward? Or does it just pull you out of the present moment?

I don’t think there’s one answer. I think it depends on what kind of thinker you are.

Some people analyze their patterns and break free. Others analyze their patterns and get more stuck. The same self-knowledge that empowers one person traps another.

Sunday, April 13th at 10am ET, I’m hosting a writing session to figure out which type we are.

Here’s how it works:

• 5 minutes: Introduction and framing the question

• 40 minutes: We write (cameras off, mics off)

• 10 minutes: Optional sharing

Example prompt: Pick one specific part of yourself — a pattern, belief, or tendency — and write about whether understanding it has made your life better or just more complicated.

For me, writing is how I turn chaos into patterns I can work with. It’s how I think clearly. But I know that’s not universal — so lets understand the difference together.

When: Sunday, April 13th, 10am ET
Where: Google Meet (link sent after signup)
Cost: Free
Sign up: https://luma.com/jrmeu1z4

Only 10 spots left. If it fills, join the waitlist — and please unregister if you can’t make it so someone else can join.

See you Sunday,
HM

P.S. Can’t make it live? I’ll send the prompt after so you can write on your own time.

Who do I want to become?

No, really. Not what do I want to do, or where do I want to go, or what should my next move be. Who do I want to become?

I’m in this strange in-between place again. A few months of consistency just ended—a job, a responsibility to show up for something. And it wasn’t terrible. There were moments where I lived for the temporary nature of it, sure. But there were also the other times. The ones of true connection. The click of a student understanding what I’m teaching them. Being praised for my ability to connect it for them—though it wasn’t even the praise that made it great. It was knowing I didn’t need to hear it because I saw it. I saw the evolution. I heard the laughs.

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I’m becoming so much more comfortable in my humor and my expression. Things throw me off track, but I think it’s all in effort to discover, to explore, to figure it out.

Thank god I did NS because I felt completely lost in my people skills before, and I really don’t anymore. I have friends who truly bring out the best of me. Sure, there are things for me to look into, to understand deeper. But knowing just that has been great—the ease, the friendliness, the love.

But I really want to understand who I am for the next phases.

I feel in a very similar place to where I was last spring. And I’m starting to realize: maybe I need the extreme boredom. Maybe that’s why I need NS right now—because I need zero distractions.

I could waste so much time. But I don’t want to. I want to feel accomplished. And what is that going to take? Real accomplishments? But what if I don’t care about recognition?

I don’t want to care about it. But maybe it’s human and unavoidable.

The Question Beneath the Question

Here’s what I’m realizing: I’m not moving around to find myself. I’m doing it to expand.

There’s a difference.

Finding yourself implies the self is hidden somewhere, buried under the wrong job or the wrong city or the wrong decisions. Like if you just dig long enough, you’ll unearth the real you and everything will click into place.

But that’s not how it works.

The self isn’t something you find. It’s something you build. And it’s built by what you expose it to. The places. The people. The silence. The friction. The awe.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I look towards what’s next. What do I want to do right now? How can I make the small and subtle urges open potentials for the next chapters of my story?

My answer: character development.

Not in a vague self-help way but as an actual strategy.

I want to explore and push myself—not necessarily in the traditional sense (sitting at my desk grinding by other people’s metrics) but push myself to experience things outside my comfort zone. To evolve my thinking. To create a person and a life of substance.

That doesn’t mean just traveling to travel or saying yes just to say yes. It means reading books that expand my thinking. Shaping a life that gives me the time and space to do that. It means traveling to places that will grow my perspective, that will challenge me in other ways. Traveling to learn. To accept how little control we have and how our mindset shifts the outcome.

It’s about shaping the people we want to become.

And I’m learning that who we become is largely determined by what shapes us.

Nature as Mirror

Spending five months in a mountain town taught me this in a way nothing else could.

Silence from my window sill other than a light breeze. A sky full of stars on my evening walk home. Unbeatable sunrises and sunsets. Ten different kinds of birds chirping.

I’m grounded.

And that feeling is not one I take lightly.

I’ve always lived in or near a city. An airport. The one time I didn’t—boarding school my sophomore year of high school—the closest grocery store was a 30-minute drive along a winding road. I felt so isolated it almost broke me. But it also kind of brought me back in a hidden way.

There were a few days when the weather finally got warmer where we camped, hiked, and played. Those days made the experience. I just wasn’t aware that those were the moments I needed to chase at the time.

I feel it now too. After living in the mountains, connected to nature in a profound way, I understand where the true bliss in my life comes from.

Breckenridge doesn’t feel like a resort town to me. It’s granola, crunchy, and oh-so earthy, and I love it. Sure, there are many who are still disconnected—whether via the screen in our pockets or the human desire to consume. But I’ve found that desire has faded the longer I’ve been here.

Amazon takes five days to arrive. Groceries are expensive, so I mainly skim the outside aisles. It’s not easy to get places, so I plan ahead, and that makes my budget friendlier.

Sure, I see a new sweater, a new ski jacket, a new something, and it lights up a part of my human desire. But that desire has shrunk significantly.

The main thing that brings it out is the moments I find myself sitting on my screen watching other people’s lives. But those are becoming fewer too.

Concrete is killing our souls.

I worry about this because I feel it in myself.

When I was at the network school recently, I loved it—the people, the creativity, the energy in every room. But something was keeping me floating. I felt slightly anxious, like my inner voice was screaming for breathwork every chance it got. It was a weird sensation. Like I couldn’t breathe as well there.

The largest attribution I kept coming back to was that it was a man-made island. That the sand was pulled from other places. That the mangrove it was built on top of had lost its might.

It really saddened me to hear this. That something so special could be built by breaking nature’s innovation. And part of me thinks that without the roots, without the foundation, it leaves us literally floating.

After living in the mountains for almost five months, that contrast was undeniable.

We live in cities removed from nature, and everything becomes about ownership.

Ownership and agency are two different things. We can have agency over our lives, but we will never have ownership—that belongs to nature. And none of us own nature. She’s her own being. No matter how much we might try to control it, we will never be able to.

Why don’t we listen to that more? It’s the only real thing we know.

I love the saying “touch grass” when people are so removed from reality, because it’s the realest thing we know. And in fact, touching it would likely help the detached person.

Nature isn’t aspirational. It’s structural.

It’s the reset we all need. The coming back to yourself.

Why We Travel (And What It Does to Us)

I was thinking about this as I get ready for a trip to Arches National Park. We’re driving for a three-day car camping trip. We’re going to hike and camp and see some of the most beautiful sights. The pictures I’ve seen have left me speechless.

But it’s making me wonder: why do we travel?

Are we driving to see the sights? Or is it about the people I’m there with? The moments we share. The song that becomes the pinnacle of the moment. The inside jokes.

Or is it about the quiet moments as we reach the attraction? The moments of awe. Of making us feel infinite. Apart of something bigger. Nature makes you feel like that.

Or is it the moments of frustration? When we’ve been driving for an hour longer than we can handle. The slight pain in our backs from sore bodies and sleeping on a camping pad. Then arriving at a campground only to find out it’s fully booked.

Or is it the figuring it out in the end? The feeling when you get home and feel the memories quietly processing in your body?

Why do we travel, and who does it make us?

I think it’s all of these things. It’s the experiences. It’s the stepping away from what’s comfortable to experience something new.

And the thing with nature—it never gets old. We can visit the same scenery and it never looks the same. Different seasons, different times of day. The awe doesn’t wear off. The same sunset seen 100 times never ceases to give us pause. To ground us and bring us into the moment.

What I’m realizing is that travel—real travel—isn’t about content or optics. It’s not even about “finding yourself.”

It’s about what the friction and the beauty and the shared moments are doing to you.

These aren’t disruptions to real life. They’re inputs shaping who you become.

Emerson wrote, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But first you have to tune that string. And that requires input. Intentional input.

The Strategy

So what comes next, and who I want to be—it’s all about finding the things that ground me. But in different colors and fonts and landscapes. Until I find the person, the place, or both, that make me finally want to just stay. And live as the person I’ve shaped, in the landscape that spoke strongest to me, with the people who make my soul sing.

Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so.

My strategy right now is simply character development.

Not drifting. Not “finding myself.” Building myself.

I want to explore and push myself to experience things outside my comfort zone. Evolve my thinking. Create a person and a life of substance.

Traveling to learn. To accept how little control we have. To let my mindset shift the outcome.

It’s about shaping the person I want to become.

And I was thinking about this from the perspective of visiting a place. Visiting people in a place. Is it all about trying the food? Is seeing sights something? Or have we reached the point where it doesnt even count if we don’t take a picture?

I think the answer is simpler than we make it.

You’re not moving to find yourself. You’re moving to shape yourself.

Ironically of my students told me “don’t get your hands on money too soon—once you do, you don’t want to let it go, so take the big chance first.” He was naming the real risk: certainty makes you risk-averse. Comfort makes you stop questioning.

So I’m doing that. I’m going to give it 80% and keep the other 20% for the fun, the exciting, the stuff that I know I love and would be crazy to let go of.

Thus my plan is side-questing for at least the next year. I just need enough money to get from one place to another. That’s all.

So who do I want to be?

Well, I guess I know exactly who I want to be, actually.

Someone adventurous, funny, thoughtful, creative, smart, optimistic, light, encouraging, driven, passionate.

The work now isn’t finding that person. It’s building her.

The Invitation

Everyone reading this is being shaped by something. The question is whether you’re choosing it.

Are you letting your environment sculpt you by default? The algorithm. The job. The city. The expectations. The people who think the conventional path is the only path.

Or are you curating inputs that build the person you want to become?

Our generation was told to “find ourselves”—as if the self is a destination you arrive at. But I’m discovering something different.

The self is sculpted by what you expose it to.

The places. The people. The silence. The friction. The awe.

Touch grass isn’t a meme. It’s a reminder that the real world has a vote in who you become. And maybe we should listen.

Character development as a strategy is radical because it prioritizes the person you’re becoming over the life you’re building—and trusts that the life follows.

When writing this I had a funny moment coming back to a piece I wrote back in December. It’s the end of March now. Looking back I had this immense sense of confidence and belief that it was going to work out. I think the second I stopped living by that piece was the second I started losing momentum.

So I continue to write. I do because I must and because I believe it will give me this freedom.

I’m not behind. I’m not lost.

I’m learning. And that’s the whole point.

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So what comes next? I take it day by day. Step by step. What do I want to do right now, and how can I make the small and subtle urges open potentials for the next chapters of my story?

Life is for learning. And I’m starting to understand where the true bliss in my life comes from.

So I continue to write, to explore, to read and love and live. I do it from the right place. From the place of character development and exploration. Not from optics and uncertainty.

I’m not moving around to find myself. I’m doing it to expand.

And maybe I can convince other people of the same presence in what they want to do next.

Because who you want to become is a question worth asking.

And the answer is built one experience, one choice, one grounding moment at a time.

xx,

HM

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I’m in the midst of planning a road trip from Breckenridge, CO to Boston for my best friends’ graduation and I can’t help myself from spending hours on the planning… hours.

See it started casually. Just figuring out the route, where we might stop, how long each drive would be. And then suddenly I had a full - in depth - spread sheet.

Nashville for two nights. A stop in North Carolina to see my mom’s best friend. DC for the cherry blossoms. New Jersey for a birthday. And finally arriving in Boston in time for all of the graduation festivities.

Considering it’s my first time making this trip, naturally there’s some sights that would be silly to miss, thus the planning commences.

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Hikes in the Smoky Mountains. Shenandoah. Little stops that will make the drive feel like something more than just getting from one place to another.

I keep opening Google Maps. I keep adding things. Rethinking things, just non stop thinking.

IM SO EXCITED.

But it’s bringing up some sentiments that are difficult for me to ignore

Several months back I had a conversation over a drink in a moody cocktail lounge. An honest moment of wanting movement, change in our lives, transparency with each other. My best friend and I decided to divulge our assumed red flags of each other.

As we came to mine, I felt like I was shot by a bazooka

The realization was huge. The power of words is frankly quite terrifying.

It was based on one of her first impressions of me. It was one of the first months of university and we were at dinner with another friends’ parents at a nice restaurant. I had taken it upon myself to choose and taste the wine. Not in a dramatic way. Just… naturally. Like it made sense that I would be the one to do that.

Looking back, it didn’t make sense at all.

It wasn’t my place. No one asked. I just stepped in.

And suddenly all these other moments started revealing themselves. And I swear it wasn’t even about perception. Sure I was a little embarrassed but it felt more like opening my eyes to a part of myself I had been blind to. It was about how I felt like that was my role.

I’ve written about this in my piece on hyper independence, the origin of my tendency to be in control, of myself and of the situation. In the piece looking at how that might have impacted my dating life in the past -negatively-.

So turned out that this was kind of the pattern.

This internal drive to stepping in, fill the gap, taking the reins before anyone else does.

I used to think that was just who I was. The organized one. The one who figures things out. The one who makes sure everything runs smoothly.

But I was also living in this entirely disorganized inner world, where after a day of not cleaning up after myself everything felt entirely out of my control. Having more than 3 things that needed to be done, any kind of responsibility, felt entirely overwhelming and I would rapidly retreat into things that passed the time and attempted to get my mind off (aka procrastination).

It felt like such an extreme contrast. And a lot of it giving vibrance to the duality of the selves that we shape and the parts of us that come naturally.

Am I chaotic? absolutely! but do I love a good plan ? absolutely!

So then what am I.

Because for a while I thought I had to pick.

I thought realizing I had control issues meant I needed to become someone who lets everything go. Someone easy, relaxed, go with the flow.

But that never fully felt like me either.

And then on the other side, the version of me that plans everything, that thinks ahead, that takes ownership, that also didn’t feel entirely right when it ran the whole show.

So which one is the real one?

We’ll Im starting to think there isn’t one.

I think both exist.

I think I just hadn’t figured out how they work together yet.

The more I’ve learned about myself and the more I observe how other people exist I’ve also determined that there is a lot of value in this trait.

Because we kinda have a tendency toward being sheep.

We need someone to take ownership. Plans don’t make themselves. Trips don’t just happen without someone caring enough to look into them. Most people don’t speak up.

But there’s also a fine line between contributing and controlling.

And I don’t think I always knew where that line was.

It showed up in small ways.

Wasting hours planning things that we’re revised with a 5 minute conversation. Offering suggestions that maybe didn’t need to be offered. Holding on a little too tightly to how something should go instead of letting it unfold. And carrying the weight of a quiet table on solely my shoulders.

Looking back I wonder if I wanted control for the sake of it, or because I thought that was how you create a good experience. For myself or maybe for others. You know being the one to think ahead. to anticipate. to make sure nothing falls through.

And to some extent, I believe that’s true.

But I think it was to easy to confuse planning with certainty.

Like if I just thought through enough scenarios, mapped enough options, figured out enough details, then I could guarantee how something would feel.

But no amount of planning actually gives you that.

It just gives you expectations.

And expectations have a funny way of turning into quiet disappointment when things don’t go exactly how you imagined.

So when it comes to this road trip, and the way I jumped straight in to planning

I found myself looking back on this former version of myself.

I needed to pause for a second and understand if this was retreat into old patterns or if it was a natural part of myself, and instead of fighting it asking myself if I simply needed to reframe it.

Because I don’t want to stop planning some trips on spread sheets. I don’t want to put away my google maps. I genuinely enjoy it. I like researching. I like finding the good spots. I like knowing that if we’re passing through somewhere, we’re not missing something we would have loved.

So heres what I’m at so far and I will update as I go

Nashville:

• Bluebird Cafe

• The Stillery

• Monell’s

• Martins Bar-B-Que Joint

• Printers Alley

Seeking the best bar for line dancing the night we’re in town.

Virginia: driving the blue ridge parkway

DC: Whats one must see attraction?

So I’m choosing to see the creative side to it. It’s not just logistics.

And I think that’s where I was getting stuck.

Because the second we find something in ourselves that needs work, we rush to fix it. We label it. We try to move away from it. As if that part of us is the problem.

But what if it isn’t.

What if it’s just been misused.

Because this part of me, the one that plans, the one that thinks ahead, the one that opens Google Maps ten times in a row, it’s not going anywhere.

And I don’t actually want it to.

I just don’t want it to run the whole experience.

I don’t want to mistake a plan for a guarantee. I don’t want to spend more time thinking about the trip than actually being on it.

So maybe this isn’t about becoming less of a planner.

Maybe it’s about holding it a little lighter.

Letting the spreadsheet exist. Letting the routes exist. Letting the ideas exist.

And then getting in the car and letting whatever happens next be enough.

Because I think that’s the difference.

Having a plan is one thing.

Needing it to go exactly that way is another.

And for once, I’m actually excited to see what happens in between

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I just didn’t care.

Not in a cold way. Not in a dismissive way. I still cared about the people involved. I still cared about doing the right thing. But the drama itself felt almost weightless. I didn’t feel the urge to jump in, defend myself, or dissect every little detail the way I used to.

For the first time I realized that a lot of the energy we give to drama is optional.

This realization surprised me because I used to be the opposite.

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Conflict used to give me intense anxiety. Someone would raise a concern and my heart would start pounding like the world was closing in. My instinct was always to shut down. I wanted to smooth things over immediately or remove myself entirely because the discomfort felt unbearable.

Looking back, I think part of me secretly lived inside the drama. Not because I liked it, but because I didn’t know how to exist outside of it. Everything felt personal. Every reaction from another person felt like a reflection of who I was.

Over time that changed. Not because I became confrontational or hardened, but because I started saying what I actually thought. I stopped bottling things up. When something bothered me I would address it instead of carrying it around. That shift alone removed so much tension from my life.

And then something else happened.

I began to understand why drama happens in the first place.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that

“great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people.”

A friend shared this quote recently and I really loved it because it captures something subtle about the way we interact with each other.

When conversation centers on people instead of ideas, it becomes very easy for emotion to spiral into conflict.

The strange thing about drama is that it often looks like people caring about others when in reality it is people worrying about how they are perceived by others. They are thinking about what someone said, what someone meant, how someone interpreted something. It becomes an endless loop of interpretation.

They are not actually thinking about the other person. They are thinking about how the other person is thinking about them.

Once you see that pattern it becomes hard to unsee it.

Something else becomes clear as well. The moments that hurt us the most usually point toward something we already struggle with internally. When someone insults you and it lands, it is often because it touched something that already existed there.

For a long time I would get angry at the person who said the thing. Now I try to see it differently. The comment itself might still be rude or unnecessary, but the reaction inside me is evidence. It tells me something about what I still need to understand about myself.

Emotional turmoil, uncomfortable as it is, becomes information.

That perspective changes the way you look at conflict. Instead of seeing it as something that needs to be fought or avoided, it becomes part of the process of understanding who you are.

One of my friends is facing a decision about a relationship right now. In the past they were hurt badly in a similar situation, and they’ve spent a long time reflecting on it and rebuilding their understanding of themselves. When the opportunity appeared again my instinct was to tell them it was a terrible idea.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized something.

Growth has to be tested.

If we never put ourselves back into situations that once challenged us, we never really find out whether we have changed. It is easy to feel confident when nothing is being asked of you. It is harder when the same emotions return and you have to decide whether you will respond differently.

Even if they make the wrong choice, it does not erase the work they’ve done. It becomes more evidence. Evidence of what works, what does not, and who they’re becoming.

The same applies to all of us.

We learn about ourselves through experience, through discomfort, through moments where we are forced to confront something real. Every situation becomes another piece of information about what we believe and what we are capable of.

That realization brings me back to the drama of last week.

At work there was a moment where a situation escalated unnecessarily. I had waited too long to ask someone to cover a shift. I accepted that part. I apologized for it. What I did not accept was the emotional intensity that followed.

Almost everyone around me could see the reaction was disproportionate. In another version of my life I would have taken that personally. I would have replayed the conversation for hours, wondering what I should have said differently.

Instead I reminded myself who I am.

I know what I bring to that team. I know the energy I choose to show up with every day. It is one of optimism and gratitude. It is one of trying to make the day better for the people around me.

So the reaction did not stick to me the way it once would have.

My only real anxiety in that moment was finding coverage so I could spend time with my friends who were visiting. The rest of it felt strangely irrelevant.

Something similar happened in the friend drama unfolding around me that week. There were situations where people were assigning meaning and intention to things that simply were not there. I watched how easily misunderstandings can grow when everyone involved is reacting emotionally rather than stepping back to look at the situation clearly.

Instead of engaging with it, I chose not to give it energy.

Not because I did not care about my friends. I care about them deeply. But because I could see that the drama itself was not productive. It was just noise.

When you know who you are, it becomes easier to recognize when something is not worth your attention.

The funny part of all of this is that I spent part of last week thinking about something completely unrelated. I was skiing and a strange thought crossed my mind.

I realized I am not the “cool girl.”

Not the cool in the way my generation often defines it. I am not effortlessly stylish. I am not mysterious. I am clumsy sometimes. I make strange wardrobe choices every once in a while. There were years when I did not take care of my body the way I should have.

For a long time I tried to shape myself into that image because I thought that was the version of myself people would admire.

But somewhere along the way I stopped caring about that.

What I see now when I look at myself is someone curious, someone passionate, someone kind, someone who says odd things sometimes and then laughs about it with friends. I see someone who loves moving her body, who comes alive on skis, who finds joy in doing hard things.

My roommate posted a video of me skiing the other day. I watched it more times than I care to admit. Not because it was the most impressive thing in the world, but because I felt proud watching it.

That was me.

I love skiing. I love how it feels to move through the snow, to feel my body working, to lose track of time because I am fully present in what I am doing. For years I fought a quiet battle with myself about discipline and motivation. Now I find myself wanting to stay outside longer, wanting to keep going.

That shift did not happen because someone else told me who I should be.

It happened because I started understanding who I actually am.

And that understanding changes everything.

When you know yourself, the need for approval fades. The drama loses its grip. Other people’s reactions stop defining your emotional state.

You do not become cold. You do not become detached from life.

You simply stop wasting energy on things that are not aligned with you.

All the conflict, the uncomfortable moments, the failed decisions, even the drama that once felt overwhelming, become evidence. Each one tells you something about what matters to you and what does not.

That is why I say I do not care.

Not because nothing matters.

But because I finally understand what does.

And once you know that, the rest becomes background noise.

I’ve seen what reflective writing can do to a person’s life. The clarity it creates. The courage it builds. The way it slowly rewires the stories we tell ourselves.

And I’ve seen something else too:

Writing becomes even more powerful when it happens in community.

That’s what The Written Hour is about.

I’m building this space with you so that we can witness change in real time — in ourselves and in each other. A place where we pause long enough to see what’s actually happening inside our lives.

Because most of the time, the thoughts shaping our decisions are invisible to us. They pass through our minds as noise.

But when you write them down, something interesting happens.

You start to see the patterns.
You notice the assumptions.
You recognize the story you’ve been telling yourself.

And once you see the story, you can change it.

You can edit it.
Refine it.
Rewrite it.

That’s where real agency begins.

The research is clear that community is one of the strongest predictors of longevity. The Blue Zones have shown this again and again. And philosophers have long argued that we are the architects of our own reality.

So let’s put those two ideas together.

Community, and the deliberate shaping of our lives.

Let’s put pen to paper and see what emerges.

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Tomorrow’s Written Hour

The prompt for our first session comes from a piece I wrote recently about agency and drift.

So many of us feel like we’re drifting right now.

Especially during periods of transition — our twenties, career changes, moving somewhere new, ending relationships, starting over.

There are so many decisions to make.

And the hardest question underneath all of them is:

How do I know I’m choosing the right one?

So this week we’ll write about the tension between waiting and choosing.

Prompt

Where in your life are you waiting to feel ready before you begin?

Write about a place where you’ve been hesitating, drifting, or postponing a decision.

What might change if you chose a direction anyway — even without certainty?

How the Hour Works

• 40 minutes of uninterrupted writing
• 20 minutes of optional reflection in small groups

That’s it.

You’re welcome to share, but you never have to.

And I know 40 minutes of writing sounds like a lot.

But trust me it flies by.

When

Monday, March 8
12pm EST

Important

The first Written Hour is free to join.

After this session, the weekly gatherings will be available to paid subscribers, with one open session each month for everyone.

So if you’re curious about reflective writing, this is the perfect moment to try it.

There is so much noise in the world right now.

Not enough signal.

Let’s create some together.

Join the first Written Hour here →

RSVP

If this email made you pause and think at all, you should probably come.

I can’t wait to see you there!

XO,

HM

I figured out what’s wrong with me.

And I see now that I’m not alone in it.

It’s not a lack of ambition.
It’s not laziness.
It’s not that we don’t want more.

It’s that most of us don’t know ourselves.

We know the stories we tell. We know the emotions we feel. But we don’t actually know ourselves. Not in the deep, uncomfortable, inconvenient way. Not in the way that helps you choose the right job or leave the wrong one. Not in the way that lets you build something aligned instead of impressive.

We absorb endlessly. We watch. We scroll. We compare. But can you pinpoint desire? Can you trace it back to where it started inside you?

We are overconnected and underexamined.

And it’s costing us clarity.

After I graduated, my post-grad plans fell apart in the same week. They fell apart because the second they were in my hands, every part of me knew they were wrong. I had never listened to myself that deeply before. All I could recognize was the intuitive feeling that I was settling.

The dream I had been working toward quietly dissolved. And that one moment of intuition showed me how blindly I had been living in indecision.

I couldn’t even decide what movie to watch or what to eat for dinner.

It sounds dramatic. It wasn’t. It was subtle. A kind of internal fog.

I’ve always had ideas. Big ones. I projected entire futures onto myself quickly and convincingly. And then I watched them disappear without fully understanding why I wanted them in the first place.

It took a huge, spur-of-the-moment decision and the fog that followed for me to recognize something.

I didn’t know myself.

Not really.

I had spent years performing competence. Performing ambition. Performing optimism. I could articulate what I wanted to sound like. I could build a persona that made sense to other people.

But when everything went quiet, I didn’t have a compass.

And I started noticing I wasn’t alone.

New grads in transition. Career pivoters. People between relationships. People quietly rebuilding after something collapsed. All capable, thoughtful, and all paralyzed in small ways.

See we don’t struggle because we lack options.

We struggle because we are drowning in them.

We’re thrown a million decisions a day. What to pursue. What to quit. Who to date. What to post. What to optimize. And on top of that, we’re filling our brains constantly.

Music in the shower.
Podcasts on walks.
White noise to fall asleep.
A phone in our hand before our eyes fully open.

When do we sit in silence long enough to hear ourselves think?

I remember walking home from work when I was 19, frustrated at how little I had to think about. I was desperate to entertain myself internally, and there was nothing interesting there.

That terrified me.

After I graduated at 22, my thoughts weren’t empty anymore. I had spent years reading, listening, pushing myself, building something internally. I was generating ideas.

But I still didn’t know what I wanted.

I had information. I did not have understanding.

One day I felt so overwhelmed by the thoughts spinning in my head that I had to get them out. I started writing. I asked AI to guide me.

What began as an outlet became something else.

I started writing like I was investigating myself.

I used AI as a feedback loop. I looked for patterns. I was amused by how often I contradicted myself. I would make a sweeping claim about who I was and then two paragraphs later prove the opposite to be true.

That was the breakthrough.

Seeing the contradictions on the page forced me to confront them.

Writing gave me an outlet, but more importantly it gave me an arena. A place to battle out my thoughts instead of letting them swirl unchallenged in my head.

Over weeks and months, the strings began to connect. The ego dreams separated from the soul ones. Borrowed ambitions fell away. Patterns became visible.

Clarity did not arrive dramatically. It accumulated.

After several months of this, something else evolved.

I started hosting bi-weekly writing groups at the Network School in Malaysia. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe a few thoughtful conversations. Maybe one or two people showing up.

What I got instead was transformation in real time.

People showed up unsure what they had to say. I would give them a prompt. Forty minutes later they were articulating things they had never voiced before.

Not because I gave them answers. Because they gave themselves space.

It became my favorite hour of the week.

Not because it was productive. Because it was honest.

When I moved, I kept recreating the ritual. Different city. Different people. Same result.

People in transition realizing they weren’t confused.

They were unreflected.

And yes, some people are comfortable letting life happen to them. That’s a choice. It requires very little confrontation with self.

But if you feel restless, if you sense you are capable of more, if you are paralyzed not by lack of ability but by lack of alignment, drifting will never satisfy you.

And the answer is not another podcast.

It’s not another productivity system.

It’s not more input.

It’s space.

There was a conversation circulating Substack recently premise: we are not meant to consume as much as we do. Consumption without an outlet breaks our creativity. We must create as much as we consume.

We need deliberate, ritualized, weekly space to sit with ourselves long enough for the noise to settle.

We don’t lack drive.

We lack reflection.

Agency requires self-awareness.
Self-awareness requires attention.
Attention requires stillness.

Stillness does not happen accidentally anymore.

So I decided to build it intentionally.

The Written Hour is a weekly ritual.

We write for forty minutes uninterrupted. No music. No phones. No performance.

Then we talk for twenty. Not to impress or debate. To articulate.

There will be optional prompts based on the existential question I’ve been wrestling with that week. Sometimes you just need to dump what’s there.

It is paid because commitment matters. If you don’t invest, you don’t show up.

The first session will be free. Come test it. See if even one hour of deliberate reflection shifts something.

If you have ever felt capable but unclear.
If you feel like you’re building a life but not sure it’s yours.
If you are in transition and refuse to drift.

This is where you start.

You don’t need more information.

You need a compass.

And you build that by meeting yourself, consistently, on the page.

March 9th. RSVP below for the first online session, subscribe to be included in what follows.

Sign up for the first "The Written Hour"

The rest is up to you.

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